Kokiri Forest - Update 2

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

It's now been 1 week since I released the demo. The reception has seemed good and positive, for the most part! But there's no "buzz" around it at all which is very disappointing.

My worries about the thunder of my project being stolen seem founded. Numerous times in the past week when I've seen a Kokiri Forest demo mentioned, linked to, or played without direct relation to my Oculus forum thread, it's been about the other project. I even had one redditer say mine was the same after reviewing the other one and giving it a 4/5. Maybe it was because he was drunk, lol. He was trying to compliment it. But saying it's the same after all the work put into it was hard to not see as insulting. (The following has been edited because some found my original statements to be too harsh, despite my best efforts to preface it.) I don't want to be insulting myself, but I have to be honest. The other version had very little effort put into it. I'm not sure how, but some textures were even made worse then they should be if left un-fixed. After playing the 2, anyone should be able to see a clear difference.

Moving on. So what have I been up to on the project? Well, I attempted to provoke some feedback on what to work on with it before my Unity Pro trial is up. But that didn't really produce any results. So I've been working on what I can, and what interests me. There's a ton I would want to do, but figuring out whats best with a looming deadline has been tricky. I've been dabbling in something to get an idea of how smoothly/quickly adding it would go, and moving on a lot.

I've fixed 2 things. The mustache of the Deku tree. I forgot to/didn't know to color it. And I forgot to set the climbable vines to a transparent shader.

I worked a little on a night time sky. I tried a couple different approaches, but at the least what I have now should be decent enough. And should be available in the next update. The Rift integration package for Unity has a scene switch built into it, and at the least that can be used to switch to the night time version by simply pressing Right Shift then enter. I might add a dawn/dusk scene too.

I messed around with sounds as well. Particularly the sounds of footsteps. But I didn't like any scripts I was finding. And getting a accurate sounding OoT footstep sound itself wasn't going easy. At this time, I'm not really sure I want to go back to trying to get in sounds before the next release.

I've been fixing up some character models. ATM I have 3, Link, Saria, and a Kokiri Girl. Getting the models is tedious, but easy enough for me now. The issue is giving them life in the form of animations. I was learning to do that alright enough. It's confusing, but not too hard. Just very time consuming for me right now. I want things I add to look accurate compared to the real game. I just can't realistically work on such things under such a timetable right now.

Lastly I've been working towards allowing access to the boulder maze area where you get the Kokiri Sword in the real game. Adding the meshes and fixed textures would be easy, so I haven't worked on that stuff yet, instead identifiying the hurdles and working on those. There are 3 hurdles with that. Access, clean display of the meshes, and the boulder itself.

By clean display I mean, in the real game when you move between the main area to the boulder maze, the main area unloads from view so the new area can load in. If it didn't the meshes from the 2 areas would clip and cut into each other. So I would have to do the same thing and unload/load the meshes. It sounds tedious, but I think I can do it.

The boulder itself, well. I'd want to animate it. At the least I could not have it at all. But I think trying to animate it might be fun for me, and within my current skills.

Putting those 2 issues aside for now, I've been working on the access issue. Meaning crawling through the tunnel. What I'm currently doing is requiring the users to press Control to crouch/duck. I have things working, but not to a quality I find satisfactory. I keep going in circles trying to get things right. This is one of those things that doesn't seem like it should be as tricky as it is being for me.

On my plate is another fix. I don't know if I broke something recently, or the released demo was like this too. But there's some issues I thought I completely addressed regarding Z sorting of textures with transparent shaders. Particularly when looking at a fence through another fence of the same type/group. Like in the area right before that tunnel you crawl through to the boulder maze.

That's it for now! =)

EDIT:

I've included some screenshots for the night time scene and the Boulder/Sword area. I took these with a standard, non-Rift camera view.

Of note, I did get around to adding the Boulder/Sword area. And I've turned on shadows for the higher quality settings.

Enjoy!