Futurelands - an infinite mmoverse

Community Showcase Game Development
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Hey guy’s, just wanted to share what I have been working on.

I don’t have much time for marketing, if anyone knows of someone able to help in that area, please let me know. I will be starting a Kickstarter campaign tomorrow.

Futurelands. The beginning.
This project started 10 years ago, I first started with my own engine, I realized I was wasting time on such a huge task as engine development that I started looking for already built engines. I went on to use Torque, then eventually Unity(and hated it) then when I realized Epic had released such an Epic game engine as Unreal to Indies, I jumped all over that. Using Unreal has sped up my game development cycle and I have for the last two months been working full time on Futurelands.

Yeah, but what is Futurelands? Well Futurelands is the game I always wanted so I’m making it, if someone else would have done it, I would never have needed to undertake this project.
Futurelands is a cross platform MMO with huge data saving capabilities. The custom networking layer is able to send hundreds of thousands(~270000) of object updates per second on a a 3g connection, allowing for tens of thousands of objects(Units…etc) to be streamed. The main bottleneck I have right now is the GPU, I’m working on using instancing better and finding all the cool tricks to optimize rendering.

Some features already implemented:
RTS, structure building, resource harvesting, AI.
RPG, leveling, questing, magic, science, dialog, inventory.
Real solar systems, planets orbit stars.
Real dynamic gravity.
Run time updating/streaming of assets.
Destructible environments.
Networking, cluster nodes easily and quickly scaled across regions.
Indoor, outdoor environments, caves.
Spaceships/structures, pirating and looting of such mentioned spacecraft.
Open worlds, freely travel the universe, the only limit is your resources to do so.

Features I want to implement soon:
Towns and Cities(most of the AI is there but need content…)

Everyday I will post new pictures and details on what I’m working on at the moment. I really hope others are as excited as myself, I want to start inviting others to join me in the alpha tests and we can start creating content!

Things I need before starting alpha tests:
Content, content and more content.

This pic is the first of many, it shows a space vessel I have been working on, as you can see it is huge and has collided with the mountains. Everything is dynamic, there is no sky box. For instance that sun will burn you if you get too close. As you will start to notice in the pics and vids are I’m using allot of Epic content from the Marketplace, thanks Epic for providing this content! I fully intent to use all 100% new art and content for this game before release but for now, this content has helped me spend more time on core functionality of Futurelands.
Videos coming soon, infact I will do them on a weekly basis.

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If people are interested in seeing or hearing about certain specific aspects of the game, feel free to let me know and I can focus on producing media for those.

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Reserved for pics.
I started working on four areas near the polar of an example planet today to showcase some features. I also started working on breakable objects, such as glass. Buildings are modular, customizable and networked, however broken objects don’t replicate right now and I’m just using it for effect. Maybe I will make it affect game play at a later time. Sorry for the UI popup.

Tomorrows agenda, continue working on forest area with zombie chase scene for demo and spiff up the interior of the space craft seen in the earliest pic.

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Too tired(working from SEA atm) to take a good pic right now, but I worked on a new Planet creator feature that I want to show off tomorrow. If everything goes as plan, I should be able to create planets on the fly on the server side and see it updated in real time on the client. Currently planets are manually created.

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This looks and sounds really interesting and ambitious. Are you planning to have seamless orbit-to-surface transitions as well? This is something I was experimenting with at one point, using tricks to get around the limitations in world size imposed by a 32-bit coordinate system. I never got past the design and experiment phase however.

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Hey , thanks for commenting it was getting lonely in here haha. Yes everything is seamless, I was able to get past the floating point errors by adjusting the world base. Within the next 24 hours I will be posting some media relating to the scale of the universe and on orbit to surface travel.

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It certainly sounds interesting, based on the features you have listed, sounds like a lot of work has gone into it, unfortunately the pictures dont do you any justice. The first pic u state is a space vessel, I dont see it, all I see is a Medievil door and carriage and some other wierd objects, and its really low quality. Your second pic I can’t even make sense of.

Not trying to bash you or anything, but really it sounds like you have some impressive features, you should really show them, and you’ll no doubt get more comments and such

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Hey , thanks for the feedback, I totally agree with you!
I posted this a little preemptively, however within the next few days I should have something better to show. Up until now I have spent most of my time focusing on the networking side of things, and I only recently started adding content. Anyway, from now on I will start posting vids as I can showcase some of the games features better.

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Can’t wait to see what you have to show, as I said before, its an impressive list of features.

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Would be interested to read that. I ended up trying a mix of origin shifting, dynamic scaling, super-aggressive LOD and tiling as you got below the surface. The idea was that the planet was never more than a few km away, but it was scaled to 1/100th size to make it look a lot further. Never got it properly working though.

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I kinda got sidetracked today and started working on dynamic terrain and meshes that can be created on the client or server. Up until now terrain has been a simple sphere and I added height using static meshes, this worked good except I wanted caves that could go kilometers deep, so I looked into UE4’s landscape’s, they did not work exactly as I wanted so I started using procedural mesh and hopefully by tonight I should have it 100%.

I don’t want to go into huge detail on how the server works, but I will put one vid up of the prototype planet creator. These planets are much larger and detailed on the client, server scales everything down so we can handle the massive amount of data to visualize. For instance in the video I’m planting some dungeons on the planet, seen as a little square but on the client it’s a full size dungeon randomly created on the server.

It might take me a few days, but this is exactly what I need to quickly add content to the game world.

Edit: Decided to show a slightly different vid as I don’t want to reveal so much about the server [video]https://youtu.be/Ay4uyR9_zWU[/video]

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Ya basically I’m doing it very similar to that, any planet I cant fit in the UE4 world, I scale down to make it appear further away. I load up all planets/stars from the server even if they are far outside the players area, and so the space is actually filled with real stars/planets although I also use a starfeild sky box at the moment because not enough actual stars in the database atm.

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So I ended up spending longer than I planned with the procedural meshes, but I finally have it working like I want. I also in the process made an interface for users to create their own objects, I’m not sure yet if I will keep this feature in game.

No vids yet, soooon! Anyway here is a pic of the mesh editor I put together today, looks messy but that’s where I’m leaving it until tomorrow.

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The dots are the vertices…

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Oh your right, I also just realized the screen is cut off in the vid… basically it’s like the pic above this last one but with a static piece of geometry for the planets, and it shows the placement of dungeons and stuff, I’ll just take another vid in a couple days showcasing the planet creator with the new additions I just worked on.