At that price it’s an instant buy for me. There’s no way I could justify spending £80+ on something like this right now even though you could easily charge that much. Your volumetic blueprint was great too, however if you are integrating it into this, is there anything you could do to hide the post-process-ness of it? Current it looks like an overlay that moves with the camera rather than light that exists in the world.
Well the issue there is that it essentially is an overlay that moves with the camera, that catches lighting and shading from lights existing in the world. One could change the way the lights themselves behave, but that would require something like a pull request or a plugin, and it’d be something outside my skillset, unfortunately.
Thank you for your support and your feedback, I really appreciate both!
Yeah I understand that it’s a post-process technique, but is it different to the approach other games use, because I haven’t noticed that artefact in other implementations. Is there not some sort of simple fix. Noise/variation every frame the camera is moved or something along those lines?
It is different to the approach other games use, yes. For example with Fallout 4, they utilize Nvidia’s volumetric lighting technique which forms light volumes that simulate luminescence of participating media along the view frustum by extracting light paths from shadowmap data. One could potentially do the same in UE4 by setting up a depth-map texture-array that is ray-marched through a volume, however that’s outside my skillset and would likely have additional performance costs, as sampling enough layers within the volume would have the same overdraw cost as my system has, with the additional cost of writing to those render-targets. Another option would be to write out a plugin that could actually pull data from lightmaps in UE4 and use them as a single ray-marched volume texture, but again, that’s outside my skillset.
My system simulates the luminescence of participating media by stacking layers along the view frustum manually, and then lighting them per-vertex. In order to get as sharp of definition as something like Nvidia’s solution, the vertex count needs to be very high. The highest quality setting uses frustum meshes with 300k vertices, which gets the job done but doesn’t have the definition I’d like.
Generating noise wouldn’t really help because the shadows themselves are generated and approximated along the mesh’s vertex grid per-vertex. Per-pixel shadows are possible in UE4 but they’re very expensive.
This will be perfect for my Ocarina Of Time remake 
Hope its 4.13 ready.
This has been implemented for the release build. 
Yes, this will be 4.13 ready, I’ll also be submitting a 4.12 build for those who aren’t quite ready to update just yet.
Cheers!
This is amazing stuff, and will go unto my wishlist the moment it hits the marketspace.
How customizable is this by the way? My game is rather stylized, and it would be great if I could customize something like this to fit the overall art direction.
edit: Also, is it purely blueprint, or are there some c++ parts to it too? I don’t mind blueprints, but for something as big as an entire day/night/season system, I would prefer to have it backstage as much as possible.
Stylized is kind of a generalized descriptor, as all kinds of different art styles constitute a stylized aesthetic. While this system is more tiered for a realistic look, there are lots of options available to fine tune a stylized look; you can swap out the cloud generation source texture with something with harder edges for a more “toon” look, there’s a full suite of options to control lighting levels at all times of the day, and curve assets allow precise color control at all day times.
I’ve been working on world design for a stylized game for a year, so I understand the desire for an easier approach for getting your vision on the screen, but stylization is so subjective that it’s inevitable that you’ll need to do some customisation beyond the very gratuitous amount of options I’m exposing, but my system would definitely handle the majority of the legwork for you.
Also, the system is entirely blueprint driven. I wanted to ensure easy customization beyond exposed parameters for as many users as possible, otherwise I would have spent the time writing it in C++.
Hopefully I was able to answer your questions, if not please let me know
Cheers!
Great work! My wallet is ready 
Now you have another fan!
Thanks for all the info!
You are right, stylized is kinda a broad term. My stylized look is largely generated by having materials work together with PP blendables, and much of the initial passes come from textures. So as long as I can swap out textures or alter materials/particles used in the system to fit my own style, I am pretty much set.
Anyway, the sheer amount of features (and the largely procedural clouds, or at least, they look much like the system Guerilla introduced at SIGGRAPH2015) makes 20 bucks a complete steal, so I am definitely gonna get it the moment it comes out. The fact that you made all of that with blueprints just makes it more impressive.
Thank you for your support! <3
Yep, everything is highly customizable just using exposed parameters, but anyone who knows their way around the editor can delve even further and make virtually any change they want.
Do you have a thread for your game? I’d love to take a look at it
Thank you for the kind words and support!
Alright, I’m tentatively going to be submitting the release build for Orbit to Epic tomorrow night (in about 24 hours.) The last bit of polish I need to do is as straightforward as it gets, so unless something breaks to a ridiculous degree, submission is literally right around the corner.
Fun fact, I just counted: Orbit has over 150 exposed, editable parameters.
Thanks for hanging in there everyone, I can’t tell you how stoked I am to be on the cusp of submitting this thing.
add some more pics !
Like a playground for outdoor simulation developers
I’m putting together a proper trailer this evening as well.
Cheers!
I’m at work so I can’t post more media, but I did manage to pull something on my lunch break to serve as a little teaser for the full trailer.
Cheers!
I will look at that gif forever untill marketplace release.
I feel the same …
are you kidding me?
i would buy this right now …
pay ya double … triple … what your asking for …add multiplayer and i will pay you $100 right now lol
Hey all. I’ve spent the last I can’t even count how many hours powering through some last minute polish and bugfixing, and I’m proud to announce that the release build for Orbit is 100% done. I’m submitting it to Epic now.
Thank you all for your support!
Cheers!