Here are two screenshots of how our new rocks look. This is to give you all an idea of where we are going with the graphical style change that we mentioned yesterday.
The rocks are still missing a moss texture and vines and everything of course and they are getting a small last pass to crispen up some details and make them a bit cleaner still. Hope you like it. 
wow your game looks so beautiful, love the models and the textures style so amazing, for some reason it gives me an ambition to work on my game
Thanks a lot! Always great to inspire other people! ^^
Player character sculpted!
Love the new direction in art style, color palette and the third person camera.
The game art direction reminds me Sea of Thieves, which for me is one of the best looking games in development with Unreal. (Now if only they made a single player RPG at this setting…)
Any single player options for your game?
Regarding the ocean did you use only material shaders and blueprints and replicating variables or anything more complicated with cpp?
Anyway good luck with your project, looks really good:)
Hey there!
You should be in luck as our game will in fact have singleplayer! We are focusing firstly on multiplayer survival gameplay though, but as soon as all the basics for that are done and working we will move onto implementing A.I. which includes skeletons, spiders, giants, zombies, sea monsters and more. As for actual rpg elements, it kind of depends. Our singleplayer experiences will be kind of a mix between survival and treasure hunting / exploring. Not much actual story telling though, so if you are looking for that in particular you might be disappointed. However, we do intend to add small “stories” to some islands. For example things you will find in a dungeon or cave which will all have a bit of a small story to tell. Oh, and easter eggs, tons and tons of those. Small things that should ring a bell for most people, but also a lot of things for true pirate lore / movie fans. I don’t want to spoil anything, so you will have to find out when you play the game. But I’m sure you can already guess some (or a lot) of Pirates of the Caribbean stuff will be in there which was after all our main inspiration. 
We are aware of Sea of Thives, a brilliant game being developped by Rare. We can only dream of ever getting close to their artstyle. They have been one of the reasons we decided to up our level. Not because we want to make our game better than theirs, but we certainly don’t want it to fall TOO far behind in terms of visual appeal. Our gameplay is however quite different from Sea of Thieves, as we are much more aiming for survival gameplay combined with naval combat. As they are aiming more for co-op RPG adventure. We always dreamed of making a survival game with all it’s familiarties such as gathering, crafting and making sure you don’t starve to death and such, but we thought it would be cool to step away from the modern settings with guns and zombies and go for something with a bit more fantasy and a more classic setting. That and the other reason that survival crafting games are flooding the indie market at the moment so going for an unoriginal one has a very high chance of it going unnoticed. And of course we are crazy about pirates and ship combat so yeah the link was quickly made. 
The ocean was made purely using blueprints and using the Unreal material editor. No c++ code has been used so far. Note though, that the actual bouyancy calculations are not made by us, but come from a plugin called “physical water surface” which you can find on the marketplace. The only thing I added to it is multiplayer support. But this wasn’t too much work as the calculations are all based on the game time value, which I only needed to sync between the clients and server by providing each connected clientt with an offset to it’s own gametime based on the difference between the server and it’s local time. In case of hiccups or freezes, the water gets automatically resynced every 5 minutes. The visual appearance of the ocean was completely hand-made using the material editor. It took me a while to get everything looking close to what we want, and there is still a lot of tweaking and work to be done on it. But if some people want I can share the shader with you all. I can say though that it relies on the most demanding type of translucent lighting method, which is quite the performance eater. But without it you get almost no specular highlights on the water so it’s a must to get it looking like water. We are optimizing everywhere we can in our game to compensate for our water shader so I would highly advise doing the same thing should you use it. I may be overreacting here a bit, as the game runs really great on my system at the moment, which has a gtx 970 and i7 cpu. Not the shabbiest of specs, I know. But we have tested our game on much less capable systems and it still runs quite smooth with everything set to ultra which is standard atm. Later on there will of course be reduction settings which should make the game run really great on a very wide range of specs. As mentioned we are very serious about optimizing wherever we can.
I think the art style you guys chose works really well. Just make sure the gameplay is fun and you got a buyer
Thanks a lot!
The main goal of our game is to provide an easy to learn fun gameplay that can get everyone excited even after a few minutes in. The core game is losely based on survival, but we are much more leaning towards fun combat and exploration. The survival is there to fill in the gaps and to give the player stuff to do and work his way up to be that awesome pirate captain he wants to be and to commandeer that ultimate ship. We just posted an in-depth gameplay FAQ on our indieDB page, you should definitly check it out if you want to know a bit more about the gameplay.
Fantastic news WizX. Story telling, is not necessary at all, just give the player quest missions, and random events, to explore the world and and participate as he explore the world. This leads to player to Role Play as he likes.
As for more RPG layers, character stats etc i understand it is not the game you make, but still your game sounds exciting. And i love the fantasy, pirates theme setting. It is something that we don’t see very often.
Just i hope the survival aspect it is not overdone as in most games where you must eat sleep every few minutes. A player could go without a food, for weeks in game and without water for days. It should be more a preparation for the next missions.
That’s my two cents of course, it is your game.
As of Sea of thieves, i am not sure what their gameplay direction is, except we have to be online, multiplayer because… single player games are dead…
The art is stunning but i am not really very optimistic.
For my game i will have a similar material for ocean. Mainly need it for traveling, trading, between islands no combat. I have made some rough prototypes in the past and there is a lot of info from community.
But if you like to share any info it is welcome. It will be helpful for others too. For the networking part i don’t plan to do multiplayer but always check some basic system how it would work on multiplayer.
You sent the server time to each client and the calculate the difference and offset the game time?
As for optimizing i understand water area will be a big part/time of your game, but don’t overdo it at other parts, make the game/systems you want first and then optimize.
With the latest versions of the engine, the blueprint Nativization would be helpful too.
Now i am waiting for more updates!
The survival aspect will not be as extreme as in regular survival games. As mentioned before the survival in our game will kind of be like a minimum base form. You will have to eat, but not every 5 minutes. You will have to craft clothes and tools, but only once. You will however need to go back to islands every now and then to stock up on wood, iron and such to repair your ship. Ships needs to be repaired with resources. If you are planning to stay on the water for a while, it’s wise to fill your ships inventory with as much resources as possible. Cannon balls will need to be crafted as well. Cannon ammo will be linked with the ship’s storage. You dont’ have to reload them manually, but when there are no more cannon balls in the ship storage you will not be able to fire the cannons anymore. Same goes for repairs, you can keep repairing the ship as long as there is wood in the storage. You can repair cannons if there is iron in the storage. And so on… You will be able to fish from upon the deck of your ship as well so for food you don’t always have to go to an island, only to repair and get ammo or to explore the islands. This is kind of how “far” the survival in our game goes. You will not have a cold meter or any other small meters. Only a food and health meter. When your food is above 50% your hp will autmatically regenerate. When your food is below 50% it will not. That’s kind of the only reason we have food in the game. So as you can see survival will not stand in the way of the other gameplay aspects, it will merely add a bit more depth.
The water is synchronised by checking if a client is connected using post login event in game mode. If yes, the server sents it’s own gametime to that client. That client then compares his own game time with the server’s and looks at the offset, this offset is then applied to the client’s game time so it matches the server. This also happens with a server to client wide event which re-synchronizes the water every 5 minutes. In theory this is not really needed as there is no immediate reason why the water should ever go out of sync, as the game time once synced should always keep ticking at the same rate regardless of hiccups and such. But just to make sure and beause it doesn’t hurt anyone I force the resync every 5 minutes just because i’m a paranoid maniac. 
About the blueprint nativization, we are having issues with it. Building our game with it works fine. But when we launch our game we get an error. Very strange. We’ve been looking for a solution for a while now and can’t find it. Once we fix that we should be able to build our game using nativization.
About character stats, there will not really be such a thing in our game. However there will be a level system. Most of the stuff you can get in the game will have to be bought with gold. A lot of this stuff will only be available at certain levels. At first the buying menu will be accessible from anywhere. But later we might add npc’s all around the world that all sell different things. But we are not sure yet. We will see in the future.
Here is a screenshot of some of our new foliage.
I’m defiantly very excited for this game, the new foliage looks great and will defiantly suit the style. I personally am a big fan of anything pirate so I am defiantly interested in receiving a test build
Hey thanks a lot, your excitement means a lot to us! Check out IndieDB I sent you a reply there.
The new foliage looks great . Keep up the good work.
Thanks!
Here are a few screenshots of our water shader update. We added refraction, more dynamic foam and some color tweaks. Don’t mind the old models, they still need to be overhauled.
Hey guys!
Small update for you today.
What we added last few days:
Here are some gyazos:
And some water splash effects when sailing at high speeds (these are actually caused by waves, not random)
Hope you like!
Looks great WizX!
Now i know probably characters assets/animations are the most difficult thing to do, at least this is where i am struggling.
But if you have an artist in the team, maybe add a bit more detail to characters during the sculpting of the body/face and you will have nailed it!
Sea of thieves, we were talking the other day, is a good example of it. They don’t take it to extreme either.
I guess later with more detailed outfits your character will look even better.
What setup are you using for lighting?
The looks of the game are awesome, very stylish, yet retaining lots of detail 
I really dig the water. Could you guide us on the making of that shader? Any pointers would be welcome!
Hey Makis! Do you mean that the characters shown in the gyazos are lacking detail? If yes, that’s perfectly normal, those are placeholder characters. Our actual character will be scultped with a lot of detail as seen a few posts ago. It’s not in-game yet because we still need to finish it up, skin and rig it.
The lighting is quite simple really, we use ultra dynamic sky with 2 directional lights, one for the sun and one for the moon. We have played a lot with the color curves and individual light settings though to get it looking just the way we want. The point lights we use don’t cast any dynamic shadows because we only use dynamic moveable lights and we want to keep the performance of our game very high.
Thanks a lot! Yes, I would definitely be willing to make a guide on how I did the water. I’ll look into making a video sometime soon where I cover all the aspects of it and run through the shader step by step. I’m not really going to create a tutorial for it as that would be A LOT of work because the shader is pretty big and has a lot of small features that when fully explained would require an entire series of tutorials.
I’ll post the video here when it’s done.
This should give you an idea of what’s in it and it’s complexity. Note though that this is only the visual part of the shader, the actual waves are generated seperately. Detailed information will follow…
Update! The spawnmap has been added. Also, all foliage is now finished and our artist has begun blocking out the second island. A very big one. We plan to have an old abandoned fort on it, an overgrown ancient temple, lots of hanging bridges, some caves, a stranded ship on the beach and some other stuff. It’s going to be one of the biggest islands in the game.
Here it is in action: Spawnscreen
Here is the new island blockout seen from the old small island
One of the islands many beaches
This is the other part of the island where the fort will be
Comparison with old island (in-editor, not ingame, hence ugly water and graphics :P)
And some new HUD graphics
