Foliage is looking great 
Thanks.
One man at a time, we’re building up a AAA team.
3/28/16 update
Hello everyone! Lots of things to update!
I hope everyone had a fantastic GDC! The goal of today’s update is to get ya’ll up to speed and give you all a bit more information about how we’re moving forward with it.
First of all, we’re looking to launch *Our Ghosts of * Steam Early Access launch sometime in August. That should be far enough removed from the Steam Summer sale for players’ wallets to have healed and early enough so that we don’t get steamrolled by the Fall and Christmas releases.
We’re aiming to launch with 78km2 of accurate Nazi-occupied Normandy, France. Every couple of months we will add to the terrain size and make the game bigger and bigger. A typical game like this in AAA would have a two year development cycle with a full budget and that would still be considered rushed. A three year development cycle is more reasonable and so how we will move forward through Early Access and to final release is going to be based off of a three year development cycle. This 78km2 terrain is already in-engine and using the Road Editor Plugin (Road Editor - Showcase - Epic Developer Community Forums - This thing is fantastic. You should really pick it up!) we’re going to be placing all the roads to accurately match the roads as they were in 1944 based off old maps.
So when you play *Our Ghosts of *, not only would players experience 1944 Normandy, France as created from DEM Satellite Data, but the roads will be EXACTLY the same as they were back then. This IS going to be the most accurate depiction of Normandy, France in the history of videogames! You wouldn’t believe how important achieving this is to us but we’re all on the verge of getting it exactly right. We’re waiting on the 4.11 VXGI build from Nvidia to come out before we put the roads into the project but the roads should be taken care of in a week. We’ll have screenshots for you as soon as they’re in the project. Considering we’re picking up Steam now it’s best to keep everyone updated as much as we can.
Throughout the rest of this week I’ll update you on the team, how the game is intended to work, and other points of discussion as it relates to the project. Here is this week’s coding update.
**Change Log - Alpha 0.5.2.1366 **
- Work on UI framework 2.0 for Our Ghosts of begun.
- Widget reworking on the main menu begun.
- Initial backend folder structure cleanup work complete.
- Custom widgets supporting GOW’s horizontal, vertical, and menu bars created.
- Style’s interfaces cleaned up for easier swapping of UI elements.
- Access to UI functionality extended into Blueprint for quicker prototyping and iteration.
- General bug fixes and performance improvements in prep for OT1.
- Implemented layered tiled UI
- Began laying out main menu based on designs
- UI framework improvements regarding tile clicking, animations, and placement.
- Implemented modular vertical content bars, currently used for selection menus.
- Psuedocode / planning for Faction Component (how AI will know if they should combat each other, players, be friendly, neutral, etc.)
- Psuedocode / planning for Aggro System (what makes an AI aggressive - a calculation of damage received from a specific source, current line-of-sight with an enemy source, and current distance to that enemy source (weapon types will affect this)
- Added way more information to the design docs
- Revised some class information
- Began to define player progression
- Researched a ton of AI resources around the UE4 community to try to save time in overall development. Cached documentation and videos for future reference and use.
- Began to define how to get AI to dynamically swap its EQS query context (who we’re testing against). This allows for AI vs AI encounters and open the flood gates for new possible game modes.
- Updated the AI detection system (where AI can “see” other players / AI in their proximity and line-of-sight).
- Tweaked the patrol behavior (where the AI moves to a node, then spawns a new node within 5 meters, then moves there, repeat).
- The start of an “Enemy Aggro” system. The enemy will calculate damage taken, distance from each enemy, and if that enemy is within line-of-sight, then calculate these factors into a score. The higher the score, the more threatening the enemy.
- The AI is now aware of when it’s been shot. It stores this to memory and begins to calculate a score of who is the most “threatening” to them.
Very impressive as always.
Cant wait to see your promised work on the landscape!
3/29/16 update
Bonjour everyone and thank you for the kind words DevilsD! We’ll do our best not to let you down.
Much of the team’s time over the past few months has been spent debating the exact direction we wanted to take ** in. Ultimately making a survival / military game isn’t easy and it was important to us to avoid taking the typical survival game tropes and throwing a World 2 skin over them, although that would have been easy to do. A subject matter like this deserves better and we couldn’t allow ourselves to lazy it up.
Most survival games out today retail for no more than $34.99, and so we stopped to ask ourselves what a AAA $59.99 survival game release would look like. What kind of features would it have? How open and democratic would the game design be? How complex would the game systems be? How authentic would the game world be? How easy would it be to mod the game to incorporate additional features as generated by the community? How high quality would the graphical fidelity of such a survival game be?
Each of these questions, and many, many more will be answered in the following weeks. However, today we would like to address how we’re planning on moving forward with the general development of the game, and we invite you to leave your feedback, advice, and experiences to help steer ** in the correct direction.
As mentioned in our last post, we intend to launch ** in August. From there we would support the game with free scheduled content for a period of three years with the money invested into the game by the community. As we develop more of ** we’ll find ourselves with what started out as an immersive survival game end up an addictive time-consuming military survival MMORTS.
The team currently consists of 14 individuals including myself. I’ll add most of their portfolios to the thread very soon. Some of them unfortunately I won’t be able to because of personal reasons. The team fully supports those individuals in that decision. We sealed the deal with a AAA character artist today and as soon as this messaged is uploaded I will returning the contract to them with my John Hancock and they will be officially on-board. They begin work on the 1st. To celebrate tomorrow I will update with the scope of their work, how we intend to handle characters moving forward, Nazi symbolism and the potential problems with their inclusion in European countries, and the possible additional of races to make the game inclusive and historically accurate.
See you guys tomorrow!
Pixel Perfect Polygons
78 Km2 is a good decision for start. Even with 14 guys, 400 km2 is crazy. You will need something like VB-Edit by eurosimtec inside Unreal. Nobody have resources or time to make such a tool … yet. 60-80 players can easely enjoy themself on 78 km2 if gameplay is good. So good dev, and keep working
4/08/16 update
Guten Tag, everyone!
I intended to do a follow-up post on 3/30/16, but unfortunately became bogged down by a number of job interviews that were required to expand the team. As such much of my time has been spent discussing the involvement of coders, artists, and photoscanners, and I wasn’t able to get back to you until now. Nevertheless, my discussions and negotiations have borne fruit and I’m VERY excited to announce that we’ve come to terms with five talented individuals since our last update. You’ll be happy to hear that these individuals have already started working on assets for ** and there will even more regular updates here.
As I already mentioned in the last update, one of the most important things heading into development was my incessant desire to create a survival / military game that felt a AAA endeavor. A key component in accomplishing this would have been the addition of next-gen characters that bring a sense of high production value to the community to whom a project like ** would appeal to. As such I’m proud to announce that the first talent that we’ve come to terms with over the last week is Bao Ngoc Vu, a character artist from YAGER (Spec Ops: The Line, Dreadnought). You can check out more of Bao’s work here: ArtStation - BaoPOW and here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bao-ngoc-vu-b504807a.
Base Model WIP
The above is the first iteration of our base character model. Bao has constructed the base model over the past week and posted the updates in our team Slack for feedback. If anyone here has input or feedback on the base model please don’t hesitate to share. We’d love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime I’d like to discuss what our goals are for our characters and exactly what we intend to launch with and how we intend to support it.
Our plan is to launch with one character body, two character head presets, two sets of knickers (American soldier underwear, German soldier underwear), an American uniform for the soldier, and a German uniform for the soldier. As our project raises revenue through donations heading into Early Access (more on that in a future update), and through sales of the games itself, we plan to create new body types (fat, , etc.), significantly expand the head presets (many more faces and hair styles), add voices, and generate every single uniform used by the Allied and German soldiers during World 2 (from the officers on down). Although we love to include more variety, our budget is limited and we feel that it would be better spent constructing the whole of Normandy to be as accurate as we can make it. We had to make the hard decision that we were going to push for quality instead of quantity for Early Access so that everyone keeping an eye on this project could see the level of detail our final product would intend to offer. This project is near and dear not only to my heart, and not only to the heart of this team, but to the people who have gotten in touch with us publicly and privately hoping that we nail this. As such we don’t want to settle, and even with our limited budget, we fully intend to achieve AAA quality work in every aspect of this game’s development. What you’ve seen so far proves it. What will you see from here on out will cement it.
When players join a server, and create a new character, they will first have to decide whether they will fight for the Americans or Germans. Once they make this decision, the game will move them into a character creator where they can adjust all other aspects of the character’s build. Our current plan for characters is that we would launch initially with the same number of character models as Ark: Survival Evolved and allow players to similarly use character customization to configure the look of the character. Once we have additional funding we would quickly begun to add new face presets and body types for players to configure in order to provide players with more of a choice in the character they wage with. We will have a future update dealing specifically with the character creator so the community can see firsthand how we intend to make it work.
Clothing will be removable so if a player wants to take off his uniform and traverse through Normandy in his boots and a wife beater, who are we to tell them no? Furthermore you can steal uniforms if you wish, and clothing will be swappable between all character body types as in Xenoblade Chronciles. In addition to uniforms, we plan on adding other native French clothing in case players want to feel like they’re resistance fighters warding off their Nazi invaders. Further, players will be able to mix and match different articles of clothing although wearing full clothing sets and uniforms would offer stat bonuses. However we don’t want to go too much in the gameplay side of things and spoil what we have planned for you.
Furthermore, although we intend to launch the game with Caucasian character models, in order to be as historically accurate as possible, and bring some light to an aspect of World 2 that most people don’t know about, once we have the funding necessary to facilitate it, work would be done on adding African, African-American, Chinese, Turkish, Native American, and female character models. The honest truth is that World 2 was truly a global affair and every man, women, and child, was pulled into its grasp regardless of race or creed. There is plenty of historical evidence showing people of different ethnicities battling it out on both sides and we want no one to be left out. These updates will given be free of charge to everyone already owns the game. Since the game will launch in Early Access, as we add more content to it, the asking price for ** would increase. As such we’re proud to say ** will be the FIRST open-world World 2 game ever made to not only allow players to pick their ethnicity when creating their character but depict the true breadth of the peoples pulled into the global fighting. Eventually we plan on doing expansions that would reincorporate these additional ethnicities for a North Africa expansion or a Second Sino-Japanese expansion.
Anyway that’s all for now guys. I’m sure there is plenty for you to digest and offer feedback on. I should have another update in a day or two from Bao so keep your eyes peeled. The team is leaving him their feedback. Please leave him yours. We legitimately want to make this the best World 2 game ever made. Thanks for your time.
Pixel Perfect Polygons
Absolutely stunning. The level of quality is amazing. Keep up the work man!
Change Log - Alpha 0.5.5.1419
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Added base class for a single character save on a server.
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Added character leveling data table. Used to store leveling of player and future modding.
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Integrated the leveling data table into the existing character leveling system.
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Modified data table with initial 25 levels and scaling for XP.
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XP leveling system now used data table properly.
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Added generic conversion function sets for general purpose use.
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Created player experience RPCs
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Minor bug fixes and stability improvements
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Set up five spawn points for the player to test random spawning / respawning. If the player spawns at the start of the game, or dies and needs to respawn, it randomly chooses between these five points and spawns the player at one of them.
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First version of a fast-travel teleporting system has been created. Player can collide with the fast-travel object and it will transport the player to another pre-determined location.
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Continued some work on my AICharacter. Cleaned up an error that was occurring in the script.
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Started on the Footprint System. Nothing tangible to demonstrate, yet. This will be my focus into next week.
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Initial setup for modular equipment supporting a small list of preview skinned equipment pieces.
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Started implementign non-deformable and material-only modular pieces such as jewelry and tattoos as well as the full list of equipment slots.
I really like your sky, can you share how it’s setup?
Holy hell, the sky indeed.
will talk more about the sky in another update. He’s really busy with the game at the moment.
You can also follow us on Twitter to help get the word out about the game: https://twitter.com
Level Design Update 4/15/16
Packed displacement maps
Recreated normandy landscape 3 times to find a better matching elevation in game
Improved resolution of satellite image for La Fontaine area
Bunker #1: WN60 - Gun Emplacement
https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T0BP8HZLN-F10G6KWDT/wip-tex3.png?pub_secret=d04ec878dc
The sky catches the mood very nicely!
It looks like a sky photograph loaded into sky sphere. Would be really interesting to see how it is done in-engine if the clouds are indeed moving.
Great scene!
Bunker #2: WN60 - Pluskat Bunker
Photoscanning Tree Test
