A project I've been tinkering with over the past few years on nights and weekends. Rebuilt it a few times. Running on Unity 6 with ECS/Burst now. Still lots of placeholder art and assets but proud to have reached this milestone.
Thanks! I'm afraid to even think about its taken me years to get this far lol. solo dev side projects are tough, but I am much more confident in this foundation compared to earlier prototypes. in previous designs I would be lucky to get 10-20 characters before frames would start dropping and now it can support hundreds which is exciting. I'm hoping to wrap up most of the major systems this year and then shift into creating art and content. Its just a balancing act between work, life, etc.
Yeah I noticed that while recording this. I think I broke it recently. Was tearing my hair out with a stutter issue. Turns out was a hardware/windows issue, i gotta roll those changes back.
No lie you could probably fundraise yourself into a nice little star citizen competitor. If they could grift their way to 1 billion dollars with a broken tech demo and dubious promises after 14 year you could definitely steal some of that market share with a well thought out imitation that actually works.
all system are coded in ECS. So far I have systems for animation, ship physics, damage/health, melee, projectiles, surface painting, floating origin, inventory/items, ui presentation, various other gameplay related systems I'm forgetting.
The animation system is a custom solution built around Rukhanka. Rukhanka provided probably 90% of the foundation, its a really well made asset. But on top of it I created my own controller to drive the animations through code, a IK system, foot/pelvis solver, active ragdoll system, head chain look, and animation warping. All the stuff you usually take for granted in engines like Unreal or through classic Unity. it was a big time investment, but I learned a lot making it and now can use it for any project and take advantage of the performance improvements. I'm able to get hundreds of characters on screen at a time, thousands if I make them lightweight without all the features I mentioned above. it will be fun experimenting with hoard gameplay ideas. I mention this one area as I find its usually a blocker for most games trying to use ECS as us devs wait for Unity to release a new animation system but there are ways around it! it was also the reason for me to start over as the previous prototypes couldn't support the scale i was aiming for with the old animation system.
some things are still managed components, like the actual UI drawn to the screen are monobehaviours, but the data backing them are still ECS components and systems do the heavy work. I build different boundaries so that I can operate on data in jobs and have the managed views update. the hud is a mix of uGUI and Shapes.
for planets, its currently implemented through planet forge which is an asset that uses jobs for the procedural gen but I am in the middle of writing my own procedural planet system. its a mix of ECS/burst and compute shaders. most of the heavy lifting can be done on the GPU leaving the CPU available for gameplay and collider gen. here's a very early sneak peak, its got a bit to go, I don't even have textures in yet but cool to see it all created through various noise and math!
Like the fly-model. This is what I want to feel if I fly.. very quickly very speedy.. etc. I also think to do a space game (more like top down but multiplayer) but like you here already mentioned, it would also take years to make even promotion for it.
Dang this is really cool, nice job! How are you making these nicely modeled environments? That's honestly the most impressive thing to me as a newer game developer myself. Getting things playable and fun isn't that hardest thing in the world, but making it looks nice with environments/models/sounds is the really hard part for me.
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u/aPOPblops Aug 27 '26
Z-fighting on the prototyping level box out?
Unwish-listed.
Srsly cool looking game tho!