and Yughues Underwater Plants v.2 by Nobiax, Yughues Free Metal Materials by Nobiax, Sea Life Pack, Machanic Woman Character,
Yea I love Unity, its such a versatile Engine, with good rendering capabilities and awesome processing abilities capable of adressing all your CPU cores, it does have some issues with SLI or Crossfire still that the Unity team say a future update will look at that, but other than that its a damned awesome game engine with alot of flexibility and its done developers and games like Empyrion a massive favour, of time saving, and time to a programmer is life just like frames to a gamer are life. Unity is also updated regular by a very competent team of programmers that add specific code for specific games when needed, there support is really good of games on its engine and I expect , as Empyrion grows to larger numbers , that its just a matter of time until the Unity team look at this game and do a few tweeks just for its performance. Unity can also be used for many types of game genre, like PlanetBase an RTS style game, its flexibility makes it worthy of a good plug.
Some professional assets in game are needed though. Something like the ones posted above. Empyrion has the worst wildlife. Other than a few items like spiders. Which I turn off. Or at least I did when I used to play Empyrion.
The biggest issue with current animated assets (creatures and player alike) are the "static" animation states. There's no IK at all - as I'm sure you've noticed, entities "glide" over the ground while playing a movement animation. Blending between states is awful, and the static "death" pose drives me bonkers (if I nail something with a shotgun blast to the face, I want it to lurch backwards and fall over, not sag gently to the ground like it forgot its antidepressant meds). Their current state is very reminiscent of "Unreal" and other late-90's / early 00's gameplay. Now, this is all very forgiveable in an early alpha, as I can see them being placeholders, to be polished up and perfected down the road, but as I mentioned in another thread, I'm more interested in seeing the quality improve on existing assets before they go adding in more. To that end, I strongly suggest whoever's on art-asset duty for Eleon to have a look at Final IK, which is something I've been trying to save up for, for my own use as well. At $90 USD, it's a very affordable framework that will help improve nearly all animated EGS assets by an order of magnitude (or several).
That spider robot makes me think of a drone from Empyrion, but on the ground. Could you imagine being attacked by waves of both air and gorund based drones like that... Could be very cool. Watching the videos for Final IK really makes you appreciate just how much time it takes to program all the different little details of everything. That is incredible to watch.
I've done a fair bit of modeling & animating over the years. Would've killed to have something like FIK, static animations are just too limited by today's standards. I actually took up Unity myself a couple months ago, thinking I could apply my skills and possibly make a little income on the side, but sadly my projects never got beyond design documents (and some half-finished models). I mention this only to provide context: when I say that I know exactly how much something like FIK would help the art guy(s) at EGS, I'm saying it as an art-guy myself. I know the work that goes into modeling, rigging, and animating an asset (and texturing, as well), and I think something like this would massively improve both existing NPCs / player models, and anything else they produce going forward.
It does mention that you can apply it to non-bipedal models, is that true? So it could help even something like the turret bots or perhaps even the alien overseers?
While that is true (check out their video of the 'spider-walker' climbing around on sand dunes), the turret-bots have so few moving parts that it probably wouldn't affect them much. I don't know what the Overseers look like, haven't run into them yet. But practically every NPC I've come across thus far would move a hell of a lot better with FIK. I'm sure you've seen a Talon Guardian or two moonwalking against a rock, or the way those bat-creatures take big galumphing hops but only seem to move about half as far as they should - then keep sliding into proximity as they switch to their "attack" animation. Things like that would cease to exist with some proper IK implemented. Unity has some basic IK features built in already (at least current versions do), but they're limited in scope and don't work as well. FIK would be a massive upgrade, and from what I've read it's extremely lightweight compared to other IK tools (that is, easier on system resources).
