Drawing Plans

9 Replies

Long time no blog, high time for an update!

First off, here’s the trailer I made a while back, it conveys a lot about the current state of the game: Volo Trailer. (You’ll have to forgive me for not embedding the video, wordpress won’t let me for some reason.)

Yeah, that's totally Bispen!

The first proper Volo Airsport trailer! Click the image to see it.

I did an experiment with Unity’s cloth physics, of which you can get some impressions here: Cloth Physics.

Look! Wouldn't that be just the best thing since... since blocky wings?

Using cloth this way would likely result in a unified approach for modeling all ram-air surfaces in the game, in a way that its easy enough for players to design & tweak the shape of their own canopies and suits using an in-game editor. How cool would it be to try and make that Vampire3 fly faster? Mind-blowingly cool, that’s how. Unfortunately it turns out Unity won’t let you read vertices back from the deformed wing mesh, so there’s no way of analyzing a cloth wing for its aerodynamic properties. Not yet anyway, I have good hopes that this feature will become accessible at some point in the future. In the mean time I’ll have to think of something else, so back to the drawing board!

As for the grand scale of things, I’m looking into setting up my own business so I can continue work on the game. Next to working on the game I will spend considerable time doing freelance game programming to build up some funds. I will also be setting up a little online store where you can buy early access to Volo, and some Unity scripts that people have expressed interest in such as scalable input and GUI systems.

That’s it for now. 🙂

  • Herr_Alien

    🙂 If you ever decide to do a bundle sale (“The Fall Bundle” 😉 ), get in contact with the guys from Dejoban. They did that BASE jump-inspired game, “AAAaaaa … A reckless disregard for gravity”.

    The game looks good.

  • Nic

    Great work! Everything seems to be coming along nicely 🙂 All the best with setting up the business, I warn you though, the business will take up a frustrating amount of your time. Keep up the great work though and thanks for keeping us posted!

  • @Herr_Alien: Oh yeah! Loved AAAaaa; Dejobaan is definitely good call.

    @Nic: I’m already knee-deep in all kinds of reading material about business administration, so I’m starting to know what you mean. I do think I need to go this way in order to make it all work on the long run though, so I’ll have to stick with it. 🙂

  • Maxwell

    Thanks for the updates Tinus! Good luck with the business side of things also. I think the game when more complete will sell itself. Oh and I know lot’s of people who will buy the early release versions 😉

  • @Maxwell: Yeah, I’m planning on just letting the game (and its players!) speak for itself, so good to hear something like that is already happening. Thanks! 🙂

  • Simon

    Hello ! I wonder if you release a downloadable version of your simulator ?

    Thanks (Sorry for my English, I’m French ^^)

    Simon

  • It’s been awhile since anything new has been posted. We’re all anxiously waiting to see whats next 😉

  • Been following your project for a while, but when rereading this post, I spotted:

    “Unfortunately it turns out Unity won’t let you read vertices back from the deformed wing mesh”

    Are you aware of Cloth.vertices/normals? Copying them into a mesh collider would let you do some fairly quick flow simulation and coefficient generation (using Collider.raycast)- to that extent, it shouldn’t be a huge deal to do some cloth airflow simulation.

  • Hey Texel, thanks for the tip! I kinda got burned out on the project a few months ago, and I’ve only started getting back into it since last week.

    Anyway, I received the news about the added cloth features a while back, but I haven’t taken the time to check it out yet. Definitely worth an experiment or two! I had other issues with cloth, like how it tended to deform uncontrollably at high speeds, and the fact that it was a bit of a system hog. It’d be great to get running though, animation and physics being in effect the same thing.

    Again, thanks for the feedback, and I love what you’re doing with the shader editor by the way!