Monday, February 13, 2012

Shinya - the game

I have made too big progress with Shinya to not share it at last...

It uses the same rendering engine as Khayyam (Sehle library). Most new (and unreleased) features in Khayyam are actually implemented so it can be used as scene builder for Shinya. Among other things there are now reflections, occlusion queries, volumetric lights and darkness, instanced vegetation, layered terrain and so on...
No - I have not forgotten the new Khayyam release. The main problem holding me back is that there should be at least preliminary support for new materials for POVRay exporter. And things just progress too fast...

Shinya playable tech-demo is nearly complete. The biggest roadblock at moment is fixing remaining shader bugs for ATI GPU-s (this is the unfortunate consequence of writing engine in OpenGL...)

OK, I know - pics or it did not happen...

Sara looking down to Shinya world

Shinya will be adventure game, similar in style to Quest for Glory series. It takes place in (alternate and fictional) medieval times somewhere in central Europe.

There is a bit more vegetation in some areas
The main heroine is Sara - a bit complicated 12 years old girl, who is recently moved to the area with her aunt (she is orphan, as expected).

Another human being!
She will involuntarily dragged into some intrigues, conflicts and mysteries that have lately developed in this otherwise tranquil place. Or maybe not so involuntarily - se is, after all, a bit complicated damsel...

A mill at the main river
Modeling in Blender has been the other big time-consumer other than programming. I am slowly starting to get a grasp of this program - not a pro yet, of course.
The most complex model so far is cathedral - LOD 0 is about 190 000 triangles (LOD 1 about 2500). I develop Shinya mostly on laptop with NVidia GT540M GPU - and thus hope, that for the time it will be released it runs smoothy on most desktop computers at least.

Inside cathedral
The world of Shinya is 4x4 km freely roamable terrain. It has continuous day/night cycles - but you cannot stay awake indefinitely, even by using stamina potions. Thus NPC-s will have certain time to arrange things without player peeking over their shoulders.

Ah, almost forgot - Shinya it is written 深夜

Have fun!