The Universim: General discussion

We can simply release it right now, but it might give us more problems down the road because we will have build everything around the version that you'll have on your machine and we will no be able to change anything. For right now you can check Demo that we added on steam, it should give you perfect heads up on what is coming next.

Ok, now that I've actually been able to download it and give it a whirl.



Intro voice

Definitely doesn't sound quite natural. Almost sounds more like a reasonable quality text to speech synthesis rather than a actual person reading the lines. But this may be due to the individuals lines being recorded separately and then the placing of individual tracks together isn't quite right. It's not bad by any means, but it certainly didn't sound natural either.

Intro content

It's a sales pitch. It's trying to sell you the idea behind the game to make you pony up money and back it. So that's why it's rather long winded and feels less like a introduction and more like a cars salesmen trying to get you to buy something.... because that's exactly what this is.

World Generation

Generated 4 different planets, and couldn't really tell the results apart other than the bodies of water were noticeable different in size/shape. Everything else kind of blends together. They certainly look nice enough though.

Clouds

One thing that did bug me is how clouds are handled. They literally just appear out of nowhere in the sky, move about, eventually escalate to storm clouds and soon after the particle emitter handling it either immediately destroys itself or switches off and the storm cloud just up and vanishes. Hopefully the eventual goal is to have proper cloud formation and dissipation in some way rather than clouds that teleport it, perform a show then teleport out again, especially if they're actually meant to be playing a environmental factor role.

Entering Clouds

One nice touch is the water effect that builds up on the camera when passing through clouds. Simple touch, but nice to see.

Ecology

Seems little to no real simulation behaviour to the various wildlife. They don't even seem to be aware of other entities. At one point I watched a mammoth and a wolf walk head on into each other, mammoth ended up pushing the wolf backwards as the wolf carried on playing its walking animation but being dragged backwards. This went on for about 5-6 seconds until the wolf finally got nudged free after which it started to slide diagonally across the terrain whilst still playing its walk forward animation.

So seems the wildlife is very much 'faked' in terms of actual behaviour. They're just getting destination coordinates, pathfinding a route and following it oblivious to anything else that may walk into its path or disrupt its trip during the sequence. Even if they get nudged or pushed off that path, they will continue to follow it once free regardless to their actual facing leading to creatures just gliding sidewards and diagonally about the place.

Overall impressions

Planets look nice. But not really seeing any noticeable diversity in the output other than shifting the same landmass about. Noticing no polar regions or clear biomes just sudden patches of sand or rock out of nowhere amidst lush temperate terrain.

Wildlife clearly has little to no behaviour simulation behind it and are just animated models that generate and then mindlessly follow static paths that don't react to any changes.

But for a pre-alpha, hey it's expected. As long as they don't try to tell anyone they're actually simulating things which at this point they're clearly not even making a token effort to simulate.

TL;DR

Planet quality in general. ++

Planet generation Diversity. --

Cloud and other environmental behaviour. Neutral

Ecology. ----- For all intents and purposes the planet ecology just doesn't seem to actually exist. It's all faked to appear to be behaviours when cubes just being lerped from A to B would achieve the same output.