WHOAAAA
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hey a friend and i got this from the early access discount thing and have been playing it a bunch! would love to post some thoughts but i donât know if this thread is the place for that.
for now iâll say itâs cool as hell though
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Post here if you like! I also have official forums and a discord. The discord is the most active, the offish forums are the most permanent, and this is where the selectbros are, so choose your poison.
We also play online w each other via Parrsec which is dope AF. One day I will convince @spacetown and @gary to form team selectbutton and wrack house
nice! i think iâll post some stuff here but i might go hang out in the discord anyway, i def want to keep playing this video game
so lil thoughts so far:
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we both suck at competitive fighting games and the closest experience i have to any of those is being a semi-tryhard at dark souls 2/3 pvp which i guess helps with this somewhat
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this game is way too fast for my brain to process so far but i can see myself getting used to it and it feels like iâm learning! cool! also i still donât know how to use shields, i mean i guess i know rationally but my head still hasnât wrapped around the idea of turning around to defend. also some day iâll be able to escape getting smashed to death by the black branch
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on second thought i think dark souls has trained me to expect escaping sticky situations to be easy and getting your opponent into a sticky situation to be hard
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my favorite weapon is that slow moving sparkly purple orb magic because it looks so pretty. so pretty and yet⌠so deadly. i love everything with shiny particle effects in this game, i want to try a setup that only uses shiny stuff
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i love the screen shake effect. please never remove it or tone it down
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i also love how much these characters and weapons and stuff hint at the gameâs setting⌠like wow i canât wait to see the world all of these things belong to
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i just looked up parsec and wow what is this future video game technology. will try when i get a chance
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@fotocopiadora I wish you could play with us all the way from Spain 
. Hereâs a video of some Black Branch play if you want to figure out how to do it better.
Shields work best vs. stabbing and swiping attacks. Overheads from the air or on the ground (like the Black Branch) are much better at getting over shields. Taller shields obviously block overheads more, but thatâs stickier. If youâre a boss you can also Parry the Black Branch because the angle and position of an activated shield is higher specifically to block overheads (among other attacks!).
Side note: The Moon Fields community is suuuper into the online play. A lot of them liken it to Souls PvP, and Select Button is where my love for FROM and the Souls games started, so I am gonna have to post this stuff here:
If you think thatâs cool above, please like/retweet/signalboost. I deffo donât have a big enough twitter following to make this thing go big all on its own.
If youâre interested in playing online, please pop into The Moon Fields Discord channel here. We can play games even if yo donât have a copy. Itâll be neat to come full circle and play w/ some of yaâll.
First time Iâve watched any footage of this
I think the footstep noise is too much, at very least itâs really dominating the mix
Ran an online tournament. It was pretty cool. Probably going to cut together a highlight reel later. This is the grand finals, though.
This was my first attempt at a tournament format. I made each tournament goer pick a character and two optional items. Each bracket was a best of three started off on a neutral stage with the playersâ tournament character. After each game the loser picked another stage, they both had an opportunity to adjust their character with their optional items.
You beautiful beast! You did the thing I was thinking of doing, which is making an engine that would apply depth information to voxels to make them look like hifi pixel art! However, it gives me a certain desire to clarify a point concerning this graphical effect in conjunction with the greater overall scene. Was your goal to give the game the look like pixel art, moving with that sort of chunky granularity? I ask because the boxes in that last video seem rather high resolution compared to the surroundings.
Is the perspective an orthographic or perspective projection? For my own part I figured that I would use an orthographic projection and do my best to preserve a 1:1 voxel:pixel ratio for all objects in my own engine.
Are you employing some sort of GLSL-like shaders on certain colors for certain objects? Do you believe that there would be any merit in such an approach, ascribing âmaterialâ properties to things that are ultimately constituted of a few more voxels?
Is there anything you can think of that might âflattenâ the appearance of the game to make it look more pixellated? What approach did you ultimately take with respects to this?
What format are you using to store and load your voxel assets?
Either way, my compliments on this. It has a very appealing appearance, for certain. Iâll definitely be reading this whole thread ASAP so I can gank some ideas from your implementation.
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hi mr b i hope youâre doing well!
thanks for the nice words!
I was initially trying to do a more radical pixel to voxel correlation, but eventually I decided against it. The biggest thing that gets my pixel/voxel aesthetic across, I think, is that a face of a pixel and the face of a voxel are 1:1 except in situations where a sprite is billboarded towards the screen and in that case the pixels are 2x as tall as the voxels. Everything else is Unityâs standard shaders and lighting. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to do realistic lighting in the game, and I think thatâs also pretty key to the overall look of the game.
The perspective is ortho, but to do ortho and 1:1 you have to do some stretching (usually) in the Z and Y axes. Unity does not like it when you stretch container objects for Rigidbodies, so be wary of that! I bet I could have done it that way if I rolled my own physics, but then⌠I can see that plus flat shaders working, but if I did it that way I bet Iâd have to get real deep into the rabbit hole of voxels exploding and such. Right now Iâm pretty happy with Unityâs implementation, soooo
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Interesting explanations, though many of them still leave me questioning the âwhysâ of the matter. Guess I might come to understand what all this is about needing to have a 2:1 pixel:voxel ratio and this âexplodingâ of voxels if I attempt one of these sorts of engines myself.
I guess my takeaway question would be, âcan you expound upon the difficulties of scaling and shading voxels projected to look like pixels?â My initial guess would be that the orthographic projection might distort the shading, but then again, if my memories of OpenGL are correct, the view matrix and the model matrix should be separate. Granted, this is Unity and not OpenGL or Vulkan, so clearly the internal model may differ in some aspect or other.
Ultimately, while I do sincerely appreciate the warnings about some particular Unity class, the warning will never be anything I comprehend first-hand. I personally have no intention of ever using Unity.
However, I could see myself using the Godot Engine, particularly given the fact that the Vulkan Redbook states explicitly that the API is less about building individual applications as OpenGL was and better suited to constructing middleware of the Unity and Godot variety.
Also, @eska: letâs go! :3
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My aesthetic is pretty simple. Itâs partially because Iâm an artist and designer before coder, but also partially because I like the way it looks. The camera is a 60* downward orthographic cam. The above voxel art is a 16x16x16 cube. I set my camera size so this stretches 4x wide on a standard 1080p screen. The height is half as tall as the width is wide. And the depth is a little geometry bending weirdness, but itâs 1/2 x sqrt3. I didnât have to do any of this math - Unity does the 3D rendering for me. I just had to pick the 60* downward cam and double the height for my sprites.
I did figure out that if I were to run a 45* ortho camera and read more vertical lines that I could get a âflatterâ groundplain where the width and depth ratio was 1:1, but I didnât like the way it looked. So.
As far as shaders go, I didnât touch any of the shaders. There was an SB member who showed me how to shade a sprite with Unityâs PBR pipeline. I forget who it was? Please chime in!
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Thatâs lookinâ really swagger!
The ambient lighting really proves out this concept of using voxels instead of pixels.
Of course, your words from before make me wonder if I shouldnât just fake the effects somehow. I imagine if Iâm willing to draw enough layered regions on sprites then with considerable, arduous work that defeats much of the purpose of only having to sculpt a given animation frame once instead of 4-8 times per cardinal face. Then again, I suppose that if I used some of the ratios and angles you elected against I might end up with something that smooths slightly more.
Ultimately, the blockiness of things doesnât detract a great deal from any particular thing, but for objects intended to be organic such as trees it is somewhat more noticeable to me.
Perhaps the best move would be voxels with billboarded pixel masks on areas that need to be made to look different in some fashion, say, in the event that the voxel model just doesnât seem to read well but I donât want to distort its shading and lighting trying to futz it into shape.
Should probably make my own thread at some point. Alas, donât have any of my books and even less gusto.
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There was a lot of discussion about directionality re: Dark Souls, Mount & Blade, etc and I really wanted to point out how The Moon Fields deals with this. Iâve written about this before, but I think the visualizations I have are really helpful:
Colt has two options. He can move down or to the right. Because TMF is directionless, I usually refer to these as counter clockwise (CCW) and clockwise (CW) respectively.
If Colt moves CCW downward then he keeps his shield pointed toward Eye Knite. This is generally safe, though you will also notice Eye Kniteâs shield will be pointed towards him as well.
And if Colt moves CW to the right heâll open his unguarded side to Eye Knite. This is much less safe for either character, but it makes forehand swinging attacks much, much more dangerous.
Do you find issues in your rotation solver at angles between ~130 degrees and 180 degrees? At that point most games pick shortest rotation, which may sometimes surprise players if itâs different from the earlier angle and theyâre counting on shields in certain directions.
Iâm not sure what you mean by rotation solver?
There are 2 ways players rotate:
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When youâre on the ground and pushing out the stick you rotate 720*/s. It takes 15 frames to rotate 180*. You do not rotate like this when you are in the air, running, or charging a jump.
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When you activate attacks. Each attack has a different turn value. The agile Knightsâ Swordâs Stab has a turn value of 180*, so you can attack in any direction at any time. A heavier weapon like the Battle Axe has a tiny turn value of 15*, so you can just barely eek out the right direction.
As in, do you rotate clockwise or counterclockwise? When the player presses a stick direction, I assume your control scheme assumes a desired facing vector. From there, you figure out this difference between your current facing vector and the desired and need to decide how to rotate them to it.
The standard solution is to pick the shortest rotation, but I was wondering if you found that sometimes confusing. For example, if a player had been gradually rotating clockwise and then snaps nearly 180 degrees aground, they may expect the rotation to continue in the same direction and rely on it because it impact the shield facing.
Oh! Yeah, youâre right that it always picks the shortest rotation. Iâve never felt confused, and no one has told me that they felt confused about the followup rotations. I have had some people complain about weapons not attacking in the direction they thought, but usually thatâs solved by me telling them to pick a lighter weapon. If someone asks Iâll tell them about the specifics of the turning mechanics, and that usually ends the convo.
I wonder if youâre right on a split second level? It takes 8 frames to turn 90*, and not much in the game happens in that short of a time. If I get hit from a straight sword attack, my initial reaction is to move the analog stick CCW. As soon as my stun is up it takes 8 frames for me to get into a position where I can block. Even if I do it in the most wrong way itâll take 15 frames for me to turn to correct it. I donât even know if this is what youâre referring to.