Are you ready to get dirty? New scandinavian map is coming into Virtual-O beta branch!
Are you ready to get dirty? New scandinavian map is coming into Virtual-O beta branch!
Landvetter-Tahult
This area is dominated by large wetlands and sparse low-growing pine trees with good visibility
Size of terrain is 2x2km
What do you mean with beta branch?
Some brave users wants to see new stuff ASAP. They are willing to accept some discomfort caused by rougher state of the build.
Well and beta branch is for them. If you want to have relative stable game in early access state. Than default branch is for you and you don't
need to read further.
But if you would like to try new map and features ASAP. And you will accept all discomfort, than please read further.
Of course all your testing wouldn't be efficient if you wouldn't report your bugs or ideas. So please send them to email specified in main menu.
Take is as first draft of the map. Everything is open for change based on feedback.
Thanks!
And remember I have warned you... :)
How to switch Virtual-O to beta branch?
1. Right click on Virtual-O in Steam library. Choose Properties -> Betas
2. Pick beta branch in beta dropdown
3. New build will start to download
It contains new Landvetter-Tahult map. Map conversion is not yet fully finished, see change log for further info. Performance could be worse on some systems. As I was forced to upgrade game engine version and performance of some parts were worse than on older version.
Change log:
Known issues in Landvetter:
Some symbols are not yet converted:
Try Virtual-O at crossroad of O-Ringen Värmland 2017 and O-Ringen Kolmården 2019
If you are attending O-Ringen next week, don't forget to visit O-Ringen Kolmården 2019 tent where you could try Virtual-O!
You will get exciting info about upcoming O-Ringen Kolmården 2019 and chance to play Virtual-O or even win Virtual-O license there.
Presentation tent is highlighted with pink color on this map:
O-Ringen Kolmården 2019
Experience the wonderful terrain of Kolmården, filled with beautiful nature reserves!
Experience a very compact and central O-Ringen city which is easy to reach from both within Sweden and across Europe, for example, by low-cost flights to nearby Skavsta airport.
Experience a concept with fellowship in focus with lots of great vacation activities both in the region and in the O-Ringen city!
Your club and family will be gathered at the same arenas all week long independent of Foot-O or MTB-O!
Experience the adventure at O-Ringen Kolmården 21-27 July 2019!
https://youtu.be/RN00Sy1fWk4
Screenshots from upcoming map from Landvetter Tahult! (WIP)
Screenshots from upcoming map from Landvetter Tahult! (WIP)
Runtime objects streaming around player
Video preview of runtime objects streaming around player
Scandinavian terrain is special beast in terms of vegetation density, so Virtual-O needed something special to get on that level.
And that's objects streaming feature.
It basically generates ground objects around player on the fly. Without run-time streaming we would need to store basically hundreds of thousands if not millions of objects.
Which hinders performance and memory usage a lot.
What is important, those objects are generated always on same place with same rotation scale etc, although they will despawn when you are not near.
Its main purpose is for objects generation which are not paint in the map. Like small rocks, bushes, small vegetation, stumps etc.
But I'm using it now experimentally for symbols 407 and 409 too and it's working great.
It's very exciting feature which is able to deliver lot of small details without big performance hit.
At first it will be only available only on new scandinavian map. But it's implemented in a way which make it possible to add it to old maps too.
https://youtu.be/b5v7gsezKL8
About upcoming scandinavian map
Here is an interesting info about upcoming map. I would like to emphasize that it will be first scandinavian map!
To make it little thrilling I wouldn't be posting map pictures yet, so you can try to find it by yourself...
Kudos to Sven Granfors. Here are few words from him:
Landvetter is a village about 20 km east of Gothenburg. The local club and map-owner is OK Landehof and the map has been produced by members of the club. OK Landehof is an orienteering club with main focus on youth, but has also fostered WM-medalists and even a world master in the 1970's. Apart from orienteering, OK Landehof is also active in nordic skiing and biathlon.
The terrain around Landvetter is quite typical for the region and parts of it is similar to the area where Tiomila will be held in 2017. It's rather hilly, for being in the south of Sweden and dominated by pine trees, however part of the area is a nature reserve, with large oak trees. Due to the active forestry in the region, there are also areas with denser forest and deforestation areas. The rather large amount of marshes are easily crossed during spring and early summer, whereas they can be very hard to cross late summer or fall, due to the high grass growing there.
Skogsvägen S.Härkeshult
SÖ Härkeshult
Öster Klubbstugan
Development update 2
While preparing new maps some time has passed while Virtual-O game engine wasn't updated. (because latest version of game engine has some issues with performance related to trees count)
Well this isn't yet fixed in the Unity. But raising compatibility problems of used assets has forced me to upgrade the engine nevertheless. This update will start its life at first only in beta branch.
On the positive side we get an access to some new features of game engine so Virtual-O can use new terrain rendering asset that allows us to render 256 textures in one pass and tessellation.
Here is little comparison of disabled vs enabled tessellation for rock faces. Tessellation will be used for new map.
And here is little preview of new feature called Screen Space Shadows. It provides screen-space raytraced shadows for directional lights for sharp, detailed contact shadows.
It's relative cheap image effect which can add a lot of depth to grass fields.
Well you can check it by yourself. First images from pairs are without this effect. Ignore slight color differences. They are not result of this effect. Effect just add shadows.
What is interesting that this effect is relative effective even on lower settings where shadows have lower quality. But this effect add here still lot of depth
New terrain rendering for next map
For new map I plan to use new terrain rendering asset.
It supports usage of 256 textures rendered in single pass with height map based blending. (Till now texture count was limited to 8)
That brings interesting possibilities for more realistic ground rendering with comparable performance.
And what is most exciting it supports tessellation too. That’s technique that I want to use for better cliffs, rock faces representation. Without using ton of 3D rock objects.
Tessellation is not an cheap technique and you need to have shader model 4.6 support on your GPU. But it can switch to fallback shader if needed.
Well video is worth a thousand words
https://youtu.be/QjTPIbJNO6I
Development update
Many things happened in last two months.
I got in contact with many people that would like to share maps for Virtual-O.
This activity resulted in one Australian map with interesting difficulty ranging from intermediate with some difficult secions. (which is something that Virtual-O needs for future)
So I have started to convert this map. But after short time I have started to experience most busy weeks in my work in entire life, so work on Virtual-O was reduced.
Still in this busy time I was contacted by more map owners. And one contact has brought an holy grail for conversion. An really really huge OCAD in scandinavian terrain.
Why it is an holy grail? Because you can prepare symbol conversion map once and than use it for whole huge OCAD while creating map by map from this area.
So this option can bring relative easily bunch of maps after first costly conversion.
Stay tuned for more info about map in next posts. And of course here is at least one photo.
Update version 0.8.6237.37503 released
Change log
<*>Added Steam Workshop button that will show competition/course directly on Steam Workshop (you can comment it there unsubscribe etc)
<*>Rebuilt symbol map. 415 was having direction disturbance 1 so tuned it down and adjusted speed too.
<*>Updated Input system to latest version.
<*>Improved map images. Added simulation of overprint improved colors.
<*>Updated Lada map video. Added Advanta Cup 2017 banner and real photos from terrain.
<*>Enabled globe navigation, zoom. (left mouse button + mouse movement) Country List is hidden now.
Now
Before
Would you like to dig deeper into Virtual-O development?
Would you like to dig deeper into Virtual-O development?
Than join this facebook group!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1639385232985688/
