About
ZENITH 01 (I needed a better name than Space Station View 2: Electric Boogaloo) is a project I have been working on for about a month now. After releasing my first space station demo in December, I decided to sit back and spend more time on another 'diorama' project. I felt, though, that I could have made my first project even more detailed if I gave it more time. So I expanded on the idea entirely and am creating a sequel (or reboot?) of sorts.
Named after the ship design showcased within, this project is intended to be less of a game and more of an experience. I'm sure most of us, upon seeing great films like Alien, Serenity, Event Horizon, Pandorum, or Cargo, have always thought it would be neat to soak up the atmosphere of a dark and cozy deep-space vessel. Or at least I have! So I set out to try and create a little environment that's at least a fraction as cozy and immersive.
Gameplay
Unlike my last game, you can fully move around two rooms/floors of Zenith 01. I've tried to strike a balance so far between tons of detail and performance. So far it's running as smooth as silk and has a moderate amount of objects without being too cluttered!
I wanted to create something that's just nice to soak in. And so, I've allowed the player to, upon approaching chairs, automatically sit in them. Just relax and look around! Want to make it even more cozy, or increase performance? Main lights have associated light switches that can be toggled on/off!
Great care is being put into the sound design. I want to immerse the player into the guts of a gargantuan spacecraft, and so the sound is booming, and all -encompassing, and bass-rich, but also mixed just right and low enough to allow you to play your own music in the background. Or why not a podcast?
Floor 1: Recreation/Observation
The most spacious and "homey" room is a laid-back and messy observation room.
Floor 2: Control
Tighter quarters but a better view. You will get a better view of the vista outside in a less-than-comfy chair in front of monitoring consoles.
Background
You are a mechanical engineer, just relaxing after a day of work. You and your partner (who you may spot outside 😉 ) are two of the skeleton crew kept conscious in shifts while the passengers and crew lie in stasis on your journey to colonise a new world.
But empty space is boring! So Zenith 01 and 02 are placed within eyesight of an alien planet with a trace gaseous atmosphere that is to be scooped up as fuel.
But that's not going to happen. This is a diorama - a looping snapshot of a moment in time. Soak it in and relax as long as you want.
Release
I will most likely release this in early July, as I am taking my time polishing it off, and would like to implement DK2 support and then further tweak the game for positional tracking if necessary. With an upped resolution and more ways to peek, peer, and bend, it would be beneficial to ensure everything looks its best with the new hardware.
Anyway, this is just me announcing this WIP. You can see any new progress at http://rift-vr.com/. Thanks for reading! It might be hard without a demo, but please let me know if you have any ideas/criticisms from what you have seen.
(Here are some dark and un-revealing screens - these may appear pretty dark - I assure you it looks great in the Rift)
Screen: http://rift-vr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/stationscreen2.jpg
Screen: http://rift-vr.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/station22.jpg
Edit: I've added a short video!
Just re-discovering the Oculus forums! I totally missed this. It's been so long since I worked on this, and haven't wanted to because of the hassle of getting everything updated with my relatively limited developer knowledge and my limited free time.
So it was as good as dead while I waited for the SDK releases to stabilize & slow & standardize & future-proof themselves.
But I started again last night. So good timing for me to see this.
I'm not touching 0.7 until it makes sense for me to do so, but I upgrades to Unity 5, and it wasn't toooooo much of a problem since most of my free-sourced models weren't UV mapped right for AO baking anyway. It's so dark and relies on realtime lighting, so all of the standard mats going defunct wasn't a big problem.
But I feel like moving forward again now that I have a brand new gaming PC and can run the thing at an insane FPS. And because I can DK2-test in the editor now instead of having to make a new build each time, it's a lot less annoying.
The quality of the models won't be insane, as this started as a small little passion project for me to try create a cozy deep-space atmosphere/mood rather than an ultra-high quality level meant for intense scrutiny.
So there's nothing new at this point; just me upgrading to a very, very different version of Unity and new Oculus runtime/sdk and makng sure things work again. I am taking sh0v's approach and using a second camera for rendering distant space now, so I'll be able to add more detail there. I do need to fix a lot of iTween animations that seem to have broke though. And I want to start adding a lot of detail that I couldn't before due to PC limitations.
TL;DR - It's not totally dead, and it might end up being a bit rough around the edges compared to the high quality gold we've seen released in the past year and a half, but it's coming!
So it was as good as dead while I waited for the SDK releases to stabilize & slow & standardize & future-proof themselves.
But I started again last night. So good timing for me to see this.
I'm not touching 0.7 until it makes sense for me to do so, but I upgrades to Unity 5, and it wasn't toooooo much of a problem since most of my free-sourced models weren't UV mapped right for AO baking anyway. It's so dark and relies on realtime lighting, so all of the standard mats going defunct wasn't a big problem.
But I feel like moving forward again now that I have a brand new gaming PC and can run the thing at an insane FPS. And because I can DK2-test in the editor now instead of having to make a new build each time, it's a lot less annoying.
The quality of the models won't be insane, as this started as a small little passion project for me to try create a cozy deep-space atmosphere/mood rather than an ultra-high quality level meant for intense scrutiny.
So there's nothing new at this point; just me upgrading to a very, very different version of Unity and new Oculus runtime/sdk and makng sure things work again. I am taking sh0v's approach and using a second camera for rendering distant space now, so I'll be able to add more detail there. I do need to fix a lot of iTween animations that seem to have broke though. And I want to start adding a lot of detail that I couldn't before due to PC limitations.
TL;DR - It's not totally dead, and it might end up being a bit rough around the edges compared to the high quality gold we've seen released in the past year and a half, but it's coming!
