Hearts of Oak: Conquest of the Seas

[mikeydmc]

Hearts of Oak Weekly Update 7

Sorry about the late update I've been dealing with computer problems

If you're a fan of the astonishing 3D artwork and unforgettable music our team members produce, you're in for a treat...

Welcome to another edition of our Hearts of Oak progress articles!

Each week*, we will bring you a summary of the latest development news, including work-in-progress screenshots and in-game footage, along with a more in-depth look at featured content.

This week we have a wide range of impressive models, engine screenshots and music to share...

3D Models

There are several sub-categories of 3D assets to cover here, so below we'll list various types of assets, what they're called and who made them.

Architecture

- WIP Chapel; Wedori

A high-detail period chapel, featuring full interior. The interior itself isn't complete, but the building is otherwise perfect for many in-game towns.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Chapel1.jpg

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Chapel2.jpg

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Chapel3.jpg

Weapons

- Sabre Concept Art; SuperDurnius

Continuing his latest trend, SuperDurnius has produced another great piece of concept art, this time on the subject of sabres.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Concept_Saber.jpg

- WIP Rapiers and Daggers; SuperDurnius

Here's another work-in-progress shot of some rapiers with different hand guards. You'll also notice some daggers, which borrow parts from the rapier models.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/WIP_Rapiers_Daggers.jpg

 

[mikeydmc]

Hearts of Oak Weekly Update 7

Part 2

Scenery and Props

- Cart and buckets; Wedori

More props with which to decorate the game world, both made to a high quality.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Cart1.jpg

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/Buckets1.jpg

- Shipping crates; SuperChango

This is a selection of containers of different types. From left to right: a wood-reinforced box, an iron-reinforced box, and a flush box.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/ShippingCrates1.jpg

Below is a group of logos, or Merchant's marks, that will be randomly applied to these boxes in the game.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/MerchantMarks1.jpg

Environment

Here we'll show how the game world is coming together, with content demonstrating lighting effects, time-of-day transitions and environmental design.

- Tavern interior lighting; RobinPC

This tavern, built by SinKing, is being brought to life by RobinPC who is applying realistic lighting effects in the engine.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/TavernInt1.jpg

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/TavernInt2.jpg

- Test Island progress; RobinPC

This is one of the latest attempts to create a realistic Caribbean environment, from the lighting effects to the colour of the sea.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/20/19616/TestIslandSea1.jpg

Music

To give you a taste of what's to come, we're regularly showcasing an original track, produced by one of our talented composers.

This time, we're taking a look at a piece many of you have probably heard already: "Hearts of Oak", a theme song composed for the game by Flannery.

As always, you can listen to the piece via the link below, and read some comments from the composer about how he came up with the track.

Hearts of Oak - Final Mixdown.mp3

Flannery wrote:

This was actually the first piece I made for Hearts of Oak, and the sketch for it was initially a test to show my worth to come on board the HoO team.

 

To brake the piece down as simple as possible: I wanted the piece to depict different notions about being at sea - different weather, different daily chores on and below the deck, the thrill of the chase, and of course the battle.

The initial melody is the scout, watching the horizon for easy prey and dangers. Then the strings come in depicting the heartbeat and the adrenaline rising. Then we have the cello which introduces the main underlying melody, which is copied by other instruments through out the whole piece. This is meant to be the rolling of the waves.

The initial dramatic drums depict the sailors getting the ship ready for battle or the chase. The other themes and melodies throughout the piece depict everything from boarding a surrendered ship, sailing through storms, washing the decks, dividing loot, taking prisoners and so on.

Also a funny fact - one if my ideas was to really forward the feeling of rolling waves, hence why the theme has this underlying melody that keeps going up and down throughout most of the piece.
But also, when you look at all the notesheets for it all, almost every instrument creates a wavelike notion with the notes, so the notesheet itself looks like a sea of waves.

COPYRIGHTS
This music is the property of D'laymusic - Norway, and Christian "Flannery" Tornholm-Lehn. It is protected under copyright law, which if violated might lead to legal persecutions.

Stay tuned for more original music soon!

Vacancies

We still have a few high-priority vacancies that need to be filled to help us make further progress on the game.
As a reminder, all of these developer roles are NON-PAID positions. Current priorities are as follows:

- Character Modellers

- Other 3D Artists

- User Interface Developers

- Texture/Shader Artists

- Engine Programmers/Scripters

For role descriptions and how to join the team, click here.

That's it for this week's progress; we'll have more updates for you soon!

Don't know what the Hearts of Oak project is? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.

*Please note that while we're aiming to post a new article each week, we can't always manage this, but we will post articles as regularly as we can!

 

[mikeydmc]

Hearts of Oak Important Update

We've been busy making some crucial decisions about how to move Hearts of Oak forward. Read on for all the details...

Ahoy everyone,

This week's article is slightly different than usual, as we'll be focusing on an important announcement.

A few weeks back, you'll remember us announcing our upgrade from the free CryEngine SDK to the 'Engine-as-a-Service' (EaaS), a paid subscription to the latest version of CryEngine.

You may also have heard that this upgrade came with a few setbacks, which at the time were somewhat frustrating, but we were confident that we would eventually overcome them.

Now, though, the reality of the situation is very different.
A number of severe engine bugs have shown up, breaking hundreds of hours' worth of hard work, and there was (and remains) little sign of proper fixes from Crytek any time soon.

These setbacks managed to halt our progress to such an extent that, unfortunately, we had to find a more viable alternative than CryEngine.

This brings us to the following announcement:

We have now chosen to use the Unity engine to develop Hearts of Oak.

http://media.indiedb.com/images/articles/1/166/165860/auto/Unity_300x125.png

We understand that this decision may leave you with a lot of questions, so please watch the video below and read the following FAQ for more information behind the engine change.

Here are some of the points covered in the video, detailing what's being worked on now and what will be done in the near future:

Current progress:

- Functioning ship with opening/closing gunports, basic buoyancy and detailed physical proxies
- Simple ocean waves with deformed mesh in foreground, texture based waves in background
- Simple ocean shader with transparency based on terrain
- Short camera controller for character navigating the ship in first person
- Time scaling, also affects physical interactions
- Very basic quest and dialogue systems

To do:
- Write a less expensive cloth renderer for sails, and to receive shadows
- Import functioning guns
- Create ship movement which responds to wind object
- Dynamic weather system
- Implement segmented terrain system
- Dynamically render islands from heightmaps

Engine Change FAQ

Why are you abandoning CryEngine?

Unfortunately, it's mostly down to the quantity of bugs that made it very difficult to progress with development, and the disappointing lack of support from Crytek to fix these bugs.

Switching to the EaaS set us back by several months' worth of work because of the bugs and undocumented changes it introduced, which needless to say, did not go down too well with our developers who were paying for the subscription.

Why did you choose Unity in its place?

Initially, we chose Unity as a temporary solution to the CryEngine's progress-halting bugs. The plan was to flesh out as many game mechanics as we could, and transfer the code back to CryEngine once the bugs had been fixed.

However, the more we used Unity, the more we noticed its potential.
It soon became clear that the content pipeline to get assets into the engine was vastly quicker and more efficient in Unity, and that our programmers had much more freedom to implement the exact features we wanted. We also liked the modular nature of the engine, with a wide variety of addons available to help speed up development.

In a space of a couple of weeks, we were able to replicate a few months' worth of CryEngine work in Unity, and by that point it was clear that we could make this game happen in a fraction of the time by switching to Unity outright.

I thought you said you were committed to CryEngine?

We were committed to it, but it seems CryEngine wasn't committed to us, if you will. If the EaaS hadn't set us so far back in development, and if the bugs were fixed and new features properly documented, we probably would have stuck with it.

Are you sure this is the best choice?

Rest assured that we're making the right decision for the good of Hearts of Oak. Our developers are now more enthusiastic than ever, with the enhanced flexibility and workflow of Unity giving us great confidence that this engine will help us make Hearts of Oak a reality.

But CryEngine looks so GOOD! Can Unity replicate those visuals?

Yes, CryEngine looks better than Unity out of the box, but with very little work we're already well on our way to making a test level that looks quite close to CryEngine. We're confident that we'll have something just as good later in development.

Don't you need Unity Pro for fancy graphics?

Technically, yes we do. It's quite expensive, but we do plan to raise funds to help pay for the licenses. More details on that below.

I thought you weren't going to raise money for Hearts of Oak?

There are a number of things that forced us to reconsider.
Firstly, apart from the Pro license, there are numerous paid addons that would aid the game's development significantly.
Secondly, we have received offers of donations from some people over the past few months, so we decided that accepting donations to cover the aforementioned costs would be a sensible idea.

To be clear, we will only ask for voluntary donations, and we plan to use this money to pay for licenses, addons and other development costs. As we remain a non-profit team of volunteers, we won't pay individuals to contribute to the game.

We will, however, keep strict control on how the funds are allocated. We will only provide funds for software licenses to team members who have earned our trust, and only if they need that software. We'll also be sparing with the engine addons we purchase, so no matter who donates or how much they give, the money will be put to good use.

How can I make a donation to the project?

We'll have more details on how you can donate soon.

That's all for this week. We know it's a lot to swallow, so don't hesitate to contact us on our forums if you have further questions.

We'll return to the usual update articles very soon, so keep checking back for the latest development news!

http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674766SeaLeftEnd42px.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674766PA_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767HoO_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767Twitter_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767FB_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674768YT_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674768SeaRightEnd42px.png

Edited September 27, 2014 by mikeydmc

[mikeydmc]

Hearts of Oak Weekly Update 8

Find out how to donate to our project in this week's article, and take a look at how we're progressing in the Unity engine!

Welcome to another edition of our Hearts of Oak progress articles!

Each week*, we will bring you a summary of the latest development news, including work-in-progress screenshots and in-game footage, along with a more in-depth look at featured content.

Following the recent announcement of our switch to the Unity engine, we have some details to share regarding donations, as well as the latest information on our development progress.

Fundraising

Due to the Unity Pro licensing and many available add-ons, we have started to accept donations to reduce the costs for our developers.

Even a single Unity Pro license that we need for improved functionality and graphics costs USD1500.
We have already raised the first 1500 dollars through an internal round of donations within in our own team, but that's only the beginning.

If you would like to contribute as well, you can do so through Paypal using the Donate button onHeartsOfOakGame.com.
We are publicly listing the latest status, including proper credit to those who donated, here on our forum.

We are currently looking into the feasibility of added perks for those who donate.
These may range from having your name used in the game to receiving a "Hearts of Oak" t-shirt.
Anything that we decide on will be retroactively provided to everyone who donated before to ensure that nobody is missing out.

All releases of the game will remain completely free as this is and always will be a fully non-commercial project.
None of our developers get any of this money for personal use as 100% will be used to further the development itself.

In other words, these donations are completely voluntary and nobody is required to make any unless they want to.
However, all contributions will be much appreciated and we promise to put them to the best use that we possibly can!

Engine Development

- Ship proxies

This video explains how a ship's collision detection is handled, and how that affects the character's movement on board.

- Ship buoyancy

Here we show how the ships react to the waves, and how different mass values affect this movement.

- Ship firing points

The 'firing points' are our solution to gun placement on ships.
They provide an intelligent system for determining the maximum gun size a ship can accept at each gunport, eventually allowing the player to create custom batteries, even within the same decks.

These points also work with the gunport lids, so guns can be run out or stowed with the lids opening and closing accordingly.

Top Contributors

Below are the latest members of our development team to be recognised with our Top Contributor award in recent weeks:

RobinPC - For his continued contributions to our project, especially to terrain development, and his willingness to learn and improve.

Dario - For his dedication to laying the foundation on the quest writing effort and his willingness to do whatever needs to be done to help move this forward.

Mask - For his valuable work on establishing the formatting of the quests, as well as developing methods for working together on writing multi-branched stories.

Their contributions have been invaluable to the game's development, and we hope to give out more of these awards soon!

That's it for this week's progress; we'll have more updates for you soon!

Don't know what the Hearts of Oak project is? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions for more information.
*Please note that while we're aiming to post a new article each week, we can't always manage this, but we will post articles as regularly as we can!

http://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674766SeaLeftEnd42px.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674766PA_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767HoO_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767Twitter_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674767FB_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674768YT_Icon42pxSea.pnghttp://media.moddb.com/images/articles/1/159/158286/auto/1399674768SeaRightEnd42px.png