At the bleeding edge of 3d engine development, and 10 years of hard work, we present:
A walk simulator. WASD to move.
Coding/engine by Tero Pulkkinen
Music created by Esa Pulkkinen.
External technologies used(in order of importance): * sketchfab 3d model collection, * meshy AI 3d model generation from prompt, * stable diffusion png file generation from prompt * chatgpt AI assistant helping coding tasks/optimization * claude AI assistant helping with coding * blender for their decimate algorithm * tinygltf asset parsing library, * stb_image image parsing and loading header-only library, * emscripten c++ development environment and compiler for web, * SDL2 our favourite library for opening windows and accessing opengl * c++ programming language, * openGL/webgl rendering technologies, * chromium/firefox web browsers, * linux/windows operating systems,
Stuff that does not seem to work: * animation for water * more complex gameplay * edges for the scene * builder tool AI nodes * android support
Fixes done after jam: * performance optimizations * fix for projection matrix, border rendering, walk animations. * decimated the meshes to get it run on low-end hardware => works ok now. * added lod implementation/now far distance has different quality 3d model * perspective matrix changes
Well this have a lot of potential, i hope there is hidden thing if i continue to walk in the void of the depths. I like mysteries. (the game work fine on my firefox version after a little time to loading).
I remember seeing this when checking new posts during breaks. So, I couldn't wait to try this one. Maybe this will become another game that will be used as a benchmarking tool, keep up!
PRO TIP: should reserve the name for the entry before anyone in LD manages to make walking sim. Everyone else with walking sim have just urls with funny numbers, when I can enjoy full power of walking simulator godness.
I mean, it does what it says on the cover, it's a very detailed simulation of walking. So detailed in fact, that it simulates the whole existential crisis going through the mind of the elephant-man when he realizes that he lives in a procedurally generated world, hence it's not quite real-time yet, but we are getting there. Truly state of the art. Makes me wonder what is possible to achieve in another 10 years with this pace of technology advancement!
@detectiveLosos: in 10 years our engine can reach the same level than where unity, unreal and godot is today. So with our resources, we're constantly running to catchup professional engines coming from larger teams. But what saves us is that the technical limitations are killing many of the ideas that larger teams are doing, so if we reach the limits of technology, we have a chance to catchup. Just need to ensure that the quality is good enough that after reaching tech limits, we're able to compete.
@alvaron yeah, web browsers enforce certain rules for security, and one of the rules is that long running tasks shouldn't be used in main event loop. On slower machines, this means our game is considered as running long task, given that it misses the time allocated for frames in 60fps stuff. But what a browser does in this situation, is that it makes the software completely unusable as it starts to miss the following 7 frames too, making it unplayable.
I guess stable diffusion takes the cake on this one for the vines (?). Also, there's an A-pose of something trying to come out of the A-pose of the elephant guy. Use of substances encouraged. :) Serious props though for the runtime generation of the environment! If you ever consider switching engines, I can hook you up. :)
@heviosso: yeah, I'm still optimizing it for getting it to work on low-end computers. Damn optimizations are required to get it running 60fps on low-end computers. No luck yet on that though. Optimizations caused temporarily some rendering issues.
@tero-pulkkinen How low are we talking? Last I checked, my thingy did ~2fps on RPi. If I were to believe the internet, adding a vulkan renderer would make it ~4fps. Can't win them all.
@cobear25 yeah, I decided to try to optimize the world rendering, since it's the first time I have such huge forest/jungle in a game. So gameplay elements are non-existing. Decided it early/got the walking simulator name reserved early in LD. But better get my engine correctly implemented rather than go with short-lived gameplay elements.
Good news. Got the game to work on low-end laptops by decimating the 3d models with blender. Now the rendering takes 6.1ms which is within the 10ms time budget reserved for browser's animation loop. => low-end laptop users can now enjoy the production.
Status report on lod support: Looks like lod is working, but performance of lod isn't as good as I hoped. Rendering high-quality meshes are still more expensive than I wished, and got 15ms rendering time for the lod support. Sadly that's not enough to reach the browser's 10ms time limit.
The outlines over the player model reminded me a lot of Hades. Cool proof of concept man - having done the whole engine yourself is an impressive feat. Looking forward to seeing where else you take it.
Only slight bug I noticed was that, on my 144hz monitor, the game would speed up significantly for short periods of time when changing focus to another window. This amount of time would vary based on how long the window was out of focus.
I played the optimized version of the game to truly appreciate the details of the walking in unwavering fps. One cannot do else but wonder what strange lands and distant past the elephant-man must have gone through. Some authors may know how to inspire fear and joy and the hearts of man, yet elephant-man displays such an audacious performance as to exponentially combine all emotions to the hitherto unnamed new height.
Bold men may claim to perceive War and Nature, wise men the elephant-man we all hold deep inside. But the thoughtful would remain silent, as thee who wants to understand Walking Simulator cannot be taught, but should play the game himself.
Absolute cinema! Loved the character and how misic matches with his drammatic story. Narrative part in general is really good Some missions are a bit complicated and frustrating closer to the middle of the game, but it really worth it - ending tears a soul apart frfr Good job!
Comments54
this is so wonderfully weird
LD57
I hope you had fun jam and learned a lot :D Im pretty impressed that it runs on browser (used edge).
Definitely fitting with theme being in the jungle.
Serious props though for the runtime generation of the environment! If you ever consider switching engines, I can hook you up. :)
Had a sweet little time walking on stream xD
~Xp
Only slight bug I noticed was that, on my 144hz monitor, the game would speed up significantly for short periods of time when changing focus to another window. This amount of time would vary based on how long the window was out of focus.
Bold men may claim to perceive War and Nature, wise men the elephant-man we all hold deep inside. But the thoughtful would remain silent, as thee who wants to understand Walking Simulator cannot be taught, but should play the game himself.
EDIT: great music btw
Loved the character and how misic matches with his drammatic story. Narrative part in general is really good
Some missions are a bit complicated and frustrating closer to the middle of the game, but it really worth it - ending tears a soul apart frfr
Good job!