Hello,
I'm Khyrid.

I'm considering leaving Unity (personal edition) to work with Esenthel instead. My project (working title: Sorrawind) is a first person shooter/survival horror type and I want it to be compatible with occulus rift. I couldn't find anything about occulus in the documentation, but I hear this engine is compatible.

I already got as far as making the core game mechanics. I still needed to start making my art assets and world building. I spent years working on the code for it though in mostly unity java script language. Now I'll have to re-write it all from scratch.

My game is pretty basic. It uses a few arrays to store the amount of enemies and items in each level, so the world has some persistence. Line of sight is important as the player must often hide from enemies. I haven't figured out what I will do for cut-scenes yet. Very importantly, because the AI uses a lot of melee attacks, the navmesh path finding needs to be real time. I had to build my own work-around for unity free to do this. So it is my biggest concern for Esenthel. Everything else is stupidly simple and I think I shouldn't have too much difficulty with it. I would finish with Unity, it's a great engine, but I don't think it's right for me.

Anyway, I'm not looking for support just yet. I just wanted to say hello and make it known where I'm coming from and what I'm planning on making, but if anyone has any good links for me, I'll check them out. I plan on purchasing a binary license this weekend.

Hello and welcome to the forum

I wish you good luck with your game!

hello ! good to have you

cyu around

Hi, glad to see you're interested in Esenthel. I look forward to seeing you port the game if you decide to join us.

All you have described sounds doable in the engine it will just take a bit of time to get it re-coded, but it sounds like you are a fairly confident coder anyway. Good luck with the move.

Some tutorials/guides that might be of initial interest:

My own quick guide to object creation: Simple overview of custom object creation in Esenthel

Scarlet Thread's excellent series of tutorials: General tutorials

The above are based on a previous version of the engine (v2) but are still mostly applicable.

Also you might find yvanvds tutorial here useful: Learn C++ with Esenthel

Reviewing the free Bloody Massacre code by Esenthel is also recommended along with other good tutorials in the forum Tutorial section.

Thanks everybody. I'll be sure to check out those links.

I'm still looking into Esenthel. What I'm wondering about before I go any further is how I would build my game world. In Unity I was making the world by connecting a bunch of levels together. I had a nice fade to black transition between levels.

Is it a good idea to make a bunch of worlds in Esenthel and connect them that way? Or should I consider building my whole game world in one world? And if I do that, I would need to disable and enable roaming AI characters as the player moves around. I haven't found how to do that in Esenthel yet. My game world takes place in a massive manor and a few locations around it, but everything is pretty much close together. There might be thousands of AI characters inhabiting the game, I cannot have them all roaming around in the same world simultaneously.

You can load another world when you reach whatever location you want it to change at or you can have one larger one, it's up to you.

(10-06-2016 09:08 PM)Zervox Wrote:  You can load another world when you reach whatever location you want it to change at or you can have one larger one, it's up to you.

I heard that Esenthel was meant for large world style games like MMOs. So, I was a little concerned that making hundreds of worlds might not be the best practice.

(10-06-2016 08:38 PM)Khyrid Wrote:  ... I would need to disable and enable roaming AI characters as the player moves around. I haven't found how to do that in Esenthel yet. My game world takes place in a massive manor and a few locations around it, but everything is pretty much close together. There might be thousands of AI characters inhabiting the game, I cannot have them all roaming around in the same world simultaneously.

A simple solution to this would be to only enable animation and rendering of characters within a given radius of the player. This is easily done once you have a basic object class for an animated character.

If more sophisticated control is required then this could be written into your AI routine's themselves which disable/enable the characters as required.

I think it can be simple. Using the class based on what section the player is in to turn off render and anim sounds like the way to gobtain.

Another concern is that my environments graphics will be limited if I try to make it all one level. I don't know if LOD is going to work with distance when the level I don't want rendered is right above the player. Maybe the engine has a way to not render things that are occluded?

Advanced occlusion culling is still on the roadmap and has been for at least 5 years that I'm aware of, possibly longer, so I don't expect this to be developed any time soon ... if ever!

So you will need to devise your own system for what is rendered and what isn't if you need to reduce the rendered polys within the camera frustum. Anything outside the frustum is of course culled.

Yeah, I guess the logic is pretty simple. I've made similar systems before with Unity. I feel safer just making a bunch of levels though. That way I can splurge with resources knowing that everything is contained into a smallish level.

I also checked out that tut from yvanvds. I'm really enjoying it so far. I think I've made my final decision. I'm going to subscribe right now. Nobody will hear anything from me for a while as I absorb this language and workflow, but once I restart my Sorrawind project prepare for lots of "how do I do this in esenthel" posts.

BTW, where should I post asking how to do a thing in Esenthel? In the support section? Or is that mainly for errors and things not working right..?

Support is where you would be posting such questions.