Splitterwelten
Brief OverviewSplitterwelten will be a real time single player RPG in the tradition of the famous "Elder Scrolls" or "Gothic" series. The player controls a single character in an almost classical fantasy world, living through various adventures, meeting a lot of people and surviving quite some more battles.
Legends tell that the world once was a whole. A man would have been able to walk for days in any direction without hitting a border, so they say. And inbetween there were lakes so large ships traveled on them transporting goods and passengers.
But these times are gone for long time. A mysterious incident has torn the world to pieces that now form a ring around the large planet.
At some of these shards humans survived. Bound to the small islands of life admidts the void these people live a limited life in small groups. It is only the Guild Of Travellers who bridges the humongous gaps between the inhabited shards with its wooden airships. Often simply called "Merchants", they form the connections that tie the last remains of humanity together and bring travellers, goods and messages to the farthest places.
Although of vital importance for everyone, the guild is yet to be welcomed heartly everywhere. Their arrogant attitude and the strict protection of their secrets costs them alot of sympathies among the common people.
The project is based on a privately developed 3D engine which is quite powerful by hobby standards. The underlying framework was designed as platform-abstract but at the moment is fully implemented only for Windows platforms. The renderer uses complex generated shaders to combine arbitrary materials with single or multiple flexible light sources, with realtime shadows using Shadow Maps if desired. A self-developed projection method allows adaptively detailed shadows from close up to the horizon.
An equally data-driven filter system allows nearly arbitrary fullscreen effects such as the usual bloom and motion blur, depth of field or High Dynamic Range rendering.
By being able to stream scene data the engine can handle nearly arbitrary sized worlds. Free-formed terrain allows a natural inclusion of steep cliffs, overhangs or caves. A powerful detail reduction system and several hierarchical optimisations allow a large range of sight. Standard tasks such as bone animations, automatically placed foliage and particle systems are supported as well, rigid body physics are provided by Ageia PhysX.
At the moment the project is taking large steps at its way to playability. While the first years of development were mainly dedicated to building the technological foundation, this foundation is now stable and powerful enough to build the actual game mechanics on it.
In the present state the basic movement mechanics of characters and monsters are working and rigid bodies do behave as expected. Character-scene interactions like opening a door or picking up an item is implemented. The quest system and an abstract theatre system to provide dialogs and cutscenes are already present, too.
Yet the list of things to do is even longer: a fighting system, visibility determination especially for sneaking, an AI to bring non-player characters and monsters to life and a serialisation solution to allow saving or loading a game state. Apart from that there's always work to do at the technical foundation: an engine is never fast or powerful enough.