Dream Build Play

I like most XNA users am aiming to enter the DBP competition. I cannot use the NiGHTS clone of course being it is a clone;P. So I descided to continue working on it to develop the engine I will use for the DBP entry. I have teamed up with my good 3d artist friend for the contest. He will be doing the artwork, I will be doing the programming, and we both will be doing the designing.

The basic plan at this stage is a track-based flying shooter. The player will be moving along a 3d track at a speed he cannot control. (very fast :)) What he can control is his offset from the track
and of course he can aim and shoot. The setting will be thick forest and ruins, most of the game will be up in the tree cannopy, but some will be down near the forest floor and some in caverns under the forest. There are many more aspects to the game but they wont be documented at this point (top secret :)) (also we havent thought of them yet).

Forest means thick, thick, view blocking, totaly immersive vegitation. This will be a challenge, but I have made the silly goal of trying to rival speedtree with my vegitation system. :) So far, all I have is some grass which I will be testing in the NiGHTS game to get it thick, detailed, and covering everything. After the grass will be leaves, mushrooms, flowers, sticks and various fungus. Then will be plants, tall weeds and vines. Then will be Trees and hanging vines all thickly covered in leaves. Then will be things blowing through the air like leaves, spores, twigs and grass if it gets disturbed enough. Basically I plan for this vegitation system to be over the top and will push the xbox gpu to the rendering limit for the 360 version, and a geforce 8800 to the rendering limit for the pc version. I do not plan to do any kind of collision or fancy render effects with the vegitation and will devote everything to pure polygon pushing. My biggest fear is that I know I will run out of video memory on the 360, so I will have to have a thread to load in new chunks. For now I will just focus on PC version so I have plenty of mem to work with. The goal for this system is to get a player to think "I cannot name a game that has this much vegitation on screen!" This of course is useless without an incredibly fun game, but a goal none the less. This pure volumn of vegitation will be achieved by relying on the fact that you are moving very fast and that you are only viewing the scene from 1 direction. That is the 1-up on FPS games which need to draw vegitation that is acurate from all angles, and that will be closely inspected by the user. Not to mention the viewable distance in this game will be very short.