The focus of this step has been changing the weather and the time of day in the forest.

To trigger these changes in the forest, the building of the interface for Abiogenesis has begun. Changing the time of day involves changing the color of the lights but also some materials. In the original game the color of almost all materials is changed but in Unreal only a few are needed to achieve the desired effect. Some other things change as well when the time of day changes: instead of butterflies, fireflies appear above flower beds and instead of doves, swarms of bats fly overhead. The sound changes too when night falls, both the general atmosphere and specific sounds of nature are different. All the sound files of the old game were reused.

Changing the colors for the time of day worked out okay with Unreal’s standard atmosphere system. But to approximate the subtlety (and complexity) of the original game when changing the weather, a new system needed to be built that allowed the reuse of specific colors and numbers in the old game. With the colors of sky and lights in place, it was relatively straightforward to implement the particles systems for rain, snow and mist, using the original textures (although the resolution of snow was increased). And to replicate how the sound is affected by weather changes.

When comparing screenshots of the old and new game, it became clear that our camera setup still didn’t match the original game. As it turns out, the field of view in The Endless Forest is exceptionally narrow. I think we chose to do this to reduce perspective distortion of the tree trunks. A more narrow view also means that the camera needs to be further away. This change required all sorts other tweaks to sound, particles systems, and so on.

Implementing time of day and weather took a lot more effort that anticipated. But I’m glad it’s done. And I love how it looks.

Thank you for your support!

— Michaël Samyn.

January has been a month of steady progress in tiny steps. In preparation of the expansion of the forest, I have fixed a number of bugs, tweaked a few features and added some pleasant details.

Unreal Engine is completely designed for multiplayer (match-based multiplayer, not the server-based multiplayer required for The Endless Forest, although there is a lot of overlap on the client side). As a result it is in fact a little tricky to make things happen only on the individual player’s computer. This is why in the current alpha, the dance music is such a jumble: every player starts a new iteration of the song. I think I have fixed this now, but I haven’t tested it in an online context (which is surprisingly hard to do in Unreal Engine). The video was recorded with two clients on a single computer (so the music still sounds messy).

In the same vein I have set up a system for local effects and added the floating particles to it. And I have implemented the falling leaves (with procedural animation rather than baked), the flying doves, and the scurrying squirrels. All of these happen only on the local player’s computer. For performance reasons and also because it would make quite a mess when many deer gather.

The motion of the deer avatar has been improved, especially when walking towards a destination such as another deer or a tree to rub. But this might need another pass. I have also removed the bug that would allow the deer to try to rub against grass and ferns next to trees. And two deer should find each other now when sniffing.

The flower antler spell casting has been fixed so that you don’t keep the flowers after giving them away. Some hard edges of tree trunks have been smoothed. And the initial camera view doesn’t end up in the floor anymore.

None of this is very spectacular but it all needs to be done. And better now than when the forest gets bigger, multiplying the problems. We will need to step up the pace a bit if we want to achieve our goal of finishing the remake in the fall. Hopefully that will be possible.

Thank you all for your support. Please spread the word about the fundraising. Since this is taking longer than we had estimated, we could use some extra support.

— Michaël Samyn.

We have managed to create a dedicated server for the multiplayer functionality in The Endless Forest. A client to try this out is available to backers of the fundraising campaign (*).

The process of creating a server for a multiplayer game in Unreal Engine is severely complicated by the fact that this requires a C++ version of the project and a custom build from the source of the editor. Here’s the steps that I took to make it work (some arrived at through hours and days of trial and error).

1. Do the following on a solid-state drive as many of the steps are long processes that involve much read and write activity.
2. Download and install Microsoft Visual Studio 2015.
3. Download the Unreal Editor source files from Github.
4. Compile Unreal Editor in Visual Studio 2015.
5. In game project’s Config folder, edit DefaultEngine.ini to set “r.PostProcessing.PropagateAlpha” to “0” as the default setting of “false” makes the build fail.
6. Open a copy of the game project in the newly built Unreal Editor, package the game and resolve errors until the build succeeds.
7. Apply the same fixes to the original project but don’t build it.
8. Open the game project in the source editor and add a dummy C++ class of “None”. This will create a bunch of files and end with opening the game project in Visual Studio. Wait until Visual Studio is done parsing and scanning thousands of files.
9. Close the Unreal Editor. Close Visual Studio.
10. In the project’s new Source folder, create [game name]Server.Target.cs (**).
11. Double click [game name].sln to open it in Visual Studio. Wait until it’s fully loaded and done scanning and parsing.
12. Build the game client in Visual Studio. We will not use it. So maybe this step is redundant.
13. Run Engine\Binaries\Win64\UnrealFrontend.exe and create and launch the project to create the game server. If UnrealFrontend does not exist, build it after loading UE4.sln in Visual Studio.
14. Open Unreal Editor (built from source) and create a build package. Make sure all maps are included in the package settings array.
15. Copy [project folder]/Binaries/Win64/[game name]Server.exe to [builds folder]/[game name]/Binaries/Win64
16. Make a shortcut to the server and add “/Game/[mapname] -log” to its command line.
17. Run the server and some clients to test if it all works.
18. If the server complains about missing files, install the C++ runtime and copy any required DLL files to the server machine.
19. After all this your 500 MB Blueprint project will have become a 16 GB C++ project. So have a lot of free disk space!

It took us two weeks to build a functioning dedicated server from a project with perfect multiplayer functionality in the regular Unreal Editor. Mostly because many of the operations take a long time and Unreal C++ project folders are huge and contain many files, making everything take long. Since testing within the editor is inconsistent, for each change one has to go through the entire cycle again. Here’s to Epic including server building in the Unreal Editor by the time we start beta-testing!

If you are a backer, thank you, and download and try out the game. We’re curious how it will fare when larger numbers of players use it.

Merry Christmas!
Happy New Year!

— Michaël Samyn.

(*) Send email to The.Endless.Forest at Tale-of-Tales if you are a backer but did not receive the download link. There’s still some major bugs (sometimes the client starts with the camera in the floor and when a player leaves, their deer body might fuse with another’s). Restarting the program usually fixes this. If automatic connection didn’t work or the connection is lost, you can try connecting again by pressing the Enter key.

(**) The text for [game name]Server.Target.cs is

using UnrealBuildTool;
using System.Collections.Generic;

[SupportedPlatforms(UnrealPlatformClass.Server)]
public class [game name]ServerTarget : TargetRules
{
       public [game name]ServerTarget(TargetInfo Target) : base(Target)
       {
        Type = TargetType.Server;
        ExtraModuleNames.Add("[game name]");
       }
}

We’re making steady progress remaking The Endless Forest in Unreal Engine.

Over the past month we have added the idols, the graves and the mysterious cage to the church ruin area. We have added the ambient forest sounds and sounds and dust to the deer’s running and braking (and sniffing!). And we have increased the running speed to match the current game.

The deer now also jumps over obstacles and can hop either by pressing a button or a key or automatically onto certain objects.
We have added the audio and visual effect when running through trees as well. And poppies can now also be picked up and worn in antlers. And butterflies now appear above flower patches.

The interface was also improved. The cursor now remains visible. The camera zoom path has been tweaked to be more similar to the original. This can now be done with the scroll wheel too. And the action bar can now be scaled. Just like the border where we have added the little icons to point at the directions of landmarks and other players.

And last but not least, we have added the visual effect when deer intersect with each other.

Many of these elements were implemented in a completely different way than in the original engine. But we strive to make them look as similar as possible. And hopefully with improved performance.

With all this Phase One is almost complete. I will be looking into networking over the next weeks.

We hope you will enjoy the upcoming holidays in The Endless Forest. They may be the last in the original game. If all goes well, touching wood.

—Michaël.

In the run-up to the presentation at the NEoN festival in Dundee in Scotland, we have made The Endless Forest extra pretty. Almost all of the vegetation of Phase One has been implemented in the Unreal remake. But not quite in the same way as in the Quest3D original.

In Quest3D we used a feature called Nature Painting to plant trees and flowers in the forest. Unreal Editor has a similar feature but it doesn’t work with the way we have set up the tiling that is required to make the forest endless. So we had to come up with an entirely new strategy.

After retrieving the final versions of all the 3D models and textures from our old archives based on hints to file names left in the old game code,  we carefully examined the layout and distribution of the trees, plants, logs and rocks in the original game. And then we used a combination of deliberate placing and random generation to create a forest in Unreal that feels similar.

An interesting side effect of the procedural method used for distributing foliage is that it is very easy to change the density of the forest, even while the game is running.

Not that we want to implement this right away as we are keen on replicating the original game as faithfully as possible. But this does open up new possibilities for the future.

Thank you to all the people who have donated to make this remake possible. We’d love it if you could join them since we have sadly grossly underestimated the effort this remake takes. Also thanks to all those who faithfully contribute to the monthly costs of the server.

If you happen to see us in Dundee during the NEoN festival, do come say hello!

If not, see you in The Forest!

—Michaël & Auriea.

Just a small update to let you know that we have added the buttons for Emotions and Activities to the remake of The Endless Forest in Unreal Engine. And of course all the animations that they trigger, including the dancing. The dance music gets a bit mangled in the video because it’s recorded from two client games running on a single machine. But it works!
Also, but hard to see in the video, we have added all the morph animations for blinking, laughing, sticking your tongue out, etc.

The Endless Forest will be featured in the NeON festival in Dundee in the beginning of November. This festival is organized by some of the people that made the addition of our beloved Halloween event possible. We hope to get a lot of work done before then.

While remaking The Endless Forest I am becoming acutely aware of how much I have learned about programming in the 13 years that have passed. The new Unreal engine is much more conventionally structured than the old Quest3D ever was. So part of the different approach to programming is determined by that. But there’s something incredibly refreshing about the way I programmed The Endless Forest as a complete amateur.

Over the years I have learned what I assume is good programming practice: to categorize problems and reduce the amount of different routines by collapsing similar pieces of logic. One could organize these categories of routines hierarchically so that subroutines can be children with functionality that the parent routine doesn’t have.

When Object Oriented programming was introduced in Quest3D back when working on the original Endless Forest, I had no use for it. Because I didn’t know how to program. Or how to program properly.

But The Endless Forest is a computer program. A multiplayer online game that has been running for twelve years and has been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s supposedly badly made. But does that matter?

The original Endless Forest is programmed in a rather organic way. There are very few shared routines. Everything is an exception. This means that every element in the game can have its own properties. So when we want butterflies on the flowers we just add them. When the candles need to switch on at night, we set that up. When birds should come sit on antlers we just program that in. None of these systems needs to fit anywhere else. Everything is unique.

In my current approach to programming, which I presume is more mature and more conventional (although far from expert level), it is hard to add such details spontaneously. Because everything is a category. It’s a sort of laziness: if I can design a routine that is used for multiple things, I can reduce the amount of routines I need to design. But adding functionality to such routines makes them less “elegant”, less clean. So I hesitate every time. I basically make my code look pretty rather than the game. Or I attempt to structure things so that the amount of bugs and the potential for crashes is reduced and performance and stability are improved. Rather than making the virtual environment richer and more beautiful.

Computers and the software we have to program them aren’t built for the sort of programming in the original Endless Forest. The game has never run very smoothly on anything but a hardcore game computer. But by adapting our designs to how the computer operates, we reduce our creativity. I have always said that computers were too slow for what I really want to create. Over the two decades I have been involved with them, despite euphoric enthusiasm about increasing gigaflops, they have remained too slow. Not only for what I want to create but also for how I want to create.

We will probably never have a programming environment that allows us to paint with code. The realtime visual flowchart interface of Quest3D probably came closest to that. But the program’s development stopped many years ago. And if it hadn’t, it would have probably become more conventional. When I stopped using it that had introduced arrays, object oriented programming and a separate edit mode. Useful, but in the end limiting for my sort of creative mind.

—Michaël Samyn.

Even if progress is made more slowly than we would like, remaking The Endless Forest only becomes more exciting every day. In no small part thanks to the enthusiastic support from the lovely community of players.

We have added and tweaked forest magic, most visibly the ability to pick up flowers from a patch of hyacinths and give them to another deer. This required creating a new system for growing hyacinths, much like the one for creating mushroom circles.

After some searching through our archives, we collected the assets that make up the floor of Phase One of The Endless Forest: meshes and textures. We adapted them to the new tiling system we had created earlier, the system that makes the forest seem endless, and implemented it in Unreal Engine. Back when we had created this floor, shaders barely existed. So we had to come up with all sorts of tricks to get the look we wanted. Since the floor is very big, we needed to tile textures that are much smaller but we wanted to prevent all too visible repetition. And then there’s, of course, the shadows and lights which are also textures. Amusingly, some things that we had set up in the old game but didn’t quite work, now do! The new Endless Forest will not look the same as the old one. But instead of striving to get as close as possible, we will use the new technology (and the old assets) to create something equally beautiful.

Setting up the ground also required the deer to walk over hills and down valleys. We initially set up a system as in the old game that basically checks where the ground is below the deer and then moves the deer there. But then we realized that, as opposed to the old engine, Unreal has a physics simulation built in. So we are now simply using the built-in gravity simulation to keep the deer on the floor. This may break the old bug that allowed some deer to fly. Sorry about that.

We are making maps of the old game to use as a guide for placement of trees, plants and flowers (like the hyacinth patches). We want the forest to feel familiar. But it is virtually impossible to make an exact copy. The systems we used for doing that are integral to the old engine and very opaque. So we’re making an artistic copy rather than an exact one (something like landscape painting). The atmosphere will be the same and things will be more or less where you expect them.

Major features will, of course, be placed exactly where they are now. We found the meshes and textures that make up the church ruin based on the floor plan of the former abbey church in Ename where The Endless Forest was launched. So we created the appropriate materials and implemented it in the remake. It’s good to see it again (although it’s a bit embarrassing to be confronted with the amateurish way it was modeled!).

Remaking things in a new engine is turning out to be a lot more involved than we had anticipated. We have a pretty good system now for retrieving assets. But every element in the game needs to be first researched in the old engine and then rethought for implementation in the new one. Not only does Quest3D work very differently from Unreal Engine, we have also learned a lot about using videogame technology in the past decade. So we want to apply that knowledge. Towards optimizing the game’s performance, for instance (which is the primary requirement for future expansion). Even though I remember struggling over some systems back in the day, sometimes it seems that it takes even more time to re-make them, despite all our experience.

Another reason why progress is slow is that we are also not the young eager game developers that we were back then. We no longer make ourselves sick by working 14 hours a day. We work more efficiently now but that may not make up for raw energy.

And then there are all the other things that we do. We don’t focus on single short-term projects anymore. But instead, we work simultaneously on multiple projects that span many years. One of those is Auriea’s full-time job in the Kunsthochschule in Kassel. Another is Cricoterie, a VR project that will launch in September… until that happens, work on The Endless Forest will be on hold.

In November, on the other hand, there’s a festival in Scotland where The Endless Forest will be featured! It’s organized by some of the people that made the Halloween features in The Endless Forest possible. And this time too, it was they who complete the Second Decade budget. They are interested now in showing both the current game and the remake, in whatever state it will be. We will want to pour some energy into the project to make a good show.

So, expect much excitement in November!

Have a lovely Summer.

―Michaël & Auriea.

We didn’t get as much done in January as we wanted to in the Eternal City. But we made up for that in February at home in Ghent.

All of the Forest Magic has been implemented! So now the deer can collect antler spells (by rubbing a tree and eating the pine cone that fell out), mask spells (by eating mushrooms growing on the side of a tree), pelt spells (by keeping a sleeping deer company) and shape-shifting body spells (by sleeping in  a mushroom circle) and cast them on another player to change their appearance with any of the antlers, masks, pelts and bodies in the current game. And the other deer can remove them, by sneezing.

Finding all the models, textures and sounds required a lot of searching in old files and folders. The Endless Forest was our first release and we only learned how to organize things during its production. To make matters worse, the file server we were using back then had crashed beyond repair. Or so we thought. Thanks to a little program called R-Studio we were able to recover most of the data on that disk.

Adding the antlers, masks and pelts to the remake of the game was fairly straightforward, but the animations of the frog, dove, bat, squirrel, rabbit and raven bodies that the deer can shape-shift into took a bit of extra work. Luckily Unreal Engine is well streamlined for these sorts of jobs.

The visual effects for spell casting are done in a different, more efficient way than in the old engine. But they look similar enough, if not slightly better (although we’re not exactly working on aesthetics yet).

We’re quite pleased with the progress we’ve made. And wish we could just keep going. But in the next few months some other projects will be demanding our attention too. We will still try to make as much time for The Endless Forest as possible. But we need to be patient.

Our gratitude goes out to all the backers for their support!
You should have received a message about 3D printing the deer models a few weeks ago. The file for printing it yourself will soon be available. We’re running a test on our Ultimaker as we speak.

You can still join the project. The budget for a full remake has nearly been collected. Less than 1000 Euros to go.

―Michaël & Auriea.

It has been too long since we updated you on our progress remaking the Endless Forest. The main reason is that we have been away from our studio for over half a year due to art residencies in Poland and Italy where we concentrated on other projects.

But that doesn’t mean nothing happened on The Endless Forest. Quite the contrary!

We have extended the tiles of the game world to match the size of the forest of Phase One. We have added proximity detection of trees and the matching rubbing activity. This served the implementation of Forest Magic: when a deer rubs a pine tree, a pine cone falls out. And when the deer eats this pine cone, it gets the magical power to change the look of another deer’s antlers. We have implemented this entire routine so that it can be easily expanded to include the other magical spells, which we will add next month. We have also worked on the action bar with the buttons to make it behave as it does in the current game.

Our art residency in Rome lasts one more month. But we are bringing our computers and file server so we can continue development, even if it only happens at a fraction of our normal speed. If all goes well we should be able to post another update by the beginning of February.

Thank you for your support and your patience. We apologize for our slowness. But please trust that we are fully dedicated to this project. The thought that we will be able to spend more time on it soon makes us glad.

Meanwhile, we hope you’re having the best of holidays and wish you a wonderful 2018, in the Forest and beyond.

—Michaël & Auriea.