We have implemented some new features in what will one day be the glorious remake of The Endless Forest in Unreal. Some of these can be seen in the video below, taken in the Unreal editor in a local multiplayer session.

The deer now brakes or even sometimes stumbles and falls after running a certain distance. Similarly it now also stretches after sleeping for a long time. And when it is standing idle it will bite its side or scratch its ear once in a while. All of these make the avatar feel much more alive. We have also implemented point-and-click navigation. And have taken the opportunity to smooth out the deer’s motion. We have added the emblematic black border around the screen. For now the only thing it does is scale up when the deer assumes its new alert stance. And finally we have added the logic for the deer to know if any other deer are near, illustrated by the new sniffing functionality.

We’re concentrating on the avatar for the moment because it’s a major part of the game (and a lot of fun to see the deer come alive). But also because it’s something we can do without requiring much network functionality – we’re still hoping that networking (especially the server part) will be made easier in an Unreal update during development.

We have now officially prioritized the remake of The Endless Forest above all other projects. That doesn’t mean other projects will not happen (they certainly will) but that we will not allow them to interrupt work on The Endless Forest. We are still figuring out how to do game development without falling into all the unhealthy traps we experienced before we quit the industry. We’re not giving ourselves deadlines anymore. And we’re allowing ample time for non-professional activities (art and music, most notably). As a result, we will not be producing output with the same hectic frequency as we did before (8 game releases in 12 years!). But our dedication is more sincere than ever.

We will continue to update you on our progress. But if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask (in the comments below, or via email or Twitter).

The Endless Forest fundraiser is gradually collecting the remainder of the budget. We’re only 2331 Euros short of a complete remake.

—Michaël & Auriea

This is a little report to keep you up to date on our progress remaking The Endless Forest in Unreal. In the video you can see how we have set up several crucial pieces of logic that only need to be expanded to approach a full remake.

We have added mouse controls for navigation similar to how it works in the current game. So now we can play with either mouse or keyboard. We have also implemented camera controls that approach the original. Both need fine tuning of course.

A major part of this step has been the beginning of the button bar at the bottom of the screen that you use for making the deer do things. We had to learn about how User Interface is done in Unreal (somehow game engines always manage to make creation of UI extremely convoluted). So now we can make the deer sleep, get up, sit down and roar with the button bar dynamically responding to the context. For this we figured out how to trigger animations through button clicks and made it work over the network too (which requires quite a few steps). The roar action also involved adding morphing for the deer to open his mouth and 3D sound (the first sound in the remake is roar!). All this new knowledge will come in handy when developing things further!

At one point we managed to run a multiplayer game over both the local network and the internet. But the last time we tried it was broken again. It still works in the editor though so we will focus on other things for now. Hopefully a future update of Unreal Engine will improve how networking is done. If not, we may need some external help.

We’re quite happy with the progress we’ve made. Next month we need to focus on a commissioned project with a rather tight deadline. So the third progress report on The Unreal Forest may take a bit longer. Do keep an eye on Twitter, where we share most of what’s going on here. And don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Remaking The Endless Forest was made possible thanks to your generous contributions to the IndieGogo campaign and the private fundraiser. It is still possible to join, and get some of the cool perks like special deer outfits and 3D prints of your very own avatar.

—Michaël & Auriea

We have made quite a bit of progress in the past few weeks with the remake of The Endless Forest in the Unreal Engine. Thanks to the generous support of many of you, we can make this work our highest priority. We are continuing to raise funds to support this project. You have almost collected the entire amount!

Since The Endless Forest was an early project in our career as game developers, and because it has been developed over several iterations, we haven’t been very orderly in storing the many assets that make up the game. So we’re going through our archives and fishing out every model and texture, sometimes even finding things that never made it into the game (but that might now!).

Because of the engine we used back then, Quest3D, many of the files are in obsolete formats. So part of the work involves converting everything to a format that we can use in Unreal.

Unreal Engine uses a very different paradigm to game creation. It lacks certain features we took advantage of in Quest3D. But it also does a lot of things much better. As a result, however, we cannot simply translate the logic from one program to the other. We have to find new ways of expressing the same ideas, ways that suit the engine well.

I’m delighted to say that we have solved two of the more problematic bits of logic now. Both are related to the endlessness of forest.

First we needed to find a way for the forest to wrap around endlessly so that when the deer arrives at the end of the forest, it finds the beginning again. After some initial despair about not being able to figure out how to implement the same logic as in the old game, we got a brand new very simple idea that actually works fine.

But wrapping one avatar around from end to start isn’t enough. We also need to be able to see other players’ avatars even when they are at the beginning of the forest while we are at the end. We found a solution for this too. And one that has the additional benefit of only rendering the deer that are actually visible, which is good for performance. The system involved separating the “pawns”, as Unreal calls the player avatars, from the actually rendered deer. That caused quite a few headaches dealing with the rather arcane server-client structure of Unreal networking, which seems to be entirely built around preventing cheating, something we don’t care much about in the Endless Forest (in fact, we consider many ways of “cheating” as part of the fun).

Anyway, as you can see below, we can now run a simply networked game with deer who see each other in Unreal now.

We were very eager to share this mini-triumph with you and tried hard to set up a server that you could log into. But this is an area where Unreal is a lot less streamlined than in most others. Creating a dedicated server actually requires downloading and compiling the source code of the engine, and packaging the game through an external tool. In the end we succeeded in running the game on our local network. But only for a minute or so, before clients were mysteriously disconnected.

We haven’t been able to try this on the internet because our current game server is an old 32 bit Windows XP computer and this is not really supported by Unreal. So we’re asking our host to move to a new server machine.

We are eager to continue the work on this project. It’s very exciting to see the deer run around in their new home. We will keep you posted on our progress.

Thank you for your support!

—Michaël & Auriea

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