The process of building and packaging a multiplayer game in Unreal Engine is a complicated affair that involves hundreds of thousands of files stored on many gigabytes worth of hard disk space. Creating a single build can take hours. So errors are expensive. And with every new version of the engine new errors occur. So one can only half rely on past experience. It’s a huge challenge every time.
This time an additional problem occurred when the processor of our good old server machine turned out to be incompatible with the new game. So I decided to try a new server host for sharing this release.
Nevertheless I was very eager to share the work done in step 26. So, after fixing some remaining bugs and perfecting the Halloween features, I started the process that ultimately lead to beta 5 being available for your evaluation.
Download links have been emailed to supporters of the remake. I you would not have received yours, please contact us.
Motivated by bug reports and criticism of players following the release of beta 4, I started to tweak the remake of The Endless Forest so it would resemble the original game more. The two areas I focused on were controls and aesthetics. I’m happy with the changes I made to the controls but ran into a lot of trouble trying to make the game look in Unreal Engine the way it does in Quest3D. Part of the reason for this is that we painstakingly adapted the look of the game to the rather primitive rendering capacities of that old engine. In my frustration I decided to just make the game look good in Unreal and not worry about whether it resembled the original or not.
I started with the material used on the floor. Since the view of the game is top down most of the time, the floor has a great impact on the overall look of the game. I reused the textures from the original game but increased their resolution through an AI-driven process in an application called Topaz Gigapixel AI. I was quite impressed by the new detail in the high resolution textures. There’s textures for dirt, grass, light and shadows that were blended in a very specific way in Quest3D, unavailable in Unreal Engine. Instead of attempting to mimic that system, as I had before, I started over from scratch, with the same textures, but using blending methods specific to the new engine. I also added some relief and detail through normal maps generated by NormalMap Online based on the original textures.
The new material graph for the floor shader. UV maps for different areas and layers on the left. The column of textures are parameters that are changed for types of floor. The light gray rectangles are for special areas: ruin and pond.
It took several days and several start-overs to get a result that I liked only to realize that now seams were visible between the tiles that make up the floor. I discovered these were not only caused by the uprezzing of the textures, but the new shader also made visible UV mapping errors that had not been visible before. So I corrected these in Blender.
In beta 4 the shadows were colored by three extra lights shining in the opposite direction of the sun light, imitating the natural effect of bouncing light. I replaced this by a Skylight element. None of Unreal’s built-in methods for simulating fog was capable of hiding objects in the distance. As a result, geometry popped in abruptly when crossing forest borders. This was fixed by replacing the fog by a shader on a plane in front of the camera that colored objects based on distance. Sometimes primitive methods work better that attempts to simulate physical reality.
To complement the increased resolution of the floor textures, I also uprezzed the textures of the ruin, the playground, the watering hole and the trees and added generated normal maps.
The camera angle was also tweaked slightly to resemble the original game more. And the controls for walking, jumping and interacting with obstacles were also fine-tuned for smoothness. The strange error of the swimming frog floating in the pond was also corrected. I tweaked the shader of the tree foliage to become transparent when it is in front of the camera in order to have a better view on the deer.
At the end of this process the overall look of the game was actually similar to the original when I reduced the contrast in post processing. So I added a slider in the game’s options to change the contrast. Personally I think the goal of making The Endless Forest look better than the original has been achieved. But I will let you be the judge of that.
Phase One, near the ruin with the old oak in the distance. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake. Phase Three, on the playground. At the top the original game, at the bottom the remake.
Note that trees and plants are placed in a very different way in the remake. Instead of the wonderful system available in Quest3D that allowed us to manually place threes and decor, I created a system in Unreal that places trees randomly within certain parameters. This is why they don’t appear in the same locations. The advantage of the new method, while we lose some of the deliberateness of the original, is that the forest can change in the future and that the density per area, similar to the original by default, can be increased by the player. The resolution of many textures was increased through AI but the 3D models remain the same as in the original.
I didn’t feel ready to release a new beta version because there’s still a number of bugs and issues I want to address first. And because I’m going on honeymoon.
I was hoping to release this version to the public at large. It worked well and looked good on my computers. But to be on the safe side, I decided to release it to the community of players of the current game first. Just in case some minor issues needed tweaking before a public release.
Thanks to the diligent research of several Endless Forest players, a flood of bug reports rolled in, making it abundantly clear that this build, even for a beta release, is by no means ready for the public at large.
Many issues, sadly, seem to be related to performance. Apparently the 2005 engine of the old game runs better on many computers than that latest Unreal Engine 5. That’s a disappointment!
I know I’m getting older and might be slightly jaded after half a life time working with computers, but technology seems to evolve in a direction away from what we used to call the “personal computer”. Creative software seems to be geared more and more towards large commercial corporations and big budget projects. I like using Unreal Editor but, especially for an mmo-type game like The Endless Forest, it’s an unwieldy monster. To simply make a build of the game takes a week because of all the steps the process entails, and the massive amount of data generated. Even in the end, the compiled game which is exactly the same as the old one, is a ZIP file of 270 MB and requires a bunch of runtime prerequisites. While the old game is slightly over 50 MB. No need to say that this slows development iteration down. Especially in a one-man operation. I’m sure big companies have all this stuff streamlined and distributed over several departments. But for single creators making anything other than a drawing, a piece of music, a video or a 3D model, has become extremely challenging.
The Endless Forest, however, is beautiful. And I believe it deserves to exist. More and more so, even now. So I’m grateful for the effort that many players have put in. Pray for me that I can figure out how to fix all these issues.
With any luck this will be the final closed beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest.
Some major networking errors were fixed in this release. Hopefully it all works well now. Because I really only half know what I’m doing or how Unreal Engine is supposed to do networking. So development is going through a bit of trial and error.
In this version a lot of small bugs were fixed, notably relating to some Abiogenesis features.
I also figured out what was making the previous build so huge: a completely unnecessary file over a Gigabyte in size! Each time I build the game, the process is different, even when I use the exact same version of the engine. The old way didn’t work anymore but the new way is fairly smooth, except for the hours that Visual Studio takes to compile things. I have to reserve the better part of a week just to make a build.
A download link has been sent to all backers. Thank you for your support!
I spent all week on creating a build of the second beta version of the remake of The Endless Forest. It’s a complicated process because Unreal Engine only allows the building of a dedicated server program through a custom version of the engine built from source downloaded from a GitHub repository and a C++ based project, rather then one based on Blueprints, the visual programming language that is the main reason why I use this technology at all. The new version 5.0 of Unreal Engine seems to have made this process even more complicated and unpredictable. Following the directions failed but through trial-and-error juggling with many gigabytes of data I finally ended up with a software package that works. The resulting program is twice the size of the previous release built in Unreal version 4 (and 10 times the size of the original game which is exactly the same) and requires an up-to-date graphics driver and a recent version of Visual C++ runtime (included with the download).
Welcome to the future!
Anyway, I’m extremely pleased with this build. We’re getting very close to a final release. Fingers crossed!
If you are a backer, you should have received a download link. If not, please let me know.
More than five years after the crowdsourcing campaign we’re happy to announce that the remake of The Endless Forest is finally complete! It has taken us a lot longer than expected to recreate in its entirety the multiplayer game in Unreal Engine. But the first beta release is ready for all backers to be downloaded and tested. And we’re already looking forward to continue expanding the forest -after the necessary bug fixing, of course.
If you have backed the project and you have not received an email with a download link, please let us know!
If still you want to support the project, play the beta and acquire some of the perks, please do so now because the campaign will be closed soon. The donation page is here.
The work on the remake began in earnest early 2017. The Endless Forest had been the first game we released, in 2005. At that time we had not fully developed a system for archiving data. On top of that, the old engine, Quest3D, used file formats for 3D models and textures that had become obsolete. And to make matters worse, the file server on which most files were stored had crashed and we had to painstakingly restore the files hidden on it.
Both Unreal Engine and Quest3D have visual interfaces to programming. This is essential for us, visual artists, to be creative with expressing logic. The paradigms of both engines, however, are extremely different. So more than translating the logic into another language, a lot of it had to be rethought within the new framework.
Since The Endless Forest is a multiplayer game, one of the first things we had to figure out was how to program networking in the new engine. Unreal Engine is set up quite well for match-based networked play with a limited amount of players of whom one acts as the server. This model, however, is unsuitable for a massively multiplayer game like The Endless Forest. We needed a server to be available at all times and no limitation the the amount of players that could log on. Sadly, the process of creating such a thing, is quite cumbersome in Unreal Engine and not very well documented. After a lot of trial and error that involved compiling Unreal from source code and converting our game to C++ we figured out how to do it. But it remains a complicated task, each time we want to release an update. Add to this the limited ways in which networking logic can be tested within the editor, requiring that this tedious compilation process must be followed simply for testing and debugging many network-related issues.
That being said, Unreal’s visual programming system, called Blueprints, is a joy to work with. And the editor contains wonderful tools, paradigms and interfaces to make many tasks easier to do, once one figures out how to use them.
In this early stage, we also implemented the endlessness of The Endless Forest, which means that the game world wraps around itself. This is quite tricky, especially in a multiplayer context. Unable to re-use the logic from the old game, we came up with a new system that works quite well.
Next we implemented controls so we could actually play the game. That was encouraging. Followed by new activities and animations of the avatar.
The Endless Forest, while extremely important, was not the only thing that we did in our artistic lives. We were also invited for art residencies in Poland and Rome, during which we worked on other projects. This of course slowed down the work on the remake.
But by the end of 2017 we did manage to add Forest Magic to the remake, a major feature by which players can change each other’s avatars’ appearance. This feature was finished when we came back home in early 2018
In 2018, work was interrupted several times by an invitation to present at the Freeplay festival in Melbourne, by participation in the Videogames exhibition in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, by the presentation of our VR theater Cricoterie in Warsaw, by an award at Indiecade in Paris and a panel presentation about The Endless Forest in Dundee.
Nevertheless, in the summer we made a spectacular step forward simply by adding the floor model and textures of the first phase of the game. Suddenly the remake started looking a lot more like The Endless Forest! So far we had been working on flat floors with symbolic colors. It was nice to feel that forest atmosphere a little.
By the end of 2018 (in October, November and December) we had implemented the buttons and animations for emotions and activities such as dancing, the trees and bushes and flowers of Phase One and the elements that make up the area of the ruin. And as a crowning achievement, we managed to compile a server for the game so that we were able to release a first playable version of the remake as a Christmas gift to all backers.
In January 2019, we finished the first phase of the Endless Forest, the area around the ruin and in February we implemented weather changes. In March, then, the new game was connected to the database of the old game which allowed players to login with their own accounts. Thanks to this, we were able to hand out the first perks to the backers in an Easter release that included a whole new outfit to celebrate the ten year anniversary of the game that triggered the crowdsourcing campaign for a Second Decade of the game.
After this, work gets interrupted again by presentations of Cricoterie in the Foksal gallery in Warsaw (our first solo gallery show!), the Tinguely Museum in Basel and the Game Happens festival in Genova. Simultaneously, we also organized our move from Belgium to Italy, which was accompanied by a lot of hard work and stress.
Once settled in a little in Rome, at the end of 2019, we added the second phase of The Endless Forest, the area with the pond, which we continue working on in the beginning of 2020. In February, after finishing Phase Two, we release another playable build for the backers.
After this I started working on a completely new project, a VR piece called Compassie, that I had been fortunate enough to get funding for in Belgium. By this time, the money from the crowdsourcing campaign had completely run out and we needed other sources of income.
The work on this new project was interrupted for adding the third phase of the forest environment and many of the elements that bring it to life. After adding the Drinkplaats, we felt that the remake was sufficiently complete to release a first alpha build to our backers in October 2020.
I then returned to Compassie and continued to work on it until its release in April 2021.
After this break, I dove back into the Forest, so that in the summer of 2021 we were able to release a second alpha build of the remake that includes the fawn character for beginning players and lots of interface additions.
To support ourselves further, I accepted a commission from an old client for an interactive museum exhibit. This project dominated the second half of 2021.
In early 2022, I implemented a lot of the Abiogenesis systems that we use for doing live performances in the game. And even though the results of this are not immediately visible to the players, we did release a third alpha build, in order to test these features on the network.
I dedicated the lent period of 2022 to the remake of The Endless Forest. In an effort to release a first beta version of the game (meaning the game is complete except for bugs) by Easter, the day of the Resurrection, I removed all other activities from my agenda. So in the meditative atmosphere of a life of fasting, with no Italian lessons nor playing music, I managed to stick to the schedule almost perfectly. Backers can now download and play the first beta of the remake of The Endless Forest! While this is a major milestone, it doesn’t mean that the project is finished. There’s lots of known bugs that still need to be fixed and undoubtedly many new problems will come up during this testing phase. But the finish is in sight!
In the third alpha release of the remake of The Endless Forest we have concentrated on a number of special features such as the seasonal environment changes and Abiogenesis technology. So these may not be immediately visible unless you catch us testing. The idea is to evaluate these features before we proceed with the next step. And as mentioned with the previous alpha, testing server-client interaction is not fully possible in the Unreal Editor.
If all goes well enough, this will be the the final alpha release. The next release should be a beta version. So this version is still incomplete. But we’re getting there.
Work on this release was interrupted for a while by a client commission the proceeds of which were invested into The Endless Forest. And by a long overdue trip to my homeland Belgium. I had not seen my parents and brother in two years because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Some time was also lost by attempting to upgrade to a newer version of Unreal Engine but failing to compile the editor from its source code. So we’re still using version 4.25.1 at the moment.
The remake of The Endless Forest is taking a lot longer than expected. So we’re happy to see that the current game is still running and that the player community is as enthusiastic as ever. We’re grateful for all the moral and financial support and are looking forward to seeing you in The Forest!
Thank you all and see you soon!
Michael Samyn.
PS: If you backed the game on Indiegogo or via PayPal and you have not received an email with a link to download the alpha 3 build of the game, please email us!
A second alpha build of The Endless Forest Second Decade has just been released. Backers should have received a download link. It contains almost all features of the original game. The biggest chunk missing now is the Abiogenesis effects. But there’s also a lot of bugs remaining. I wish I could fix them already but I have to interrupt the work for another project now. We are compensating for our hopeless underestimation of the budget collected through crowd sourcing with income generated by such other projects. This delays things a little more but we are getting closer!
Lots of things have been implemented since the first alpha release of October.
The loading of saved data (for the avatar’s appearance, among others) was restructured. This is particularly complicated because we’re combining local saving and online saving.
Bug detection in online features is particularly complicated in this project because one cannot run an online game in the Unreal Editor and it takes an entire day to build a new server package. And Unreal requires perfect compatibility between servers and clients.
The Action Bar display was tweaked a little and a slider was added to the menu to change the size of the buttons. Many other items were added to the menu to the point where it can be considered complete for the remake. Several things from the old game were omitted because they are not relevant anymore. And new options were and will be added.
An option was added to invert camera zoom and to change camera rotation speed and direction. And a switch was added to put the camera behind the avatar
Joystick control of the avatar and of the Action Bar was added as well.
A system for localization of the menu language was implemented, starting with English to Flemish. But it doesn’t seem to work in the build yet.
The screensaver feature was also added: now the camera turns around the sleeping deer. And the option to observe other players in this rest mode was added as well.
Our beloved fawn is back!
A big feature is the implementation of the fawn avatar that new players use in their initial month. It turned out to be impossible to import the original files used in the current game correctly. But thanks to Blender we managed to put the fawn back together and even succeeded in having the adult deer and the fawn share animations. Then all the fawn’s textures and antler meshes where excavated from our less than perfect archives. And finally all the ways in which the fawn logic differs from the adult deer were implemented (magic that times out, for instance).
The game menu was further expanded with toggles for pictograms visibility, morphing (used for blinking and roaring), Abiogenesis performance camera and sound. Volume sliders were added for ambient sound, sound effects and music. The credits were added to the menu, including the names of the backers of the crowdsourcing campaign.
An exciting new feature was added too: a slider to increase the density of the forest, which may now be feasible on fast computers.
A lot of research was done in the Abiogenesis system, especially with respect to initializing semi-permanent changes (such as time of day, weather, huge crocuses, confetti, etc.). Different approaches were implemented in this alpha to test which work best. So that we can finalize the system in the next phase of development and add all the Abiogenesis content. After which the remake should be complete and ready for a beta release.
This project is taking a lot more time than expected. We are grateful for the patience of the players and also for the fact that, against our fears, the current game is still running, despite of the ongoing evolution of technology. Hopefully it will continue to do so until the remake is done. Soon!
A big thanks to all the backers for their support!
The remake of the Endless Forest has reached the alpha stage! With the completion of Phase Three, I feel confident enough to declare the new release Alpha 1. A link to download the new build has been sent to the backers. The new server is already up and running and replaces the previous pre-alpha build.
Software is released in three stages: alpha, beta and final. For me, an alpha release is like an introduction: it gives a good idea of what the final program will be but several features are lacking and there’s many bugs and errors. The stage after this is the beta release which presents the full program with all features implemented but still many bugs and errors unresolved. It is in this stage that testers are invited to report on errors that the developers might have missed. After all beta stage problems have been addressed, the program can be released in its final state.
The work on this step took place over a period of two months: August and September 2020. It started with the creation of special effects to simulate the streaming water on the Drinkplaats area, a major feature of the Phase Three forest, inspired by a painting by the Flemish baroque artist Roelant Savery we showed The Endless Forest with in a museum exhibition.
Less natural effecs were also added to the area to illustrate its magic. Upon entering the mushroom circle that surrounds the watering hole, the deer avatars lose all their special attire and return to their natural state. This feature was implemented making sure that the painstakingly acquired looks of the deer would be restored when leaving the area.
The real magic of the Drinkplaats happens on the watery rock: when a deer drinks from the water it shapeshifts into another animal: a bat, a rabbit, a frog, etc, of varying size. This was implemented as well as the animals that come to witness this strange spectacle. When many deer are gathered in this magical place, more and more forest dwellers show up and strange events occur ever more frequently. Stars fall from above, rainbows appear, circles of doves flutter away, fireworks of flowers explode in the air, and so on. These are all effects well known to the visitors of ye olde Abiogenesis festivals and have now been implemented in the remake. It was quite a massive task to analyze the Quest3D logic that drives these effects in order to recreate them in the Unreal Engine. The implementation of Abiogenesis effects on the Drinkplaats was the final big feature to be completed. A fittingly festive finale of the pre-alpha stage of the remake.
Of course, along the way, many bugs and errors were discovered. The most severe were fixed but a lot remains to be done. Thanks to the attention of several players, some errors were discovered in the animations of the deer. These were corrected. And the deer’s autonomous idle behavior was toned down a bit as well.
Perusing the old Endless Forest project, I find myself stumped every day at how much we were able to create in such a short amount of time, with far less experience than we have now. We must have worked like maniacs! Fighting against extreme budget limitations and driven by an enormous enthusiasm for the medium of videogames. Fifteen years later, just recreating the game without even needing to worry about design, will probably take two or three times as long. But it’s a rewarding process, seeing the old program regain new life and energy in contemporary technology, thwarting the death sentence of planned software obsolescence and re-opening the gates towards further expansion of our deer Forest and getting back to the live events we all used to love until everybody’s computer crashed under the pressure of our frantically dancing hooves.
I hope the players who supported this enormous project enjoy the first release of a complete remake of The Endless Forest. And it’s not too late to join them! Since development time has far exceeded our naively optimistic scheduling, the funding of the remake relies entirely on our own finances and the very welcome additional donations. If you like The Endless Forest and you want to see it continue its long life, and you want to hurry up the remake already, please consider contributing to the fundraising. We have some nice perks for you!
In this step detail was added to the Phase Three area, and some to Phase Two as well.
The daytime look of the grassland and birch forest area were tweaked to resemble the original game better. And the nighttime look was tweaked as well. The soundscape was adjusted to match the serene atmosphere.
Interaction with the Playground area was implemented. And the little birds were added, flying all over the place and landing on the deer’s antlers. While creating artificial life forms, we added the beautiful koi to the pond as well.
Phase three is almost finished. Only the Drinkplaats area remains to be done. Over the past month we haven’t been able to spend as much time on the remake as we wanted because another project demanded our attention. So a new build will have to wait until next month, when Phase Three is ready for you. This other project, by the way, is Endless Forest related and very very exciting! But, sadly, it need to remain a secret for now.
We hope all deer in the Northern hemisphere are finding ways to enjoy the summer time despite of the very strange things that are happening in the human world.
