Exploring the world of Knightmare with Oculus Rift
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Hi James
I have seen the fantastic work you have done here. Its all nicely put together and the detail is excellent. My favourite would have to be Smirkenorf video as it is visually stunning but I also like the Play Your Cards Right and clue rooms.
The CoB is fabulous but I struggle to watch that room due to memories of being scared witless as a 6/7 year old in 1990. Its too accurate!
Take a bow, you are a real star. BRAVO!
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Thanks for all the feedback so far. Just a quick post to let you know that I am still here. I really should do a bit more work on this at somepoint.
Seeing the videos is one thing but to actually put the Rift on and see the rooms around you in true to life 1:1 scale is completely different
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Wow, this is unbelievable!
This thread has been absolutely fantastic to read through - experiencing the dungeon first hand is great! I can only imagine how awesome it must be to actually see it through the rift.
The video with the massive snap dragons in the dwarf tunnels actually made me jump out of my skin. Great work. I notice there is a hole in the ceiling in the final part of the tunnel. Was something supposed to appear there?
And you have put so much effort into the sound effects and music too, as well as the graphics. Actually looking down and seeing the causeway pieces fall away into oblivion was excellent.
Do you plan to recreate some of the earlier rooms (either the castle ruin photos or the early dungeon room paintings) in 3D? I'd love to see a version of the castle ruin where Lord Fear's massive hand comes down!
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Thanks for the feedback
Look at Episode 1 of Series 8. About 5 minutes in, you'll see there's a hole in the ceiling hence why I put it in there.
As for the earlier rooms, due to the highly detailed hand painted nature of them, it's highly unlikely at this point that I'll try to recreate them in 3D. I'd love to put them in though.
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Well, after seeing the videos on YouTube before tracing my way back here (after a gap of about 14 years!) I must say I'm impressed (did I just quote Greystagg there?!).
This UK Lockdown situation has seen me rekindle an old flame- my 2D-engined rendition of Knightmare, which I originally released in 2006, which now looks horribly awful. How things have changed in 15 years!
My experience with 3D game programming is virtually non-existant, however, I have been an avid user of SketchUp (for other non-game-related projects) for several years now, so I've decided to take a unique approach to implementing 3D graphics into a 2D engine.
Although not quite as visually dynamic as Jamesuk's masterpiece (the camera view will be fixed on each room), it does however mean that the player/viewer will get an authentic Knightmare visual, as well as the ability for me to get around a few obstacles- particularly creating and animating 3D figures from scratch for NPCs.
As Jamesuk quite rightly expressed- the NPC aspect of Knightmare is rather daunting!
Animating them is one thing (even superimposing them from video footage of Knightmare is a laborious task) but constructing/editing the dialogue to suit a variety of scenarios is very difficult indeed.
I've already spent days sifting through episodes gathering audio of some characters, only then to listen through it all and remove all traces of noise interruptions from advisors/dungeoneers/dungeon MASTERS...
This then leaves a rather rigid, limited range of dialogue which one can truly work with.
The other- perhaps most frustrating factor- is that of burning out, creatively.
You get so far into a project before something else takes hold and places it on the back-burner...
Test Imagery.jpg
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Great job! Curious to see how this progresses! I'm excited. Keep up the great work. Keep us updated!
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So, I've started drawing up 3D models for the game's non-player characters.
This is a steep learning curve for me- from sculpting faces, rigging clothes and getting used to software which I've never had to use before (Blender 2.
I've been working on Elita, Gwendoline (see other post) and now Hordriss.
You'd think his flowing cloak would be easy, but this took some fathoming in order to get the cloth simulation to behave properly.
The medallion was made from scratch (good old YouTube for close-up reference images of Hordriss) and the hair is "real", meaning it consists of thousands of tiny strands.
The next challenge is trying to figure out how to add the red streaks to the sides and along the eyebrows.
Hordriss1.jpg
Now I wonder who I should start on next...
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Hi all,
It's been far too long since I've posted here but I can't really hold off not talking about this any longer.
Basically work on this for the past couple of years has ceased entirely. My reasons being are the follows:
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Lack of overall interest in terms of those that downloaded usable VR binaries. Admittedly due to a lack of VR headsets in the wild at the time and the fact that Knightmare itself appears to have very little interest overseas in places like the United States where other than one episode that IIRC got broadcast from Rhode Island, it appears to be completely unknown outside of UK which in my belief has resulted in hardly any downloads of the binaries. With the exception of France and Spain that had their own versions of Knightmare based around Series 1-3.
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The sheer amount of time it'd take to refit it to work with modern motion controller implementations. (further complicated by point 1). IIRC, I tried refitting it with motion controllers and the ragdoll system just wouldn't get on with it. The fact that I'm extremely inexperienced as a programmer doesn't really help matters as I was mainly dependent on studying code snippets online and modifying them where applicable.
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The main one: Burnout. It was getting to the point where I was getting home from work and then starting up on this immediately upon getting home. Not a good mix in retrospect considering how much my workload was going up in my job. This in turn started adversely affecting my ability to sleep. I had no choice but to walk away. The amount of stress I was getting from being frustrated with my limitations in programming wasn't helping matters either.
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My overall inexperience with programming was severely holding me back from making a proper usable game out of it. Even when making basic code in Javascript and C#, it'd take me hours possibly several days to get something basic working. Something a proper experienced programmer could get working in minutes or a matter of hours.
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My inability to create advanced NPC animations and make proper scripted sequences with them was severely holding me back in terms of making the game more advanced and faithful to its source material.
I love the work I did on KnightmareVR. I really do think the absolute world of the effort I went through to present to you all what I believed at the time to be the next step in Knightmares evolution and the ability to experience it in the very medium that Tim Child at one point sought after doing but was unable to due to the technological limitations at the time.
Although my work on this has ceased, I hope my work has bought inspiration to others here who may be able to iterate on where I've ultimately left off. As knightmare continued to evolve with the absolutely cutting edge of technologies that existed throughout its run on CITV, I know for a fact that Knightmare can live on through the advancements that current technology and the future technology that AI Neural Networks can bring once they've sufficiently evolved enough.
I cannot thank you all enough for the interest you've showed in this project for the past couple of years. The download link will stay up for the time being but due to the fact that it's an old version of Unity and was made during a time where the Oculus Rift didn't even have motion controllers, I can't guarantee how it'll run. If it'll even run at all.
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James I absolutely loved the work you did on this. Thank you.
You only have one life and you shouldn't spend it doing stuff that is not rewarding for you and/or is simply not worth the effort. I for one am glad you did the amount that you did.
Thank you for taking the time to come and give us an update.
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Welcome back, James. Thank you for sharing this with us. To echo what AriadnesLayer has said: your VR ambition and achievements were stunning, but your health is a price that none of us would want you to pay. No quest can succeed without life force. I hope you will continue to appreciate and engage with Knightmare and ways that work for you.
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I just saw this (years too late)! I'm a game developer and wondered if you'd be willing to open source this project? Or team up and build a version for modern VR (or anyone else wanting to build something)?
I primarily work in Unreal Engine on 3D games, as blueprints can handle most of the complex logic (I trained as an artist before jumping into level design, then development, and still prefer the visual method).
I loved Knightmare as a kid and have waited (unsuccessfully) for it to be rebooted since the 90s! A VR game would work even with Knightmare newbies (I've shown the TV show to my young relatives and they loved it). You don't need to have seen the original to understand the concept of wandering alone through a dark and mysterious dungeon and solving puzzles.
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