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This page lists official Steam announcements for New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering, including the latest post "Achievements & Workshop Location Tool Patched / Fixed". Each entry links to the full changelog on Steam.

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New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering Patch Notes & News

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New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering Patch Notes & News | SteamScope

Full Release! New Heights out of Early Access

Wikklsteam_community_announcements

157d ago

New Heights is now officially out of early access! It comes with a gigantic update that has cost us 19 months to develop. This update reworks the climbing system completely, optimizes a lot, includes rope based belaying and the legendary location of the Hanshelleren Cave in Flatanger, Norway. Now you can climb some of the world's most famous (and difficult) routes like Silence, B.I.G. and Change.

We are very excited to have reached this moment. This of course doesn't mean that we will stop updating the game. We are always looking to add new locations and improve the climbing system.

Rope physics belaying system

It replaces the respawning system with a full rope physics based belaying system! Including a (limited) rapelling mode.

Climbing system rework

The climbing system is being reworked to be much more consistent, flexible, realistic, performant and user friendly.

Hanshelleren cave location

This really is the ultimate end-boss location. Don't expect a lot of easy climbs here. Oh, and it's positively huge.

Super high fidelity locations rework

Existing locations are being reworked in much higher detail. Most notable Al Lègne and the castle Crèvecoeur have been upgraded significantly. Routes have also been reworked, and a few 'mega-routes' have been added.

Textureless surface scan mode

As requested by some members of our community, a 'Textureless surface scan' mode is added to the game. In some places, this makes it easier for you to see the exact surface without being distracted by non-existing features the texture.

First person bonus mode

A funny / bonus First Person View mode is also being developed! Don't expect a perfect experience, but it's nice for a change of view. And a challenge :p

More customization

Many more customization options are being added as well. And more.

All updates on Discord

Detailed development updates can be found on the Discord channel!

https://discord.gg/2DqPft9tnk

I will also write some actual patch notes later.

Steam Sports Festival Discount - Just before the update

Wikklsteam_community_announcements

237d ago

Hello everyone! i everyone! It's Steam Sports fest, and we've joined it with a 20% discount. If you didn't have the game yet, you can grab it for the discounted price, just before the huge update!

It was meant to be timed nicely with the new update, but alas, we could not make that in time. Still working very hard on that though. I know that there is the banner that says 'this game has not been updated, it might be abandoned'. Our fault for combining too much in one update. But if you're in doubt: no, we have not abandoned this game and we're working on it very steadily.

So a development update that I've also posted on the discussions board and our Discord server: I've been sick for quite a while. Incredibly annoying, totaling about 2 months actually in bed and about 5 months being sick this year. But since this week, I'm feeling fine again!

The big update contains rope belaying, the Hanshelleren / Flatanger cave, more customization options, a full climbing system overhaul and more. (Check the previous update or the Discord for details)

We're working on a lot of routes: Al Legne and Hanshelleren Cave. And our developer Joris has been making incredible progress, also when I was gone. We've made a big memory & performance optimization: better dynamic loading for big locations. So.. Al Legne is about 2x the original density, but it also doesn't fry your (and our 😅) computer anymore! And we're optimizing vegetation / trees in the distance btw. Another nice bit.

We had this 2025 deadline. We're not making it. I really really wanted to make it, but I have to watch my energy and health. And other projects, and personal life, and we want this to be good, not a buggy mess. And my god, making games takes so much time.

I do think that at LEAST we'll publish a beta / test version somewhere in the coming three weeks. Not perfectly polished probably, but a chance to test the rope system and gameplay overhaul.

Steam Workshop & More Fontainebleau - Major Update Live!

Wikklsteam_community_announcementsworkshop

737d ago

The Major Summer Update is live! Adding workshop support, 65 new Fontainebleau routes and much more.

Now you can really climb on anything in New Heights! You can browse the steam workshop page for user made content, create your own routes from within New Heights or create new locations with a Unity-based workshop tool.

New Fontainebleau Locations

The update brings three new Fontainebleau Locations: The fortress of Tour Denecourt and some nearby boulders - 18 routes The famous Elephant boulder and some nearby boulders - 12 routes Abaye Notre Dame du Lys, beautiful ruins of a large cistercian church - 35 routes

Custom Route Creation

You will be able to record your own routes within New Heights, and share them on the Steam Workshop. We are very interested in seeing what kind of routes you can come up with! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/ef260e4bf8b4d75572e1b399a8d97dc540a70fc6.jpg Many examples and instructions will follow, including tutorial videos on how to use Unity and how to optimize your locations for climbing. You can read more about how to create your own locations in the guide: https://newheightsgame.com/blog/how-to-create-your-own-routes

Location Creation Tool

The workshop tool is a basic Unity project with a 'Steam Workshop Wizard' in it. For those of you with few or no Unity experience, don't worry! I'll start uploading videos, and at least one will contain tips and tricks, and they will cover the basics of the controls within Unity. And you don't have to code btw. Just using the editor is enough. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/97aaff12b97d13b59eba9d3a61ae59c4cad5f60c.jpg The tool contains a few holds that we used in the tutorial routes. It does not, however, include other assets like nature props, because we didn't make them ourselves. So we don't have the licenses to share those assets with you. But don't worry, the unity asset store has a lot of free and cheap assets for you to get started: https://assetstore.unity.com/ You can read more about how to create your own locations in the guide: https://newheightsgame.com/blog/how-to-create-your-own-locations

Patch notes

The update also includes the following changes/fixes: - Added automatic balancing mode when not holding something with one or two hands - Dyno's fixed - much more stable, much less abusable, also less disorienting - A brand new menu system. It removes the fiddly mouse-over route selection. Also it costs less time for us to create new locations this way, and it gives us more route creation freedom because routes can now cross each other. - Working on replay-ghost transparency issues. Not fully fixed yet, but improving - Fixed route creation spawn point offset - Reworked falling / landing, making it at least a bit less random-resetting. Not perfect yet, but we feel like we're going into the right direction - Fixed many reported location issues, also at Al Lègne - Fixed steam cloud save - Fixed controller issues in the menu and route created popup - Fixed wrong context menu icons being shown sometimes - Made pinch icon appear more often again - Fixed some spelling mistakes - Some graphical changes to the character, increasing skin detail - Made multiple small physics changes to make the movement more stable / less qwoppy - Improved posture in a few often-occurring situations - Foot hanging penalty reduced - Foot max hang support increased - Increased max hang support slightly - Reduced max inverse support bonus - Reduced max local inverse support bonus slightly - Adjusted upwards-facing support curve, causing slight situational buff (at slopey top-outs)

Workshop Tutorials, Content and Examples

Multiple workshop examples and tutorial videos will follow shortly. Content and examples on Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2179440/workshop/ Tutorial video's on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@newheightsgame/videos Discussions, suggestions and bug reports on Discord: https://discord.gg/2DqPft9tnk

Dyno's and Bouldering in Fontainebleau

Wikklsteam_community_announcements

937d ago

The big Dyno's and Bouldering update has arrived! It contains three locations in the boulder-rich Fontainebleau Forest near Paris, many fixes and new features. Plus brand new climbing moves: Dyno's / Jumps! Thanks everyone who participated in the testing and gave us feedback on the dyno's. It helped a great lot. And now you can view the leaderboards online! The season has been bumped to Season 1, but the site also works for Season 0. You can find it here: https://newheightsgame.com/leaderboards/ Congratulations to DK37 for having very much dominated Season 0! Also honourable mentions to runner-ups: pwndnoob, Qbx, Acedog11, SilverFox57, pitti42, NotDK37, Adam_Ondra_Official, Tvinz, Nettur39, Kristoffer, Chlorion, Reaper, ElDull, BBB171, Brand238, Medicated Blunt and SuperJack! Hope you like the new update as much as we do! Patch Notes New Content

Training Grounds - Dyno Training - 1 route

Fontainebleau - Bas Cuvier - 33 routes

Fontainebleau - Chapelle Fourches - 36 routes

Fontainebleau - Cul de Chien - 20 routes New Features

Dyno control mode, jumping

Online leaderboard on the New Heights website

Challenge players from the leaderboard - with magnet links

In-game leaderboard filters: personal / global / friends

Leaderboard seasons

Fall time penalty

Made character rotatable in customization screen

New achievements for the new locations New Options

Rebindable controls

Target FPS slider

Automatic camera reset

Automatic releasing limbs

Automatically place legs

Competitive ghost options

Automatic release limb option

Falling duration before respawn Reworked

Stars system - local unlocks per location

Travel menu layout & controller support

Options menu controller support

Images in tutorial now respond to controller / mkb modes Climbing changes

Inverse support made more powerful

More power to pull up from situations like overhang

Less grab range around the hands/feet Fixed issues

Broken localized login flow fixed

Some route stop/restart/out of bound flow issues fixed

Controller layout issues fixed

Navigation edge-cases fixed

Game starting in very low resolution

Sometimes missing shoe graphic fixed

You could walk before the countdown ended in timed mode fixed

Fixed a few cases in which the character physics would explode

How we created our climber - Part 2

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1129d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/006b047528f35ba0efc58b3d178235acfca84c12.png Like we mentioned in the previous article: for New Heights, creating a realistic physics-based human climber was key for making a genuine climbing experience. But how does one create such a thing? Well, having a human character with realistic physics is mostly a solved problem by the industry: you use ragdolls. The real trick is trying to control that ragdoll in such a way that you can use it to climb walls and boulders in a realistic way. That is what led us down the rabbit hole of Active Ragdolls. That hole goes deep, way deeper than you’d think at first glance. For starters we needed our ragdoll to stand up, walk and follow animations like a normal character. For this we used an off the shelf solution which simply did that part for us, great! But just having an animated character is not enough to scale walls. We needed to be able to control the limbs separately and aim them wherever we wanted. If you’re familiar with game development, or if you read the previous article you already know the next step: we added an Inverse Kinematics (IK) solution to the project so we could point the arms and legs wherever we needed. To help us out with that we used an IK package which contains a lot of different IK solutions for us to use. At this point we had a solution for making a ragdoll follow an animated character and we had a solution for making the animated character point its limbs wherever we wanted with IK. Now we just had to combine the two of them together! Alright, easy enough. We just make our ragdoll follow our animated character climbing up the wall! And…. wait. If our ragdoll simply follows the movements of our animated character we still don’t have any realistic physical climbing! We just have what we had before, except more wobbly because of the ragdoll. Clearly, in order to have an actual physics-based climber our ragdoll needs to be in the lead. We need to do it the other way around: we should make our animated character follow the ragdoll! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/3456c3c088fd153d149b427b1de5282a7767c1be.gif Rest In Peace :( Oh yeah that’s right… Puppetmaster was using our animated character to keep our ragdoll upright. Without that reference, we just slump down like a sack of potatoes. Clearly there are two different situations we need to differentiate: walking and climbing. For the walking we can just use Puppetmaster to make our ragdoll follow the character animations like before, nothing fancy here. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/029ce857ef1a840d9a83f512f68c6fd22184e67f.gif Our ragdoll can walk! But when we start climbing, the physics need to take over and make our animated character follow the ragdoll. So as soon as we grab the wall, we switch control over to the ragdoll! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/365c3c9ec861d1896a2456ebbb66cd2163154318.gif When switching to “ragdoll mode” our character just falls down Alright, that’s a start! Now let’s work on aiming the limbs of the ragdoll. As we said before, we can simply use IK to make a limb aim towards a certain point. But we can’t just set the positions of the ragdoll limbs directly, we need to use physics! Otherwise our limbs might clip through rocks or even worse: they could tear our ragdoll apart. To achieve this we make our animated character follow our ragdoll and then perform IK on the limbs of the animated character (shown as the blue skeleton). With this animated limb as our reference, we can then add physics forces to our ragdoll limb to make it match the animated limb. For example: the ragdoll’s shoulder, elbow and hand use physics to move towards their corresponding parts on the animated character as indicated by the spheres. In other words: the ragdoll arm tries to use physics to align itself with the animated arm. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/88d503eb4e5392f356d9e39afde0eb744233957e.gif The ragdoll arm tries to align itself with the spheres Nice, now we can actually aim our limbs and grab the wall. Let’s start climbing! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/413d0856edd7ebcdce5995b9c0baece55f1d9089.gif Our character is too weak to climb, she needs to drink more protein shakes Oh no… our climber is too weak to pull itself up in any way. We can aim our limbs but there’s nothing that can actually make our ragdoll move up and climb the wall. Right now, we are just weak. We need muscles. WE NEED TO BULK. In the next article we’ll talk about how we can actually make our ragdoll go up towards… new heights?

Taking our Boulder Gym graphics to New Heights

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1136d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/bfe298c1ec4f494267538a4f7b1ed9053d1db23c.jpg Most of the levels in our game are based on real world locations and put into the game using photogrammetry. These photo scanned levels have a high baseline of quality because they so closely resemble real life. The photogrammetry pipeline we have supplies multiple layers of textures we can apply to a physically based rendering (PBR) material in Unity; These texture maps include occlusion, roughness, normal maps resulting in a realistic looking surface. We do have one level that is not based on a real world location: the boulder gym, where you learn the ropes of our climbing system. It's the first level the player sees and experiences and it has been built by hand instead of using photogrammetry. The level is based around the idea of an outdoor climbing gym at an old/abandoned industrial compound. We blocked out the level using some props and buildings. For the climbing walls we used ProBuilder to block out meshes resembling climbing walls. The boulder holds the player uses to climb these walls were made by us (using Blender). {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/11f03bf286305a37912f1285265290a3d51b4933.jpg An early version of the boulder gym level With our photogrammetry process improving over time the boulder gym level quickly fell behind in graphical quality. It did not stand up against the other levels we have in the game. This was problematic for us because the boulder gym is the players' first impression and is also something you see when you watch someone play the game for the first time. With our photoscanned levels being so beautiful the boulder gym needed a graphical lift. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/8753bd24e553dc6b5aec06f56164a0ae83148944.jpg Big quality difference between our boulder gym and photoscanned levels The first and most pressing items to beautify were the climbing walls themselves. The shapes we made with ProBuilder for the walls were unrealistic looking and had a basic texture on them without any PBR properties. Basically, it was just a block with a simple wooden looking diffuse texture and a basic normal map. We needed better textures to make our climbing walls look more realistic. I took my camera with me for my next bouldering session and took a lot of photos of the walls (also of the holds, more on that later). The next step was making these photos tile properly. I tried some AI assisted tools, but they were mostly prompt-driven for generating textures from scratch. I just ended up making the photos tile in Photoshop. My process was as follows: duplicating the texture on the X- and Y-axis, fixing up the seams, removing glaringly repeating elements and making the shading on the image consistent. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/7de41083108ecd69ccb95e5bfda70db0934840c2.jpg From photograph to the diffuse texture used in game To create a more photo-realistic and modern look the textures needed to fit into the PBR pipeline. I came across a program called Materialize (https://boundingboxsoftware.com/materialize/index.php) that can take a single photo as input and create all the needed texture maps from there. You end up with a complete PBR material, exactly what I needed! I placed the newly created material on the existing walls and it looked great, but still the wall models were really out of place, so these needed to be updated as well. I modeled some hand crafted looking walls that were supported by beams and planks. It fits great with the industrial boulder gym look that we have. My texture actually has a seam where it repeats but we ended up emphasizing this as it makes a single wall or block appear to be made up of multiple slabs which looks great. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/d5991f92fb3a1f7ab864cbf85d19379a064c930c.jpg The PBR material creation in Materialize With the texture workflow in place the climbing holds were also updated using Materialize. I had also taken several high resolution photos of climbing holds in our local boulder gym which I converted to PBR materials. Our holds now look like the real ones with great, grippy texture. I did the same thing for the mats beneath the walls as the old mats were very bland and shiny looking which I didn't like. The new mats are actually indoor mats, but since it never rains in our boulder gym they'll be fine! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/8218c5df8602776fff896044d7768c12218c4a8d.gif More realistic looking holds {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/8dfc7fa34277b2a8d034957edc87b642432a7f42.jpg The new walls, with mats and holds Other changes to the boulder gym include adding in some ground clutter for variation and placing some props around the place to make it more believable. One of these props is a long brush that is used in bouldering to brush the holds clean. These brushes were placed around the level by giving them a collider and physics then copying their position after they fell into place; way easier than placing them by hand! I also put the building’s textures through Materialize to increase the overall graphical fidelity of the level. Additionally we have cats in our levels that the player can find to get an achievement; Unique to the boulder gym level is the dog, which even has its own dog house. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/a7fc36415316e0267ba6c5e31d6a8655d8bb8fb0.jpg Additional props and assets that were added to the level The end result is a way more realistic looking boulder gym that looks like it has actual climbing going on. The graphics are also more in line with the rest of the game regarding fidelity and level of detail. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/38c5876d1ce3b458b51c067d54462cbf860ba51e.gif Old versus new!

How we created our climber - Part 1

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1137d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/84a0118447be4363bfd9f0d14dd211d7fa27759d.jpg In this series of articles I’ll tell you all about how we created our climbing system for New Heights. Not only will I explain how it was implemented, but also what steps we took and what decisions we made along the way to get to where we are today. Like many games before us, New Heights started out as a simple prototype. The goal was to create a game with a realistic climbing system to simulate the climbing and bouldering we do in real life. But then meant to be implemented in a more story-driven adventure game! The first version was based on animations and Inverse Kinematics. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/efec715ee1013451673837aee83d212bd3e9d970.gif Our first climbing game prototype We picked some nice walking and climbing animations and we used Inverse Kinematics (specifically: Final IK) to aim the limbs where we wanted them. For the first version this worked well enough. While you were moving along the wall we played a nice “shimmying” animation which we blended based on the direction you were moving, we kept the arms where we wanted them with IK and we simply moved the entire body up/down/left/right based on the input of the player. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/64085aba663a9b1e43e034dc3699c65987a294cf.gif You can see the hands away from their holds while the character is moving around But there were some awkward quirks to this system. Most prominently: it was pretty hard to keep the hands and feet locked at the position they were grabbing. After all, IK simply aims a limb towards a point but doesn’t impose any restrictions on our character movement at all. We had to program these restrictions ourselves by introducing a maximum distance the player could move from each of the limbs they were holding. For example: we didn’t allow the player to move further from a hand that was grabbing a hold than its arm length. But what if the player is rotated slightly? What if the limb is restricted in some other way? What if the limb grabs something around a corner? The system was beginning to show its flaws… Yet, we pressed on. We improved it as much as we could, we removed some of the climbing animations to prevent the character from wriggling on the wall too much and improved the movement limitations. We implemented some rotation limits and tried to make the climbing look as realistic as possible. For the first prototype this worked fine, the character felt snappy and responsive, it looked decent enough and people could test our climbing mechanics. All of which gave us the confidence to continue the project and to build it into a fully-fledged climbing simulator. But we kept having the feeling that the climbing just didn’t look good enough. In certain situations the character felt like it was floating instead of climbing. The character lacked “weight” and the climber always just stuck to the wall without ever losing its balance or sliding down. Everything felt too static and predictable, it lacked the suspense of real climbing. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/cb2891fbee897f7d1961f28348a3595d15e1a199.gif You can make the character float The more we discussed it and the more we tried to implement changes to improve the feeling of the climbing mechanics the more the limitations of our current animated-based implementation started to show. In order to improve it we were trying to simulate the physics involved in climbing itself: how your character would “hang” on your limbs, how your rotation affected your reach, how your character would fall over if you were out of balance and probably a countless number of other ways real-life physics would affect your climbing experience. We realized we were fighting the inevitable: in order to make it feel truly realistic, we couldn’t just simulate these things ourselves. We needed to introduce actual physics to our character and while it required us to rework the entire climbing system we built thus far, there was no other way around it: we needed to make our climber entirely physics-based. We needed to use active ragdolls. In the next article we take our first steps towards making our active ragdoll climber. We’ll look at the basic setup, how we aim its limbs and how we can combine the ragdoll with character animations.

Studio and Game introduction

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1145d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/397276b76291a99421fd9761f12c13b705f9a3e8.jpg First of all, thank you to those of you who have already played our game, wishlisted it, or interacted with the New Heights community so far. We here at Wikkl Works can’t wait to see even more players trying out the game during Steam Next Fest starting June 19th. As we’re still a small community, we wanted to introduce ourselves and give a quick introduction to New Heights. We are an independent Utrecht-based Dutch studio founded by experienced game developers and climbers. Our team members are Guido (Creative Director), Finn (Producer), Geert (Senior Developer), Timon (Game and UI Developer) and Niels (Game Developer). After years of creating games for our partners we decided as a team that it was the right time to create something of our own and that is why we’ve created New Heights with the goal of making a realistic climbing and bouldering game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/5ba595e9a0f4f7cd96e04a1ec90df0533ac45b92.jpg

So what makes New Heights different from other climbing games out there?

New Heights is all about creating a realistic and immersive experience. With physics-based climbing mechanics players will have to test their balance and grip in order to climb each of the in-game locations, that are all from out in the real world. We personally go out and scan locations using drones and implement them into the game using our photogrammetry pipeline. Every hand hold and every divot is exactly as it is in real life. We want players to be able to climb things that they may never have the chance to. That’s why we chose real-world locations for our game. If you’ve ever wanted to become a climber but haven’t had the chance to try or to travel, New Heights lets you give it a shot! We have loads of plans for future additions to the game, but when players pick up the demo during Next Fest they’ll be able to first learn the controls in our in-depth tutorial and then climb 2 beautiful locations. As we head into Early Access later this year, players are expected to be able to experience upwards of 12 hours of content! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/3198e7e6b740b0ec83afe9807323433c5979fd53.jpg Thank you all again for your continued support and interest in New Heights. We can’t wait to see players climbing and mastering each of the locations available in the game. Let’s reach New Heights together!

Photogrammetry on Steroids - Part 5 (final part): Getting it all in the game

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1196d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/dec419166cc2bc361f4a0a6d908abe2b4154f89d.jpg As the final part of the photogrammetry process for us it’s all about getting the model in the game. Even though we decimated the mesh in the previous step it’s still in the tens of millions of faces and comes in one big piece. If we would just drop this into the game it might still run technically, but having such a high definition is not needed for most of the mesh most of the time. The first solution you might think of is to decimate it further. This would be a perfectly fine solution for a lot of games, but in New Heights the climbing system actually needs the definition of the mesh to decide if something is climbable. So we still need to have the dense mesh, but when you’re at a distance we can still show the lower resolution version. Using LODs (Level of Detail) we can achieve this right in Unity. The only problem with this approach is that when you get close to the mesh it will still go to the full resolution version which will drop your framerate fast. Our meshes are also very large inside of the game world, because they are actually scanned cliffs. This means that when you’re on the edge of the cliff on one side it would put the whole cliff as the dense mesh, even though most of it is still really far away. With this in mind we decided it would be a good plan to cut the dense mesh into chunks. This way we could create individual LODs for each chunk and only show the dense version when you’re actually close enough that you can climb on it. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/130e4576821eec2c6e23a6cd68af27d63b911556.jpg For the cutting of the mesh of the cliff and decimating for each of the LODs, we decided that it was time to switch programs and move to Blender. This allowed us to use the power of a fully blown 3D program together with Python to automate it. The Python script was fully made with our pipeline in mind. So the input will always be the textured mesh from MetaShape and the output should be easy to integrate into Unity. Even though Python might not be the hardest language to work in, it took us quite a bit of testing, iterating and tweaking to get everything working and connecting properly. Any small misalignment would show up in the game as seems and ridges. In the end we got the script dialed in and now we can fully automatically cut the cliff mesh into chunks, then create multiple decimated versions of those chunks (1 for each of the LODs) and structure them in a way that would be easy to create an import script in Unity to put them all together again. The output of Blender ended up becoming a root folder for the cliff with a bunch of folders for each of the chunks. Then in those chunk folders would be the FBX files for each of the LODs (in our case 3 for now). With that structure in mind we created an import script in Unity that takes the root folder as input and then creates all the GameObjects for each chunk with the LOD groups filled with the correct meshes. In the end getting us a nice prefab, ready for use! {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/404ae89f50256e50cfb599f3541dfa0cd1a72d19.gif That is the overview of our full photogrammetry pipeline. All the way from the reasoning behind why we are using it, testing out if it would even work, doing our firsts scans, creating our first models and getting those models functional in the game. As you can imagine we are always looking at optimizing the workflow by automating more, improving the quality of the final prefab, decreasing the processing time and tweaking every step of the way. Currently we are looking into how we can better remove noise and fill holes in the mesh. We hope that this overview about how we approach photogrammetry in games can help you when you want to use (meganormous) photogrammetry assets in your game. Let me know if you need any help!

Photogrammetry on Steroids - Part 4 From 2D to 3D

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1242d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/03e49f3b36def2ea4dc54d29768c74f412484e9e.jpg Back in the office, with gigabytes of video footage from Al Legne, Rocher du Casino and Crèvecoeur it was time to start processing. This might come as a big surprise to no one, but most if not all photogrammetry programs are built around photos and not videos. Taking still images out of a video is trivial to do with ffmpeg. First we started by just taking an image at an interval of 3 seconds. This would make sure there is enough overlap between the images. Feeding these images into Agisoft’s Metashape already gave quite good results, but we had a hard time having some images aligned. When we looked at those images we noticed they were very blurry.. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/0ec7f790b3e362b84bcb731d66fcb0909b38ba5b.gif Looking at the original video we saw that around the blurry image there should be more than enough footage to get a better frame out. So we used ffmpeg to get more frames out, then used blur detection to find the best image and we used those as input to Metashape. Actually to our own surprise using this method has given us a 99%+ aligned on the photos!

What does this actually mean though?

Converting the images to a 3D model happens in several steps that all build on the step before. The first one is the alignment of the photos. What this means is that the program will look at features of a picture (this about hard corners, etc) and try to find them in multiple pictures. When enough of these features are found in multiple images it can then triangulate the position of where the photos were taken from and align the virtual camera for that image. After having your images aligned the second step is to create a dense point cloud. In this step the program will use things like curvature to find many many more points that overlap between the features found in the last step. All these points are found in 3D again using triangulation. When this step is done you can already start to see a vague version of what will be the output. Based on this dense point cloud the program can now start to make a mesh. It does this by some version of triangulation, and yes this is very confusing because this is a totally different kind of triangulation then used in the previous steps. Here it actually means “to divide into triangles”. After the mesh is built there are most likely a bunch of floating bits and ugly edges. These can easily be removed with some filtering. This mesh is actually even too detailed for us, because it breaks almost every program we tried to put it into. So we use the decimate function in Metashape to bring it back to still very large, but not meganormous numbers of vertices. Don’t throw away that high detailed version though, because we still need it in a later step!! A mesh is still very boring though without having any textures on it. So with the power of Metashape we are even able to generate albedo textures from the images. Here is where a little bit of good judgment comes up. Because you need to pick the size and number of textures you want to create for the mesh. You might think just picking the highest resolution and a high number of textures would give the best results, but there is a very strong limit on the quality of the textures. This all depends on the input pictures. Metashap is a very magical program, but one thing it does not do is use AI to enhance or content aware fill parts of the textures. Another thing you need to keep in mind is that the higher resolution and number of textures you want to export the longer it will take and the more system resources you will need. For our computer with 64GB of RAM the limit was around four 16k textures. The model still kind of looks flat. This is because there is no normal map yet. We can easily get this by using the high detailed version of our mesh. This step will bake in all of those details into the decimated mesh, making it so the light will reflect better how it originally should. After the normal map we also generate an occlusion map to get those really nice ambient occlusion depth right into the model. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/cfdfd294fa1c8ea52ce12d3137e32ab10ff8fd4b.gif Now that we have the model we can actually prepare it for use in New Heights. This is what the next part will be about. Having super detailed meshes is really amazing of course, but having a good framerate is also very preferable over a slideshow in a game.

Photogrammetry on Steroids - Part 3 From scouting to scanning

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1245d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/a7b846718091ff63a63d3a84cfae86dc8dc1979d.jpg Our studio is located in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and there aren’t any particularly interesting cliffs in the next town over or even in the country. So we started looking for what actually are the closest outdoor climbing locations and settled that the Belgian Ardennes at Frëyr and Rocher du Casino were probably going to be a good balance of some proper cliffs with a wide range of difficulties, without having to travel by airplane. As you can see from the thumbnail image, Al Legne (at Frëyr) is a pretty huge cliff with the human for scale at the arrow.

Scouting

To get high quality data it is optimal to have a nice overcast day and try to avoid any moving inconsistencies between the photos. Things like leaves, animals and even people will have a major impact on your data. We chose the end of November for our trip, because there should be fewer people trying to climb and more importantly the trees don’t have any leaves anymore. Time to book a hotel and get the preparations going!

Preparing

Maybe one of the most important steps to a successful scan of a cliff is the preparations. Please do not underestimate this, we are well aware of the excitement you get from being close to the cliff and flying your drone about, but it has to be done safely!

Be prepared to be outside for hours. So have enough warm clothes, food and (hot) drinks. It’s even a good idea to bring a tarp or a tent with some foldable chairs so you have a place to keep your things dry, out of the wind and take a rest.
Bring enough power! Depending on the size of the cliff you need to have several battery packs for the drone and probably even have a way to recharge those packs, but also (VERY IMPORTANT) have multiple phones to control the drone with. Those phone batteries will drain really fast, especially when it’s cold outside.
Since we are scanning climbing cliffs it’s of course also important to bring some safety gear, think about mountain shoes, ropes, carabiners, also depending on the location it might be smart to bring a helmet. And last but not least it never hurts to have a first aid kit at hand.

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/55ca86d4ec1310cf17bb06da444de8c4e5c689d7.jpg

Scanning

Now that we are ready to go and our batteries are charged it’s time to go. Skipping some of the overhead logistics I’ll just move on to the moment we start the scanning. Based on the tests we did earlier we will use the drone to record video and use the start-stop flying to ensure we have enough frames with low blur. We decided that it would probably be good for our source data to have multiple perspectives of the same area. To do this we fly the drone up with the camera tilted +24° and then in the same location fly the drone down with the camera tilted -45°. This would make sure that we give the photogrammetry software more information about the 3D details. After doing one vertical strip we would stop the video, move the drone a couple of meters horizontally (ensuring about 30% overlap between the strips), start a new video and then fly the new strip. When we see a particularly interesting / detailed area we would also fly some extra perspectives around it to make sure we get that data in our dataset. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/6e4fd75869e6f25022393338775fc1af0ab2ce77.gif After hours of flying the drone and many gigabytes of video footage later we even had some time left and decided that it would be cool to try and scan a ruin in and see if it would be good content for the game (spoiler alert: this worked great!). Now it was for sure time to head back home. In the next part we will talk about how we process these videos to get a meganormous 3D model out. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/d16f3e5cef493b90ea6237fab7d05063e2d3b48a.jpg

Photogrammetry on Steroids - Part 2 How will this work?

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1263d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/343c321e4491c7d53883119fc47446a1add7b2e0.jpg It’s all good and well to decide you want to try something completely new (like photogrammetry in our case) as a core part of your game, but you have to then start with doing some tests. We looked online, did some research and read a lot of valuable methods that are used in the field already. For our case we have a very concrete and consistent thing that we want to scan though: cliffs, boulders and structures. This gave us a very clear goal and limitations. Time to test out the methods in practice! First time we went out with our phones and took a bunch of pictures of some boulders. The results were surprisingly good, which gave us a lot of hope that we actually made a good choice. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/f47b163439231cfb2855bdeac3c87acb197d2d93.jpg Based on those first tests we were convinced that we would be able to use photogrammetry for creating the models, but if we want to scan a whole cliff it would take quite a while to climb every part of it with a phone in our hand. Therefore we decided that it would be a good idea to buy a drone and get the licenses to be able to legally and safely fly it. Our drone of choice is the DJI Air 2S. It has a great sensor, really good image stabilization with a gimbal, it’s compact and light, and comes with actually decent software to control it. So Guido took it on himself to become our professional drone pilot. He actually didn’t have too many issues with getting the licenses. Honestly the hardest part was figuring out which licenses are required to have. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/31792e42f6698c9664ecf2a223562a1c5245c2c9.jpg Now with the drone at hand or rather in the air we started looking into a good methodology for collecting the photos needed. We found an old brick factory close to our office with enough space around it so we can safely try out some things. We started by moving, shooting a photo, moving, shooting a photo, etc. It proved very inefficient! The drone needs to be fully stationary, else the photo gets blurred and the 3D result will only be worsened by that picture. And it is intensely time / energy consuming. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/24cad203051042b7978fc7877dc715200f6822ea.jpg Next we tried shooting videos, because maybe the quality would already be good enough. We extracted the frames from the video at an interval. Better! And most importantly: easier! This allows us to move, keep the drone still for a moment, move, still, etc. Especially for the scale that we are capturing at having a more efficient process would save us potentially hours or even days of time. This would then balance out the lower quality photos by having a more consistent lighting on the location. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/80a907554711080374fb7addc4acc010ca8c7a8c.jpg With a methodology tested and approved for quality we decided that it was time for the real deal. In the next part we will be talking about how we decided where to go, how to prepare for a photo scan of a cliff and how we applied our methodology at scale.

Photogrammetry on Steroids - Part 1 Why even bother?

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1269d ago

{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/5cbaf90bbb983db96bcb4a9abaa752a05002e44f.jpg We rely heavily on photogrammetry for the production of our realistic climbing game New Heights. In this series of articles we will attempt to explain why, how and how we got to this point. For our climbing system to work it needs something to hold on to, because climbing in the air or on a flat wall would be quite difficult. So we need some (collider) meshes, but how detailed do we need them? About 100M - 500M verts, those kinds of models. They are rocks (think more like whole cliffs), which have to be super detailed, because you have to actually climb on the details. More detailed = more better for us. Luckily, we have a constraint: these meganormous rocks will NOT move. Since we are mostly developers, and a little crazy, we thought it would be a good idea to look into other ways of creating these 3D models than to just model them, because it seemed like it would be a lot of work to model realistic looking mountains that would also be fun to climb on. When you model a cliff for the purpose of it being climbable it’s also easy to focus too much on “creating routes”. This would not be optimal for the realistic experience that we are trying to create as it would simplify the puzzle of climbing too much. Scanning seemed to be the obvious answer as an alternative. 3D scanning is already used extensively in games and even movies so how hard can it be? After doing some research into methods of 3D scanning it came down to photogrammetry (based on photos) or LiDAR (based on infrared lasers). A quick search later, we found that LiDAR could be adversely affected by sunlight. This would obviously be a bad thing for us as we would be going outside to scan the cliffs and boulders. Also looking at the prices we would much rather work with photogrammetry, since hooking a good outdoor LiDAR to a phone or drone would be quite pricey. A major advantage of photogrammetry is that the model will already have a texture and not just a texture, but actually how it looks in real life. At least how it looked on the day that we did the scanning. Changes in weather conditions, like a cloud moving in front of the sun, will show up in the textures of the final models. So it is decided photogrammetry is going to be our way forward for creating these meganormous rocks. In the next part we will go over running some photogrammetry tests and fundamental decisions we made for how we will be doing the photo scanning.

Nature is Beautiful

Azpetsteam_community_announcements

1272d ago

All around me, everyone (including myself) uses some form of stylized art for their game because you can accentuate what you want to stand out the most. You can also simplify, making art easier to model, set-dress and combine. If you do it well, your game would also stand out from all the others because of your style. Knowing this, we started to define the right style for our current game, a sports / simulation / puzzle climbing game called New Heights. For the demo we found a way to stylize its look, using asset packs and retextured high detail models of rocks. Very highly detailed rocks actually, because we need all the features of the rock model that a player can climb. This was one of the reasons for us to make our own 3D scans of rocks. Most rock models online are too low detailed and sculpting very detailed rocks by hand is very time consuming. But we now ran into the stylizing problem. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/d2374234bc03b4fae8770c5879b5fbbf4dc8aa1f.jpg For the demo we used Substance Painter presets for generating nice textures, mostly based on curvature. But still, as you might see in the demo, it proved difficult for us to create the right amount of detail for the rocks. Whatever we did: the original textures always turned out much prettier and more interesting than whatever we came up with in Substance Painter. We also tried ‘stylizing’ the textures in photoshop with some filters, but it kind of came down to getting a lesser result than the original. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/d4df7f58e07ccab03b456f86a79507de2fb6a2c9.jpg Then we realized something. We are creating a game that is based on one primary visual principle: show beautiful rock. Sure, also beautiful nature and nice looking climbing, but 90% of the screen will be filled with rocks / cliffs all the time! And somehow, whatever nature itself came up with, it is consistently nicer than our attempts at stylization. Of course! Being in nature is a huge motivation for many climbers like myself. So why would we take that away by stylizing it ourselves? Now we are taking the raw, 3D scanned materials as the base for the entire style. Everything else has to fit the looks of the rocks. For now that means a fully, utterly realistic art style, even with our small indie team. And wow, this is going so much smoother! There are enough great asset packs out there that can help us (specifically, a big thanks to NatureManufacture). Suddenly we can look around on the internet, and check what photos we want to make a reality! It seems to be the perfect timing for us to make this realistic looking game. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/54ff7dd52beafbab3d611dfdc74a15b2fdc49d05.jpg Now we are facing the challenges as well. Animations need to be smooth and plentiful. Our climbing system will have to look even better. But at the moment we are mostly just relieved. Because coming up with - and creating the scenes, is quick, easy and looks great. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43535104/b0f5c055d445ec3b7daefa240532169868bdb16d.jpg

New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering news & patch notes

New Heights: Realistic Climbing and Bouldering news & patch notes

Rope physics belaying system

Climbing system rework

Hanshelleren cave location

Super high fidelity locations rework

Textureless surface scan mode

First person bonus mode

More customization

All updates on Discord

The biggest update yet coming in 2025

Rope physics belaying system

Climbing system rework

Super high fidelity locations rework

Textureless surface scan mode

First person bonus mode

More customization

All updates on Discord

The Major Summer Update is live! Adding workshop support, 65 new Fontainebleau routes and much more.

New Fontainebleau Locations

Custom Route Creation

Location Creation Tool

Patch notes

Workshop Tutorials, Content and Examples

So what makes New Heights different from other climbing games out there?

What does this actually mean though?

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