Brutal Nature, The Multiplayer Voxel Sandbox game

Brutal Nature is a multiplayer survival game with voxel based terrain to mine for resources, destroy with weapons and place to form structures. Featuring realistic natural environments and rich engaging combat, it blends PVP and PVE game play with resource gathering and detailed but easy to use crafting.

 

All the following features are included in Brutal Nature.

 

General:

  • Fully destructible terrain. Large Rapid fire explosions supported with ease.
  • Physically realistic Grapple Gun allowing for amazing acrobatics once you learn how to use it.
  • Smoothed voxel terrain with cube voxel support for man made structures allowing details as small as 1.5" in size.
  • Realistic endurance and food system where usage of endurance results in more food required.
  • Realistic weapon, ammo and armor system. Weapons are based on real world stats.
  • Realistic crafting system with over 700 recipes utilizing 40 mined ores and minerals letting you craft over 400 items!
  • Supports over a thousand simultaneous light sources across the island.
  • Full mod support with scripting. Add whatever you can imagine to the game! Clients automatically download mods on connect.
  • Clients automatically download and install required mods when joining a server.
  • Easy to use terrain editing system. Build structures to defend yourself and mine to gather resources or build a secret underground base.
  • Multiplayer text chat.
  • Built in help menu in case you forget the key bindings.
  • In game item description/help. Ability to open an in game help page on any item by scanning the item or clicking on it when its mentioned in recipes. All object stats are shown and correct even if game mods are used.
  • Water Physics where water flows down slopes and fill in voids.
  • Built in server browser.
  • Built in voiced tutorial quests to introduce you to the basic features.
  • Updates released every 2 to 6 weeks.
  • Weekly development blog

  • Extremely stable and bug free. All known bugs are fixed before every release.
 

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Combat:

  • 40+ different weapons including: M16, AKM, Beretta PX4, Mk108, HK UMP, Mossberg 590A1 and many more!
  • 10 calibers of ammo: 5.56x45mm, 7.62x39mm, 9x19mm, .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, 7.62x51mm, 12Ga, 40x46mm, 30x90mm, Hook
  • 12 subtypes of ammo: Round, AP, HP, JSP, JHP, FMJ, HE, Buckshot, Birdshot, Triball, Slug, Hook.
  • Realistic projectile ballistics simulation.
  • Multiple ammo types for each caliber of ammo.
  • PVE and PVP combat.
  • Detailed armor system with 20 slots for equipping armor.
  • Armor has 3 main stats: blunt resistance, piercing resistance and encumbrance.
  • All weapons and ammo are craftable by resources found on the map.
  • Form a party with other players
  • Soundar for showing you the direction and location of gunshots, explosions and other loud sounds.
  • Realistic gun recoil depending on current endurance level.
  • Guns shoot where you aim, No spreading cross hair effect from running or recoil.
 

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Weapons:

Weapons in Brutal Nature are highly realistic, They all fire actual projectiles that take time to reach the target and have drop due to gravity along the way as well as experience air drag that slows them down and reduces impact damage.

 

Damage depends on mass times velocity squared of the bullet with each weapon having its own muzzle velocity. Bullet and case weights, muzzle velocity, etc are based off real world values. Each weapon also remembers its magazine count and ammo type when you change weapons. Weapons have multiple types of ammo, each with their own bonuses and penalties against armor or lack there of.

 

Weapons, armor and ammo all add to your encumbrance. encumbrance slows you down and makes you use more endurance to walk.

 

Read more about ammo types here: Ammo Details

   

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Health:

Your overall health in Brutal Nature is broken down into 3 categories: Health, Food and Endurance.

 

You die when you hit 0 health. Having no food or endurance is not fatal however low health, food or endurance will make tasks much harder to do. Health is slowly restored using up your food any time your health is not 100%. Low food will slow health regeneration.

 

Endurance is used by all actions: Moving, firing, reloading weapons, butchering animals, etc. It is regenerated automatically by using up food, or health if there is no food left. As such running out of food will lead to a death by starvation where every action you take makes you starve to death faster. Endurance regeneration slows with low health or food and speeds up when endurance is lower.

 

Low endurance slows movement rate and decreases ability to control weapon recoil. Most other actions require endurance to execute. This means everything you do uses up food and every action places a demand on your endurance. You feel the effects of low health, endurance or food before they run out. 

 

You should always try and keep health, food and endurance above 50% in combat. Working harder and lowering endurance further will let you do more but will put you at a disadvantage if you must engage in combat.

 

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Crafting:

Crafting is kept simple to do with a menu of recipes to guide you through the very detailed crafting tree of over 700 recipes. Select a recipe and it will show you its ingredients, how many of each ingredient you have, how many you can make and the recipe's output. You can then just type in how many you want and click craft. Nearly every item has flavor text explaining where you make it and what it is good for.

 

Terrain is mined in Brutal Nature to provide ores and building materials. Objects like trees can be harvested for wood. Using materials you can make buildings like smelters and camp fire to further craft objects. You can also craft light sources to light up your mines and houses.


Each building has a limit on the quantity it can craft at once and crafting takes a set amount of real world time before it completes. Most buildings also require fuel (Coal, wood, etc) to craft an item. Most buildings have visible effects to indicate when they are in use.

 

Chemistry is a part of game play with realistic recipes to make everything from everyday items like glass and steel alloys to explosives like TNT and Gunpowder. Very accurate chemistry recipes are used in the game that loosely follow the real world methods to make things.

 

Ores can be smelted by using coal, coke or charcoal into metals at the smelter. Some ores require chemistry to refine. Metals can be used to produce armor, weapons and ammo. Some recipes require higher quality fuels while others can use any fuel.

 

Electricity is implemented. You can craft generators, junction boxes, electric lights and electric smelters then wire them all togethor. Each load has a different power draw and each generator has its own power limit. Generators draw additional fuel when under higher load and different generators have different fuel efficiency levels. Batteries can be used to store electrical power and switches can be used to turn parts of your electrical grid on/off.

 

Dead animals can be butchered for meat and skinned for hide. meat can be eaten raw or cooked into different meals while hide can be used to make armor and clothing. Food can be cooked into different dishes depending on what ingredients you have.

 

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Terrain:

  • Fully editable terrain. Dig down thousands of feet below the ground and build just as high above it.
  • Smoothed and cube voxel support.
  • Cubed voxels support arbitrary sizes and can be exceptionally small.
  • Destructible terrain, blow terrain up with explosives, damage the terrain with bullets. Supports very large and rapid explosions with ease.
  • Destructible plant life and world objects, everything can be destroyed.
  • Supports tens of thousands individually destructible and harvestable trees and other flora.
  • Miles of caves to explore.
  • Terrain editing preview.
  • Terrain Generated from erosion simulation of user provided heightmaps allowing for realistic terrain and detailed modeling of sediment deposits, rivers and lakes.
  • Shadow mapped terrain supporting self shadow.
  • Can restrict editing along the X/Y/Z axis for ease of making walls, floors and ceilings.
  • Easy to use adjustable grid size editing system.
  • Water Physics: Water flows down hills until a set slope is reached. Water can be picked up and moved.

Terrain in Brutal Nature is voxel based converted to a smooth mesh. It can be destroyed by weapons fire, mined for resources and placed to construct structures. It can be mined or placed up to thousands of feet in every direction, tunnels and bridges can be made as it is a true voxel data structure.

 

It is initially generated by taking a user provided height map, running it through a fluid erosion simulator and then exporting it as a custom format. This allows any terrain to be easily imported into the game. Once generated, regions are assigned on a 2d basis and sub-regions within those on a 3d basis, different sub-regions having different soils, stones and ores, this provides a level of order by location while allowing variation based on depth and biome.

 

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Technical Details:

  • Custom engine coded in C++ using DX11 and shader model 4.0.
  • Uses instanced mesh and texture arrays for high performance terrain rendering.
  • Fully Multithreaded voxel to vertex conversion.
  • Supports x64/x86 builds.
  • Voxels are approximately one cubic foot in size.
  • Voxel compression reduces disk/network usage to approximately 0.3 bits per voxel on typical maps.
  • Voxel caching further reduces network traffic.
  • RakNet for networking.
  • Angelscript for scripting and mods.
  • Fmod for 3d sound.
  • Zlib for compression.
  • Botan for cryptography.
 

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Team:

The Brutal Nature team currently consists of just one full time programmer and a few artists who contribute now and then.

 

   

Black Moon:

I started this game because I wanted a survival sandbox game that natively supported mods and complex game play. I work full time on Brutal Nature and there is nothing else I would rather be doing. I am talented in C++ programming, machining and electronics. I hope to bring my knowledge of the world into Brutal Nature to make it a highly realistic game where you can create anything in a believable manner.

Contributors:

 

Vurt:

Pine tree, Berry bush, Green bush, Bush, Lupins, Mushroom

The Master Elite:

Texture artist: Created some of the terrain textures.

Pangaea:

Texture artist: Radar texture, Blast furnace model

Innsewerants:

Modeler: Bullet model, Smelter model, Ammo box, website favicon

Weijiesen:

Particle effect textures taken with permission from 'Essential Visual Enhancements' mod for Fallout new vegas

SmiteZero:

IndieDB logo

Other asset sources:

http://www.cgtrader.com

http://www.textures.com

http://www.freesound.org

http://www.turbosquid.com

 

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