What are you working on?

[Shpuld]

Sock: loving your use of actual 3d models instead of 2d GUIs.
Mankrip: looks very sexy, would love to have that effect as a shader for the more modernized engines as well.

I've been working more on the scratch base, added a simple hitscan weapon and a viewmodel for it.
I have pretty simple example code for moving the viewmodel around in CSQC when firing for example, as well as for the muzzleflash effect, which is just rotated and scaled to make it look animated when it's only 1 model with a single texture.

[ceriux]

nice shpuld i cant wait to see even more.

[jim]

sock: reminds me of Tomb Raider inventory.

Shpuld: looks like the muzzle flash works pretty well. I like the crunchy eating sound when picking up items. I always imagine I'm eating the stuff I'm picking up in games.
==

Tweaked the shader to have some extra dark shades (total 13 shades). Trying out some 16x16 and 32x32 textures. 16x16 sometimes need some dumb half pixel offsets, and can't have "medium" size hexagons. 32x32 feels like it could have all the necessary detail, while still keep the blurry soft look, and not take too long time to do.


Same room as above, but lava theme... and those hexagons. I guess the brown metal could work for both.


Also I'm a bit unsure about the flight, fast movement speed and 3rd person view. They don't seem to be working as well as I had hoped for. At least the graphics style seems to be becoming something interesting. Well, if I decide to make some run & gun game, then I suppose I already have some/all of the flying/swimming enemies modelled.

[mankrip]

Shpuld: It sounds like the bullets are emitting an echo sound when they hit the wall, which is pretty cool. Is that on purpose?

Jim, although your graphics are more polished now, I preferred the cartoony "Mario 64" color style of the previous images.


And as promised, a... . It also shows my current map in Worldcraft and the edited texture set I’m working on.
The E4M4 part of the video shows the animated features implemented in the emitter shading effect, which resulted in a full visual integration between the torches and the lightstyles.

And a screenshot with several color-keyed textures:

[Shpuld]

Thanks guys.
Edit: made some slight improvements to the effects and also tried a twice as fast rate of fire for the laughs mostly.


Jim: Yes, the sound is me eating a nacho... I 'll probably use something else for most items when I end up recording more sounds.
I think that level you posted requires more crazy colored lights to help the bloom to kick in more to get the same trippy feel for it.

mankrip: yeah that echo sound is a part of the firing sound on purpose, it almost sounds as I want it to sound but not quite yet.
I still think that your effect makes the torches look incredibly sexy while still fitting the style of Quake.

[toneddu2000]

jim: it seems that your project is shaping up! Keep up this good work!
mankrip: looks reaally cool, pity for the video quality but flames are great
Shpuld: Awesome! I hope some day we can share thoughts on FTEQW improvements!

[jim]

Some two years ago I had this sort of models. I made some other character too, but eventually I abandoned them. Their proportions were too child like, and the always floating body parts looked a bit weird. So I thought I'll check how it's looking if I change the stuff that was wrong. It could still animate with a very minimal set of bones, have weapons easily put into the arms, and sometimes the body parts could appear detached. Like if it was punching someone, the arm could fly off and hit the target, or if it's holding a two handed weapon, the other arm would detach.


If I make a non flight game with simple models, then the walking ones should probably be like this model. I think it's about the same style as my flying things. So they could probably be in the same game.

[mankrip]

Well, it has wings, so it don't need to stay landed.

And it's very cute.

[jim]

Visiting some old levels with the... Dragonant. The levels have textures at 256x256. The model has 256x256 for body and 64x128 for the wings. The gun is 256x256 and sword is 128x256. These were just AO Bakes + Color, gloss and some bump maps. There's also the shader, but it's effect isn't so obvious with the higher res textures... Though turning it off, does make it a little bit low contrast/dull looking compared to having it on.

The player model got 5 colors: White, Green, Indigo/Blue, Orange/Yellow and Red. Then I noticed that I have or have had pants with all these colors. Then I also decided to order them sort of the way they were in Doom. Maybe I'll also add some skins with the colors and the current black parts flipped? The shirt changes color a bit too, but it's mostly staying blue, but maybe it could stay the same blue on everyone?







When I had the earlier version of the character in Doomsday, I used some "shine/fake reflect" effect that used one tiling texture as the reflection. It created a nice web/feather like look on the wings. Now I tried dp_reflectcube, but it doesn't seem to do the same kind of effect. It looks more like additive blend... Or maybe it's just wrong kind of cube textures? Or maybe it's not working at all?

I would have probably animated it already, more than just some idle animation, but I spent the entire day battling some shading issues. DPModel apparently creates models with broken shading, both the DPM and MD3 from it were broken. I tried PSK, but that had some shading issues at the UV seams, and I can't figure out which way to turn the bones to be able to attach things into them. I got the torso attached to the lower part, but for whatever reason, the weapons weren't even close to the arms or any bone that I tried. Finally the only acceptable format was MD3 exported straight from Blender, fix tags with NPherno's MD3 Compiler, as the exporter didn't seem to understand tags. Also what was with the tags, they're just triangles? I had to import the tag model from some older model, didn't want to spend more time on trying to figure out why this new triangle made the attached model explode somewhere between the border of this reality and the computer screen.

Why is everything this difficult and take entire day to get it working. I wanted to go to the shop and buy peanut butter, but no.. or go out for a walk or run, but no.. and now it's 1am and I'm hungry

[scar3crow]

I've got to say jim, those are some very consistent looking visuals. It feels like the Dragonant is made of the same components as the world.

This may sound like the lamest compliment ever, but consistency in visuals is a huge failing point for me with games. So thus far, you're outstripping most games visually in my book =)

[mankrip]

The top screenshot looks the best, but the robot looks better in the last one.

IMO the map would look better with less detailed textures (at the same resolution).

[jim]

Mmmm... well I like consistency. Figured out why the fake reflections weren't working. Hey, and is it possible to just use one tiling texture for the fake reflections? Would be much simpler to do them. Now I have a "skysphere" with one tiling texture mapped into it, and then 6 cameras with 90 degree fov placed into the middle pointing in the 6 directions. Then I render a texture from each camera.. and then I have to smudge/soften the textures, because they got lots of same color pixels in lines that got stretched in the sphere. I think this much effort is ok for the skyboxes, but for fake reflections? I don't notice much difference between these fake reflections and the simpler ones in Doomsday...

AARGH! RIP AND TEAR!

[toneddu2000]

I like the first one from top, the grey and white one. A LOT. IMHO it would be awesome inserted in a similar well polished aseptic styled world (white, grey, rimmed black and a bit of azure here and there). But, of course, it's just my opinion!
I don't like too much, instead, the forced palette. If you use Darkplace, there's dp_reflect in shader to have goooood reflections and refractions, give it a try!

I don't understand a thing: did you change gametype? No more third person fly arcade game? Or is this another project?

[jim]

Yea, the 3rd person flight didn't work so well. It was easier to play 1st person, the camera was a bit shaky and player couldn't see much if hovered up to the ceiling. Player's sounds were played from the player entity, so they were not as loud when viewing the game from the camera entity. The ships moved so fast that the levels needed to be pretty big, and apparently a big level, even if it's mostly empty, take a long time to compile and the level file size was kinda big too. The first test level I made, took 9 minutes to compile, is 7.5MB file, and looks like crap, and it's not even big enough for flying, and it's dimensions are 6144 x 5632 x 4160. And I wanted more outdoors flying than flying in some claustrophobic deep dark dungeons...

dp_reflect is way too performance requiring to be useful, which is why I'm using the fake one. Maybe the performance requirements also come from the wavy deformvertex water (would be nice if the tesselation amount was cvar controlled), and I've only used it on water surfaces earlier. But it's also unuseful on the water because I want to set the water alpha in the level editor.. and if it has alpha in the level, then there's a whole a lot of glitching going on in the reflections, and if it doesn't have alpha in the level and someone disables the reflect effect, the water no longer have alpha. And not/seeing what's in the water affects gameplay.

I can't exactly force the palette effect.. it's probably default on, but it doesn't change the appearance much with the 256x256 textures. It has much bigger effect with the very low res textures. With them it's sort of like cellshading effect. With the 256x256 it's more like a software renderer 256 palette, except it has 2197 colors.

[xaGe]