Sword of Moonlight Forum
Sword Of Moonlight Games => Games (General) => Topic started by: HwitVlf on June 09, 2011, 03:46:52 am
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At the rate I'm going, it'll probably be 50 years before I finish my game, but I thought I'd post a couple screen shots of what I've been working on lately.
The working title is . . . (begin drum roll and manly echo voice) A REALLY SPIFFY GAME WITH DRAGONS AND SWORDS AND STUFF. But I'll probably go with a cool acronym ARSGWDASAS!! (hmmm might need a little work)
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Looks good!!!
It'd be good to get a good acronym that you can rhyme off quick and remember like...
Drinc beer!
(Dragons roam in natural calamity be extatic everyone run!)
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Very nice John, any game with Guyra in it has to be awesome :)
(favorite dragon of all time!)
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Looks good!!!
It'd be good to get a good acronym that you can rhyme off quick and remember like...
Drinc beer!
(Dragons roam in natural calamity be extatic everyone run!)
HAHA LOL...
How about "Dude Riding A Giant Ostrich Named Sam Craves Only Dessert Pie, Instead Eats Canned Eggplant"
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Nice screenshots, and so far I like all the names. I wonder what name will be the final? HA HA HA!!!
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Love that one, how about...
Drink Rum And Go On Not Scotch Cause Often Dudes Puke In Environments Change Everyone Come Have A Few Enjoyable Shots - Rum Easily Aids Ligaments Bah Am Drunk
Peter Rivendale Often Lusted After Paulines Superior Elves
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One more. . .
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I have to say this looks fantastic! Can you tell us anything about the story? :)
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This looks much better then I expected from SOM.
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The story's setting only vaguely hints at a tie with Kings Field universe as part of a distant past when the world was ruled by a powerful and advanced kingdom. Ruins of the 'ancient kingdom' are found scattered across the countryside. They were once prized for the powerful artifacts which were occasionally found in them, but most have long since been looted by treasure hunters.
It's an era of chaos when self-appointed nobles and petty robber-chiefs squabble for power. The main character is just a commoner who is displaced during the chaos. He decides to try his luck by exploring the last ancient ruin that hasn't been fully plundered- the old royal palace on an island filled with dangers (cheap ripoff of Melenat :biggrin:). He hopes to find the most sought after and powerful artifact of the old kingdom- the ancient king's sword which disappeared from history when the king was killed by one of his own generals. etc etc...
It originally started with the player already at the ruins, but I decided to add a background story of how he got there. I hope to have multiple storylines and let the player decide which path they follow. For instance, the screenshots are of the forest the game begins and the player will choose to 'travel on' or 'camp for the night' and gameplay will differ a little depending on what they choose. It takes a lot of creativity to keep things interesting so I'm not sure how good I'll do.
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Any news?
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WOOOW does this mean we won't have to suffer with hex editors? :O :dance: :danceroll: :dancev:
Could you also make a tool that will allow us to make custom animations for each sword?
Is it possible at all?
:notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy::notworthy:
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This is just for Enemy PRFs so we'll probably be stuck with hex editors somewhere. :dazed:
I was 95% done, I even made a few new working PRFs, but I found a whole new ability that can be set in the PRFs. It's mostly not used by SoM's models (why I didn't find it right off). It lets you play spell effects during any of the normal animations (walking, triggered etc). You can do cool things like making an enemy with a flaming sword.
Now I have to go back an redesign/recalculate the editor to let people edit those settings. It's going to take some work, but hopefully someone will use the feature. :goodnight:
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It lets you play spell effects during any of the normal animations (walking, triggered etc). You can do cool things like making an enemy with a flaming sword.
BLADDY HELLLLLLL
*kf customisation overload*
(http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/4/12/corblimeymate128525123657505000.jpg)
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+1 to that!
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this sounds neat xdd
flaming sword mobbies and monstors smokin dubbies lol
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This is very awesome!
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this sounds neat xdd
flaming sword mobbies and monstors smokin dubbies lol
LOL!!!
(by the way, you forgot this little guy ---> :smokin: )
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Without giving too much away - Horsee courtesy Mr Airflamesred!
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Looks nice! Well done to both of you.
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sweet that looks pretty cool
"a horse is a hore of course of course" sings :biggrin:
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Your screen shots totally rock man.............so sweet and you got a wolf.............damn, I want a wolf........laf. Seriously the graphics look sweet..........keep it up!
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Any news, Hwitvlf?
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It means a lot to me to finish this game, but I've gotten a little sidetracked lately. I just need to make some time to work on it. It's quite encouraging to see the progress in your game.
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My game isnt being built too much. Im still focusing on assets. I think soon ill finish making an easy npc type that i can repeat easily with a few differences. Then ill start building.
Your screens are awesome. Did you make the wolf?
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I did make the wolf, but truthfully, it doesn't look that good ingame. The "tinman" joints don't work very well on low-poly models of real animals. They look bad when moving- especially the back legs. 'Fantasy' creatures seem to work better because you can design the joints to work well with tinman :razz:
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I think the whole tinman joints and stubs are long out dated. It'l probably affect our inal game presentation in a big way.
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But at least we have an importer. And when my games done you'l be able to use some of my tinman models. :smokin:
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The tinman works well for a lot of Objects like windmills etc too.
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I just found this thread. (I'm a little slow I know)
I should wander around here more often!
I mean this question in the utmost of compliments, but John, are those screens from Sword of Moonlight?
O:
I can't believe how awesome and detailed those look! Great job!
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Anyhoo, I might as well contribute screens from my project. There's a few in this banner I just made...
(http://www.thefieldofkings.com/tfokbanner.gif) (http://www.thefieldofkings.com)
There's even more on the official website I also just got setup. (I'd post them here, but I like the scrolling marquee I have for screenshots, plus there's other stuffs on the website)
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An axe modeled after bronze/early iron age tools. 54 vertices and 512x512 texture - probably not actually going to be used as a weapon, just scenery- or maybe for a mini game.
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Good, did you triangulate the faces yourself or did you use the triangulate faces tool?
I was once speaking to a Scottish man who had found an iron age axe head near to where he lives. It will be on display somewhere in Scotland now.
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Most of the triangles came from me using "join vertices" with two corners on a square (trying to break the symmetry a little), but I did use "triangulate faces" at the end so that I could change the direction that some of the squares were being "cut" by using the wire tool. :bowl:
Cool find! Did he discover the axe head in Scotland as in a Pict etc, or was it southern as in Saxon/Roman?
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I really like how the axe blade merges into the leather.
Actually its pre dark ages, so probably somewhere between 800 BC to AD 43. I asked someone about what tribes would have inhabited the area and he didnt know.
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A couple sets of coins- top group ("Coins of the Old Kings") are more of a trade item than a game money unit.
130 vertices for the pile and a shared 256x512 texture.
Lower two are in-game currency, but I still hope to utilize trading more than "money collecting" to facilitate the player getting supplies. So such coins will be rare in true "dark age" style.
76 vertices and a shared 256x256 texture.
:biggrin:
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Like cunes! Looking great, did you take the coin designs from your own collection?
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More like "I wished I owned". The coins are composites of elements from Northumbrian , Celtic and Greek coins. But I couldn't help myself :biggrin: and put mostly intact copies of coins from Redwulf and Eardwulf along with a totally hammed up Hwitvlf equivalent. I expect the designs will be too small to make out ingame, so I was just having some fun :wink:
After walking around in a forest level from my game, I realized it was too "green" and somewhat mundane so I tried to make some colorful and exotic rarities to scatter about the area. This one is part of an "item harvest" puzzle. I made it more symmetrical to contrast the forest's organic lines. I think I could get the polygon count down a bit, but it will probably work as is at 580 vertices, 256x512 texture.
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That plant is great! I see lots of colour vareity in there, i think the colours blend well. It looks like it has a defensive property, so will the plants spike you when you walk over them? Or are the eyes more butterfly based?
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Thanks for the input Ben :) The "spikey" look is just to explain why you need a skill to harvest the seeds, so no damage when you get near. I was going to do minor damage (1 HP) if the player tries to harvest it before learning the skill. That's just for ambiance not to penalize the player.
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You guys are phenomenal at this, alas I pine for a day where I get to trudge through both of your completed masterpieces....even if I am 80 years old at the time :P
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A waist-bag item. Not really satisfied with it; I think it needs more definition but I've spent enough time on it. Anyways, it will probably not be looked at very long in-game. 134 vertices and 512x512 texture.
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Map building is one of the harder parts of making an SoM game so I was trying a new method- sculpting a specially prepared plane much like the ones used in most 3D game engines. It was being a little tricky to convert a 2D map sketch to 3D in a visually pleasing way. So I made a ultra low poly version of the map just to see how various lines and angles interact with each other, and to get an idea of the needed scale. It only took about half an hour to put together and it seems to be helping with sculpting the actual map model mesh. Hopefully it will work out to be fairly easy.
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Looks good man ! screenshots are very deep and moody. lovin' it :smile: It seems to me detail and lighting can go a long way even with an old engine like SOM.
Haven't been in here in a long while but I remember you asked me if i was at the agetec forums because of my avatar. (fixed lol) :tongue: Nah, I just used the sad soldier at random really. I'd stop and harass him whenever I had to pass through that area.
This is off topic but I read you were a mechanic by trade so you might find this funny lol. I rebuilt the frontend of my old 89 gmc sierra (all the parts that matter anyway). I broke one pitman arm puller and stripped out a 2nd trying to get the pitman arm off the steering box. Finally I had to use a universal 3 arm puller. When it let go it shot from the vice across the shed and nailed the door hard ! After that I thought about modelling a pitman arm of death to throw at enemies. Could'a caused me a bit of damage anyway I think lol. I would have had to use your staple removing techniques :tongue:
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Don't know how I missed your post above Smittox!!? Sorry :tongue:
Ha, that's funny :biggrin: I love exotic "joke" weapons like that. Someone had a fish weapon here a while back... a Swordfish??? I have my own set of near-miss automotive stories like yours. I've had presses 'pop' and launch their stuff across the room more than once. The most exotic near-miss happened when I worked at an auto-dealer; the business next door was using a home made air compressor and it's 250 gallon air tank was not strong enough for the compressor and one day it split its welded seam. It sounded like an explosion and about a second later the compressor fell out of the sky onto a car about 20 feet from where I was. That was a bit startling! :1zhelp:
I'm glad you like the look Smittox :) I agree that details can do a lot even if advanced lighting and animation techniques aren't available. I remember being very impressed with the game Soulbringer (http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/913680-soulbringer/images/gs_screen-4); it had very simple models and environments, but did an amazing job on character animations and a moody immersive environments. It felt much more detailed than it actually was.
Attached is a picture of an assembled cliff using a new map Piece I built. It's a single, oversized, 10m tall, 4-sided pillar shaped Piece. Because the Piece can be rotated in 4 directions, it looks fairly organic (non-tiled) even though it is only a single Piece. As people using SoM know, setting the collision (MHM) file for such irregular Pieces can be a pain, but I seem to have gotten it working OK. The collision is an octagonal shape whose sides come together in any position to form a flat wall (see pic). It isn't 100% smooth when the player walks along and pushes into the wall, but there doesn't seem to be any areas where the player can walk/fall through.
I also detached and raised the top of the pillar's collision (where the player walks) because it makes the step-up transition much smoother. The pic shows the collision shape and then a couple views of how it combines ingame to make smooth collision walls.
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Looks really great John, was the set I sent you not steep enough?
Really like the texture you used for the cliff :)
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Ha, I just emailed you about that a few second ago. The problem was my forest set floor. It has a double-layer irregular floor so the mountain set wouldn't plug in without an adapter Piece. It was just as easy to do make the single cliff Piece for the small area I needed here.
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Hey HwitVlf !
Good Grief man ! "A bit startling" lol? Sounds like an understatement. AAA auto repair/satellite launching pad at your service :tongue: That one tops any of my stories lol. I almost had a flywheel chop the top of my skull off but it caught on something as it slipped off between the engine and the transmission. Not that it would have but I'd have had a nice sharkbite across my forehead to explain. I built the little 8 X 12 workshed earlier this year and was happy to find I got the MHM data for the door right at least :tongue:
Got a silly side myself :smile: Swordfish eh ? lol, I missed that one. Kinda sounds like something from the old Monty Python skits. WHACK! stop it, thats silly !! Mabey a herring that could chop down trees too lol.
Yeah I can sure understand the collision problems with irregular pieces even with simple models sometimes. I was playing around with making simple freestanding blocks and ramps with sides at first to get an underatanding of how it all works and was getting frustrated with it. :confused: Was always wondering why x2mhm didn't always just follow the original model. Verdites advice and just plain old experimentation set me on the right path though :smile:
That cliff looks great man! :biggrin: So many new games in the works. I gotta get cracking on my own. I took all the screenshots of the old Realm of Impossibility game off the C64 and pieced together full maps in 2D to see what the full map of each area would look like. Been collecting pics for kings crowns I need to make too. 7 total with pedestals to place them on. Thanks much btw for the skull pedestal mqo zip you put up for ML. It helped me to understand better how they work :smile: I started work on an 'ORB' enemy too.
Mabey here soon I can get some stuff together for upload to give everyone an idea of what I'm doing. The original game is old and the only point was to either collect a key or a crown in each level (13 total with some locked) but it never really had a story or any real point for getting the crowns. It was cutting edge back in the early 80's though :P. I read the creator had originally just made it for him and his son just for fun since you could co-op in game with each other. Me & my younger brother sure played it into the ground back then.
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Ha, I suppose I tried to tone that "falling compressor" experience down in my mind- otherwise I would probably have developed some phobia where I couldn't stop looking up :tinfoil:
I found that tapered collision shapes don't work well- perfect right angles seem to work better. I don't know why they made the collision as funky as they did. My guess would be they were trying to save the resource load for old PCs in 2000 when SoM was released, it wasn't all that uncommon to find 66mhz PCs still in use.
You got me curious about your game. I like puzzle games. I wonder if you could integrate finding the crowns/keys into some sort of puzzle in each room?
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I don't blame ya there. Has me rethinking the repair on my old compressor. It's just a small sideways tank on wheels. I'm not sure how many gallons but it has pinholes on the underside where it wasn't drained everytime. The condensation rusted it through I guess. I was going to bend a plate to the shape and weld a new underside on it but now I'm paranoid :tongue:. It's over 30 years old and I'm not exactly a master welder. Nyeeeh, I'll probably wind up trying it anyway lol.
Yeah I can see how right angles would play a lot nicer to a 66hz processor. Hadn't considered what a real task SOM was for computers back then. simpler the better. I guess thats still true for modern machines too though. 40K poly models are a real drain on what I have today. Creaturas skeleton had smoke ready to poof out of the graphics card I think lol.
You read my mind man. Gonna try n go for a nice blend of puzzles, action and gameplay and some humor thrown in for good measure :tongue: I guess any kind of story to it would be an improvement too since there isn't one so thats wide open.
Originally the keys/crowns were just laying there to grab at the end of each map. The challenges were just dodging enemies, grabbing the item and running out alive. There were only 4 enemies. Snakes, zombies, spiders and the orbs. The only defense you had was dropping lil crosses the baddies would get stuck on and 4 scrolls to find & use ... freeze, confuse, protect & an HP scroll to give ya a lil more life. This fella put up a vid if you wanna see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXQgKCgkX1o
I liked playing the older silent hill, tomb raider and resident evil games for the puzzles and thinking involved not to mention a real 3D environment was a new thing back then. Even the controls were a puzzle to figure out lol. They seem to have gotten away from a lot of puzzle solving now though. I love the elder scroll games too but they basically just have me running errands most of the time lol. Oh btw I earned a housecarl for lakeview manor in hearthfire. She reminds me of Zula (Grace Jones) from Conan the Destroyer especially when I put a copper and onyx circlet on her head :tongue:
I think why I loved playing the Kingsfield games so much ( and still do) was the mystery and challenge of it all. They gave ya almost no information from the get go and just tossed ya in and said sink or swim. Hidden 'special' weapons, rare drops, etc gave a sense of accomplishment. The music and atmosphere were great. Story behind everything was good. seemed to have it all :smile:
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I wouldn't trust that weld, but that's just me. :1782:
I totally miss the puzzle solving aspects in the older RE and Tomb Raider series. I kind of felt sick when Squeenix bought Tom Raider. I know Core had gotten totally stagnant, but I always hoped for a decent revival. I don't think that's going to happen under Squeenix. In general, games seem to have moved toward action oriented button mashers. I totally agree about your description of the KF series.
On your game, you could make a cross projectile attack that worked similarly to "dropping a cross" in the old version by making new enemies with a long, stunned "getting hit" animation. If you set their defense/HP to max, they would be essentially indestructible. That might capture the urgency of the original as you ran from enemies while trying to solve a puzzle,
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Nice shots...seeing your backpack reminds me to ask a question...does it require SomEx to build 512 x 512 textures? I hate to say this, but I can't recall what SOM's original limit was anymore, I've been away from it too long to remember. :doh:
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No, Ex is not required. The converter for high res textures is a drag-n-drop built into the "tools" tab on the PRFeditor. The standard SoM textures were 256x256.
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Theres a texture extension I was recommended to use from the SomEx extension library while we are on the subject
texture_subsamples
Introduced around 1.1.1.3, this extension blows up textures, smoothing them out in the process. So if set to 2, a 256x256 texture will become a 512x512 texture in memory. Sword of Moonlight alone will try to blow textures up to the maximum size allowed by the display device. With modern hardware that is quite dangerous, since 8192x8192 or better is common, which is a 256MB texture. The Sword of Moonlight Extension Library by default uses 256x256 textures. Values are limited to whole numbers; 1, 2, 4.
It's not clear why Sword of Moonlight tools exhibit this behavior. One theory is the tools would in their day require software emulation under most circumstances to display graphics inside popup windows. Since filtering the texture on screen would be slower for a software rasterizer, blowing the texture up achieves the same effect while consuming considerably more memory.
The Extension Library ensures the texture is sampled in "halftone" mode. Sword of Moonlight neglects to do so and therefore where that is not the default behavior will likely consume about 16+ times the memory required without any positive effect.
Taken from
http://en.swordofmoonlight.org/wiki/Sword_of_Moonlight_Extension_Library/list_of_extensions#texture_subsamples
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It is in a section marked "Editor" so that extension is only talking about the 3D preview windows for the Editor, correct? It would be preposterous to say the actual SoM games enlarged every texture to 8192x8192. It's even preposterous to say the Editor does that. A single texture that size would take up 64MB of memory and be the equivalent of 1024 textures that are 256x256. Trying to display a texture that size would have caused serious problems on a computer back when SoM was released, and it doesn't. It's more likely that one of Mick's other "tweaks" caused the bug that this extension is trying to fix.
I don't even see the point of enlarging the size of textures in RAM under any circumstances; he says it "smooths" them, but more accurately it blurs them. Which is the exact opposite of why you want large textures in the first place- for crisp sharp definition. If you want 512 textures, just use 512?
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Trying to display a texture that size would have caused serious problems on a computer back when SoM was released, and it doesn't.
I was curious about this, which is why I posted it. I tested the texture uppage when you released the function, and the definition was clearly there without any form of extension... :bowl:...
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It occurs to me that this "enlarging" issue for textures in the Editor may be what causes the Map Editor crash when the 3d preview for Map Pieces is displayed. I know the crash doesn't happen with texture-less models which supports that thought. If so, I can certainly see the benefit of using this extension, but I would expect the cause to be a change in the way video card drivers handle textures since SoM was released. When I first got SoM, I was running a fairly snazzy (for the day) ATI Radeon video card and the Editors opened all the preview windows perfectly. I only started having the issue after a video card upgrade.
It's too bad that Mick doesn't release stable, versioned installer packages for the fully tested and functioning parts of Ex.