Old discussion and screenshots thread

[dmpdesign]

Um, that castle looks sweet, what didnt work out on it?

[dmpdesign]

Another thing, I really am a fan of the darker skies, I think alot of what makes things look flat is the light gray sky, but thats just my opinion...I really dig that last pic, and it also has the black sky.

[Holy_Diver]

I noticed in the hallway screenshot Som's mipmapping sans anisotropic filtering is pretty prevalent. You won't see that kind of blurring with Ex and the mipmap quality might be better, plus there is linear mip filtering under Ex so there isn't a sharp line cutoff where the mipmaps change (each level is blended with the previous/next)

I guess this means mipmaps are created for custom graphics even though pretty much all of the graphics that come with Som don't have mipmaps / are not mipmapped in game (with Ex mipmaps are generated at runtime for all textures / Som's mipmaps are not never used)


PS: Things feel flat because they are not really 3D (stereoscopic or whatever) so we rely upon visual cues like fog and the fall of light to make sense of things. Strip everything away and you almost might as well be looking at a quilt. Especially if the viewer has a poor grasp of three point perspective.

[Verdite]

The castle will be back :)

Maybe just not in the demo. I spent hours on it and made a huge mistake with the uv co ordinates, and kinda gave up on it. Its a five storey castle and i am especially fond of the enterance piece i made.

[Verdite]

Actually i think you're right. After sorting out the (argh!) mhm data! for the temple i'll start on rebuilding a castle similar to that one.

I've got the right mhm data for the walls and the temple floor. I used a single cube for a single map piece and dont need to build any corners now (they were a major pain for mhm data.)

Theres alot of map pieces gone to waste now, hopefully ill find some minor use for them... 

[Holy_Diver]

If you plan to let the player walk around on more than one story...

One thing to bear in mind, is I think many types of events will trigger even though you are too far away on the Y axis.

If there are workarounds you will need to be careful to make sure you always deploy them.


That said you might want to consider handling all of your events manually. I don't know if I will stick to it. But in one project I was working on I started setting up events for all of the doors / treasure chests / etc so I would have more control. But mainly because I wanted the player to have a more enjoyable experience, and felt like making the player dig thru their inventory to try one key after another was player abuse, versus just looking for the key in their inventory. Also I made most of the popup messages blank because I didn't like them more or less, but also for reasons like I was probably using 20 sealed doors for every actual door as just general props (though it would probably be best to make a new non-door object -- if there was a way)

Ex will definitely have a way to do custom popup messages. In fact I don't think there is any hurdle to adding that at the moment... it would work by loading a number for the custom message into a designated counter, then the message would display for the same amount of time. The messages would need to be defined in the translation file, like <message0> and that's that.

[Verdite]

Yeah i intend to make most events manual, i think thats the best way to make the player feel like they are deciding actions for themselves. Though the first release wont have alot of journeys to different major areas, it'l be more like a circle around one major area (with different maps obviously). This works best for me i think, and because its the 'demo' i think its acceptable.

Well ill address problems based on user feedback when the game is up.

[dmpdesign]

Ben, also remember you can only go + or - 10 meters above or below the 0 point of your map piece.  You may have already known that but I wanted to remind you since you are talking about making a 5 story map piece you would want to build your 0 point at the 2.5 story mark.

[Verdite]

Thanks for reminding me ill remember that.

I listened to what you said about the castle and today i completely redesigned the texture myself, and i'm really happy with it, though it did take me a while to finish.

I've decided that the temple set is finished pretty much, so ill be reworking the castle set next.

You'l see it soon :)

[Verdite]

Temple set is done and dusted. I corrected the mhm data perfectly and now have a great template set for mhm data.

There are no holes in the set at all now, and you can bump into walls as merrily as you like.

I've included some new screens of the test temple set with mist / fog.