Screen shots

[HwitVlf]

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.

[HwitVlf]

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.

[Smittiox]

Looks good man ! screenshots are very deep and moody.   lovin' it  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)    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     

[HwitVlf]

Don't know how I missed your post above Smittox!!? Sorry 

Ha, that's funny  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! 

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; 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.

[Verdite]

Looks really great John, was the set I sent you not steep enough?

Really like the texture you used for the cliff :)

[HwitVlf]

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.

[Smittiox]

Hey HwitVlf !

   Good Grief man ! "A bit startling" lol? Sounds like an understatement.  AAA auto repair/satellite launching pad at your service  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 

   Got a silly side myself  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. 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 
 
   That cliff looks great man! 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  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.

[HwitVlf]

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

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?

[Smittiox]

   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 . 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  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

   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 

[HwitVlf]

I wouldn't trust that weld, but that's just me.   

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,