FreeGameDev

As explained, here the progress on the body spritesheet for texturing the directional sprites (45° views still missing):


As noted before, this is only a test assets, not intended to be used for the game itself.
I kind of suck with 2D graphics I have to admit, so unless a great character pixelartist steps up, I will definitely have to go the "fake" route and render out the charcters (hopefully with special render parameters so that it looks not out of place in the hand-pixelated backgrounds).

Wasnt surt gonna do that?

So far surt has only done the cool reference drawings and that 3D test mesh. Not sure what his further plans to contribute are, but I hope I have not scared him away with my 2D/3D hybrid character tests. I hope we can agree to try that novel character style/technique, as it would really speed up the creation of characters and enemies tremendously.

Edit: or you mean draw the characters in 2D? Not quite sure... would be certainly awesome, but he didn't seem super convinced about the idea of 2.5D characters in a 3D environment.

Hi, Julius, ill be out of home for the weekend, ill be back monday or tuesday, see you.

Heh, no obligations to work on the weekends

I found some interesting links I would like to share:

Extensive pixel art tutorial: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_p ... 9318#13931

Some sort of dedicated pixel-art renderer (edit: got it to compile, at least with the given examples meshes it renders quite nice): http://timmaxwell.org/pages/retrorenderer/

Thread about render settings for pixel art style: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=97311

Awesome news: Robert has just send me updated binaries with the directional and animated sprite feature implemented Looks quite great already in game, and I hope to finish the rest of that test guy tomorrow.

Update: Making good progress with the 2.5D character test model, but didn't manage to finish it today (got distracted by other stuff). Maybe by the end of the week, as I have much less time on weekdays to work on it.

Robert has also fixed the issues with the GUI scaling and Buch's gui graphics look crisp like they should now! Time for me to have a look at them again and implement more parts.
@Buch: Is the latest version is pretty much finished, or do you have more ideas etc.? Maybe you can upload a .xcf with a clearly stated license then? Thx!
Is there any other pixel art you would like to work on? Maybe some larger enemy and point's of interest icons for the overview map? The current set of items is also a bit scares when it come to armor icons, and I would also like to have specific separate shoulder armor as items. Some cool crossbows as weapon icons would be nice too.

@Julius: Nice to hear of your updates with character! I would say UI is pretty much complete, except I still have to draw the pressed/highlighted variations of the buttons and optionally an alternative glove cursor (my attempts up to now did not result in anything good...). Once I've done that I'll give you a .xcf file with license specification (I'm going to license the whole thing under CC-By-SA, which should be the license of the rest of the assets you plan to use, right? Still, if you need some different license, just tell me - I'm pretty open on that side). You might also want to have the control split in their parts, so they can be easily and dinamically resized... That's something I am planning to do anyway, so I will also make a file with separated UI components (for example this)

As for other pixel work, I could draw some armor and items to expand the existing icon set if you need. And larger icons for the overview map could be done easily, I guess (what were you thinking of? I guess some balloon, exclamative/interrogative point, bigger circles, house-like icon, anything else? ) But first of all I'll complete the UI stuff...

Anyway, I should be delivering the GUI in a pretty finished state during this week (taking advantage of a relaxed period at school )


@Danimal: I really like your pixel-textured models! Keep up with good work!

Thanks Buch, im learning pixel art while i do them and im liking it even more. Here is another model:

Another one, regarding pixel quantity, which one do you prefere? the table that has a lot or this stool whit way less pixels? personally i like the table best.

@ Buch: yes, CC-by-SA is perfect. Concerning the overview map icons, something that could be displayed on a larger map for quest items etc.

@Danimal: We have to see how it will look in game from a distance and with a normal-map applied. The "cleaner" style might look a bit better from a distance.
I also think you might be able to add a few more pixels actually. A character is currently about 128 pixel high, so when standing next to your table the pixel on the tabletexture will be a bit bigger. I think we should try to aim for a mostly uniform pixel density.
You can also paint in some subtle ambient occlusion shadows in the texture to support the normal-map later on.

Edit: try to do some more outdoor stuff, as that will be more likely of use soon. Fences, (empty) signs, wells, stone-walls etc. e.g. something to populate a terrain.

Edit2: And you can also add more polygons... it's only supposed to look somewhat low-poly, it doesn't have to be that low-poly

I just started texturing the most simple objects, i have many others that have more polys.
So far 32 pixels seems to be giving nice results, i dont think we need to upper it?, also, for now all i have modelled are dungeon indoors stuff, ill start with outdoor ones now as per your request.

I thougth the game was more indoors oriented? please share what direction you want the game to take (gaunlet/rogue like or elder scrolls like)

Ya3dag supports both, basically there is a general outdoor world, but you can enter indoor/underground levels as sort of instances. The reason why I am asking for outdoor stuff is that outdoor levels can be easily build with the ingame editor, while underground levels require you to use GTKRadiant or such to build the levels. And while the latter allows a great deal of freedom building stuff through the editor, the outdoor (terrain) editor is more geared towards placing objects and not building them. Thus the need for nice objects to place outdoors that I can use to quickly make a nice outdoor test level
Ultimately I think the coop-action levels will be mostly underground dungeons, while the above ground "world" is mostly for the story and "stocking up" in town etc. But there is no reason why there couldn't be an above ground action level also.

About the pixel size: well it depends on the UV layout. I guess you are reusing quite a few parts on the 32x32 pixel texture and that is perfectly fine (but please keep the detail from the normal-map in mind), however the pixel size -in game- should be roughly the same everywhere, meaning that a table for example should (looking from the side) be about 48 pixel "high" (if we keep the current pixel size of the characters). But we have to see how that looks... sorry I guess I should have said that earlier.

Edit: did you have a look at making some nice small market stalls using the LPC/OGA tiles? At the beginning we could use those with a NPC for shopping different items.

Julius {l Wrote}:while underground levels require you to use GTKRadiant or such to build the levels.

I think that could be a potential bottleneck, especially if underground dungeons make up most of the game, as you need people experienced with GTKRadiant (or NetRadiant, etc) to make those parts, and it can be quite difficult and slow.

There is a recent Quake editor called TrenchBroom which may be easier to use, it is basically WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), though it may take some work to support the Quake2 format -- the raw map format is basically the same as Quake but it's a matter of getting the textures into a texture wad and invoking the Quake2-specific BSP compiling tools.

You could probably create a bunch of largish room pieces and have some logic to combine them into a large dungeon, like 2D tiles but in 3D. One issue is lighting, it is baked into the BSP models, so where two of these pieces connect may look strange as the lights in one piece will not affect the other piece.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a game and engine which creates random 3D dungeons by combining prefabricated pieces. It has different goals to this project, e.g. I'm not a big fan of the pixelated look. Anyway, wish you guys the best on your project and I may chime in from time to time with some hopefully useful advice

New model:

And it looks like this together with the others, please ignore for now the color/hue/saturation difference

Good work!

@Danimal: that looks great!

andrewj {l Wrote}:

Julius {l Wrote}:while underground levels require you to use GTKRadiant or such to build the levels.

I think that could be a potential bottleneck, especially if underground dungeons make up most of the game, as you need people experienced with GTKRadiant (or NetRadiant, etc) to make those parts, and it can be quite difficult and slow.

There is a recent Quake editor called TrenchBroom which may be easier to use, it is basically WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), though it may take some work to support the Quake2 format -- the raw map format is basically the same as Quake but it's a matter of getting the textures into a texture wad and invoking the Quake2-specific BSP compiling tools.

You could probably create a bunch of largish room pieces and have some logic to combine them into a large dungeon, like 2D tiles but in 3D. One issue is lighting, it is baked into the BSP models, so where two of these pieces connect may look strange as the lights in one piece will not affect the other piece.

Yes ultimatly I would like to make it work with TrenchBroom, as that is the much nicer overall workflow. But that editor is just getting a mojor rewrite and has no Quake3 bsp compatibility yet (as you already mentioned). However I am not quite as sceptical when it comes to the usability of GTKRadiant

It is also possible to build levels out of "pre-made" bsp blocks in the ingame editor of ya3dag, and baked lightning of those can be recalculated by the ingame editor too. But personally I really don't like the generic look this gives levels, and would thus much rather preferr a more flexible option. Who knows, maybe there is someone who will add Trenchbroom like editing features to the ingame editor at some point... it shouldn't be hugely difficult to do.

@Danimal:
Nice, but how about adding some transparency to it, so that there are UUUUUUU like flaps at the cloth in front and back? Just use .png transparency and it will work in game.
The barrels also look a bit small.

My progress: Now that the sprite functionality is working, I did some extensive testing with it and realized that having the arms seperated from the body doesn't work very well after all (Well... Robert told me so from the beginning). I guess I will revert back to a Quake3 like setup, where the body is split at the waist. This means I need to redo some of the sprites, but drawing new ones will probably a bit easier as one can combine the arms and the torso in one sprite.

Have been really busy this week with "real life"tm, but the character is progressing slowly.

Since with a quake3 like torso system is isn't so easy to make an exchangeable 3D armor (because it would overlap with the torso included arm), I am currently testing a 3d neck and shoulder armor and 3d belt system that shouldn't overlap with the arm, hides the .md3 gaps well and should still offer some nice character customizations (the torso and the legs can still have a texture overlay to change the look, but that obviously uses quite a bit of additional texture memory for all the animation views and is not quite as quick to create). 3D helmet is also still planned, and together those should also give the characters some good "volume" when viewed from above (although we are also looking into displacement maps on the sprites that would be visible at an top view angle when the Y axis only sprite is not rotating to view completely).

Sooo... Here's the UI. I made a weird error with Photoshop (which consisted more or less in joining the levels and then pressing ctrl+s -save- instead of ctrl+d -deselect- and then quitting the program without noticing) which caused me to lose all the layers - but: I made a split version of the whole UI (included on OGA) so you should be able of constructing your UI at any size you need, more or less (I could do that for you, if you need...).

As for the extra stuff (items, icons etc.), I'll start working on those next week

Simply awesome!

Player model is working in general:


I have a strange error with the Blender md3 exporter though when I try to add in the 3D parts near the waist and neck; It scale the mesh "to fit md3 space" something like 14 times, totally oversizing and braking the model. I have zero idea why this happen, and all my attempts to avoid it have been futile so far (if I force a normal scale, the resulting md3 is really small and squished, using the exact same parameters that exports the above sprite model fine).

Im not sure what you are trying to do, but ill no doubt see something more clear and not a placeholder soon.

I keep on doing models, but real life just kep getting in the way, and modelling is way faster than texturing, see a screen of all i have for now:

I thought the environment would be your typical dungeon crawler affair? Not sure if some of those models (e.g. the shop tent) fit in that environment.

I think it's about time Julius came up with a theme for the game!