FreeGameDev

I've got test alpha channels for all creatures now except for the construct, because it has got an environment map as texture and I'm not sure how I can properly overlay it with another texture. The team colors on some creatures look pretty good already, but on others like the dwarves they don't seem to fit very well and are also not very visible. And this shimmering effect is probably too strong, because it makes the colors almost white sometimes. Red team colors, for example, look pink most of the time.

I begin to think that it could be better to use only symbols under the feet or over the heads like in DK, that also show the level and health of the creatures, instead of painting the colors on the textures.

I always liked the health/level flowers too.

Yeah, that's what I meant by team platters. I think around the feet might be a bit better in this case, to differentiate from DK a bit

But if we put it under the feet, then it would be difficult to combine it with health and level indicators, because the model would cover some parts of the symbol.

That's true I guess.. I'm sure one could make it scale and rotate to be visible, but models would move in front of it. We should find a way to make it look as if it's not ripped from DK though, maybe make it a floating, rotating mesh?

Remember, the other thing we have to consider is not just how to differentiate creatures, but how to differentiate everything that has a team color. Claimed floor tile, rooms, traps, doors, etc, all need to have some way of identifying them and colorizing them is the most natural way (and in a lot of ways the easiest) method of doing this. If the coloring that we are doing is causing problems I think we should fix the coloring, rather than just abandon it. I like the idea of the platters or flowers or whatever if they are done _in addition to_ the team coloring, but I don't think they are a substitute. The Ogre forums list several methods of doing coloring, what we really need is someone with a good understanding of shaders and 3d graphics pipelines to work out how to do the coloring without breaking normal maps, etc (and I know this is possible).

-Buck

The team color will really distinguish OD from DK. Hopefully we can make them work :S They seem to make allot of trouble :S

I'm about to upload the new materials and textures with alpha channels to SVN. The animations of the portal are now called "Idle" and "Spawn". I also gave the construct a dig rate and reduced his speed to 1.

Cool, I will update the code in git to reflect the latest changes to the portal mesh. If you could upload the portal to SVN and level file to SVN that would be cool, then I can test that the spawn animation works properly.

For the construct worker's move speed, 1.0 is probably pretty slow. The units on that are tiles per turn so to walk across a medium sized room would take ~15 seconds, which seems kind of slow (especially considering that they are an advanced worker). You may want to set that a bit higher as 1.0 will make it one of the slowest creatures in the level.

EDIT: I see you just uploaded everything to SVN, I am testing the portals now. Also, the alpha maps on the creatures and rooms looks amazing.

-Buck

Video please buck!

I will try to put one together in the next little bit here. It's probably a good idea to get one out before the next release anyway so everyone can see/comment on any issues we want to change before then.

Edit 1: The video is uploading now. It should be done in the next 15 minutes or so. Once it is on the site I will add some annotations to it outlining what has been changed.

Edit 2: After waiting an hour for the video to upload, youtube screwed up reading the .ogv file format and produced 6 minutes of a nice green square on the screen. I have converted the video to mpg and will re-upload it now.

Edit 3: Video is up now. Adding annotations.

Edit 4: Video is here.

-Buck

Nice video, but the forge should show the team color as well. I forgot to update the other two material files of the forge. The repository is already up-to-date.

Just checked it out, looks good.

-Buck