Dungeon Temple and Portal

[Skorpio]

I made some concepts for the temple and the portal. Do you prefer the green stargate-like portal or the blue vortex? I also attached a short animation of the temple and a screenshot with the new secret mech monster.

[svenskmand]

For the Dungeon Temple could you make the spikes be three instead of 4, one for each kobold that you have in the start. And then turn them more down so they almost touch the container in the middle? Like in the concept art?

In the animation of the dungeon temple the container has a triangle grid that rotates around it, I think that it should be still and only the inside of the container should rotate/flow around, as it does. The inside of the container holds the keepers physical heart and his soul, so the hearth should be beating and the soul flow around in there. I imagine the inside of the container be greenish/blueish.

For the portal I do not know yet. But I think that a combination of a portal and vortex might be better, if you keep all of the portal except the green stuff and put in the vortex, with the transparent border that it has. We also need to decide why the portals are there: First I thought about letting each faction control some portals elsewhere, and then they will come to your dungeon. But for that idea to make sense the player must be one specific faction. Which we want to avoid. Another idea would be for all portals to be connected such that each faction have a portal and then creatures will come to the keepers portal if they like his dungeon. The problem with that idea is: what prevents the enemy (other factions) from coming through the portal and destroy your dungeon :S

What do you think would be a good story/plot for how the portals should work?

By the way I am in the process of recompiling the somewhat doubtful creature list (now you are speaking of mechs) that we have for each faction. Right now I have finished the Undead creatures, I have made a list of 9 creatures, and have found some images on google, for most of them, that I will use to get inspiration to make the concept art for them. I can publish the list in a new thread if you want to see. I first plan to make concept art in black and white as it is by far the fastest. Then later I will try and color it. Likewise with the dungeon temple.

Edit: sorry for messing with your post (I was given moderator access the other day by Andrew), I hit the edit button (new one for me) and not the quote button as I was supposed to, I have edited it back to its original form, sorry

[Skorpio]

For the Dungeon Temple could you make the spikes be three instead of 4, one for each kobold that you have in the start. And then turn them more down so they almost touch the container in the middle? Like in the concept art?

I tried that first, but it didn't look good. Since you mostly see the building from above, it just looks better when it's more open. And I think the temple is easier accessible with 4 spikes, because the spikes are on the corner tiles and not somewhere between the tiles. Also why can't we have 4 start kobolds?

In the animation of the dungeon temple the container has a triangle grid that rotates around it, I think that it should be still and only the inside of the container should rotate/flow around, as it does. The inside of the container holds the keepers physical heart and his soul, so the hearth should be beating and the soul flow around in there. I imagine the inside of the container be greenish/blueish.

I think the color should be changed depending on the team color.

For the portal I do not know yet. But I think that a combination of a portal and vortex might be better, if you keep all of the portal except the green stuff and put in the vortex, with the transparent border that it has. We also need to decide why the portals are there: First I thought about letting each faction control some portals elsewhere, and then they will come to your dungeon. But for that idea to make sense the player must be one specific faction. Which we want to avoid. Another idea would be for all portals to be connected such that each faction have a portal and then creatures will come to the keepers portal if they like his dungeon. The problem with that idea is: what prevents the enemy (other factions) from coming through the portal and destroy your dungeon :S

What do you think would be a good story/plot for how the portals should work?

I made an animation of the green portal, too, which looks quite nice. However, I'd need to animate it differently in OD and won't get the same effect as in Blender. For the vortex I could simply use two or more textures which I could let rotate.
Regarding the plot, maybe the keepers and creatures can only access portals if they know their magical code. The portals could work like a fax or stargates.

[svenskmand]

For the Dungeon Temple could you make the spikes be three instead of 4, one for each kobold that you have in the start. And then turn them more down so they almost touch the container in the middle? Like in the concept art?

I tried that first, but it didn't look good. Since you mostly see the building from above, it just looks better when it's more open. And I think the temple is easier accessible with 4 spikes, because the spikes are on the corner tiles and not somewhere between the tiles. Also why can't we have 4 start kobolds?

How will the pointing down look bad from above? Remember that you will be seeing it from a 45 degree angle and not completely from above.
There can also be 4, I just think that 3 spikes look better, but then how about 5, I think that looks at least better than 4. With 4 it looks too much like DK, I think.

In the animation of the dungeon temple the container has a triangle grid that rotates around it, I think that it should be still and only the inside of the container should rotate/flow around, as it does. The inside of the container holds the keepers physical heart and his soul, so the hearth should be beating and the soul flow around in there. I imagine the inside of the container be greenish/blueish.

I think the color should be changed depending on the team color.

Yeah that is a good idea, but it should still look cool. We will only have a fixed number of team colors right? If so we can tweak the color of the dungeon temple to still look nice with all team colors

For the portal I do not know yet. But I think that a combination of a portal and vortex might be better, if you keep all of the portal except the green stuff and put in the vortex, with the transparent border that it has. We also need to decide why the portals are there: First I thought about letting each faction control some portals elsewhere, and then they will come to your dungeon. But for that idea to make sense the player must be one specific faction. Which we want to avoid. Another idea would be for all portals to be connected such that each faction have a portal and then creatures will come to the keepers portal if they like his dungeon. The problem with that idea is: what prevents the enemy (other factions) from coming through the portal and destroy your dungeon :S

What do you think would be a good story/plot for how the portals should work?

I made an animation of the green portal, too, which looks quite nice. However, I'd need to animate it differently in OD and won't get the same effect as in Blender. For the vortex I could simply use two or more textures which I could let rotate.
Regarding the plot, maybe the keepers and creatures can only access portals if they know their magical code. The portals could work like a fax or stargates.

That is an idea, but then it does not really make sense to attract creatures, as they cannot come and join you as they do not have access to your dungeon unless you allow them to. How should they know about your dungeon if you have locked them out?

[TheAncientGoat]

You guys are going to kick me... but what about multiple temple/portal types? Although I guess that would be best left for later

[svenskmand]

The problem with that is that a player would need 6 different portals to get all possible creature types.

[TheAncientGoat]

Hmm, maybe I wasnt clear, I didn't mean for the player to build multiple temples, just have one that morphs/is chosen by the player. I feel this would reflect the different play-styles more clearly.. Heck, I'd like to see that in all the different building types, but maybe that's just silly

[svenskmand]

The player has one dungeon temple (aka. dungeon heart), and then in the normal DK he has to claim portals from where he can attract creatures. Now if only creatures of a certain faction can come through one portal, the keeper would have to claim 6 portals (one for each faction) to be able to attract all possible creatures. And this is way to many portals.

[TheAncientGoat]

I think we're misunderstanding eachother. I'm not saying only creatures from a certain faction can come through a certain temple (although I don't think all creatures should be available at once, alignment should prevent that), so the 6 different temples situation thing is in no way what I'm suggesting (not sure where that came from in the first place)

I am just saying, that as a purely visual aesthetic, temples should have different models, and to some degree all of the buildings, to make the game vary visually. That's all.

[svenskmand]

Ok. In regards to that I have been thinking about changing the kobolds texture according to the keepers alignment, as they are (sort of) a part of the keeper. It could be something with making the texture bright and dark, transparent and opaque and so on, but it should reflect the keepers alignment.

But I was asking if anybody had a suggestion to how the portals should work and I outline some things that I have thought about, and then explained why they where not good ideas.

[svenskmand]

Does Ogre 3D have support for changing textures in-game, e.g. making them brighter and darker, more and less transparent etc.?

[andrewbuck]

It can be done however it is not easy to do. I am trying to do something similar to "colorize" the meshes so that certain parts turn your teams color so you can tell your creatures apart and it doesn't seem to work fully (it can be done I just have a bug in the code somewhere). It also slows down the loading a fair amount, although when we are already doing one coloring operation the additional overhead for another should not be that significant, the additional time I think is mostly bringing the meshes back into memory and then pushing them back to the graphics card.

With regards to the design of the meshes in this thread, I quite liked how the "rocky" portal looks quite natural underground. There was a suggestion to use the vortex from that one in the other portal which I think is fine. It might be nice though to also take some of the rock, too. Maybe the bottom and outer portions of the metal ring on the other portal could have rock on them so it sort of looks like they are "grown" together. Like the metal spiky bits are teeth growing out of the rock "gums". As you go up from the bottom the rock would become less and less prominent so there is basically none along the top portion of the portal and it is almost entirely rock on the bottom 1/3 or so.

Edit: I forgot about the dungeon temple as well. I quite like the current design and think that 4 columns is probably the way to go since the map uses square tiles.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I imported and tested the temple in OD to figure out the best dimensions, and I think it should be either 5x5 or 6x6 tiles big. In the screenshot you can see the 5x5 version with 3 spikes. I also tried to bend the spikes down again in Blender, especially for Svenskmand , but that just doesn't look good imho (take a look at the render: temple2). At least this time the spikes didn't occlude the container as in my first test. In the beginning I used spikes that were a lot thicker, which occluded the container almost like a roof.
And maybe it would be nice to attach some torches to the spikes, similar to the fire in the screenshot but at the sides.

BTW does Ogre have some kind of procedural textures? After some researches I guess not. I ask because I wish I could animate the texture of the portal as in the attached video.

Andrew, which technique are you using now to add team colors to the models?

[svenskmand]

The render is very nice, I like that the spikes are bend downwards , you could also make the base of the spikes a bit thicker and then the tip thinner. Also maybe the stairs could also be round instead of octogonal, and then with space for water between the steps. But very nice

For the portal (that you have attached an animation of) could you try and put in the blue vortex instead of the green thing, just to see how it looks?

If you really do not like 3 spikes, then could you make a render with 4 where they are still bend down? That would look nice

[Skorpio]

For the portal (that you have attached an animation of) could you try and put in the blue vortex instead of the green thing, just to see how it looks?

I'll try that later, gotta create a vortex texture first.

Also maybe the stairs could also be round instead of octogonal, and then with space for water between the steps. But very nice

What? You want water between the steps? Are you crazy?

[andrewbuck]

Andrew, which technique are you using now to add team colors to the models?

Currently I am using the one where the algorithm looks for a specific marker color in the loaded textures and any pixel of that color gets mapped to the team color. There is also a small range of color "near" the marker color in the colorspace which will also be mapped to a corresponding color "near" the team color so you can do a bit of shading. I don't know that this is the best mechanism but it seems to work alright when I tested it. Currently the only problem is that only the first team to be loaded gets its colors set right. Something about how the materials are being cloned is not working correctly.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

For the portal (that you have attached an animation of) could you try and put in the blue vortex instead of the green thing, just to see how it looks?

I'll try that later, gotta create a vortex texture first.

Why can you not just use the blue vortex from the image you already created in you first post?

Also maybe the stairs could also be round instead of octogonal, and then with space for water between the steps. But very nice

What? You want water between the steps? Are you crazy?

Yes, that was how my concept art was supposed to look, I admit it is hard to see without colors though I can try and color it tonight.

[Skorpio]

Andrew, which technique are you using now to add team colors to the models?

Currently I am using the one where the algorithm looks for a specific marker color in the loaded textures and any pixel of that color gets mapped to the team color. There is also a small range of color "near" the marker color in the colorspace which will also be mapped to a corresponding color "near" the team color so you can do a bit of shading. I don't know that this is the best mechanism but it seems to work alright when I tested it. Currently the only problem is that only the first team to be loaded gets its colors set right. Something about how the materials are being cloned is not working correctly.

-Buck

I read somewhere that's a technique from the stone age. We should use the alpha channel of the texture. I'm currently playing with the orc's material script and am trying to change his team color in the script, but I've only managed to colorize the whole model, not only the red team color areas.

Why can you not just use the blue vortex from the image you already created in you first post?

I should have said I'm too tired to animate it. Anyway, I've attached a vortex portal video to this post now.

[svenskmand]

...
I should have said I'm too tired to animate it. Anyway, I've attached a vortex portal video to this post now.

Very nice one , I like it allot

[Skorpio]

What do you think about a vote? Just post which concepts you prefer.

I'd vote for the first 4 spike temple (Temple.jpg) and the vortex inside the spiked circle (as in the Portal2 video).

[svenskmand]

I vote for this temple: download/file.php?id=736&mode=view and the portal in "Portal2.zip". If you really want 4 spikes I still vote for download/file.php?id=736&mode=view but only with 4 spikes.

Can you make a quick render of download/file.php?id=736&mode=view only with 4 spikes?

[Skorpio]

Here you go!

[svenskmand]

Oh yeah thats the way I like it

I think the stair should be circular instead of a octagon

[andrewbuck]

I like it. I should try to get the room loading routines working so they can load meshes which are bigger than a single tile. Currently if we tried to load this on a 5x5 room there would be 25 of these loaded up next to each other.

Regarding the stairs, I think they look pretty good as is. I guess more polys could be used to round out the steps a bit more but it is fine like this too. There really should only be one or two of these objects on screen at once so if the number if polys is higher then it will not be a problem.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

So which versions of the temple and portal do you prefer?