Julius {l Wrote}:Welcome to the forums!
Very cool, I hope this project can be revived with some renewed focus.
Thanks.
Julius {l Wrote}:Any chance to transfer the code over to github (or similar) for better developing tools and an issue tracker etc?
I'll have a look into it. I forked it on Source Forge, as I figured it would be the most visible to those looking at the project, but on Source Forge it seems like a fork is just meant to be a satellite to the main project, which gives it fewer features.
Julius {l Wrote}:Do you have some further plans what you would like to do with it?
I don't have any definite plans yet. At the moment I'm just messing around with it and seeing what it can do. I do have half a mind to use it for an old game project of mine, but I imagine there's some work to do and familiarisation before I can seriously do that.
In the short term, I'm toying around with the idea of adding a Lua console, to allow easier debugging and experimentation at run time. Plus I'm thinking about adding more terrain features that can be generated.
Julius {l Wrote}:Some VR (OpenHMD works well with Ogre3D I was told) implementation would be cool
I might look into that when the urge strikes me, but I lack VR hardware, so it's going to be a rather low priority for me.
Julius {l Wrote}:Edit: are the model files somewhere available as .blend? I had a quick look at the repository, but could not find any. If it was available, adding some simple climbing animations would probably not take very long.
The .blend files should be in the repository. The blends for the player's model should be in this directory: data/lipsofsuna/actors/aer/
Julius {l Wrote}:Edit2: on a second thought... this game probably needs an "art reboot" as most people didn't really like the "new" extreme cell-shaded look. What are your thoughts about going back to something a bit more traditional?
I'm a big believer in the "working code is king" philosophy (or working art in this case). As flawed as the current iteration of art is, it does work and serve its purpose. Rebooting it when I barely know my way around the code base or Blender is a recipe for failure.
I've been playing around a little with 0.5.0 and see how in some ways it's better. I do have some thoughts on how the visuals can be improved without resorting to an art reboot.
- Fully modelled face: 0.8.0's face is simply painted on, which results in it looking rather flat when you get the camera in close. I imagine a face with properly detailed eyes, nose and mouth will look better.
- Improved environment textures: The current textures for ground and walls are currently a bit bland, and lacking in detail.
- Irregular environment decoration: 0.5.0 had a lot of irregularities added to the geometry of cave wall and floor voxels, which made the environment look good. In 0.8.0 it uses "sticks" which are something like a variable height voxel. Although stick can have sloped tops and bottoms, their sides are perfectly vertical, which makes their regular shape quite noticeable. Adding irregularities to the sides isn't straight forward, as sticks can be absurdly tall, meaning added detail gets stretched a lot, or lots of extra geometry needs to be added.
- Improved lighting: With the current lighting, a single directional light source dominates, with other light sources having little to no impact. Although this does make sense for outdoors, it makes dungeons look too bright.
Julius {l Wrote}:I guess the Ryzom animations could be used, and this seems like a very nice base for a generic Anime female model:
http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/75366 (polycount around 7000 when you remove all the props, so quite game ready). I am mainly thinking about a quick way to bootstrap something usable, and there are definitely much more nice open-source RPG like assets available than a few years back when this game was under development.
It's a nice model, but I do see a couple of problems with it. First that it's marked as fan art, which renders it unusable from a copyright perspective. The second is that the clothes are part of the model, so rework would be required to turn her into a bare model onto which clothes can be layered, otherwise the model will just be a place holder.
Julius {l Wrote}:Story could be "regular Japanese school girl suddenly transported into RPG world" like all those recent Animes with a similar theme
I thought that was an old theme. :P Not sure about that story specifically, but there will need to be some threadbare story to give things context and purpose.