Mod Idea - Team Fortress

[Julius]

hmm... definitly a big improvement already... just the side walls... well the flag make them a bit better, but I tink those are still the main 'boring' part of this map (edit: big improvements now ).

Btw there are two variations of a player model I was working on a long time ago and might be able to finally finish for inclusion in this mod:



Obviously no texture yet... but a general color layout is there already. Plan to add some more props (bags etc) to make them more different per class.

[Julius]

@John_III: I had a closer look at the pictures of your map again, and while it looks quite nice already, there are a few areas that need improvement:

1. Some of the geometry is quite blocky, and the look would definitely benefit from some props like fences, barrels etc.
2. The ground is often just strait and the tiling texture really shows there. Break it up with some variations... the terrain tool in Cube2 is quite good for that, and maybe you can find some small grass/vegetation map-model to add here and there? More difficult to do (but great looking) would be also pathways e.g. a slightly different texture along the typical running paths as if the ground was "trampled-out" there. Does Cube2 support texture blending on terrain meshes?
3. Overall color scheme (probably the most important). The all rusty red and the yellow sky fit quite nicely together, but there is a lack of a third contrasting color to spice things up a bit.
4. Color of the shadows (not sure if that is a technical limitation), but right now all the shadows are pure shades of grey... this makes maps look quite blank. Normally it should reflect the sky color somewhat and adding specific colors (and colored lights) in certain areas of the map (blueish near water for example) really spices up the look (It is surprising with how much color in the shadows you can get get away with without the eye noticing something strange).

[qreeves]

Does Cube2 support texture blending on terrain meshes?

Indeed, it does

[Skorpio]

Yes, the map looks pretty good already, but still too clean and empty. I think some of these new barrels and palettes on OGA would look nice on this map.
http://opengameart.org/content/fueloil-tank-pack
http://opengameart.org/content/metal-barrels-pack
http://opengameart.org/content/wood-pallet-v2-pack
http://opengameart.org/content/cardboards-pack

[John_III]

Thank you for the suggestions, I will work to implement those ideas into the map.

Nice models as well. I will give them a try.

[cdxbow]

I have been lurking on this one until I had a chance to download and play the SVN of it. I love it, even though its early days. So here goes:

Firstly, we at TeamXbow want to give you as much help as we can, because if you can make a mod that turns makes RE a class based shooter then you have made MekArcade for me! I always dreamed of MekArcade as a 'no code' expansion pack for BF, then RE. So we want to help. We may be able to help with player and map models, so after you have a plan of what you need let us know what the gaps are.

The second thing is for Quin and the dev, we want to help you take the league mutator as far as you can, and hopefully all the way to that class based shooter MekArcade needs. I know it would need a big rejig of the engine and while we don't have the skills to help you with that we could help in other ways, we could fund another player model by your artists or I could get Walter to do one to your spec. He's very good.

The third point is to follow up on the 'angle' aspect mentioned inearlier posts. This is really important, because doing a simple Team Fortress clone is'nt going to be enough to bring players. TF is now free and even cross platform. Current TF players have no reason to change. The cube community is pretty small and perhaps dwindiling pool to draw on. So whose going to play? I don't want to pour cold water on the idea because I very much want this to succeed, but the angle is critical.

Which sort of brings me to a fouth point. I have to say I have been very disappointed with the adoption of RE, I hoped it would have done better. This is meant as no disrespect to the RE team, I think everything in the release has been done in a very polished and professional manner. Perhaps PR and marketing have been lacking. It should be doing better, but's a tough market, for example in the last 18 months I have been hassling/berating/encouraging people to in various Mech and other communities to try BF/RE. Do you know how many have, only 2! I am hoping to do a lot better when MekArcade is released as there's a lot of desperate Mech pilots out there. So that's my angle, there is no competing game, it's dead. What yours?

[John_III]

Image One
Image Two
Image Three
Image Four

Change Log:

• Replaced tiled flooring with grass texture and used terrain tool to create height variation - the new grass texture also serves to vary the color themes of the map - no longer just shades of red
• Used blue-tinted bricks for the walls of the blue base rather than using the red bricks for all the structures in the map
• Replaced the skybox with blue cloudy sky
• Changed the sunlight angle, added new light entities to brighten shadows
• Reduced the red value in the sunlight
• Added detail geometry to various areas of the map - heaps of hay, wood crates
• Added more scenery geometry to the non-playable areas of the map - fences, truck, billboard
• Used more map models to add scenery - bushes, trees, crates, barrels

[Julius]

I know you will not like this comment... but I liked it better before :-/

With the new sky and color scheme it lost a lot of character... and IMHO I don't see an additional color by adding brown (???) grass.

A few other suggestions:

-loose the tree... it looks just horrible
-make the terrain unevenness more subtile
-add some texture blending to the terrain for color variation
-add some details to the roofs, as right now the texture repetition shows strongly (or use another roof texture)
-make the central roof (e.g. the bridge) a bit smaller and add some variation to it (right now it is very blank for such a prominent feature)
-try to break up the box look a bit, e.g. especially at the side walls... just by adding detail at the top you just clutter up the look, without actually making the map look less boxy. Try to remove the side walls all together and come up with a clever way to hide the rectangular nature of the central area... e.g. extend the water channel, but close it off with a grid or a big circular waste water pipe or such (maybe the pipe on the one side and the fence/grid on the other side?). you can also extend the map on both side and put the buildings a bit further back and close off the area with a fence or such.

Oh yeah and go back to the old color scheme more or less Now it just looks like any other not so well made map.

[John_III]

I am in the process of adding your suggestions. So far I have reverted the color scheme and brought back the skybox/reddish ground texture. The tree has been removed as well.

I am also trying to hide the boxy nature of the map by replacing the center wall sections with believable and varied scenery.


On one side, I have the water in the central area flow through a tall fence into a drainage area, and spill through pipes out into a river. I have a backdrop landscape through which the river flows.

On the other side, I lowered the wall and constructed two large pipes that are designed to look like fictional overflow release valves. I have put some lamp posts and a catwalk behind them.

[Julius]

Ahh seems much better now, I like the landscape idea. Oh and those spill over pipes... maybe that idea could be further developed to make the entire map look more like a small "flood water dam" station or something like that. You could also look at a typlical river sluice (those things for lifting boats in rivers) for inspiration as the overall shape of the water seems similar

But I guess the next step would be also to rethink some of the details as a few things still seem overly cluttered (e.g. try to focus more on "form follows function")

Another bigger but sifficult to solve issue is the "map geometry" problem. Many mapper make the mistake of trying to do detail in map geometry with are to delicate to be made out of anything else than map models. Take the lamp holders for example... they look way to massive and blocky... or those cross bar scafolding things holding up that black part. This is a bit difficult to solve without making proper map-models, but IMHO it looks better (or is more belivable) leaving such structures out completely, then to make them this blocky (I think the "minecraft syndrome" could be a nice new expression for this ). In some cases you can "cheat" by using transparent textures (alpha masked) and trying to make the map-geometry parts as delicate as possible, but it is a difficult compromise.

Last but not least... a very important point is texture trimming, where ever there is a sharp corner or connection to a new texture, it looks very bad looking to just have the same texture extending all the way to the border. That is why many textures only tile in one direction and have a different border at the top and bottom (or best is to have a fully tiling texture with border variation tiles you can place where necessary). In case of terrain and some special cases you can "cheat" with automatic texture blending, but in all other cases you have to have a special texture. Adding break up geometry like a border trim can often make things a lot easier, but also adds to the visual clutter if not carefully used.

P.S.: I think it would be nice if we would agree to a general art direction for the maps and such... I guess a "low tech, partial terra-formed mars" theme would be a discription that fits well to the feeling of this map, and could be a cool overall art theme for the mod (and Red Eclipse in general seems to fall somewhat in that category if I remember correctly).

[Julius]

Ummm... sure at some point

Right now I realized however that the full .blend of the RE model is not in the SVN (I can find only one without a rig and one with only a "powerslide" pose), and I definitly don't have the time or motivation to do all the animations myself (I am not a very good/fast animator ).

Maybe Quin will release the full .blend, or the rig in a relaxed pose (assuming that iqm is similar to md5 and psk that animations can be shared) so that I can adjust my mesh to the rig before continuing with it?

BTW: any update on the code wise implementation?

[Julius]

Ok disregard what I said above... the full blend is in the RE svn... it was just me being too stupid to use Blender.

[Julius]

horrible WIP picture (in no way representative of the final quality )

UV map done and proportions adjusted to fit the standard RE playermodel rig.

I will still add some props (a backpack etc) and then its an easy step to get it exported and running in the game.

A real texture and a normal/spec map will have to wait for now (volunteers?), not sure when I will find the time to make them.


Edit: btw, John_III: do you keep in mind that RE has all these crazy movement options? I don't think we should completely cut them out of the mod, so we need to keep these in mind when making maps.

[Julius]

Principally yes, but I have no idea what is needed exactly

[Julius]

Not a jetpack , but a different head variation with a backpack. The idea is that this will be the heavy class (while the two above, with some additional props will the the medium and light ones).

[Julius]

and while I am on the go... here is the backback etc for the medium:


As always suggestions are welcome

[riidom]

is the model available anywhere? I can give it a shot with texturing. Also: Is the pose fitting to the restpose of the rig? this is pretty important for rigging and skinning later.
Looks pretty good so far, try to keep it lowpoly like it is, because there will be edgeloops have to be added to give the limbs a distortionfree bending.

[Julius]

I will make a version available as soon as I got it all rigged and running in game.

Otherwise, yes the UV mapped version is adjusted to the rig already, and based on a very quick deformation test it defroms quite ok.

[Julius]

First rigged test (but currently still all 100% weighted), all animations work fine though

[John_III]

Edit: btw, John_III: do you keep in mind that RE has all these crazy movement options? I don't think we should completely cut them out of the mod, so we need to keep these in mind when making maps.

Yes, I tried to design the map in a way that would utilize RE features, such as the double-jump. The bridge roof in the center can only be reached in that way. Wall-jumping can also be used to access certain areas and jump out of the water.

The map has high clip walls so the player cannot wall-jump to escape.

[Julius]

Hmm... got it all nicely rigged up and ready for game export, but when I export the model from blender with the newest iqm exporter from the iqm website and then replace the original model's iqm with mine the game gives an seqmentation fault (11) upon level loading

Really strange... anyone got in idea, or sucessfully exported an iqm already?

Edit: I am currently using the windows SVN (revision 2700) as under Linux the models don't show up at all (some normal bug).

Oh and I left the animation field empty in the exporter, as I guess I am just exporting the model and rig for the game to apply the animations from the regular animation iqms. Do I need to select the mesh I want to export or something like that?

Attached you can find the iqm I exported.

[sireus]

I've had that problem too, but I blamed it on my somewhat special setup. You should probably report the problem to eihrul.

[eihrul]

Hmm... got it all nicely rigged up and ready for game export, but when I export the model from blender with the newest iqm exporter from the iqm website and then replace the original model's iqm with mine the game gives an seqmentation fault (11) upon level loading

Really strange... anyone got in idea, or sucessfully exported an iqm already?

Edit: I am currently using the windows SVN (revision 2700) as under Linux the models don't show up at all (some normal bug).

Oh and I left the animation field empty in the exporter, as I guess I am just exporting the model and rig for the game to apply the animations from the regular animation iqms. Do I need to select the mesh I want to export or something like that?

Attached you can find the iqm I exported.

Look at the file. It's 124 bytes. You didn't actually export anything. To export a model, you must select both the armature and the mesh.

[Julius]

yes I was a bit in a rush and didn't check that. however if I select the mesh and the rig (or all of the scene) the mesh shows up in the game but badly disorted.
interestingly the file is only 160kb, while the original is 290kb.

btw I checked if I could export the original model again, and when I try to export the exact blend file from the svn it shows up several errors and the resulting file is also only 150kb or so. the newly exported model also does not show up in the game (invisible players).

does the export script have any dependancies I don't know of?

[John_III]

I have added some trim textures to corners, added windows to the roof of the red base, changed the red base roof texture, shortened the height of the center bridge, added a wooden beam to the center in order to create some variation, removed the geometry lamps and replaced them with map models, placed water sound effects in the canal, and added some general lighting in the two base buildings.

I still need to blend the terrain textures and make a few more modifications.