MekArcade SP models and storyline

[cdxbow]

This is the very first meka done for MekArcade, the Beholder. I have given it a makeover, the original skin is the camo one on the left, the middle pair feature the new skin. The meka on the right is the same meka after a touch of surgery with the fusion cutter, then adding some gun models. It doesn't look too bad. Attaching weapons with the side armour parts in place just didn;t work, so I had to remove them.

[Ulukai]

Definitely an improvement over the older one. I fint it exciting to follow the development process of a game / mod and look forward to a first real version of MA. With all the effort that has been put in already, it must become something good

[Evropi]

Looks really good the flatness at the back makes it look like how I'd imagine one of the first mecha to look if they existed in real life, but hey, simple mechs are look too.

PS: cdxbow's topic titles are the best, lol.

[quintux_v]

Attaching weapons with the side armour parts in place just didn;t work, so I had to remove them.

Here, you could probably go with the Battlebots method of choosing either armor or weapons for customization. The new skin is also much easier on the eyes. In the image, is there a variation on the new skin (mek 3), or is it just colored differently from the back?

[cdxbow]

Here, you could probably go with the Battlebots method of choosing either armor or weapons for customization. The new skin is also much easier on the eyes. In the image, is there a variation on the new skin (mek 3), or is it just colored differently from the back?

Last Q first. There is some variation in the panels.

Full customization won't be for a while, but armor could be part of it. Armor is one of the player attributes that is scriptable, so it is possible you could add an armor module and up the value. Note this is global so it wouldn't be specific to an arm or whatever. You would need a more complex damage model. Linwarrior does I think, so did Front Mission Evolved, but I didn't think it added much to game play. I have been looking at the first derivitives of the Beholder trying to work out how to do them with attached weapons. Here are most of them, the missile mek got a quick reskin with the new skin.

[cdxbow]

One day, in the far future, MekArcade will have a decent SP mode, a story to go with it, all set in a rich & diverse Mekaverse. This is the preliminary list of main charcaters for development over this year. To have models of them ready in 12 or 18 months, I have to start now.

The SP story would follow the crew of the SS Proud Mary, a small jumpship, and you would play your missions mostly from the ship. The ship is a sort of free agent, sometimes trading, sometimes fighting as mercenaries, sometimes doing special favors for friends. It has been kept very open. Eventually I would like to be able to play missions related to the back story of each characters.

Human Crew
Captain Nagamura: famous as the man who found and rescued the last remaining of the Seven Sisters, the Captain is widely respected by most, This helps getting work, from the Terrans, the Corp Worlds and the clans are all happy to deal with him. The Captain has a few secrets, one of which is he may be dead. I haven't any strong feelings about the captains appearence.

Natalie Souza : the first character you play. Orphaned clan child on Jacobs World, Natalie discovers a hidden clan meka and who she is. After defeating the harvesters on Jacobs World, she tries to reclaim her birthright from her clan; and fails. After this she forced to try her hand as a Merc, but happens upon the Captain, who happens to be looking for another pilot. We have a working Natalie model, which need a little work, but should be OK:

Isabella de'Terra : The Captains Lieutenant is tough and able, indeed she is a good deal tougher than a human should be. Fast, too. Trained in all forms or martial arts, she is capable of beating just about any opponent in direct combat. Five star qualification from the Assassins Guild means she can take you sneaky, too. Top meka pilot she who specialices in infiltration. We have a suitable female model which may be suitable needs to be rerigged, exported, configured. See #1. below. The others are concept art from the web, the model is headless at present so found some to try. The current head is only an image, transplanted from #2. I liked the retro, space 1999 look of #3

Wolf : Born into the hardship of the grim mining world Zircon, he stowed away on a freighter and eventually joined the colonial marines. In the marines he was subject to various 'enhancements' which left him powerful but difficult. Eventually went AWOL on Cerberus V during the insurrection. Work as a merc and got enough money to pay for a DNA job, which gave him with a new identity, but he still had the same issues. It was during a mercenary fight in the Dark Nebula that the captain found Wolf, they were trying to kill each other when the Captain made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Wolf i see much like a gears of war type soldier. I am hoping we can use a modded version of the battle armor for him.

Prince aka Prince Edward Whitethorn of the noble house of Whitethorn on Britannia II. Noble house or not, when they found he was mute, the elders of Whitethorn rejected him. They didn't quite leave him out in the snow to die, but they did exile him and feigned his death. Little did they know the young prince was telepathic. Sent off world to New Tibet, where he was schooled in the way of the technomonks, and got some aural implants. When his training finished, he rejected the noble path and took himself to the fleshpots of Rigel V, where he made a fortune doing telepathic porn. Once he made a fortune he disappeared, and surfaced after being rescued from Kid Death by the Captain, it's not clear what the Kid wanted with him. Standard male human biped.

Master Engineer Rider Smyth: Originally an engineer with the Imperial of Marines of Britannia II, he has been with the crew longer than most. Responsible for building The Proud Mary from the wrecks of a Terran cruiser and a Corp World jumpship, he's the one that keeps the whole show on the road. He is, in short, an engineering genius. Controls the ServiceBots and would pilot the Big Pig, otherwise stays on the ship. Standard male human biped. Based on the Biggles character of the same name.

Dr Mari Kapoor - Growing up on Shiva II, she was top of her medical class and expected to become a specialist in nanomed. Instead she joined the Space Corp, became a ships surgeon and travelled the Terrasphere. Class V space surgeon and implant expert, the good doctor is married to the Master Engineer. Licenced to operated a Medibot and SurgiMek. Mostly stays on the ship. Standard female human biped

Alien
'Splendid beauty' (an alien, Tralnah) - Deep in the hull of the Proud Mary is a translucent ovoid object about 10 m long. Within it is 'Splendid beauty', a Tralnah. Contact between humans and the Tralnah has only been documented to have occurred a few times since the diaspora. Physically they appear much like slightly luminescent sea grass, but what appears the be simple vegetable matter is reality a complex neural net, with interconnectivity about a millions times greater than the human brain, giving them the mental horse power of a high level AI, as well as special mental abilities like telepathy. Their home world is unknown, as is most of their physiology and life cycle. As for their intentions, we can only guess; when 'Splendid beauty' when asked why he joined the crew, replied, telepathically, "it could be fun"

Artificial Sentience's

Sister Mary (Seven Sister) - As is law, Sister Mary is the hyperspace navigator of the ship. Until the fall, the Seven Sisters had been responsible for the safe passage of human ships through hyperspace. Only high level quantum AI are able to navigate in the complex computational matrix of hyperspace. After the AI wars destroyed all but one of the Sisters, a quiet darkness fell across the Terrasphere, and it wasn't until the Captain found and reactivated Sister Mary that Jumpships could again traverse hyperspace safely. In additionton to navigation Sister Mary basically runs the ship. She consults with the engineer regarding maintenance and repair; and with the Captain regarding destination. Otherwise she is a fairly inscrutable sister. The Sisters play a big part in the story and need to be done well. Glowey, holographic angels or nuns are my only thoughts so far.

I was thinking of some other AI characters for the ship. Karl (security bot) - pinched from my ISP. Karl is responsible for the physical and cyber security of the ship. Karl, when need be, runs a droid, a sort of a robotic guard dog. Robodoc and various Mek AI where considered and rejected for the moment. Karl would look something like this Sanyo robot

Villians

Harvesters The exact nature of the harvesters is unknown. They have only been seen on Prime worlds, where they abduct teenagers and take resources. What becomes of the children is unknown. Natalie Souza came from Jacobs World, one of the afflicted worlds. In visual terms the only 4 legged semi organic machines. I started work on a model but it's just not coming along. I haven't thought any more about the story, only enough to do the Birthright story. They could be anything, using the humans for......

Kid Death is a shark mouthed, albino mod, with telepathic & telekinetic abilities and a penchant for cowboy gear. Some say the Kid was a military experiment that went wrong, others say he's a rogue AI, truth is no one really knows. The Kid was first noticed when the people in a small outpost all died. Next he went to Tarsus II, and after more than half that colony died, he had it out with the Captain, who he found he could not kill. longing for the big smoke he moved on to a Metropol III, a world of billions. Even there his victims were eventually noticed, and they nearly caught him. Since then the Kids been playing it quiet, killing them softly as they say. Pinched from Sameaul R. Delaneys' book, The Einstein Intersection, the Kid has always been one of my favorite villains, from one of my favorite books. I promised myself if I ever got the chance to do some SF, I would try to bring the Kid to life in a visual way. I thought the Kid could pop in and out of the story. No one seems to have ever illustrated the character, if you search the web all you find is the soul eater character Death the Kid (who might be influenced by Kid death)

AI - Lots of whacky and malevolent AI out in the Terrasphere. They would be much like the old greek gods, caprious, meddling and pretty much uncaring about humans. Core AI are those that left the terrasphere and went to the core. There actions towards humans are ambiguous, sometime hostile, though they are supposed to be our side. Lots of potential for some good villians. Rogue AIs' will be a constant story line.

Clans - various clans will be villians.

I will update this with new images as the models get done over the year, and as always, if you want to pitch in, let me know.

[greaserpirate]

Wow! This is really detailed, I'd love to see more!
The universe/setting seems really cool, and having clans as enemies could make multilayer make sense. I'd love to learn more about the history/setting.
Characters also seem really good, Natalie Souza has a really solid backstory and Kid Death seems like an intriguing enemy. (the Einstein Intersection seems like a good book also.) The telepathic Prince has an interesting backstory, but I'm wondering how his personality is; being a telepathic monk made me think at first of a 'quiet kid barely able to control powers' (like Akira, River Tam, Aang) but considering he left to work in the telepathic... entertainment industry, maybe it makes sense for him to be impulsive/egotistical? Of course, you have a better idea of the characters than I do, so I'd love to hear more about them.
I've always wanted to see an open-source project with a real detailed story unfold; the vast majority of open-source games have storylines along the lines of "aliens/demons are invading, kill all teh enemies", and while that's still a lot of fun, designing an engaging story seems much more exciting and rewarding.

So if there's anything I can do to help, particularly in the area of mapping, let me know. Sniper-Goth's the real wizard of trigger/script stuff, but I've been learning about them as well, so I think I could make some decent SP maps from any scripts you have. (I'd also like to do some writing/worldbuilding, but you have a far better idea of this world than I do so I'm probably going to need more information about the characters and the universe).
Anyway, good luck!

[cdxbow]

I'll take you up on that offer of mapping! The Birthright story has only the first map, the village of Westend and it's surrounds. I need to tidy it up a bit, so I will post it here along with it's models in a couple of days.

Following that there would be a series of maps that either advance the story or are campaign style shoot up the harvesters as you work your way to Jacobsville where the harvestors ship is. Here is a map of Jacobs World:

Its a small, cold planet, temperate at best. The equatorial regions have very strong winds, and are not suitable for habiatation. Its much denser than Earth, so despite its size, gravity is marginally higher. Climate is northern european through sub artic and artic. Only the southern aspect of the continent, Promised Land is permenently settled. The biology will be alpine. I wish I had the time to do alien plant life, but I don't so we will have to use northern european plants. Now where did I put that snowpine?

Like many Prime Worlds, the colonists belonged to a religous group who eschewed high technology as the work of the devil. Only wind and water power are allowed (apologies to David Webbers' Safehold series). It is a very conservative, patriachal society. In their minds the Harvesters are either a punishment from God for sins or the work of Satan that must be indured.

[cdxbow]

The Captains coming along (left) he is made using Natalies skeleton, the Prince on the otherhand is a little less animated. I keep thinking of the Sanji character in One Piece for the Princes look, hence the dark suit.

[Julius]

Nice models so far, and interesting that you seem to go for a somewhat anime looking style. Just a pity that you don't seem to be utilizing all the nice modern features the Cube2 engine offers (normal-maps etc.).

[John_III]

Nice stuff. What is your workflow for creating the textures?

[cdxbow]

err...what are normal maps?

[Rabidbutton]

err...what are normal maps?

They are basically a texture that gives shader coordinates to alters pixels in such a way that the model appears to have more geometric detail than it actually does...there is probably a better way to explain it, so here is an image I found on the net for example

[cdxbow]

Sorry Rabidbutton, I was just kidding. Nice exposition. I can do/cope with normals and spec maps. I don't have the hang of DDS files at all, it might have been a problem with paintshop, and one day I will have a go with the GIMP

John: There are a few biped models I recieved from Gabriella (battle armor, male, female) which had a basic texture, which I work from. I don't do normals or spec maps until the models are done and the texture finished (and it's going in the game). I don't like texture work much, too much scratching around like a chook. I don't have any real short cuts either, it just takes time. More time, better quality.

[cdxbow]

I took the fusion cutter to the human characters (bloody messy) and took the (potential) character heads onto the working battle armor model we have. Only character missing is Master Engineer Smyth. A bit of quick and dirty texture work and you can see below its quite a squad.

The battle armour is the one posted earlier here: http://teamxbow.org/cube/models/misfit/battle_armor2_v04.zip , it works and has about 90% of the animation done. It still needs ragdolls and the mesh split as described in the post http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=3529&p=35310&hilit=battle+armor#p35310 Having all the heads together makes it easy to work on them, get a more consistent look and basically make them look better. Once I have finished the heads I will attach them to the battle armor and export. Then I will take the finished heads and go back to characters (out of armor).

[raiden]

Very nice, a top model family .

[cdxbow]

Thanks raiden. Wait till you see what can be done with a mek skeleton and a.........

[cdxbow]

Here is Isabella with a few different looks. The heads are all the same, the body meshes of 3 of them are the same, and one of these has a additional piece of light torso armour. The odd girl out is in the full body armor, it's also the only model thats working (bar rag doll deaths and splitting the mesh)

I am going to try to make natalie and the other characters have a similar look. I started with Isabella to see how she would look in different guises as she was the closet to how I want the characters to look. Fully posable, too......

[Julius]

Uhmm... why does the torso armor model look so Half-Life'ish? It even seems to have a messed up "Lambda" sign on it...

[cdxbow]

Well spotted. It is the armored torso from HL. I wanted to try attaching large objects to a mesh and seeing if it worked. I've done heads and they worked OK as long as they didn't have animated faces. It did attach, but it didnt bend properly with the rest of the mesh and looked stupid. Maybe if you rigged it as well, but it starts to get complicated and inefficient. Looking at game models they tend to model most of the clothes in the main mesh.

[cdxbow]

Isabella is all rigged up now in human form as well as her battle armor.

My wife says I am spending too much time with her. She is rather attractive. I wonder if I could get her 3D printed? Life size perhaps.
Dr Kapoor is'nt yet properly animated, but she is looking pretty good, too.

[greaserpirate]

Just wondering about the battle armor.. in Mekarkade will you eventually be able to play as a ground troop in battle armor? With the story and all the different mek classes, Mekarcade's looking to be pretty good, but I'd love to still have the chance to get the same small-scale, twitchy type gameplay that RE has.

[cdxbow]

I would like to cover lots of different futuristic armor, but the 'simple' physics of the Cube2 engine only works with upright, human sort of shapes, so battle armor and meks can be done as is. Tanks, cars and other long shapes work really badly so they are off the agenda.

Battle armor or simple human scale players are needed to make more interesting SP games and develop the characters, afterall in mek SP games mostly you just blow stuff up. Perhaps for MP there could be 'battle armor only' games or an FPS mode. I would like to keep thet RE twitch in some form. As the battle armor currently works OK in RE, I thought (briefly) about a 'half way' relase to MekArcade. Mek-half-arsed-Arcade. The current classes need to be finished a bit by Quin, but the rest could be RE as is. Probably not a good idea.

Heres Wolf.

A generic head on the battle armor and on a soldier type mesh. I will export them next week and see how they look in game. I'm on a bit of a roll with character modelling so i should keep going.

[Julius]

Battle armor or simple human scale players are needed to make more interesting SP games and develop the characters, afterall in mek SP games mostly you just blow stuff up. Perhaps for MP there could be 'battle armor only' games or an FPS mode. I would like to keep thet RE twitch in some form. As the battle armor currently works OK in RE, I thought (briefly) about a 'half way' relase to MekArcade. Mek-half-arsed-Arcade. The current classes need to be finished a bit by Quin, but the rest could be RE as is. Probably not a good idea.

A first playable release that doesn't have all the features yet isn't a bad idea at all!

[Evropi]

Hmm... noticing you used the same armour for Wolf (cool name) and the red-haired woman, will this be a faction war type of game? RE has the awfully generic Alpha, Kappa, Sigma and Omega (Α, Β, Σ, Ω) (they are Greek letters) but this looks like it has more going on. I suppose you'll have to code in something that does more than just colour characters according to their team as well?

Keep up the great work!

Battle armor or simple human scale players are needed to make more interesting SP games and develop the characters, afterall in mek SP games mostly you just blow stuff up. Perhaps for MP there could be 'battle armor only' games or an FPS mode. I would like to keep thet RE twitch in some form. As the battle armor currently works OK in RE, I thought (briefly) about a 'half way' relase to MekArcade. Mek-half-arsed-Arcade. The current classes need to be finished a bit by Quin, but the rest could be RE as is. Probably not a good idea.

A first playable release that doesn't have all the features yet isn't a bad idea at all!

Well, I played it about 2 months ago from the Subversion repository and... yeah, I just don't think it's ready. Like, not even alpha. The camera (both first and third person) especially needs some work, and also detecting the way mechs are looking because they appeared it look to the left of the screen yet moved forward and weird stuff like that.

Still needs a lot of work, that's for sure, but modelling is just about done I suppose with cdxbow's phenomenal work.