Kreatur

[Skorpio]

I've been working on a high poly version of the Kreatur and it's finished now. I've baked the textures already, but without normal mapping there's no big difference in-game to the old Kreatur. Some screenshots of the high poly version:

[svenskmand]

What is the status on the normal mapping problem?

[andrewbuck]

I have been looking at normal mapping and am more and more convinced that nothing needs to be changed in the code, normal mapping is done entirely in the .material file. I spent a couple hours trying to read the docs and get normal mapping working on the forge but have been unable to though. Unfortunately the documentation is lacking in decent examples. I also think the issue of how to "color" you creatures so you can tell which ones are on your team and I think I see a way most of the hard work for that can be done via the material file as well, although I am less sure about that.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I think it would be nice to add teamcolors as glow maps, so that they are more visible. I had some trouble with the other method, because the teamcolor made the material shadeless and I think it's rather difficult to make it receive shadows again. Could you try to enable glow mapping? http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Glow&structure=Cookbook

BTW I changed the teamcolor of the orc back to the old red one. That's just another texture overlayed on the diffuse texture so the orc doesn't look shadeless. We can use it as a placeholder until we figure out how to add the teamcolor properly.

[andrewbuck]

I was actually just thinking about teamcolors because of my post above and I fixed the problems I was having the other day. What I did is make a material with two passes. The first one can just be empty and the game will set that internally in the code. The second should be the base texture of the color with the "color_op alpha_blend" operation. When the game loads and "colourizes" the textures in the engine it sets the "emmissive" color on the first pass (the empty one in the material file) to be the color of the team controlling it. Then any passes on top of this with the alpha set to something transparent will let the emmissive color leak out.

I know we had kicked around the idea of using alpha blending before but I was never able to get it working but now I think we've got it. The only disadvantage is that the emmissive property draws the team color even when there is no light on the object. There may be a solution to this once we tweak the material files a bit more but I think this will at least work for now. Below is a screenshot showing the team colors on all the objects. Most of them look broken because they have not been set up but the Forge and the Dungeon Temple both seem to work pretty nice after just minor tweaking to the material files of both. On the forge I took the select tool and just cleared the two "blobs" you see to alpha=0.0. Let me know what you think of this system. If you think it's a good one then I will try to get a material script set up we can inherit from for all the other materials so we don't have to hand-code each one.

-Buck

[oln]

I did try to look at the normal mapping as well, couldn't get it to work either, but I did notice atleast that the shader programs needed wasn't in the repo. Though I guess andrew have seen this if he was doing work on it.

[TheAncientGoat]

Andrew: Wow, OD is really shaping up! I must say that the Dungeon temples look a tad dark though compared to Skorpio's render

[Skorpio]

It's so dark because glow maps don't work yet. Once they are enabled I have to experiment with the glow map and the material of the temple to get the look right. I'll upload the texture with the runes and the glow map to SVN in a minute.

[andrewbuck]

I have been playing the game a bunch testing it for the new release and have been really enjoying seeing the animations you have for the creatures now. It really adds to the realism seeing the creatures with proper attack and die animations. One thing I would suggest that would improve the animations for the Kreature would be to make the tentacles twist around a bit and have it more deformed when it is laying on the ground dead. The Die animation looks good now if you look at it from the side (as if you were standing next to it) but when you see it in game you look at it from the top down, and from that angle it is hard to tell whether the kreatur is dead or alive.

-Buck

[svenskmand]

I must check out these animations soon Sounds great

[Skorpio]

I have to see the die animation in-game before I can adjust it. In Blender it actually looked alright. It's probably difficult to make it more dramatic since the kreatur seems to be a very stable creature so it can't fall over like a human or other humanoids. I guess I have to refine all death animations a little bit, because I don't know yet how they appear in-game.

[andrewbuck]

Yeah, seeing them in game definitely changes it. I agree with you on the stability of the Kreatur, I think the legs and body should fall exactly as they do now. I would only change the 4 "arms" and tail. My suggestion is to have all of the arms bend in some way that they do not do in any of the other animations: for example they could all pull straight back and the tail could bend off to one side. This way when you look down and you see one all twisted up you know if it is dead by the shape of the "chalk outline" it makes (by chalk outline I mean the kind of thing police draw around bodies at a crime scene).

-Buck