models/meshes/textures for next release

[Skorpio]

I think everything I have is already in the repository. I haven't added alpha channels for the team colors to the textures yet, because I'd like to test them in-game first before I upload them. I'm working on a high poly version of the lizardman, but don't know how much time I need to finish him.

[andrewbuck]

Cool, I will then go through and tweak the level file so all of the art content is used in the test level at least once. The build of the game you have should support team coloring on everything except for the tiles which will work the same as any other coloring. If you want to test the tiles too, you can try copying "Claimed0.mesh" over top of something like "RoomPortal.mesh" which should be colored properly. The current code on git does correctly color the tiles so once the release candidate is out you will be able to test it directly.

Also, we should look into the inheritance system in the materials files that Ogre uses. There is a way to basically define what a material a "creature" should use, and then have all of the creatures inherit from that material file, thus saving you having to manually set up each material file separately. You basically make a template and then just fill in the blanks for each specific model (the blanks being the names for texture files, normal map pictures, etc). I think it is probably best just to do the files individually for now, but before the next release we should try to get switched over to the new system.

-Buck

[andrewbuck]

I got the level file updated and will put together a youtube video showing what everything looks like with the new level file in a an hour or so. While checking all of the files in the media directory (which I copied freshly from the SVN repository) I found the following issues:

- The Media/gui/OpenDungeons.layout file is missing (it is in the git repo, pulling it from there fixed that issue).

- The Cannon.mesh file is of the Axe but we actually have a .blend file for the cannon, it just needs to be exported (probably the same for Cannonball.mesh).

- There is a mesh file called Halo.mesh which doesn't appear to be used at the moment, it should be removed from the Media/models directory if it really is not in use to save space in the download.

- The same goes for the Mage.mesh file (wizard.mesh is the one you made with the blue robe and staff, mage.mesh appears to be an old version of either this mesh or something else entirely), additionally mage.mesh is rotated wrong so if it is intended to be used it should be properly reoriented.

- PortalObject.mesh is currently just the flame mesh we use for the lights, your portal .blend file should be exported to that file.

- The Weapon_L and Weapon_R bones in the knight skeleton should be changed to be like the ones on the lizardman, i.e. the bone should be held in the hand like the hilt of a sword rather than pointing with the fingers like it does now.

- The Lizardman.mesh should be exported, the low poly version is fine for now.

- None of the following meshes have the weapon bones (most probably don't need them but are listed here for completeness): Con_Worker.mesh, Mech.mesh, Pit_demon.mesh, Spider.mesh, and tentacle.mesh.

- The .mesh file for the mech seems to be exactly 10 times too big. It should either be scaled in blender, or have its scale applied with ctrl+a and then re-exported. I have changed the scale in the .mesh file to 0.1 for now, when it is re-exported the level file should be changed back to 1.0 like all the other meshes.

- There are two meshes in the models directory for the tentacle and they both look the same in game, at least at first glance. Are they different or is it just a duplicate?

Most of these thing should be fairly trivial to solve but my blender is not properly exporting meshes so I can't do them. If you could have a look at this and upload the relevant changes to the SVN I would appreciate it. I will attach a .zip file containing the level file I made so you can test all the new meshes in-game.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

Mage:
The mage is a model that I took from Summoning Wars IIRC to test something. It can be removed.

Weapons:

- The Weapon_L and Weapon_R bones in the knight skeleton should be changed to be like the ones on the lizardman, i.e. the bone should be held in the hand like the hilt of a sword rather than pointing with the fingers like it does now.

What's the reason for that? The way the knight holds the weapon bones seems to be more intuitive to me. If I needed to change the bones, I'd have to adjust all animations. And the weapons would have to be re-exported then.


Portal:
The portal has no texture yet, but I could give it the same black material as the dungeon temple. Also, have you checked the animation of the vortex? It's called walk because I tested it in-game. It looked good.

Tentacle:
I had to export the tentacle twice to give it an alternative texture and I tested it with different sizes (scaled in the level file). There's a green and a yellow version, but only the yellow version is up to date. I'm going to re-export the green version now. Is there another way to use different textures on the same model?

BTW the tentacle is a bit too small. I think it looks better if you scale it to 1.5. I can't scale it in Blender because that would mess up all animations. Giant tentacles 2 times larger than the small ones also look cool.

Mech:
The mech was meant as a joke, but maybe we could use it as an easteregg or something like that. Rescaling in Blender would mess up its animations. Does rescaling in the level file affect the performance?

Halo:
The halo mesh is the soulstone of the old construct worker that I made a while ago. I think I exported it only to test it without the construct model.

Lizardman:
Shouldn't we wait with the lizardman till he is more complete? He has only 3 animations and the texture needs some work.

[andrewbuck]

Regarding the knights weapons, you are correct actually, they do work right in the game. When you are in the map editor (before you start the game) the swords point down into the floor so I thought the bones were wrong. As soon as the game starts they are correct though.

Portal, the dungeon temple texture should work fine, as long as we have something in-game so the players know what it is. I don't know if the engine does any animation with the portal at all, if setting the walk animation to spin the vortex works that is fine, I haven't had a chance to test it myself yet though as I can't export the .mesh file.

Tentacle, I am not sure how to do different textures, but remember if you changed the texture to a different color, that may get overwritten anyway with the team coloring. I am not sure how much of the tentacle you planned to paint the team color.

Mech, you can remove it if you want then. I just added an entry in the level file for everything that was in the media directory, just to see what it all was. If you do remove the .mesh file from the directory, also remove the 2 lines for it in the level file (both the creature class and the creature itself). Don't forget to decrement both of the numbers for how many classes/creatures to load as well.

Lizardman, if you want to wait with it I am fine with that, the decision is up to you. I think the low poly model and texture we have at the moment probably would work for the game well enough. It at least lets us see what it looks like from a concept art persective, and maybe after playing with it in the game we decide we want to make it look/act different. It certainly doesn't have as nice of a texture or animations as the other creatures though.

Regarding the scaling of the creatures in blender as it relates to animations, it is possible if we need to do it in blender but it is very difficult. There is no performance impact on the game engine from having the level file scale it so if you want to scale things there that is fine, that scaling was originally implemented as a hack to fix the scaling issues with the models before I knew about ctrl+a in blender but I left it in because I thought it might be useful for exactly this kind of situation.

PS. I am about to make a youtube video to show the new in-game assets, I will take out the mech from that version so we don't mislead our viewers/players.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I just exported the green tentacle and it looks fine, but I think the attack animation needs to be changed. It was actually just a test attack to see how it would look like if the tentacle jumped and adhered to an enemy.

[andrewbuck]

Here is the video I mentioned. I plan to add annotations to it in the next few minutes showing the names of all the creatures.

Regarding the tentacle attack animation, that may work alright if you make the attack range for the tentacle in the level file only 1 or 2 meters (remember to change it for both left and right weapons). This will force it to get up close to the enemy before it attacks.

EDIT: annotations are live now.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

I've changed it already and will upload it to SVN later. Now I have to texture the portal, that means I have to unwrap it first.

Edit: Just watched the video and noticed that the construct is moving way too fast and the troll doesn't hold the shield correctly. I haven't tested him with weapons yet so maybe he should be unarmed till I can fix his animations. And the walk speed of the goblin needs to be adjusted. Also, I should really add alpha channels to the textures soon, because it looks odd when the whole models get colorized.

[andrewbuck]

Yeah, even very rough alpha textures would be fine. Just painting a big "x" on the trolls back or something would even be sufficient for now, although I understand if you don't want to "deface" your textures with bad alpha right now and would be fine with them as they are now, too. The move speed is set in the level file, it is 3.2 I think for the construct worker. Right now all the animations get sped up by the same factor as the move speed (which is done to make the stride distance work out as the creature gets faster). I could add some kind of a check that doesn't scale by the movespeed unless the animation is walk, flee, etc. Then all the attack and idle animations would be correct. Do you agree with this plan?

-Buck

[Skorpio]

That would be nice, or maybe it would be better if animation and move speeds could be separated completely.

Edit: Oh by the way is there a command to reload the meshes, materials, etc. in-game? It's kind of annoying to restart the game everytime I change something, especially because the game needs much more time to start since version 2.45.

[andrewbuck]

There is no way to refresh the meshes in-game right now but I can add a terminal command which will do that fairly easily. I should have that pushed to git in the next couple hours so it will make it into the release candidate build.

Regarding animation speed, the walk animation has to speed up as the creature moves faster since they cover more ground and if their feet did not move aster to compensate they "slide" or "moonwalk" as they go. Eventually I hope to get a proper stride length system set up but for now I just speed up the animations by the same factor. I will apply it only to the walk animations as discussed above and that should be in the next release as well.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

Regarding animation speed, the walk animation has to speed up as the creature moves faster since they cover more ground and if their feet did not move aster to compensate they "slide" or "moonwalk" as they go.

Yeah, I know, but it's kind of difficult to get the walk animation speed right in Blender, because I have no indication of the stride length, and with separate variables in the level file it could be a bit easier for me to determine the correct walk speed.

[Skorpio]

The portal and tentacles are in the repository now.

[andrewbuck]

I got both of the changes updated and pushed them to git. oln is ready to build the release candidate and put it up on sourceforge whenever now. Is the SVN all ready to go with your latest media stuff? I have nothing else that needs to be changed so we should be ready if you are.

PS. The terminal command to refresh the meshes in-game is 'refreshmesh'. You can run the command and it will erase and reload all the meshes, however it seems like Ogre is internally caching the material files and so they don't get reloaded, thus rendering the command somewhat useless at the moment. I am starting a ticket to look into a fix for this but I am not going to delay the release for it. For the purposes of testing if you want to just build a smaller level to play around in that makes the game load much faster. Thats what I did for the level with all the orcs fighting.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

The repository is up-to-date. Tell me if you find any missing textures, materials or meshes. Do the portal and tentacles look OK for you? I'm not sure if the construct worker should be in the next release, since he has got only one animation.

[Skorpio]

Oh I forgot to export the cannon and cannonball. BRB

[andrewbuck]

The portal and tentacles look good to me. The vortex on the portal does not rotate but that is a minor issue. I don't think the game is setting the animation for it, did you title that one "Walk"?

The construct worker I think is fine, we have had models without animations for a long time I don't think it would kill us. It also has some nifty stuff going on inside it which I think is worth having in the game. That is also the only advanced worker so it will be nice to have one of those for testing the AI, etc.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

The portal and tentacles look good to me. The vortex on the portal does not rotate but that is a minor issue. I don't think the game is setting the animation for it, did you title that one "Walk"?

Yep, it's "Walk". I tested it and it looks pretty cool.

[andrewbuck]

You tested it in game and it worked? It doesn't seem to rotate on my system. In any case we are ready to build the next release then. I will tell oln to put everything together.

-Buck

[Skorpio]

Yes, I added the portal as a monster and the vortex animation worked. I just updated the cannon and cannonball in the repository.

[andrewbuck]

Oh, thats how you did that. I am working on adding the code to make it do it properly as a room object. I don't think it will make it into the release candidate but it should be in the final build that we release next week.

-Buck

[andrewbuck]

Just in case you were interested, this is what my development environement looks like when I am coding. I have the code up showing part of the change that adds support for the portal animation to work properly (the change is on git now and oln is building it into the release candidate). Note the comment about the animation name, the next time you re-upload the portal you should also change the name to idle and then I will remove that line. It is not worth polluting the SVN with an extra commit just to fix that by itself but when you do any future work on it try to rename it then. I thought about it and Idle makes more sense for the name of that animation. The forge should probably have a similar one with the bellows slowly pumping, etc. We should also think about whether there are other room objects that should be animated as well. Maybe the sphere on the dungeon temple could rotate or something.

-Buck

[oln]

Hm, i need to start learning vim again.

[Skorpio]

Ah that makes my eyes bleed!

Maybe the sphere on the dungeon temple could rotate or something.

Yeah, that was my intention and I already posted a video that shows the rotating sphere and container. I wanted to work a bit more on the textures of the spheres first, because they should be partially transparent and I need to put something like a heart or soul into the container.

[andrewbuck]

Ive used vIde, visual studio, textpad, notepad++, bluejay, and DJGPP on windows, eclipse on windows and linux, and Xcode on the mac; and not a single one of them comes close to competing with vim for editing source code. I wouldn't trade vim with the linux toolchain (gdb, grep, find, etc) for anything else on the market today.

-Buck