models/meshes/textures for next release

Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 28 Feb 2011, 23:23

Skorpio {l Wrote}:Ah that makes my eyes bleed! :cool:

andrewbuck {l Wrote}: 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.


It should actually not be just a sphere but a glass sphere with some golden wrappings with a pointy steeple, then some growth that looks like tree/roots grow around the container in a spiral shape, see this concept art :)
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 28 Feb 2011, 23:30

andrewbuck {l Wrote}: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

You do not miss auto-completion, online-compilation and error-markup? Or are you a hardcore vim hacker that has set all this up in vim?

How can you code in a window with at most 10 lines? And how can you use windows with only a single line of text to anything? :S

I use vim for everything else than coding. I mostly write LaTeX in it :)
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 28 Feb 2011, 23:33

oln {l Wrote}:Hm, i need to start learning vim again.

You can start with this very short and to the point guide I made once :) It contains the basics :) If you do not like it in danish here it is again with Google Translate (please notice that Google Translate have capitalized some letters which are not supposed to be capitalized :S).
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby oln » 28 Feb 2011, 23:38

Danish is not all that different to Norwegian, so reading Danish is probably better than a badly translated version.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 28 Feb 2011, 23:59

andrewbuck {l Wrote}: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

As far as I know we agreed to drop advanced workers and only have Kobolds in favor of the game-play changes described in this thread. That is the keeper can spawn as many Kobolds as he wants but they each drain mana, which is only generated at a constant rate. So the number of workers is determined by the keepers mana generation rate like in DK2. This way of spawning Kobolds avoids the problem that you can only have a few workers if you want a big army, due to creature limitations of the portal. And with little workers you have little income. On the other hand with many workers you can only have a few creatures to train, and your army sucks big time and you will probably loose fast. We would also have a panel where the player chooses which creatures he wants, and then they enter through the portal, which limits how many creatures the keeper can have, since the keeper can only mentally control so many creatures, and this is determined by the number of portals he has.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby andrewbuck » 01 Mar 2011, 00:00

You do not miss auto-completion, online-compilation and error-markup? Or are you a hardcore vim hacker that has set all this up in vim?

How can you code in a window with at most 10 lines? And how can you use windows with only a single line of text to anything? :S


I do somewhat miss the autocompletion, I have played around with the vim plugins for doing it but it is not as nice as windows has. Vim does a much better job of integrating with grep and man pages (pressing shift+k on a word looks it up in the linux man pages). All of the window dividers you see can be dragged around and at will so I set up the few I am working with with the mouse and then jump between them with keyboard commands. As I am editing I just accumulate windows as I go until I commit in my code to git and close some of them off.

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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 01 Mar 2011, 00:04

andrewbuck {l Wrote}:All of the window dividers you see can be dragged around and at will so I set up the few I am working with with the mouse and then jump between them with keyboard commands. As I am editing I just accumulate windows as I go until I commit in my code to git and close some of them off.

-Buck

You can also change the windows size using keyboard shortcuts.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby andrewbuck » 01 Mar 2011, 00:26

Hmm, I didn't realize that the advanced workers were not being used anymore. I kind of like the idea of having them be better than the kobolds. The four kobolds you get automatically were just supposed to be a fallback in case you got killed off temporarily so you could fight your way back. It seems like the main objection in the other thread to the advanced workers was the fact that they count against your unit count and you might have to throw some out to get fighting units. We can discuss changing that to make that less of a problem.

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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby charlie » 01 Mar 2011, 02:20

Vim is better than everything else for C++ because C++ is broken by design. Eclipse for Java redefines productivity. /offtopic
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby TheAncientGoat » 01 Mar 2011, 09:47

<3 Eclipse autocompletion /continues threadjack

I also like the idea of advanced workers, it kind of helps differentiate us from Dungeon Keeper. But I wouldn't be too set-back if they're dropped..

Oh yeah, and I really like Skorpio's Temple design faaar more than mine; kind of suprised to still see it floating around heh

Anyhow, seeing as there has been a release, shouldn't we start a new thread?
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 01 Mar 2011, 10:41

andrewbuck {l Wrote}:It seems like the main objection in the other thread to the advanced workers was the fact that they count against your unit count and you might have to throw some out to get fighting units. We can discuss changing that to make that less of a problem.

-Buck

Yes that is the problem, do you have any suggestions for a solution?

charlie {l Wrote}:Vim is better than everything else

:)

charlie {l Wrote}:C++ is broken by design

Agreed :)

charlie {l Wrote}:Eclipse for Java redefines productivity

It is the best :)

TheAncientGoat {l Wrote}:<3 Eclipse autocompletion /continues threadjack

Sorry, and I am even a moderator in here, I should know better :S
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby Skorpio » 01 Mar 2011, 14:57

I just added test team colors to the knight and they work, but materials with the line "colour_op alpha_blend" can't receive shadows. You have to turn on shadowing again and I don't know how to do that. It would be so nice if the OGRE manual had more examples/descriptions of material scripts.

Also, I really need a refresh command for the materials. Having to restart the game only to see the effect of changing one line sucks so much.

So should we use shadeless models with correct team colors or wait till we figure out how to make them receive shadows again?
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby oln » 01 Mar 2011, 15:14

Andrew is working on the refresh command i think.
And if the shadow's don't work on the blended models, then i agree that we should use shadeless untill we have it sorted.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby andrewbuck » 01 Mar 2011, 15:20

I would definitely say shadeless for now if shadowing cannot be got to work. Not having team colors makes the game pretty hard to play, whereas shadows only add to the experience, they do not _make_ the experience. There is a way to enable shadowing in the code, I added it a long time ago and it made the game almost unplayably slow (since it shadows everything when it is on), so I commented it out. We can experiment with this at some point but I don't think it would fix the issues we are having anyway.

The refresh command has been implemented and does delete/recreate all the meshes, however Ogre caches the material scripts an other resources so it just ends up reloading the same stuff again. I will look into seeing if I can clear the Ogre cache of that stuff as part of the command.

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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby Skorpio » 01 Mar 2011, 18:06

I just noticed that the areas with the team color still seem to receive some light. They look a bit iridescent. Here's a screenshot with some test team colors (around the indicator box the colors are brighter):
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby TheAncientGoat » 01 Mar 2011, 18:13

Oh wow, that looks cool!
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby oln » 01 Mar 2011, 18:22

Even without shadows it looks way better now :)
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby andrewbuck » 01 Mar 2011, 18:26

Yes, I had noticed that shimmering look too. The solution we are using for the team colors is not the most elegant. The engine is internally setting the 'emmissive' color to the team color (emmissive is also know as self illumination). When lights shine on it (such as the one that follows the cursor) it seems to add enough extra light to give it that glow. I actually think the effect looks kind of nice as it makes the team colors really stand out. If you want to tone down the effect so it is not so noticeable you could alter the team RGB colors at the top of the level file (in the seats section) to be less intense. That is actually something you should have a look at in any case, as the colors that are there were just chosen by me in 30 seconds, and no thought has gone into making them actually look good. It would also be nice to come up with a pallette of at least 10 team colors for when we have bigger maps with more players on them.

A separate issue I have noticed is with the animation speed fix I added yesterday. Now the walk animations look good however some of the other animations are too slow. Hopefully this should be the last time I have to mess with animation speeds.

Finally, I was thinking it would be nice to use the bone scaling in the animations to shrink the spinning vortex in the portal down and have it rotate more slowly on the idle animation. Then make a "Spawn" animation which shows the vortex grow, spin faster, then spin slower, then shrink again (or something like that) when a creature is spawned.

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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby Skorpio » 01 Mar 2011, 18:36

andrewbuck {l Wrote}: ... it seems to add enough extra light to give it that glow. I actually think the effect looks kind of nice as it makes the team colors really stand out.
Yes, I really like the effect, too, and don't want to change it. It just sucks that the rest of the model gets shadeless.

andrewbuck {l Wrote}:Finally, I was thinking it would be nice to use the bone scaling in the animations to shrink the spinning vortex in the portal down and have it rotate more slowly on the idle animation. Then make a "Spawn" animation which shows the vortex grow, spin faster, then spin slower, then shrink again (or something like that) when a creature is spawned.
I'll try that later, I'm busy with the team colors now.

andrewbuck {l Wrote}:A separate issue I have noticed is with the animation speed fix I added yesterday. Now the walk animations look good however some of the other animations are too slow. Hopefully this should be the last time I have to mess with animation speeds.
Yes, especially the kobold has some speed issues. His animations are all very slow maybe I should speed them up in Blender a little bit.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby andrewbuck » 01 Mar 2011, 18:38

Actually after thinking about it a bit you might be able to do shadows even with the teamcolors as they are now. You probably just need to add another pass section to the material file and then add a "perlight" clause to that with whatever tells Ogre to do a shadow calculation.

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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby Skorpio » 01 Mar 2011, 20:26

I'm not really sure anymore if this is the right method to add team colors. Every texture needs an alpha channel now, even if the model shouldn't have team colors like the bed or the sack of gold. This method also interferes with transparent materials like the portal vortex which gets slightly colorized, it doesn't look bad, though. Maybe there should be a list with models/materials that should be able to have team colors.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby oln » 01 Mar 2011, 20:44

Don't know if it will mix properly with the normal mapping either if we get that working. I think we need to go through the shader and material setup both in code and scripts to get this set up properly.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby Skorpio » 01 Mar 2011, 20:52

Actually I don't have to add alpha channels, but everything needs to have the line "colour_op alpha_blend" in the material. And yes I'm also afraid that it could cause trouble with normal mapping.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby svenskmand » 02 Mar 2011, 01:12

I would prioritize having nice looking normal maps over nice looking team colors.
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Re: models/meshes/textures for next release

Postby TheAncientGoat » 02 Mar 2011, 09:16

Nice looking normal maps + Team platters = win win :) However, being able to tell apart your creatures from enemy creatures is more important than normal maps imo. Team platters would be quicker to implement, and could look nicer as well, and could convey the info that you can only view via the middle button at the moment
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