Some new models

Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 03 Oct 2012, 14:39

My lastest piece : The adventurer (low level)
Is textured and rigged, animation is on the making. The one in the corner is the basemesh i used to start it. Everything else is done by me (textures, adittional models, etc...), stripping him of everything but sword and shield makes him a militia, or just giving him the shovel, scythe and pitchfork (not shown here) makes him a common working peasant. Opinions?
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Re: Some new models

Postby Skorpio » 03 Oct 2012, 19:58

Cool model and nice details. The textures are a bit oversaturated for my taste, and he seems to be kinda sad and a bit scared. Or do the eyebrows look different from another camera angle?
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Re: Some new models

Postby charlie » 03 Oct 2012, 22:27

Brilliant.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 03 Oct 2012, 22:38

Thank guys, well i went for cartoony, but everything can be desaturated, as for the expresion, i didnt really notice it, but i guess if you are trown into a full scale battle with a toy sword and shield you are not bound to feel well (as a militia, since adventurers have a few loose bolts and wont care). Can be changed easily, brows in texture and mouth on model.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 14 Oct 2012, 22:20

Someone still out there?
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Re: Some new models

Postby paul424 » 14 Oct 2012, 22:37

Yeap, I still poke here and there what's happening on forum :).
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Re: Some new models

Postby charlie » 14 Oct 2012, 23:50

I like cartoony btw. I think it looks good as it is.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 15 Oct 2012, 14:20

Thanks Charlie, but i was refering the forum has been almost dead for about two months straigth. Is something to be worried for the future of the project
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Re: Some new models

Postby Skorpio » 15 Oct 2012, 22:46

I'm still around, but I'm not working on OD related stuff at the moment.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 16 Oct 2012, 11:31

No wonder, who would? The reason i havent done anything for it since ages its because i dont feel this is going anywhere, no motivation to do something and see it unused forever (your fantastic wall set for example), and thats a pity because i really like this project.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Skorpio » 16 Oct 2012, 20:49

Motivation is really a crucial part of the development process, it's kinda hard to motivate yourself or others, though. I think seeing others work on a project can inspire you to some degree, but if no one is working on it that's rather counterproductive to motivation. Having lots of intermediate goals can be helpful, too, because if you only see the final goal - the finished game - then the amount of work looks overwhelming and causes doubting. Reaching an intermediate goal helps to keep you supplied with happiness hormones. :) Also, some kind of reward would be useful, but I don't know how that could work in a FOSS project.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 17 Oct 2012, 15:39

Skorpio, lets be realist, there havent been any activity in this forum besides this topic, i think Svend is doing some kind of thesis and he is the project´s soul, no update for months is quite worrying
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Re: Some new models

Postby charlie » 17 Oct 2012, 17:09

It needs somebody to grab the thing by the balls and just get OpenDungeons out there. It only takes 1 guy an hour or so to put together a project status and requirements brief - i.e. something that outlines what the codebase currently does, and what it needs to be able to do (further i.e. incorporate these tiles!) - then post to gamedev forums, sites such as reddit, gamedev.net, etc especially programmer hangouts and dungeon game / rpg hangouts. If you can get this on the front page of the OD site, even better. This will get somebody's attention, but somebody has to do it.

At the moment anything that happens is buried in this forum, where only the regulars (or even really the really deep dwellers) will see it. These great tiles, for instance, should be all over the OD site. If nobody knows about it, nobody will get drawn in.

If nobody wants to carry the torch, then things will just die off. All that is required is a bit of determination though, what I outlined doesn't take long or much skill to do. People with skills won't search out the project; the project has to reach out to them.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Skorpio » 18 Oct 2012, 00:39

I think Paul has already asked for help on some forums, but I don't know if he got much attention.

I just had a look at the website and I think the "About" page should be the homepage. Some of the wip graphics should be added as teasers. A "Tasks" section on the website would be good for newcomers, so they can quickly choose something to work on. There's already a lot of information on the wiki, but I'm not sure if the structure is newb friendly enough. It looks a bit confusing atm and it's not really clear what is implemented already and what has priority.

The wiki link on the HP should be moved to the top bar.

Btw maybe someone should split this thread.
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Re: Some new models

Postby charlie » 18 Oct 2012, 01:12

It depends how you ask.

The important thing for any project seeking to attract contributors is to appear alive, even in the lean times. If that means posting Blender renders then that's what you do. You post them to the website, you keep track of the various threads on the Internet in the many game/gamedev forums and post copy/paste updates there too. It doesn't take long, but it makes a world of difference.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 18 Oct 2012, 20:50

Wise words Charlie, but as you can see thats something nor Skorpio(i think , i may be wrong) or me would do. Is something more fit for some of the code guys, who are absent lately. I fear this will never upgrade from being someone´s pet project
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Re: Some new models

Postby paul424 » 20 Oct 2012, 10:34

What I can say , first I become quite lazy in writing the OD code myself and I wait for some small gesture that this is a team project, one of those was preparing the new Tile set to be available for download via SVN and that I wouldn't need to tinkertoy with blender. Second thing is , most of the time I have to use the laptop, which I have numerous issues and I don't like to use it , but I have to .... Third is I have had dozens of ideas how to reach wider and narrower audience with OD project , but most of them were torpedoed from the bare beginning.

Current thingie I wanna to do extract a separate class -- Fixed Float Precision from Camera Manager and debug the missing screen when one do the rotations .
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 20 Oct 2012, 13:26

I dont like laptops as well... What kind of ideas were they? im interested in hearing a few of then, surely they can be that bad, one thing i hate about OD is that it wants to be a DK copy but without copying it at all, you either copy it totally or add new things to be diferent and fresh but loyal to the concept (Example i proposed some kind of evil high society lady, but was rejected because it reminded of the dark mistress).
Another thing that really annoys me its that i see how easily everything could be done if there was a change in development tools (its too late for that now, i know), just an example, but im sure that i could prototype mostly of what they have acomplished in less than a month just using Unity3d and my lousy programming skills. Ogre is hard, C even worse...
No ones take care of models that could be used as if, they just say, they are good, and forget about it (i can remember a few threads already), just to name a few things, im just a bit tired of this project
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Re: Some new models

Postby Julius » 21 Oct 2012, 14:43

Sorry to butt-in as I never really contributed and I also don't want to sound like a smart a** ;) (Well maybe I should so that you complain about me and stop accusing each other -- that is very bad for the teamspirit :( ).

IMHO OD has three problems in my eyes:

1. First of all (and that is has in common with the majority of open-source games) it seems to depend on one central programmer who bit off more than he can chew, or at least will take a long time to establish his goals over which he or the other contributors will will likely lose interest (current state).
- One possible solution would be to find some way to collaborate on a common code base with other teams so that more developers and dev-time leads to quicker results. Likely candidates would be other Orge3D based games, but I am not sure in how far the current code-base is suitable for a restructuring. Potential projects might be Summoning Wars (sadly also on the verge of dying for similar reasons) or maybe DNT (does that use OGRE3D?)... maybe Lips of Suna, or OpenMW? But I am skeptical if this will work as motivation is low right now, and changing codebase will take (a lot of) development time before one can reap the benefits.

2. The second problem, and again this is sadly all too common is the tool-chain... some see what you wrote above: Artist are complaining that stuff doesn't get integrated, the coder is complaining that stuff isn't fully integrateable and that he has do play around with Blender to do it.
- Projects should never depend on the central programmer to integrate art assets! Artists need to be able to get stuff running in game themselves easily, at least in a viewable prototype state (game-play integration is another thing). I am actually amazed how much great art assets have been done for OD regardless. For me I don't even bother with games I can't get stuff running myself to test out things (with minimal programming skills, e.g. editing a configuration .txt is pretty much the most I will do).
Most artists actually only start contributing (regularly) to a project after they played around with things on their own, without ever even contacting the developers. If they can get things running with the publicly available tools, documentation(!) and game-builds, they will be hugely motivated to invest further time.

3. Last but not least, and this is specific to OD (and other "clone" projects): Basing a game on a known and well loved classic will get you interest of both developers and players, but that will fade quickly once they realize that development is slow and they can rather just play the original instead (which they will probably not do either, but that is another story). Differing from the classic and making your own thing will result in a small but very vocal part of the developers and players who want everything like they are used to from previous builds or the target classic, but IMHO those people are a brake to development and should be silenced rather sooner than later.
- One potential solution is to mix things up right from the start, e.g. saying is will be based on Game X,Y and Z (while adding ones own ideas also). Case in point: OD als a DK clone never really interested me much even though I liked the original quite a bit; A Game of Dwarfs ( http://www.agameofdwarves.com/ ) on the other hand interests me as it seems to be a healthy mix of great games, and that even given the fact that I never played Dwarf Fortress ;)
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 21 Oct 2012, 21:58

yup, you exposed everything quite well, im also awaiting a game of dwarks and impire
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Re: Some new models

Postby oln » 28 Oct 2012, 21:41

Julius {l Wrote}:1. First of all (and that is has in common with the majority of open-source games) it seems to depend on one central programmer who bit off more than he can chew, or at least will take a long time to establish his goals over which he or the other contributors will will likely lose interest (current state).
...

The project seems to have started stalling after I had to stop working due to health issues. Stefan was doing some code work for a while, but got busy with other things and then disappeared for unknown reasons. (His forum account is deleted, so I am not counting on him returning. ) Since that we've kind of lacked someone to manage/drive the project forward. So your hypothesis is probably somewhat correct. I am intending to return to the project whenever I feel well enough to work again, but the progress on that has been rather slow.
I have been trying to help paul424 along, had some discussions on skype about how we should progress, though getting a full overview of how the codebase should be improved takes a good amount of time and effort. (Also, I feel we've had a bit of a language barrier which may resulted in me misinterpreting some of his comments.) Changing to another engine/platform/framework/etc. is something that has crossed my mind several times. Whatever the motivation for choosing the platform and programming language was I don't know, since I joined 2 years after it was started. (In 2008 (http://www.happypenguin.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4705). There have been two "core programmers" before me, so I don't know the full story here, svenskmand could probably give a better overview. The project started with just using plain OpenGL/SDL I think, and was changed to use ogre some time later. I would assume there were less options back then, maybe there are more now. The amount block-based games kind of exploded the last 2 years when minecraft started getting popular. We could start a new discussion on this, see if there is anything that would be usable. (Something that has some support for the kind of block-based dynamic terrain used in DK and similar games.)

Julius {l Wrote}:2. The second problem, and again this is sadly all too common is the tool-chain... some see what you wrote above: Artist are complaining that stuff doesn't get integrated, the coder is complaining that stuff isn't fully integrateable and that he has do play around with Blender to do it.
...


This has just been a matter of it not being implemented fully yet, it has been the goal all along to make the game very customisable. The creature models are already specified in the map file, so they can be changed with out touching any code, though the syntax isn't the best right now. One of the short term goals me and paul424 had was to get a working gui for the level editor, which would make it simpler for people to make something that could be played. Another thing, that there was a guy working on recently, (but disappeared), was an xml loader for defining such things.


Julius {l Wrote}:3. Last but not least, and this is specific to OD (and other "clone" projects): Basing a game on a known and well loved classic will get you interest of both developers and players, but that will fade quickly once they realize that development is slow and they can rather just play the original instead (which they will probably not do either, but that is another story).
...


Being a direct "clone" has never been the goal. (there is another project called Natural Born Keeper aiming more for that, but they seem to have suffered a similar fate to us.) In fact, we have had a lot of proposals that makes the game different from the DK series. (Such as factions, multiple levels, different creature mechanics, etc.). Though, I will admit that a quick look at the website might give the impression that it's more of a dk clone.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Julius » 29 Oct 2012, 10:46

Ahh I didn't know that the core team has changed so much already... quite amazing that the project survived that ;)

Anyways... no "finger pointing/blaming" here at all... just observing what seems wrong from the outside and some well ment (seemingly partially ill-informed) suggestions.

All the best for your health recovery btw!

P.S.: Hmm, yes maybe using one of those voxel based minecraft engines would be an idea indeed. Maybe one could go into 3D layouts of the dungeons as well then... but that would probably require a too large change in game-dynamics.
A bit OT, but I like the idea of the "ant-hive" from the new XCom game... which is basically an dungeon but not viewed from the top but rather from the side looking a bit like those jelly ant-hill games seemingly popular in the US.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Danimal » 29 Oct 2012, 12:52

Try "a game of dwarves", even if it is just a demo, you should get an idea of how that works, it requires a slower place since it can get a bit overwhelming having a multilevel dungeon.
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Re: Some new models

Postby Skorpio » 03 Nov 2012, 16:24

To get back to the topic, I'm just testing the orc in-game. The bone weights and animations still need to be improved, but the model looks pretty cool. :) There are some shading issues with the blender internal renderer but not with the in-game renderer. Here are 2 screenshots that show him in comparison with my old orc which served as a base mesh for the new one.

Could anyone split the last posts and create a new topic?
Orcscreenshot_1.jpg
Orcscreenshot_3.jpg
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Re: Some new models

Postby charlie » 04 Nov 2012, 03:05

That looks great.

You guys need an OD blog badly that gets syndicated on the frontpage of the website. Then these things could be posted regularly and it would generate a lot of interest over time.
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