realmsoffantasyadmin featured, world building

Town, Camping and Interiors

Bit of a long time since my last update. Sorry. You know how it is etc. You can follow me on twitter @skyemaidstone if you like. I do tend to update that more often.

Anyway, I’ve been beaving away at making the 2nd town “Serah”.  It has a forge, market, guard towers, a wooden wall to protect the towns folk from the dangerous lands beyond and a large comfortable inn (compared to the tiny one in Tarin. Here’s a couple of screenshots of how that’s getting on:

serah2

serah1

You can also see it has some nice magical lights to act as street lighting. Who knows how they work? It’s magic. This required me to make a light editor so I can adjust their color, intensity and obviously position.

Next up I moved on to an enemy camp:

goblincamp

This will soon be populated with orcs or goblins or some kind of enemy. This will be the main problem for Serah so I’m planning a few quests for this.

And that brings me to the next focus of my work: Interiors.

When the player enters a building or a dungeon they effective change to a new mini “world”. So I needed to make it so my editor saved models, lighting and “terrain” (which is usually just flat for a 1 story building). This proved fairly complicated but I got there with some nice fairly elegant results in the end.

Here’s a little video of Tarins’s small Inn.

 

Needs candles, fire in the fireplace and some patreons to drink and offer the adventurer some words of advice or perhaps send him on a quest and of course an innkeep to serve drinks and offer a room for the night.

Next up I’m going to have to make the particle effects editable so I can place them where they’re meant to be in the world (fire in the forge/fireplace, butterflies around a bush, water from a fountain – stuff like that) because my flaming braziers are rather hard coded right now. Also I really would be nice if the place had something else to fight besides the 8-12 rats behind Darin’s farm.

Until next time…

 

 

realmsoffantasyadmin featured, user interface, world building

The Realm is Growing

Oops. Well it’s been a little while since I posted an update but sometimes that’s a good sign.

I’ve been so busy making it I forgot to document what I’ve done. Anyway, excuses aside as you can see from the featured image the world has grown a fair bit. You can barely see little Tarin behind the rocks and trees that have sprung up around it.

I had to make some changes to my editor to make it more useable on a grand scale. Making the camera that can sweep and swing around the terrain, cinema style was one of those (which I took that screenshot with). That made it easier to “spray paint” where i wanted things generally then switch back to first-person to place them carefully. That only really applies to things like instanced models and the texture type used on the terrain.

Talking of terrain I could resist adding bump mappnig to the terrain. Amazingly this wasn’t too tough. My engine already supports normal and specular maps but those are used by the geometry generate by package like 3DS. The challenge I had was to generate the tangent/binormal data for my computer generated meshes. That wasn’t THAT bad and with a little help from the great guys at http://www.gamedev.com it was up and running pretty quickly.

Here’s a before:

bumpmapterrainbefore

And after:

bumpmapterrainafter

You might need to zoom in a bit to see how it’s working but its basically adding a more bump look to the road texture (and fading out to not use this technique for other textures since I don’t want bumpy grass for now. Would be nice to use displacement maps but that’s a nice-to-have really. I shouldn’t really be adding subtle (but nice) visual effects at this stage anyway really.

Anyway now the world has a fairly long road that runs from the starting village of Tarin all the was to the larger village/town of Serah. The new villge will have 2 storey buildings and some slightly more modern ones. Perhaps some better shops than just the odd stall.

For now it’s just a flat plaza… I’m going to dot around some bushes, trees, flowers and rocks all the way either side of the road first.

Besides that, and those of you who follow me on twitter @skyemaidstone will know this already, I’ve been working on player skills and a trainer to buy the knowlege from with knowledge points:

trainer

playerknowledge

The first screenshot shows the trainer (The Sage in Tarin in this case who has some basic skills to teach you) and the 2nd shows you the abilities you learn from each of the skills. My player knows all the skills for now. How it works is in order to effectively use a short sword (for example) you’d need the Light Swords skill. So when you equipped a short sword a few abilities will show up. However if you learn Light Swords Expert then equipping a short sword will give you more abilities and perhaps even some combos. Skill points are just earned from questing for now but that won’t be the only method. We don’t want to force our player to do every quest in the game although some will be required obviously. This isn’t going to be a first-person shooter after all.

Ok hopefully next time I”ll put together a video of the trip from Tarin to Serah.

Until next time…

 

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

The Blending of the Realm

Ok so lots of new stuff. Yay.

Firstly you can see there’s a working health and power bar. How power is used it’s entirely decided but it’s there and it works which is most important for now.

After all the behind the scenes stuff it was nice to just work on the game again. So now you can target other entities (NPC’s, animals etc) with the spinning targeting arrow. So there’s that.

I spend an annoying amount of time fiddling with the jiggly shadows problem which I promised I’d leave alone for now. It’s not THAT tough to fix I just haven’t figured it out yet. I will but I just don’t want to get too bogged down in a minor visual problem.

Talking of annoying problems, I wanted to get my peasant male/female models standing in a sensible rest position. I managed that eventually. I think I really need to leave SoftImage and learn 3DS though. SoftImage just doesn’t seem to like exporting FBXs that anything actually likes unless you do everything “just so” and even then you sometimes end up with a distorted mess.

Another big leap forward was the ability to be able to edit the texture of the ground using the editor (rather than the blend map in GIMP which just isn’t really practice in a 50km terrain). So this is exactly what I did, it’s not remotely perfect but I think you get the idea of the beginnings of it from the video capture below.

I’ll probably have to work out some kind of rudimentary combat soon. Kinda exciting.

Have a look at this:

Terrain Blend Map Editing 

Seeya next week!

 

 

realmsoffantasyadmin Uncategorized

Animation Working At Last

I guess this should include a video but I don’t have the time right now but I finally got animated 3d models working again.

I started from a small block “man” (see last post) with a few bones and then went to the basic nude male model that comes with XSI and then my own model with no material… then my own model WITH a material and it works.

I had to write down a very specific set of steps on what order to do everything and how to store the animation clip in the scene, how exactly to make the key set and store the keys. If I follow these step so far it’s working perfectly. I have a nodding man with his material in tact.

For some reason MG isn’t automatically including binormals and tangents with my animation processor  but I don’t care about too much. I can use the normal with my normal map and specular map and it looks great.

I’ll sling together a basic run animation (I’m not going to actually make the animations myself in the long run, I’ll find someone on Upword or Fiverr to do that) and get on with the village again.

I’ll finally be back to where I was before getting rid of any XNA connections finally. I can make my peasant npc’s into vendors for weapons and food. And a quest npc (someone to tell me to kill 10 rats 🙂 ) and maybe a dungeon entrance.

Ideally my village will end up something like this:

house3