Introduction - Jwrac

Hello everyone, my name's Jacob.

I have in the past frequently visited the HoL forums, mostly for things related to Arcanum modding and downloads, as well as reading up on some of the fan-explained lore and thick detail on getting it to work in certain circumstances on modern OS' and such. (kudos to you blokes)
I'm a HUGE fan of Arcanum, foremost, as well as (lesser so but still a big fan of) Fallout and similar old-school RPGs.

I'm an almost-20-year-old geek obsessed with games, computers and how to make games and similar jazz. x)
Just wanted to make a short introductory post first, not just jump straight into overly verbose posts.

Good to meet you via the interweb.
(Also how does one edit their avatar image? I do't seem to have this ability in my profile settings.)

Cheers.

 

Welcome aboard, Jacob.

You'll be able to choose an avatar here after you write a few more posts.

 

Who is the puppeteer? I vote on Muro

 

This community is.. Special. But a penchant for oldschool RPGs is the beginning on the road to fitting in. Welcome!

 

An under-twenty-something with even a passing knowledge of what Arcanum is is an aberration.

Welcome, Jwrac! I'm glad you came for the Arcanum and hope you are willing to stay for the more generic content that makes up the bulk of contributions these days.

 

Wow thanks guys, this community sure is great.
As mentioned I only really visited at times when attempting to scour the 'net of its info regarding Arcanum, but something about these forums is cool, unsure what.
Maybe some sort of secret Dark Necromancy goings ons I don't know about yet eh my good fellow? [wink]

Sadly I know what you mean. I even tried getting my friend into the game, twice now, but have failed.
The younger generations want their satisfaction delivered on a silver platter, ASAP, with modern games it seems.

Weird as it is, ever since my friend Toby showed me Arcanum when I was fourteen, I've had this undying love for it. I never fully appreciated it though until I got to play through it myself completely.
When that happened the game really sucked me in pretty well, by the time I had a nice chat with (and mangled) Kerghan, all the story and walls of dialogue made so much sense, and everything just fell into place to give you that 'epic' and 'feels nerdy but feels amazing' spine tingling. I think I had put on about four kilos because I hadn't moved for a week. xD (luckily I've managed to recover now)

 

No no no, you're supposed to jump straight into trolling the forum, not write a namby pamby introduction post. Now everyone is going to be suspicious.

See? It's started already. You only have yourself to blame, Jacob, if that is your real name.

 

Re: Suspicions

Ah right yes... Huehuehue. (disposition: 32 [suspicious])

 

I'm taking this noob on face value.

Welcome, Jacob. Good to meet you.

Any friend of Arcanum is a friend of mine.

 

Any friend of ytzk's is an antagonist of mine.

 

And any friend of Smuel is plainly an idiot.

Anyway, it is a nice thing to know about other under-twenty Arcanumite.

It is a shame that this game gets less than half of the attentions it deserves. I've tried to hook an older friend into it, with few to no success.

But I'm diverting from my point. Welcome aboard.

 

Nope.

 

Well, an enemy of an enemy is not a friend to me. I guess most of us will get along. xD
Thanks for the welcomes chaps and/or chapettes and/or other.
Any friend of mine that's a friend of Arcanum is a friend indeed.

I've always wished for an Arcanum 2, but reading into it led me to finding out that awful big companies now own the rights.
I'm such a big fan of Arcanum I've actually taken to designing my own Isometric Game Engine. (images seen below)



Also how it looks when editing (similar to World Editor): http://i.imgur.com/7VvCjTd.png

A friend's been doing most of the modelling work, seen there. (trees)
He's a pretty good overall modeller, but they required a lot of tweaking in regards to giving them the right 'look' and 'feel'.

I can 3D model myself too actually, pretty decently might I add, but he was able to make the tree primitives pretty fast. Me making my own tree took about 6 hours...
I then did major amounts of raster-mastering in PhotoShop afterwards on those for contrast, brightness, levels, colour and sat.

NOTE:
I am NOT making Arcanum 2, or at least not at this stage, just thought you fine people might be interested in such developments.

I am actually an intermediate coder/scripter of a *cough* certain language. So I have some idea of what I'm doing.
An isometric game is a big leap, so this engine is just something I've been doing in my spare time.
(Despite the fact all the coding is done -topdown-)

I'll most likely be working on smaller games of varying 2D view styles and finishing a few more of those before delving head first into my own isometric RPG. xD
Probably going to go for publishing a few mobile games for the barely literate to earn some dosh in the meanwhile.
I've a job waiting for me in Tarant with one of the Mage Consortiums... if I've ever a mind to go there...

I'll try not to over-clog my posts with dev stuff in the future, just something I really enjoy doing.
That might try to give you a better idea of 'me' anyway. :'p

 

Golly.

Erm... well, you're still my most hated enemy, etc, but can I ask where you got the textures for those trees? And what were they created in? i.e. Was it Blender or similar?

 

Those trees were modelled and rendered by my friend.

Personally I use Blender3D, but he uses 3DS Max.
He cheated a bit I think and used a program called "Bryce" to render those trees.
I supplied a custom wood texture, which I made though.

Unfortunately they came with quite a few defects so I had to 'shop those out.

That's not to say the trees weren't in our scope, we just took a shortcut to save some time.
Apparently Bryce has a 'tree generator'. But regardless I think we could have achieved nicer results modelling them by hand.
That and the amount of 'shopping the one with leaves required was a bit over the top.

We're working on a better method for the trees. Most notable solution was having both leaves and trunks rendered on separate layers. (tomorrow)
I think Bryce's tree output isn't too unoriginal so we can use those without any dramas.

 

Damn, that looks good.

 

Yep, these are some fine pieces of wood, my friend.
If you ever need a playtester, remember my name.

 

Count me in on that!

 

Nope.