Jwrac's Technological Developments! Stupendous!

*Gets some popcorn* Ah. Finally some action. Any one familar with the Marquis of Fantailler rules and want to use them? At your own risk, people. Now gentlemen, choose your weapons very wisely. Good. FIGHT.

 

News on the Technological Happenings!

Hey there all, I've decided to take a break form IsomEngi and get back to working on something that might earn some coin. (mobile html5 games).
I was most recently working on some cliff tiles for IsomEngi:


But right now I'm doing some work for a mobile game, probably in space or at sea. Really basic simple coding and I had my doubts about simple projects but this is actually coming along great, and I'm having a wonderful time with the stress-free level of coding, and I can spend more time working on the aesthetics... and lack of complex engines that have to be made is a big bonus.

I am working on a space ship currently:

But I might not end up doing the space thing, depending on what my dev/publishing partner (not Noel) has to say about the theme.
The game will be a simple 'dodge the turd' clone with a theme of sorts, but I'll get back to you guys when I am working on something that we can all tinker with.

Cheers!

 

Those Cliffs... with some nice texturing... Wow...

 

Thanks I am glad you like them, I spent about 2 hours getting them just right, but they still need a bit of work.
I actually made them by hand, with a huge subdivided cube mesh.

Not too hard to make, but getting the tiling right to be used in a game is crucial, so I work with duplicates on either side to insure seamlessness.

 

Bit of an update for those who care, I've added a download link for 'WorldGen' and the Name Generator.
World Generator: http://bit.ly/WorldMaker
Name Generator: http://bit.ly/NameMaker

 

Time for another update, I've been hammering out code and tile based stuff recently.
Recently decided that coding my own tile-painter WorldEdit style was the way to go, so far features multiple layers, auto-tiling, auto-iso/topdown, grids/settings, pan, zoom, fancy mouse controls, etc.



When it comes to tiles themselves I'm still looking into the best sort of masking methods for edging.
Instead of making countless "sand meets rocks in water" style tilesets, I'm using edge-masking.


Things are going alright, but finding a very nice method of fading tile-edges is hard, since contrasts of underlying tiles can differ extremely depending on the material, texture or brightness.
Which is making me consider coding up some fantastically ridiculous auto-darkening tile placement in sub-layers of the Editor, which essentially goes around placing black squares with alpha, but that's just an idea at this stage.

I really don't want to have to do things like different tiles for different materials meeting each other, and the only way of edging is using a mask and alpha.
Hopefully I can get it looking dandy, somehow.

I've also had to up my tile's size from a base of 32x for IsomEngi to 64x, since 32X doesn't leave enough res for nice shapes in the edges, anyway.
Haven't gotten around to texturing those cliffs yet, either.

Progress on that mentioned mobile game has slowed, but I'll jump back into it after I do some more on my Tile Painter.
Cheers for now. Stay tuned.

 

Looking good might be a bit of an understatement, but I have little knowledge of how difficult/time consuming this might be.

On the subject of tile-edges, I don't see why you need to enable all materials to meet each other since most of them won't ever meet. Or do you intend to place much jungle covered tundra in your deserts?

Also, can you be busted for triple posting in your own threads?

 

Unsure if I can be busted or not. (I don't think there's much reason to bust me, but sure why not)
I suppose if I bumped the thread every single day with no new replies it would become an issue.

No, I don't really plan on having muddy jungle grass in desert tundra, but I still want to leave options open. xD
Something along the lines of, "what if there was a muddy, sandy beach at the edge of a snowfield?" style maps.

Arcanum's tiles were all pre-rendered with conditions for only certain environments.
When you placed a river tile in WorldEdit, it would surround itself with river-edge tiles and dirt. (though it looks amazing)
But I can hardly be bothered coding and arting something of that magnitude at this stage. :'o

Taking another recent look at WorldEdit itself, I might need to reconsider the way I make textured tiles to give them that psuedo-3D feel.
Specifically, the way they translate between topdown and iso.

 

An update! Marvellous.
Spent the recent months in the void that is the lazy holiday season, and coding, arting and playing video games.

I've been smashing my keyboard into submission to produce this release demo.


NOTE: This particular demo most likely will only work in Google Chrome.
If you decide you want to check it out, I urge you to use Chrome, I will not be held responsible for floating grass planes of ultimate doom, levitating character, or fire being 7 times too large 50% of the time.

A downloadable Windows version is planned later.

Link to the demo: http://gamejolt.com/games/rpg/the-debug-game/19101/

Other things to note:
- It does not support lefty controls.
- It's buggy.
- It is not Arcanum 2.
- The red collision box draw error on hover is known.

 

Update on progress, I have been going to Uni for two years (TAFE, undergrad Diploma).
I am taking six months off going to Uni, to not stress out as much, and spend time with family.
Which also means working on my hobbyist projects, so I present to you...



I've redone the base rigging and meshes for those animated characters, for that isometric demo.
The previous rigs and meshes were actually my first attempt at even doing such a thing and as a result had lots of dodgy geometry that isn't apparent in the 2D renders. However, these slightly less-poly quads-only versions are much simpler to work with. I even figured out how to equip them with GEAR! This means I can even start to build 'parts' of armour for them to wear, brilliant!

Due to Blender being amazing, I can also use the same animations for several rigs, so, despite their anatomical differences, males and females can both share the same animations, like falling over, standing ready in combat, or walking even, etc.

It doesn't look /too/ terrible either, since the female 'armature' is anatomically different, (smaller shoulders, thinner ribs, breasts, different hips, etc.)
Which means, because her 'bones' are different, the animation looks pretty convincing, despite the fact she's an alien compared to the male.

So here *are two gifs too*.

Apologies for resurrecting my own ancient deceased thread.

 

It's good to see Blender being put to use. Perhaps I'll put my recent reinstall to work.

 

Could you maybe explain the camera settings you used to render these models?
They do look tasty, and I can easily imagine how much time would be saved for an artist who wants to create models with variations in 2D.

About the 2D to Iso conversion, you can use flat texture on isomtric geometry (your method?), or native iso tile graphics with no mipmapping or fancy texture filtering to keep the pixel look. Arcanum uses the latter option if I'm not mistaken. The top-down view is the one modified by the camera matrix to give the dev a visual hint, but the native graphics are isometric.

 

Brilliant work! I've played a bit with game developing with Blender in the past myself, but I never really developed the hobby into anything noticeable.

 

Oh wow really? I thought I was actually on to something when I started mangling the view that used topdown textures to produce automatic isometric results... damn... oh well no matter. The only issue I am running into right now is figuring out 3d-style tiles, like rocks jutting upward-looking (not actual props, but deep-shaded flat iso tiles)
I set the camera orientation to simply face the center, where the model is, and turned on orthographic mode, and messed with the sizing of the render zone to get a good size, then set the angle to about 60 degrees.


(depends on the axis, I guess, ignore the scale thing)

Thanks man!

 

Thanks for the tips, I will try to render a simple animation with this method and see what I can do from there

Btw I'm not saying the 'isometric transform' looks bad, and indeed it is actually quite handy to be able to simply rotate your textures to get the iso view. The best advantage to using this method is you won't have any issue with rendering order and overlapping things since the geometry is 3d.

 

Been working on some big steps in the custom world editor, here are some demo videos.


and