Guild of Writers

I started out with an idea. I wanted to do a big clock hanging in the air by giant chains. Here are a couple of non textured renders of the basic meshes. The mountains are all gears.







The biggest problem with this approach is why a clock, why is it there, wht does it do? It took me a while to work out the story.

I went through several ideas. Originally I was going to have a pendulim from the center the player would have to reach and slide down. I thought of a world of abandoned time pieces. This is my latest idea.

Tempis will have four different clock faces representing four different planets in the local system. Scattered around on the surface will be telescopes, three for each of the four planets. The player will record the numbers then enter the clock. A giant planetarium will be in the center. Entering the numbers will unlock a book to each of the other planets and correct the position of the planetarium and the time on one of the clock faces.

Here is another image of the inside to give an idea of the scale.

That sounds interesting.. and ambitious!
And really big too.. Will the telescopes be far away from the clock, and from each other? If yes do you have any ideas how you will travel through all this? (some sort of vehicles or cable-car maybe?)

Sounds like a cool idea! But as Aloys said, you should be warned not to make the age too big! It's much, much better to have a detailed small age rather than a massive area with little detail. Also, I find that when you have excessively large areas, people get bored running from one place to another. I suggest making it as compact as possible.

But keep up the good work! I like the texture of the clock. I look forward to seeing more from this.

More practical: I've noticed big ages are way more difficult to texture well. it's hard to keep large planes interesting and to keep them varied enough. Then again... if you pull it of it will be really, really cool!!

That's the problem with a 3D age. I love the earlier Quicktime games but each view probably has 300-500mb of 3D content to create it. I have been constantly adjusting my objects to keep the final download size around 30mb.

The first set of chains came in at 30mb by itself. I doubled the scale then cut half the links off and reduced the size to 11mb. I did it again and reduced the size to 5.5 mb. That's still a lot for a visual element that won't be walked on. I may go with cables and towers but I really want to keep the chains.

I built a bunch of ramps and paths between the main mountains and clock. I quickly realized there was a lot of walking involved and lots more mesh if I was going to make the textures look like anything. I have decided to make a system of linking panels to get from one place to the other within tempis. One of the mountains has a cave with a zeppelin hangar. The four chains and the mountains are the same distance from the clock so I could put a zeppelin on a circular path and have it stop at the mountains.

Let me say right now that I don't know squat about python or game programming. I am a modeler and half decent texturer. I have seen these things in the game however so I know they are all possible. I have read several of the tutorials like the ladder one and the linking tutorial. People have posted about rotation but I don't know if its possible to start and stop. It may be a very slow zeppelin ride wher you have to jump to the dock. I'm working on making it look good and be small enough to post and download first.

Woah! That...*blink blink* is amazing!

Keep up the good work!

Maybe change the modelled chains to texture chains by using what I call the double planes method. Putting two planes in a + (infamous use for trees). Similar use: In Gira Cyan used this method for the green vines going down from the high path down to the little crater where the nexus stand is. This looks ok there ans isn't too obvious. If done right and it isn't necessary to be too up close to the chains, this will really cut in the amount of modelling you need.

Then again... modelled chains look really cool You could always think about combining the methods by modelling the first few and then use the other method for chains far away.

Is this a useful idea?

I'd love to use images instead of models. I could get away with 4 polygons instead of 48 for each link. That would take the final meshes involved from 5mb to somewhere around 600kb. Unfortunately there are too many perspectives where these would look flat to the player and ruin the effect.

I have tried unsuccessfully to use the nvidia dds tools. If I could figure them out I would be able to create 3D looking textures like the bridge cables and many of the balcony rails in the game. I can make heightmaps normalmaps and alpha channels. I have paintshop instead of photoshop and the plugin doesn't preserve the alpha channel after saving. I tried stitcher but the documentation is non existant and it always throws up an error. From what I understand Blender does not support DDS textures anyway so even if I could make them I'd have to edit the saved game.

Here's a little more detail. I decided to model a girder structure inside the clock. I used triangle shapes because they were the smallest closed object I could create. This way there is always a normal facing out so objects don't disappear when you walk to the other side.

The view shows all the struts, the bottom deck, and one deck on each level. The entire thing is only 251Kb.