Guild of Writers

Short ago Chacal posted some inspiring pictures in this thread .
http://forum.guildofwriters.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5849
I chose a simple one of them , just for fun.
I wanted to add it to a large age i am developing.
But it does not fit in it as i thought it would.
So i decided to just make a little age without puzzles or anything in it because i have no ideas yet.
I will develop it rapidly and wil show in this thread, with a weekly picture, where it stands.

However if anyone has an idea to "name" the age
Or if you have an idea for a little story ,
or have a drawing or a picture for an object that fits in it.
or a nice idea for a little puzzle.
Or ... what else?

Post it in this thread and i will do my best to build it and fit it into the age.
I consider it as a way to encourage people to cooperate with agebuilding, even if you cannot build or code yourself.

Lets see what we can do together!
I hope you like the idea behind it.


Here is the second , this weeks picture.
Only a few objects are textured yet.

This looks very promising already and the textures look great ...

All those small pedestrals, every one of them more or less worked out, are lovely to look at ...
Yeah, it is nice to see such a beautifully drafted world in its several developments stages ...

Thanks, for sharing, dendwaler, and it is a great idea to inspire others to elaborate on this
dream in co-creation, everyone contributing his/her own imagination and skills ... With me
you have at least a fan awaiting the completion of this project and to beta test this world ...

It seems well modelled and textured so far. Good job.

Are you planning on adding lighting effects later?

dendwaler, I am reminded of the Palace of Minos in Knossos (Heraklion, Crete). These photos are over 28 years old but they will give you an idea of what I mean.
It took a bit of time to change the Photos to digital so I was slow in getting back to you.

Needs lighting.

Thx for the replies sofar and the photoimpressions, they do help.

About lightning.

When light hits an object, it will be reflected.
The amount of reflection depends on the coordinates of the reflecting face.
In other words, this depends of the Normals of this face.
Since PyPRP does not support ORCO these Normals have to be baked first into a UV map.
The age i showed is in a very early stage and the objects are textured initialy only with the UV map of the normals translated into grey values.
You can see this on the grey objects , because they have different grey values depending of the normals.
This makes the objects looking less flat.
Before baking the the normal maps most round objects gets a subdivision modifier , which are removed after baking.
and all the objects have an edge split modifier which are set to split on angles more then 30 degrees and on seams as well.
ofcoarse smoothing is turned on.

The next step is texturing the objects with a real texture.
The pilars do have 3 different textures already , if you consider the normal as a texture , there are 4.
I did not do anything else yet.

When finished texturing and all the objects are in the scene, i will bake an ambient occlution for the interaction of light between nearby objects.
Then the vertex lightning will be turned on which also needs a vertex color layer.
The reason there is no light in the scene is because the shadbuffer is turned off and the "shadeless" function is turned on.
This is necessary because this stresses the engine to much.
The vertex lightning will replace a static simulation of how it would have been with these functions "turned on"

The last step is baking a lightmap for every single object and do some additional vertex painting on a new layer.

The normal layer, the occlution layer , the lightmap layer and the vertex paint layer will all be multiplied to the first layer.
This have to be done for every material in an object.

None of these things are done yet, but i will do them all.
That is much work , even for a small age.

....and this is the reason that the development of an age which is " up to par" takes lots, lots of time, especialy if one person have to do all, modeling texturing ,scripting,coding,designing PUZZLES STORY and SOUND.
If you don't master one of these things and you are working alone, you will fail to deliver quality!
Making your first age will be done relatively fast because the bar is not so high .
But when the real task comes, it will probably take 1 or 2 years to build an age in your spare time.

But we will see howfar we come with this small one.

@ dendwaler if you are accepting volunteers I would love to help with SFX, sounds, puzzle ideas, Journals and story line.

Unfortunately I am not that good at music composition. Unless we use music that predates 1931...

Every help is very appreciated Wam but

With sound i cooperate with Pojibonzai and will continue that coop for all my ages,
as long as he finds time and is willing to do that.

Todays progress

What I really like about your work denDwaler is the richness of details you put in every objects we encounter. In Turtle Isle, we see fine details everywhere in pots, plants, flowers, balustrades, buildings etc. I like very much this temple idea of that small age you are working on.