Age Building - Things to Remember

[Sirius]

It looks quite nice Good work !

To create low-poly meshes, remember to use the Decimate modifier. It does an incredibly good job simplifying meshes (although it works best with organic meshes). I always use it for plants and terrain. It might screw up UV mapping though, so beware.

As for the gun turret, I'm still working on it. Basically it works fine, but I'm messing up with the aiming system. I'll report back when I've figured it out.
After that, I'll leave it to your guys to find how to use the bullet manager in Max. Or maybe I simply take the gun model in Blender, put it in a separate PRP and rig it manually.

[Calena]

wow, this is looking really great!

Thanks for that Acorn. Little pats on the back from the community really do mean a lot to me. It lets me know I'm on the right track as I struggle to learn the "art".

To create low-poly meshes, remember to use the Decimate modifier. It does an incredibly good job simplifying meshes (although it works best with organic meshes). I always use it for plants and terrain. It might screw up UV mapping though, so beware.

Good reminder! I'll just add a note to this regarding items like the cutlass. In this particular case, I tried both "Optimize" in Max and "Decimate" in Blender and neither gave satisfactory results. What I did find was that the original artist left hundreds of polys inside the face mesh. I was able to cut over 600 faces from the mesh by getting rid of what wasn't needed.

The various web sites hosting free-to-use models can be great resources to speed up building, but I've found that most of these models aren't designed for real time gaming environments. Along with what has already been mentioned, I've discovered that those models make great templates for building a low poly version of the same thing.

I had downloaded a model that I really liked only to discover that it contained over 400,000 polys and was completely unusable for my purposes. But in studying how it was built, I realized I could duplicate it. I set up the screen to build the duplicate right next to the original and slowly started to rebuild the object bit by bit. With only slight loss of detail, I was able to recreate the object, except mine had less than 4,500 faces. The differences in software packages and building techniques can make a huge difference!

[Deledrius]

It's coming along really well!

The various web sites hosting free-to-use models can be great resources to speed up building, but I've found that most of these models aren't designed for real time gaming environments. Along with what has already been mentioned, I've discovered that those models make great templates for building a low poly version of the same thing.

I had downloaded a model that I really liked only to discover that it contained over 400,000 polys and was completely unusable for my purposes. But in studying how it was built, I realized I could duplicate it. I set up the screen to build the duplicate right next to the original and slowly started to rebuild the object bit by bit. With only slight loss of detail, I was able to recreate the object, except mine had less than 4,500 faces. The differences in software packages and building techniques can make a huge difference!

You probably want to check out tutorials in Re-topologizing (or "retopo") if you haven't already. There might be some useful shortcuts for this process. It's a great way to get game-friendly meshes from fancy ones.

[Sirius]

Ok - I managed to get the gun working (well, most of it. I couldn't or didn't fully test everything).

Here are the instructions and Python file.

Now you'll know why I said this wasn't easy



Also, tell me if you don't understand part of the instructions.
I had 7 hours of school today (that's what you call a "light" day in France), so I am currently quite tired



Ok, since I'm done with it, I can begin work on another project for someone else here, which should be really hard, but interesting enough

[Karkadann]

I got some time coming up soon Im gonna try and figure this one out.

on a simpler note I just realized since I could never figure out how to keep partial systems off upon linking in but can turn them off once Im there, I was half asleep when I realized I might be able to use animated texture for the smoke of my one shot none rotatable cannon since I assume animated textures are a bit more easily controlled.

[Calena]

Two more things to remember:

- Vertex shading propagates across extruded faces. What that means in real life is that if you put vertex shading on some faces, then come back later and begin extruding those faces to create something like a tunnel maybe . . . that shading is being duplicated in very strange ways on the entire sequence of extrusions. This may cause you to scratch your head for possibly one or two hours because all your careful UV mapping seems to have become horribly corrupted, but you can't figure out why; because by now you've forgotten about the vertex shading .

- Speaking of tunnels and trying to get all organic and stuff; when mapping a convoluted tunnel system that somehow reminds one of pig intestines wrapped around, over and under two large islands, always remember that sound regions are created from cubes. These cubes cannot intersect nor can they be extruded. If you intend to have background/ambient music that is specific to this pig-intestine-resembling tunnel mesh, you will have a problem . Fortunately, what I lack in German engineering skills I make up for with American ingenuity! All is well now .

[dendwaler]

A nice option to remember is that you can set in the button windows your camera to orthographic.

Then your renderings in the f12 window will be orthograpic!

This is a great option to make textures, because in a front view you won't have a perspective distortion.
and the camera distance is independent of the distance to the objects
Its an easy way to integrate lightning and bumps in the texture.

Here is an example.

[Karkadann]

@Sirius about the xShootableGun Python
Never having dealt with SDL files before I got a few question about the SDL file and the boolean variable. Is it as simple as this?

Show Spoiler

STATEDESC TestEx
{
VERSION 1
VAR BOOL MyState[1] DEFAULT=1
}

or did I miss something
Also I found a xAgeSDLBoolSet python file, would that work as an alternative?
in other words Im gonna need more info on this one when you have time

Thanks in advance

[Sirius]

STATEDESC TestEx
{
VERSION 1
VAR BOOL MyState[1] DEFAULT=1
}

Yes, that's it. Replace TestEx with your Age name, and MyState with any variable name for the gun. Then save it as YourAge.sdl, and it should work.
Make sure your Age has a BuiltIn prp, and a Python file (YourAge.py, in a pak file).

xAgeSDLBoolSet is used to toggle variable state, since the Python file I provided does it already it won't work.

Let me know if you need any more info.

[Calena]

One month left 'till Christmas! So far, so good. I'm on track to finish this age and hopefully get it online soon after Christmas. I have an idea of what I'd like to do with the gun, but it will require building a completely new section on this age. I won't start that until you guys have an opportunity to see what I've built and provide feedback.

I have managed to build some interactive challenges into the age, but I've had to keep in mind that this is being built for a 10-year-old to solve . I'm thinking that if we decide to move forward with expanding the age, we can incorporate more advanced puzzles at that time.

In the meantime, here's a new screen shot: Nothing To See!

Yup, that shows nothing . No more spoilers, you'll just have to wait until it's finished.