For the last 2 months I’m completely occupied with RecastNavigation – porting and bugfixing, with addition of rigging now, which goes slowly .. very slowly.
On the brighter side – here’s a little glimpse of whats going on behind the scenes (aka Krom bought a color laser printer)
Impressive, I hope it motivates you!
I hope to print more of these, but fist I need a cutter, co cut those ugly white frames that printer cannot print on (5mm from every side of A4) and a more thought-through mounting, cos the wall is very dense and office pins are ugly 🙂
Hey Krom, it’s been quite a while since I have last spoken on here.. Actually, the last time might have been on the project’s forum.. O.o
Wew..
A ton has changed, actually..
Gotten a little wiser and stuff. 🙂
Left the icon making and menu making stuff to other people and went balls-to-the-walls on ArmA2/3 modding, this lead me to study Data-communications instead of stage technology(Sound and light stuff), Got into the Cisco Academy and I finally got the taste of real programming, instead of being the annoying script-kiddie.. xD
Anyways, I read through all the articles in a record time and I noticed a few things…
First off, you need this sucker, easy to use, cheap as dirt but effective: http://www.kijkshop.nl/data/producten/1000×1000/-136834-1.png
A paper cutter, it’s not the blade type, but one with a rail that you move a blade over.
Also I wonder.. Are you planning to create the graphics engine and the “physics”(As for the sloped/bend tiles and the units moving over them.) all by yourself?
That’d be interesting to see, really.
Also, maybe an idea for the structures..
Using image-over-mesh methods seem to work quite well in a few AAA games.. What I mean is like this in ArmA, you take the mesh, then a texture image that the engine wraps around the mesh. Then you create a file to make the result look a bit more… realistic?
You basically make a little image, the size of the main texture, and you create rgba channels, in these channels you determine, for example, in the red layer you could determine the specific shapes that show in the water, in the green channel how dark it is during night, then you have the blue channel for how shiny the object is during sunlight and the alpha for actual alpha, to use with windows etc..
Just a little idea..
Here some examples:
The mesh, bald and just a shaper:
http://i.imgur.com/E4T5sMu.png
The main texture:
http://i.imgur.com/i5snImB.jpg
The wrapper, that determines the engines behavior on the item:
http://i.imgur.com/66va765.png
http://i.imgur.com/zRoKezd.png
Hope it helps to bring in these ideas.. Of course there is a lot more to it, like the RVmat and stuff, in the case of ArmA.. but hey, it’s a basic idea that might simplify the animations and modeling. 🙂
Good to hear from you again, keep up the good work.
Hello Thibmo!
Thanks for stopping by and all the feedback and thoughts you have written.
For now I’m using paper cutter knife and a cutting mat. It’s very cheap, but works good enough. I have looked into paper-cutters alike you suggest, but they are quite expensive in here.
RTS games usually don’t need physics engines. Unless there is some level of interactive destruction involved, which we might ignore for now for simplicity sake. As for the graphics engines – that’s one of the things that is especially interesting for me to try.
Multitexturing/masking is a good idea and we might try that on some things, but for now everything is happening in the sunlight and most of the materials are quite similar in terms of diffuse/reflectivity, so that is not gonna add much to the game. Later on – maybe )
Thanks again for the feedback and ideas!
Thanks for the reply. 😀
Also, I might request a speed lesson on delphi at the academy, it’s an interesting and rather capable language, unlike C#, which I was able to teach myself pretty much through Google…
I tried some 3D rendering in there but gosh that frame lag when spontaneously rendering 25 static figures that cast a shadow on the ground and wall… I had no single animation going on either, I went from 175 fps to about 15 at the point of render start… And that with the gtx 750Ti :/
Blegh, I’ll check out OpenGl with delphi and see what I can learn from it..
also I will do my best to get a few interesting ideas/hints along the way.
I wonder, though, will the source be open? I love checking out the styles of programming, as they do show some tweaks and tricks that I could pick up. 🙂
Delphi is much alike C#, with a slightly different syntax (e.g. begin/end keywords instead of {} ) and a few differences in OOP model iirc. You should be able to grab it pretty easily 🙂
We still have not decided about the source-code location and access model / license. For now it’s a private repository at CloudForge. We can discuss details in email/Skype.
Krom,
I found this at Ebay, they do deliver world-wide
But because they are whiney they filter out some countries, like Germany and Lithuania etc..
e.e I am lucky to be in an extremely neutral country, it seems… Could port it through, just give a call.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-white-Orange-909-1-A4-Guillotine-Ruler-Paper-Cutter-Trimmer-Plastic-Cutters-/291301479137?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43d2ebd2e1
Sorry for the spam.. e.e
But check out banggood, they are a chinese company that do actually deliver world-wide.
they have a ton of the stuff laying around, also for more tech-geek areas.
Now back to trying out Delphi. 😛
You really make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this topic to be actually something that I think I would never understand. It seems too complicated and extremely broad for me. I’m looking forward for your next post, I’ll try to get the hang of it!