That was really kick ass when I was thinking that top picture was going to be your modeling lol, before I finished reading the post. But what you've done is cool. The tires look great. I've only ever made a lute and similar medieval knickknacks myself as well.
Geez, Dema. Way to wound me. "First, I was all like HOLY FUCKING SHIT, then I was all like :slow clap: good for you". :P
But seriously, it's coming along alright. The front end isn't nearly as correct as it should be, but it's close enough for government work. I'm thinking of leaving it as is for now, and getting down to the spoiler. Which is rad.
edit: A little more finished.
Last edited by Renzatic; 7th Aug 2011 at 06:10.
It's a very modest project compared to the stuff other people are working on, but I'm working on a mod for System Shock 2 that deepens the security camera mechanic. Basically, I'm trying to make the difficulty of a level (the number of roaming monsters) increase if a player destroys cameras and decrease if they hack them.
I'm totally inexperienced... this is the first time I've ever tried making a mod or level for any game, so it's been pretty slow-going. I'm looking forward to having a working mod soon, though. I'm definitely looking forward to play-testing and tweaking it. SS2 is my favorite game and I could play it over and over again indefinitely.
I heartily endorse this. The world needs more NES style tile games.Originally Posted by icemann
And I'm not talking about those kitschy indie games that look 8-bit, but are more modern at their core. I mean real and proper Nintendo style games. I'm talking about the atmosphere, the evil difficulty (though admittedly more fair than what we got back then), and the sound that seems to be inherent with all the best games from that era.
Last edited by Renzatic; 8th Aug 2011 at 17:49. Reason: I've suffered brain damage at some point, I'm sure of it
Man, sod hard games. If I wanted that I'd have stuck to my damn C64.
Bahhh! Wimp!
Gimme Contra, or give me death! No. Not literal death. It's just a turn of phrase. But, you know...I want difficult oldschool action games.
And the updates continue. It's starting to look like an actual car now. Still haven't gotten to the spoiler, though.
This whole experience has taught me one thing: always go into a these damn things with a plan. That front end is mostly me goofing around to see how cool and complicated I could make it while still keeping it looking similar. The end result is that I've messed up my mesh so much, any additions I make end up taking me 5 times as long to do, and end up not being very neat and tidy. Adding in those grills, doing the light cavities, and combining them with the main mesh ended up taking me as long as the entire back end of the vehicle.
I've spent the last two days working on those, cutting, looping, welding, and reshaping everything to get it as close to what I originally had as possible. I should've been able to finish them quick and start on my spoiler.
But oh well. I'm larnin.
edit: and if you all want to see what I'm basing this off of...here. I want to add in all the details you see here, sans engine, of course.
Last edited by Renzatic; 9th Aug 2011 at 00:57.
Renzo, you following the dimensions for it? I think you may need to elevate the driver/windshield area a teensy bit. The additions to the front are cool and all, but now it looks a bit... knobbly. Which isn't the right word, but it's lost the sleekly aerodynamic look of a race car now, IMO.
Uh...sorta. I'm not trying to replicate it inch by inch, but I found a nice set of schematics that's helped me keep it roughly to scale. At least until I got to the hood. It was too hard to follow all those curves, bumps, and planes from a 2D perspective, so I started winging it from there.
Which is one of the reasons why I'm having so much trouble now. I spent so much time knocking out the shape based on guesses, eyeballing pictures, then changing it when I figured out I did something wrong, that it's hard to add in more detail now. And it still ain't totally right.
The sleekness isn't a problem. I've managed to keep the overall shape going pretty well. The knobby bits are the headlight cavities, when you've got the glass covers in, it maintains the curvature.
Check it out here.
Yeah, some of it does need changing. Right now, though, I'm saying screw it, working my way back to the spoiler, then do some more with that skeleton I left hanging about 6 months ago. I can go back and redo the hood later. It's good enough for the time being.
Yeah, I'm a lazy procrastinator. :P
No. Dragons Lair NES wasn't difficult. It was flat out broken. Which was a shame, because it looked like such a cool game.
Hence one of the reasons why I'm rooting for your remake here.
Actually, ripping 8-bit sprites and tiles isn't too difficult as long as you're not using any sort of filtering in your emulator, and save all your screenshots at native NES resolution. Basically all you do is use the magic wand, marquee, and the pencil tool, and you should be grabbing about 5 a minute.
Sprites were a little more difficult, but I remember using some program back in the day that'd save 15 pictures a second, and made grabbing frames easy as cake. If I can remember the name of it, I'll send you a link, cuz it was pretty damn handy.
Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of that old program I used. It was some freeware fan project type thing I used back in '99 or so, so I doubt I'll be able to dig it up again easily.
On the plus side, I did find this: [url=http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Capture/Bulents-Screen-Recorder.shtml]Bulents Screen Recorder]. It looks like it might do what you need.
Alternately, you could try to find an NES emulator that lets you save screenshots frame by frame. I'm sure there are probably a couple out there with the feature specifically for sprite ripping purposes.
So there's this guy, Nosslak, over at the TDM forums that's a pretty damn good modeler. This one model he did, a lamp post, struck me as pretty cool, so I figured I'd try copying it and see how it turned out.
This is his original. Pretty damn slick looking.
And my attempt at it.
I went with different lamps, cuz I didn't want to copy him 100% on everything. Not half bad for just 3 hours worth of work.
I'm making a module for the open Axis & Allies engine (Triple-A) to cover the "Cold War in Asia", cir. 1947-1954. Rules are essentially Axis & Allies. There's a historical version -- Chinese Revolution, Korean War, & First Indochina war through SVA creation, forced French pullout, & probable US entry into Vietnam (otherwise the SVA will definitely lose) -- but more interesting (for me) is the Japanese civil war variation, which has those three and adds Japan, where Japan doesn't surrender WWII until a full US-Soviet invasion & partition of the country into North & South, then a civil war.
I made the map so China is morphed to be relatively smaller, making Korea, Japan, & Vietnam both bigger & closer without using annoying insets. Here's what my planning map looks like (game map with photoshopped plans), with the countries color coded & my first-draft placement of forces (8 "players" (France & SVA should be the same player), so like 4 players with 2 each, or 2 players w/4).
Anybody every played A&A? Anybody have an ideas or thoughts to add?
Last edited by demagogue; 15th Aug 2011 at 15:28.
Renz:
One thing that I found helpful when modeling planes was to go out and get pictures of the real thing. Some CAD programs will allow you to set a photo or diagram as the backdrop, which then makes getting the proportions right child's play.
Also, that car looks fantastic.
Yup. I've got a few schematics in there already, assigned to planes specific to each viewport. I never showed them off in any of the screenshots because they're too distracting.
The reason why I had so much trouble with the front, despite having a nice schematic, is because a bunch of line drawn 2D profile cutouts don't do a good job of showing how that one plate on the hood separates from the rest of the car, and how it's shaped behind. For that, I had to eyeball it off a bunch of pictures I googled up. Hence the reason why it isn't as exact as the rest of the vehicle.
Why, thank you.Also, that car looks fantastic.
Right now, my current project is this door:
I actually own this book, and always thought that door looked pretty cool. I tried doing it back about a couple of years ago, but found it way too complicated to finish at the time. Too many tightly packed knicks, doodads, and whorls for my skills.
Well, I've learned a couple of things since then, and figured it was about time to try it again. This time, I've managed to get alot farther.
It's not finished, of course (and yeah, I know, neither is the car. Or my skeleton. Shut up
Then I'm either gonna go back to my car, or finish my skeleton. Or maybe start a trolley. Hell. Whatever. :P
Hey, look! My first game.
It's a crappy clone of Lights Out, and it only took me a few days. Not going to share it because there are nasty bugs hiding in there.
Ah, bugs. Or "fish" as is often said here ("fish"/"fishing" just works better than "bug"/"debugging" especially as "fish" tends to be a slippery thing that is quite time consuming to catch ... even when you have very good tools and tons of experience).
I for one have not yet overcome my latest brain-fart ... while implementing some base classes related to opengl i somewhy assumed (and never thought to check) that index buffer is not part of vertex array object state. Well. Of course it bloody is. Also, while trying to fix it i noticed that my implementation failed to keep VAOs immutable - letting the non-immutable nature of them creep out.
Have to redo all that ... very annoying.
So, due of some unlucky events i am reinstalling a bunch of stuff and though that to be a good time to upgrade to 2010 (have run into enough "will be fixed in 2010 version" things). Though it to be stable ... like it is 2011 or something. But keep getting into trouble:
* macro expansion in config is broken (as in: does not work as in 2008) in 2010 ... can not use $(IntDir) for OutDir ... took me long enough to find where it gets the wrong folders (out dir was used only once: in /PDB).
* erroneous warning messages regarding to directories, which is OK as they changed stuff, but there is no ShutTheFuckUp option - you have to edit that stuff out of the used-for-every-project build script manually. x_x
* (windows 7 sdk) bscmake.exe for x64 is missing ... uups ... official stance: won't fix. i guess i have to use an older platform toolset then ... ok ...
* ... "LNK1181: cannot open input file 'kernel32.lib'" ... ugh ... like ... what!?
welcome to two-thousand-fucking-eleven ffs.
Some trouble is to be expected when updating your compiler ... but is it worth it one wonders :/ Any 2010 users here who happen to also target x64? Some advice to give?
Makes me glad I never upgraded, happily chugging along on 2008 Express. Main reason for avoiding 2010 is I hear it performs like complete shit, unless you have a PC capable of running Crysis on max settings while it also makes you tea and toast.
Got it to compile and run (in debugger) with x86 target at least - works - so, there is light at the end of tunnel.
* macro expansion in config is completely broken indeed: all target related macros contain garbage with my settings - can not be worked around either. Have to enter the correct paths for debugger manually myself (at least ProjectDir is working ... so, i can make a relative path out of that).
However - i DO need x64 actually. Have not found what is wrong with the linker error. The file exists and is in the correct place (just in case tested v100 as platform toolset with x86 too in case some paths are fucked up - nope, no problems there). Completely stumped... tempted to use process monitor to extort where it was looking out of it (as apparently all the error messages are specially engineered to be as least useful as possible) - kind of a "Nuclear Bomb to kill a Fly" solution.
About VC being slow: i can confirm that it takes bloody ages to start up in comparison to 2008 x_x. Property pages are also amazingly slow. All that is only an extremely infrequent inconvenience tho - so, not really worth mentioning.
edit: procmon ftw ... it is looking in the wrong place for SDK files. It is looking in "C:\Program Files (x86)\...\lib\x64\kernel32.lib" instead of where it was installed "D:\...\Lib\x64\kernel32.lib". Now, how the fuck do i remind it where it installed itself :/
edit2: Yay! Found the invalid path in: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A
All working now (as far as i can tell/test)
Last edited by zombe; 25th Aug 2011 at 23:26.
Scaffolding for building blocks in the world, as well as a tile-based "ambient occlusion":
I finally got my custom "Cold War in Asia" Axis & Allies map to open in the TripleA engine today. That's not a small accomplishment for me. Now I can actually focus on balancing it and playtesting it. I thought some people might be interested to see a milestone met.
Here's a screenshot of it in-game:
Last edited by demagogue; 15th Sep 2011 at 19:28.
Very nice, Eldron. Reminds me of a top-scrolling Terraria.
God, I hate unwrapping, I really do. I took me 2 hours to flatten, stitch and position all the elements for the low rez mesh, that's more than I needed to model HP and LP meshes combined...
Eldron better make that game Mac compatible.
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