Pancakes

You're mistaken, I was never pessimistic. I was realistic. I join the project now, in the face of that realism because people that I respect have decided to be involved too. It's as simple as that. Besides it's fun.

Where is the list of everyone who has already joined? If I won't be able to do too much. But I can help a little bit. It's always been a personal goal of mine to develop a game with Rick and Aggror some day. Seeing as 50% of all coding I learned from them. So I'll join, but I don't think I'll be one of your main guys.

How does one get these to work inside of Leadwerks? I want to start using some.

I still have to say I think that ICO path is best. Effort wise you will get the most bang for your buck. AND, the artstyle can be as surreal/untrained as it wants to be. And any lack of polish can be seen as a stylistic device to convey an emotion. Partially because In ICO emptiness is just as powerful to the experience as having actual objects. A sparsely populated environment, either interior or exterior, with leadwerks lighting could prove very effective without the need of creating very many art assets. But most of all, very many complex art assets. (instead of modeling a rifle, you would be modeling a barrel and a sword just as an example). Also, I thought that the puzzle oriented design of an ICO - like game would appeal to the programmers here. From a technical standpoint, developing such a game wouldn't be any more challenging than making a zombie game. However I feel you'd have more freedom to express yourself from a design stand point. It's not that I am particularly in love with ICO, it's just that in my honest opinion it's the best route to take and very feasible to complete such a game. It's only required features are movement, the most basic combat you can imagine (optional)...and that's it. The rest of the game is conveyed through level design and music. The only issue I see with a zombie game is that of course the feedback that you convey into the zombies themselves. Making the zombies feel satisfying to destroy will be technical challenge seeing as the killing of said zombies would be the meat and potatoes of the gameplay experience I think. I don't like it when so much of the game hinges on just one person, in this case, your animator. With a more impressionistic artstyle, such as ICO, you can allow the programming to stand at the fore because it's going to be the cleverness of the programmers that actually define the meat and potatoes of this style of game. And most of all as I said I think it's doable. For those of you that don't know Ico:

Whatever you decide to do, might I suggest you find a way to take full advantage of all the very experienced programmers that you have? It would be best to limit the amount of characters (which require animation and textures) to an absolute minimum. Even with some experienced artists onboard you're going to have to decide on what you want, then build a concept, and then actually make it. I would suggest a game like ICO or Shadow of Collosus. Sparse enviornments, very few characters. Lots of emotional impact with minimal cutscenes. This will give your music composer and story boarder something to think about. While all the complex climbing and object interactions will be something to keep the programmers busy. Puzzles for level designer etc. But I look forward to seeing what you guys REALLY decide to do.

As I said before, the leader of this thing will have to be 4x more committed than anyone else. And ALWAYS ready to respond to everyone's messages ASAP. Otherwise things will quickly tumble into chaos. And basically, the leader is just an empty vessel for one of these things as well. Who will be the sacrficial lamb? I led a 30 man team for one of these projects for about 3 months in the past. I was "that" guy.If the leader falters for one second, everyone stops working. Who shall it be? You will give up your life until it's done.

I don't think I would. Every one here loves game design I suppose, but to each of us game design means something altogether different. As I said before I managed one of these in the past and the way in which decisions were made struck me as a bit unsettling. For the sake of the project, everyone had to compromise a great deal on what it was that they loved about game design in the first place for an extended period of time. I learned a lot from the project. But I can't say I even cared about or liked the game itself. I'm not sure if anyone did. We each had are favorite parts about the game. We liked the enviornments, the enemy design, the waterfall effect. But I'm not sure if any of us were making a game that we actually wanted to play. My sole reason for starting that project was for learning experience and I said so upfront. We were all noobs on that team so it made perfect sense. But in Leadwerks Community, I'm not so sure. Personally, I wouldn't mind partnering up with a couple of people here at some point, but I wouldn't bother to build a partnership with others when there are so many areas where I need to improve before I could honestly consider myself as an asset to anyone. So I would have to say no. But if Josh joins it I will have to yes! He could be our Tim Tebow!

Surprise, she is an elf! Sunday I am going to finalize her costume and begin retopo and animation. So that means that if you have beef with anything I'm doing as far as anatomy is concerned now would be a good time to express it! I recognize the fact that the detail below her waist is rather lacking but that is because I don't think she is going to be baring any leg in the engine. Also, lack of skill. I want to practice on better legs and arms parrellel to my working on this project, but I'm not sure if any of those practices will make it into the game because I have to move to more areas right now. Thanks!

Have you tried Lord Hippos Crysis shaders? I'm not sure if that is your issue but his shader makes all the geometry in Leadwerks have lots more contrast in the way it is lit.

I have no idea of whether this is an improvement of not. But I made some changes. I now have about 10 difference faces for this body I guess more or less not including all the inbetweeners. I simply can't choose. So, as I've been designing the costumes I have decided to possibly just cover her face. And to "pull a Tali" (or Samus, if you prefer) and just uncover her face for a few moments of the game only. I think I had a more realistic looking face before I ever started posting screenshots. But I slowly started stylizing the lines. It even started to look a bit like the faces on the Shin Megami Tensei characters and that's when I decided to pull it back a little bit because I wanted a little bit more realism. Anyways this is what I suppose I'm going with and I'm gonna start finalizing this. I think I improved the hips. But only in a subtle way. She is probably still double knee'd but I'm gonna cover that up anyway with clothing. Since I never learned to model arms very well, at least for now, I will probably just cover them also. I'm also working on her theme song or her battle theme. I loved it late last night. But then I woke up next morning and was like..."Was I drunk or something when I did this?!" Anywho, back to work.

I went back over the 100 other versions to see where I went wrong. And actually at version number 50 and below I had the hips correct. But at some point I used the Pose tool in Voxel mode and everything got stretched out of porportion but I didn't notice it because of snow blindness. I dunno about 3d Coat anymore. It feels like if I want to correct the hips, the best thing to do is to just delete the legs and start over because I can't get the hang of that Pose tool. If I was sculpting on a base mesh using polygons instead of voxels or live clay, I'd have a lot more precision for stuff like this. Really starting to wish I could get Zbrush. But for now, I think I'm going to go back to blender for sculpting.

How generous! Thank you!

Thanks guys. Hopefully this will help me improve. I agree with everything you say. Though the double knee was supposed to be the muscle right above the knee, it doesn't really look like it.

I'm finally going to convert these voxels into polygons. After rejiggering and rejiggering for so long. I am so indecisive but I have finally decided! There are at least 100 iterations of this model on my harddrive each just the tiniest little bit different than the other. What really finally helped me decide is the fact that I was watching the original Mobile Suit Gundam series and I noticed that even though the artists knew the anatomy for their characters that sometimes they just bent the rules in order to do whatever they liked. So I stopped trying to be so realistic as I was before and I just let it go and allowed myself to model the way I thought I wanted to see it. Still not 100% happy but this is my personal best. So I'm allowing myself to be 94% happy for today. I am glad that I laid the groundwork for the gameplay code before I finished the character model because now I can just flow into the gameplay and animations side without too much of a jarring change of pace. I'm curious in your honest reactions so that I can learn from them even though this is IT. I'm going with it. All the other 99 versions of this model are telling me to do it! It's a bit comic booky but I'm alright with that. I have other, more grounded feeling versions where for example the hips are not so full and the head seems larger because the rest of the body is smaller and therefore a bit more common. She also has the supermodel trait of wide shoulders that are exceedingly narrow from the side view. But hopefully the player will be too preoccupied with the game to be bothered by such things.

Using Lua means I don't have a GUI I guess. But that's fine, I'm just using Debug text and pictures to get my point across. It's not going to be too much worse than Minecraft's default interface. Just don't look under the hood. It's a mess in there, how I'm doing things at least, but it runs fast.

You're right, but when I started making this script I didn't know that. And I also set it up so that any numbered switch can do any number of different things and then I can view dubug text that tells what it's doing. Why? Lack of experience. I was just making it up as I went along. I was using my experience with CryEngine Flowgraphs and Blender Logic Bricks to come up with the design for it though. My entire script is just a bunch of text nodes like in a flowgraph, that you designate with set state commands just like in Blender GE, which is how I see it now.

Wow, I decided to take a lil breather ,as you do, when sculpting in 3dCoat. I had a choice between playing League of Legends or doing something else. So I decided to check how much harddrive space I had left because hi res modeling in 3dCoat can take up gigabytes pretty fast if you are irresponsbile with your saves, as I have been recently. Anyway, I found I had almost no disk space remaining so I set out to delete some old 3dCoat files and there must be hundreds here. So I went to my very first 3dcoat save on this computer and what I saw got me thinking. Because recently I've been calling myself some pretty bad names. Saying things like, "Why do I suck...so BAD!?", "I hate myself". Especially since Josh announced the 3d art internship, that I don't even think I will succeed in getting. But when Josh did announce it something inside me started to move. Because I had always shielded myself from getting upset about my modeling by being a little non chalant about it. Not to say I wasn't putting effort into it because I have been. I love modeling and game dev stuff, but my attitude was pretty chill even while spending many hours practicing over and over. For example, I couldn't tell you how many times I've practicing modeling a single finger. And to this day I still haven't gotten it right. Though admittedly I could still practice more than I have been. But hearing about the internship made me start to recognize and deal with the desire that I have to improve. Not to expect to get better, but to sort of demand that I try harder. Anyway, when I looked at the first 3dCoat savefile that is on my PC. I opened it in order to see whether I should keep it or just delete it. And I look at the model which was saved in January of 2010, and I realize that back in those days I never taunted myself by saying that I sucked so bad or that I hated myself because of my modeling (at least that I can remember). But back then I just put my head down and kept practicing. And the best thing that I discovered is that today when I look at them I don't think, "Wow these old ones such bad" I look at them and I can see where i did things correctly and I can kind of plot out what I would need to do in order to correct that which wasn't done properly. Like in the first head on the left, you I see that the brow and forehead are fundamentally sound for the beginning stages of modeling. Even the curvature on the jaw is pretty functional. I can also see what's wrong with it too. And it's reassuring to me that I didn't give up even in the face of how much actually IS wrong with it. Well anyway, I guess that's sort of my point. That even in the face of what's wrong with whatever I'm currently working on, I shouldn't give up. Because I didn't give up back then either. Anyway, back to it! Though I'm sure I'll be calling myself bad names again shortly. Also as a colorful aside, the guy I used to idolize "elsevilla", has really been progressing as an artist during the past year that I haven't been following him much. He was once a pencil artist who wanted to learn colors. And I watched him struggle with that, but I went to check him out today and my goodness his colors have improved so much that I feel ashamed that I ever doubted his decision to change from pure pencils --> color and CG artist. What a fool I was to doubt that guy. Maybe I should allow myself the indulgence of idolizing him again. Though I'm not sure if I need to idolize anyone anymore. I'm too old for it.

thanks, I'll let you know how it turns out

Would that work out okay? I am looking at this simple lua info and I am just wondering whether this is the right path to go. Right now I use arrays for everything in my lua code including a finite state system implementation. Where I basically just say... --State System stateSys={} stateSys[1] = {name = "Break", switch = "false"} stateSys[2] = {name = "CamSwitching", switch = "true"} stateSys[10] = {name = "In Battle", switch = "true"} stateSys[11] = {name = "Battle Mode", switch = "active"} stateSys[12] = {name = "Base Damage Cal", switch = "set to nil"} stateSys[13] = {name = "Friend or Foe", switch = "friend"} stateSys[21] = {name = "pa_commandprompt", switch = "disabled"} stateSys[22] = {name = "Count?", switch = "count"} It's the same for the weapons, characters, monster data... Everything in my lua code is structured around manipulated arrays like this. It's not elegant but it works and it runs fast. I tried fancy loops but I just ended up slowing things down. Well anyway, everything is running and working fine except I don't have a dynamic inventory system that is capable of sorting itself and being sorted by the player in game. Is the table.insert command the right way to go for building something like this into my array laden code? If so, does anyone have tips on how to use it effectively so that I can have a sortable inventory? Thanks

@ Josh cool ^^

I was hoping for a dark theme option too =D. My 3dCoat background is BLACK

I think most people care about cloth and water and stuff like that for physics. and as far as the 500 falling boxes is concerned, you can replace the boxes with feathers, softbody goo drops, or chocolately nuttyslack bars. Imagine it raining nuttyslacks! Doors are cool and all, and believe me on other forums such as Blade3d and blender I've seen my share of forum posts of people complaining about how their car doors won't rotate properly due to interactive forces. Oh well, I guess it's a got pros and cons for all of them.

the hips don't lie and neither do these results - speed also doesn't lie where are the softbodies

Hello! The procedure is simple. Add Cube Select front face E to extrude face. S to width and height of this face E to extrude again G to grab and now push the face back into the cube to add depth Now select a a face on the cube with right click Shift + D to duplicate G to grab this cube and move it somewhere to make it easier to see E to extrude this face to add depth to it keep the width and height unchanged so it is a cube still Then position this and Shift + D duplicate it and move those around to make shelves hope it helps

Hey if those kids didn't gain access to 27" Imacs we'd have to spend that money on teachers' salaries and policemen I think the good guys won in our current situation