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[Handshakes]

As if you care   . Anyhow, I was very impressed as to how the game played out. The game is absolutely oozing with potential, its just up to you devs to unlock it (and I am sure you will ). One of the areas that particularly struck me as great was the music. The second I heard that music I was instantly transported back to the early 90's when all of my favorite games (mostly RPGS back then since that was pretty much the only genre besides sidescrollers and flight sims) had that kind of eerie and mysterious music. Most impressive. In fact, my only gripe is that the interface, while having a classic feel like that of many earlier RPGs (which also is kind of fun), is kind of non-intuitive. Anyhow, I know it is kind of early on in the developement of the game and that all the models are just placeholders, but could I perhaps get some information on how to replace some of the models (IE: what format to save the models as, the submodels as, the animations, etc...)? Are there any 3d-Studio Max plugins that you used?

[Toady One]

Actually a lot of the interface is kind of a placeholder -- until the game gets further along, there just isn't much sense in fixing a set of buttons and commands.  Things change too much from version to version.

Although I don't have the music anywhere near done, I think, say, Ultima Underworld or Ult. VII (Part 2?) had good music along those lines.  I hope to invoke more of the Ultima Underworld feeling when I get to caves.  There's a lot of potential there.

Um, so, models are done in a very gutter-ass fashion right now.  If you go into the editors from the main screen, click on creature models and load the file "human_head", you'll see how I did them.  Tragic, in a sense, and it would be better if I just learned how to use a more established product, but in any case, I have my head model.  All of the creatures in the game use the same head model, but for every individual, it is deformed within parameters based on species (you can see the deformations in the editor)...  I guess I could do the same thing by making an editor that adds information onto 3D Studio files or whatever, but I never learned how.  It's going fast enough for me this way, but I guess it makes the game way harder for others to modify.  I'm not using a standard format.

Animations are all hard-coded, because they depend so much on the stance of the creature involved.  If you are playing the game, you can change your stance under movement options.  Then you'll see the problem (even if some of the stances are poorly constructed now).  The game just looks at a creature's body part tree and which points are touching the ground and tries to construct the animations from that.  Later on, especially for the combat release, I'm going to have to save some more "fixed" data, but I haven't gotten to that yet.

[Fourth Triad]

Two questions: Where is the editor in the latest release? and Why does my head turn 2D when I attack with it?

[Toady One]

OH!  It looks like I took them out for this release.  Did I mention that before?  I totally forgot.

I have no clue about the head.  I don't think I did real combat animations for odd parts yet.

[Handshakes]

Very interesting. From what it sounds your method of deforming a standard head model could be a cool way of making every creature in the game look different. So I guess all the models are in some kind of ASCII format, no? I can't say I understand exactly what you mean by the animations being hardcoded. Could you explain further?

[Toady One]

The models are saved in binary...  it's just a mess of zeros and ones interpreted by my editor when it is loaded, which apparently were disabled in the current version (I guess there was some horrible bug that I subsequently fixed).  Like I said, not a user-friendly format at the moment.

By hard-coded, I mean they aren't in the files.  The game comes up with a standing position for a model after it cobbles together the body part models to make the creature model.  The standing frame is based upon which models are associated to which body parts, how the creature's body is set up as a tree, and which nodes in the tree are on the ground.  The creature bodies are defined in another editor which you can't get at -- to get an idea of what is in there, look at your (D)escription in the status screen (ESC).  The body definition also has information such as "human arms hang down when not on the ground" and "human legs stay rigid when not on the ground".  This makes standing and hand-stands looks right.  Then for walking, it's just regular key-frame animation where we interpolate between a few special frames, but the special frames are created when the creature is loaded instead of being defined in a file.  So the game decides, "how does a human walk when it has these nodes on the ground?"  Then it goes through some routine (which needs work).  Again, the body parts have helper flags so that your arms move opposite your legs (I put the right leg and left arm in "movement group one" for example).  For an ant, the front right leg, middle left leg and rear right leg are in group one.  The animations don't look as good as those that are specifically designed for some fixed model, but the game can handle a huge array of random models.  Eventually I'm going to write some helper files so that humanoid animations look more realistic, but it'll still mostly be handled by the game.

Yeah, deformations are cool...  if you zoom in on your face when you start a game, you'll notice a number of differences (esp. with your nose).  I haven't really gotten different hair started, and although there are gender differences it's mostly in the face and clearly needs more work.

[Handshakes]

Very interesting. I had been thinking about an animation system similar to this over the past year. Its really a good idea because the animations will (in theory) this way never look funky when going over different terrain. It could also potentially elliminate clipping problems and that whole "floating body that is too close to a ledge" thing. The only drawback I see is that modifying the animations and/or models is now quite impossible     . A disappointment to be sure, but understandable. Has this ever been done in a game before? Nothing comes to my mind. Maybe it had been pondered before by a past developer. Perhaps there is an unforseen drawback?

[Toady One]

I know there's some kind a recent "ragdoll physics" approach to modeling and animations, but I don't know much about it.  A google search for those terms might yield something.

There might be technical drawbacks, and it is hard, but generally it seems (not that I know) that such systems aren't added to games just because it doesn't fit some kind of project budget or duration parameter.  If people pay sixty bucks for the game without it, why pay the programmers to add the feature if it doesn't increase revenue much and takes extra time?  The bar is always being raised I guess, but only in limited directions and only so much as people absolutely expect games to have certain features nowadays.  It's a shame, but commercial game writing is more business than art (not that there aren't gems out there), and since game sales are equal to movie ticket sales last I checked, that's not going to change.  Eh.  Whatever.

As far as things being pondered by past developers, I'm sure it has.  I'd bet practically every idea on my future pages has been thought of as an improvement to an existing game (but never implemented).  One thing I've found, and the posts on the forums here are evidence for it, is that a lot of people have great ideas a lot of the time.  I mean, if you sit down for a while, you can come up with a billion improvements that make a game world more "realistic" or whatever you're going for.  The trick is to find the time and money to get it turned into a reality.  Most improvements aren't really nasty to code...  the worst technical points are probably just upping triangle numbers and getting gas/fluid physics to work out quickly.

Not that I'm tooting my own horn -- I clearly haven't invested enough time or money to make Armok anything close to finished in 4 years.

[Handshakes]

So true. The industry had made some dramatic changes in the past few years. I don't mean to point fingers or anything, but it seems like since Blizzard first came out with a little game called Diablo things have gone down hill. Yes, Diablo. A game with crap graphics and gameplay that would make every rpg gamer who played older greats from the likes of Mike Singleton and Richard Garriot cringe at the non-existant storyline. And yet somehow this game sold incredibly well. I think this sent a message to developers. The message said that above all else, hype is the key to selling. Suddenly game boxes didn't have a story from the games on the back, but instead they had big flashy text that read "...from the creators of ...). That's right around the time that the publishers became the biggest influence on a games creation and that in turn led to the death of garage games. Fortunately though, there are a few remaining companies that care about quality and will pump an amazing game out once every 4 or 5 years. We have to look to those few for hope.

[Fourth Triad]

I think the evidence shows that if you want a good game now-a-days you have look somewhere other than a store, or you have to make one yourself.

[ April 29, 2004: Message edited by: Fourth Triad ]

[Handshakes]

Not always. There are still a few developers who, with past super games that were great, either earned the money to be their own publishers (ID, 3D Realms, etc...) or have earned the great reputation to earn publisher respect like origin (yes I know they have disbanded), westwood (also disbanded but pretty much the entire core team is back together working on Battle For Middle Earth), and probably others that I can't think of now at six in the morning. Unfortunately these few companies can also only make a few gamers per decade. The great developers under publishers happen to be my favorite because while the publishers give them lots of freedom because they know the devs skill and want the game to be great, they also usually force a two year or so deadline. So from these companies you can expect a great game every one to two years, where these other developers who are also their own publishers set a "when its done" date and pump out an excellent game once every three to five years (Valve, 3D Realms, ID I'm looking at you).

[Fourth Triad]

Yes, but unforunatly they are kinda rare. But it is true once in while a really good game will come out.