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[Ciehoo]

Here's a 3D model question (poll?):

If you had to model a big beast, say a giant or a dragon, would you rather:

- Make it regular tile-sized (same size as a dwarf)
- Make all "small" creatures take only a small fraction of a tile.
- Make the big beast bigger than a tile (even if it causes clipping into walls).

I'm leaning a bit toward the third one, but it can get ugly in narrow tunnels.

I'm personally leaning towards 2. We could divide the in game cells into 2x2 or 3x3 blocks and dynamically position "small" creatures on the subspots. If the rules of allocation would be consistent, it might even be possible to completely forgo saving this information anywhere. It would also bring items, such as beds in line with dwarf sizes.

As to the furniture - I don't have items mapped out yet, but from seeing other structures it might be possible to squeeze the data into some unused flag spots (it would only need 2 bits of information). But without full, and I mean full understanding of which parts of the fields are used where it might cause very nasty surprises later on (silent bugs are the worst)

On a more positive note, if time permits, I'll finish up terrain texturing tonight, and hopefully by the end of the week I'll have cleaned up and commented the code enough to release it into the wild.

Ciehoo

[monolar]

... release it into the wild.

Cool! Looking forward to it. The main thing that interests me is how you access df memory without reading chunks of it a thousand times.

[Ciehoo]

The main thing that interests me is how you access df memory without reading chunks of it a thousand times.

The brutal way:
char* data = (char*)0x12345678;

I don't know if I stated it clearly before - the mod is loaded as a DLL into the Dwarf Fortress.exe process, and has full access to memory. This of course means, that any bugs crash the _WHOLE_ game, but it's a tradeoff for quicker memory access and code synchronisation.

[Footkerchief]

The trouble is with keeping the data. As in, saving and loading the fort. I can see a chair being rotated towards the table that is used by the dwarf on the chair, but there's no way to preserve that data in a DF save unless the game has a way to store this information.

Well, siege engines do have a stored orientation, so clearly it's not totally unsupported.

[Fugue]

You could probably write orientation in yourself using basic checks. A default orientation that gets switched depending on its surrounding tiles. Any chair adjacent to a table will orient facing the table, anything adjacent to a wall will orient facing away from the wall. That alone covers most orientation issues.

[monolar]

True. I think stuff like the orientation of furniture is a minor issue. We can definitely get it be reasonably oriented automatically. It's just the corner cases, e.g. a cabinet standing on a tile with more than one wall or a chair with more than one tabe in adjacent tiles and so forth. For a first step until we figure out how to reliably save this data (incl. save games) automatically orienting would be fine.
Well, even before that just displaying items at all would be a great step.

[Ciehoo]

Hit some snags with the terrain materials, so the release will be delayed. But it's on a right track:



The text on the blocks is an automatically generated texture, based on the matgloss name.

The release should run as fast with terrain textures as it did without (i'm using only one texture for all terrain materials, so the FPS cost  is negligible)

Of course it still needs models for the terrain,  but that's another thing.


Ciehoo

[Sean Mirrsen]

Och...yuk. Will it be possible to make non-horrible cells? As in, the same height as their width? I mean, I know it's possible, but will you?

[Ciehoo]

Och...yuk. Will it be possible to make non-horrible cells? As in, the same height as their width? I mean, I know it's possible, but will you?

I based the 2:1 ratio with hummanoid creatures in mind. I wanted to keep it in proportion - but as far as I'm concerned, if it doesn't interfere with anything else - the cells can be cubes.

[Sean Mirrsen]

You account for humanoids, but I account for everything else. I don't want tiny wolves or dragons standing on their hind legs just because the cell space is so narrow. That goes double for 3D models.

[Ciehoo]

You account for humanoids, but I account for everything else. I don't want tiny wolves or dragons standing on their hind legs just because the cell space is so narrow. That goes double for 3D models.

You forget that the plan was to use only a part of the cell for "small" models.

And as for "tiny" wolves... dude, it's 3d. if you want to, you can render a zoom in from orbit onto a flea without serious graphic glitches. Size does not matter here, only relative to other things.

[Mephansteras]

Wow, I'm impressed!

[Andir]

I vote for cubed (1:1) perspective.  Humans/Elves would be one tile tall and Dwarfs 3/4.  Dogs 1/2, Cats 1/4.  At least they would be in my world :p

Dragons will just have to be human sized (maybe a bit bigger with clipping)... that's all.

[Jifodus]

Or if it doesn't render ceilings it can be bigger than the tile, and it's left up to our imagination on how it manages to get around.

[Philipp Sobecki]

Hi,

sorry for my intrusion, but I wanted to say how much I admire the OP and all the efforts that are being made here. Especially the dwarf-model in on one of the first screenshots, which totally reminds me of the Dungeon Keeper II-style.

That brings me to one humble suggestion to the modelling-artists: What do you think of making the graphics tend to the style of Dungeon Keeper II (in terms of polygon-count, texture-resolution, etc.)? It would draw a unconcious, aesthetic bridge between these two often compared games and maybe would find more lovers than some totally unrelated graphics. It would be also a kind of tribute.

Greetings,

Philipp