New DirectX9 DM clone - entombed

[cowsmanaut]

so the olympics have come and gone.. and I spent much of it working on my own project but I did repeatedly think of stuff to do for your clone. The problem with my pirate is at the moment, he seems to me not to the level I want him to be and am unfortunately a bit anal on such things. I know that some parts I just quickly threw together.. figuring it was dark anyway.. so now I think it needs more time spent on it. The other thing is that, I have 5-6 textures to make up his whole and yet, should probably knock that down into one map for you.

I think started to think about your efforts on traditional DM and the fact that so many others here are looking for renewing the graphics for the same purpose. So, as a result, rather than continue work on the pirate, I actually started on a screamer instead.. Requires minimal effort in animation.. so, perhaps this will be more worth while

[DSE]

The project is on hold from my side. I have completed the engine near enough (rendering is now spot on, animation works perfectly, particle system works, physics is automatic from the original meshes. Its all good stuff) but got to the point that I just dont have the art assets to complete the game. And with that I decided to shelve it. I have done what I wanted which was to get commercial grade rendering done from a sensible gfx pipeline.

If you end up with anything then send it on. Otherwise dont worry too much about it.

[Gambit37]

Aw, poopy. I understand where you're coming from but it seems a shame to just leave it at that. If I had the skills and time, I'd definitely help out with creating art assets, but unfortunately I don't.

Perhaps you could release what you've done as open source?

[DSE]

Someone else has just asked for the source via a pm .... the work I have done on my engine has taken 100s of hours as I learnt directx and reworked and refined my code. I'm not prepared to just release it unfortunately. If you look at what my engine does its very close to a commercial engine (in fact the quality of rendering is better than a lot of games I play), so it doesnt seem right to just give it away for free. Maybe I will in the future but not right now.

Also, releasing the engine as open source wont help anyone get the clone done. The coding isnt the issue, its art thats the problem. If someone wants to do the art then i will finish the clone, end of story. But until that happens I'm not going to spend any more time on it.

Also, I have spent over £1500 on my clone in the last 3 years, due to requiring tools and I dont like running illegal/copied/cracked software. I have asked on numerous occasions for help with art assets (just creatures really as other items can be bought off turbo squid, etc) but receive next to nothing. I dont want to keep everyone waiting when deep down I know I'm not going to finish it.

I did try to create my own creature and it looked like gonzo and the animation was very funny. I tried and failed miserably.

[beowuuf]

Hopefully everyone will respect your wishes and not make further requests. It's sad not to see it finished (especially thinking for your side of not seeing it fully work), but as a personal project I'm just glad you shared the development and that you achieved the coding.

Sadly, there seems be be few people with artistic talent around - I know what you mean about failing with creature art.

I hope in the future someone does provide you with sufficient assets to see your clone fully developed, perhaps even under a commerical banner.

[DSE]

Thanks for the comments guys. Just to clarify one important point .... the clone isnt dead, its on pause until someone steps forward to do the art.

Good luck to anyone writing a clone of any description, but especially the guys doing 3d.

[Gambit37]

I'm aware that you asked for help with art, but I didn't offer to help because I don't have the skills. That's true of most people on this forum. Did you ask on other gaming forums where people DO have the skills?

Once I get a fulltime job and no longer need to work evenings and weekends just to make ends meet, I could teach myself 3D. Might take a few years, but once I have the skills I could do some creature meshes.

[DSE]

Gambit37 - you are awesome mate ... I like that dedication.

I havent tried anywhere else as, well, Im not sure where else to ask.

[Gambit37]

OK, come back in a few years and I'll have something for you Seriously though, I've always wanted to learn 3D but I have so many other personal projects on the go that I've never been able to give it any time. I would love to be able to take a couple of years off to get all these projects in better shape. I'm great at starting things, but not so good at finishing...

Another benefit of learning 3D would be that I'd also be able to generate pre-rendered assets for RTC custom dungeons, something that at the moment I just cobble together from stuff from other games, which isn't exactly creative!

[Erik Bauer]

Gambit37 - you are awesome mate ... I like that dedication.

I havent tried anywhere else as, well, Im not sure where else to ask.

Mmm....

Can I suggest you a couple of places?

1)http://amigaworld.net/ It's one of the biggest and more openminded Amiga Communities around there. Ok, your project is not going to be released on Amiga... but I know most of them are GFX artists and if asked nicely maybe you can find someone willing to help. If you do not want to register there I can ask it for you, just tell me what you need to be done as GFX (Textures, models, meshes...)

2)http://www.pixologic.com/home.php This is the homesite of Z-Brush, one of the most amazing 3D software I've heard of (I'm not into 3D modelling, so there might as well be better softwares aroun, but whatever...). For the few times I went there it seemed a quite strong community, maybe you can ask them if someobody is willing to do a little practice by modelling something for you.

A general advice is to look for 3D Modelling software/2D GFX software communities and hope some freelance is willing to help you.

[DSE]

The problem I have is the fidelity I require, people want paying for working at this level. I am considering changing the requirement so that the creatures dont walk smoothly, they would jump from square to square like the original. This makes animation trivial and I would just require creature models which can be purchased. We will see ....

[Erik Bauer]

I do think that making creature movement "Steppy" instead of smooth will also work better with the burst-step-by-step movement the player is allowed to do; smooth movement would contrast too much.
But this is just my personal taste.

[RAF68]

I dreams to see one day a dungeon master in 3d which make him tribute qu 'il deserve Malheuresement, in the purest dungeon style master 1, my knowledge in programming is too weak so that I my dungeon on RTC " DUNGEON master FOREVER " pour for a dungeon of very big can conceive it a me even, me m 'éfforce d 'améliorer qualiter, who will please you, me supports you Lord_BoNes and DSE and all those which would like this throwing in one such plans, I am with you

[Rasmus]

I agree with you DSE. Making creatures models are the worst job, it can take several hours and still it looks odd. I still have to learn mesh skinning to get rid of this problem.. Textures and such are easyer to get leagely. There are several sites on the net where you can get textures that have Unrestricted use, and then creating normal and heightmaps with some freeware generator. I just found a treegenerator on the net, and I'm sure that there are more of these out there to fit several needs. The only problem is creating creature models.. It's really hard work :S

About your 3D engine you use in Entombed (very nice graphic ), I'm abit confused with this, is it like creating a hlsl shader to Direct3D 9, or is it more like creating a whole new engine instead of Direct3D?

[DSE]

I used to work for a game programming house and had two good friends who could create very cool creatures in next to no time. Unfortunately I have lost contact with them :O( so have to resort to donations from the web. Most artists require payment before contributing which I can understand. The search continues ....

About my engine. My game is written using Direct3D (openGL can achieve exactly the same result, the API isnt really important). All the lighting, shadows, paticles, effects, etc are shaders. Virtually the entire rendering code is contained in the shaders. Hope this helps.

[Rasmus]

Okey I see, just wondered about the shaders.. I must say that when they got intruduced I was soo happy, there are endless of posibilitys and the game usually runs faster when using them..

[DSE]

They are great but you must be careful when writing them as debugging is difficult and performance tuning is 'interesting'. To get the best out of your shaders you need to learn a bit about how the actual hardware processes batches of pixels. Performance tuning shaders is not like tuning 'standard' code.

[Rasmus]

You are right, when I was creating DMT 1 I learned in the end that some coding does exactly the same thing as some other coding but takes longer time to calculate.. If you like you could take a look at dmt 2 on my homepage, the shader code is open for everybody too read, I don't care much about that right now because I know that it will be changed and improved several times before I'm finished with the game.

[DSE]

Ok cool. Did you animate your creatures using skinning in shaders. That took me a while, it was worth the effort but it was very difficult. Especially hard when the physics was included :O)

[Rasmus]

Nope, that is my next problem, last time a just used vertex learping and got poor results :S Do you know any good tutorials on this on the net that could help me with this? I've got the direct3d 9 skinned mesh example to work with, but I havn't been able to import/export a characters with bones to/from x files using 3d studio max jet :S Maybe some plugins

[DSE]

Welcome to a world of pain :O) It has taken me a long time to get my engine working correctly and it was by far the hardest problem I solved. I started with the DirectX tutorial but it isnt very helpfull and when you require multiple instancing of the same creature you enter "undocumented" territory. The instancing demo in the DirectX SDK does not work properly and is tailored to only work with their model/anim (which is why it was later removed from the SDK). Trust me this is a real pain to get working and to ensure the correct results are shown everytime. If you really struggle I may be generous enough to supply some code ;o)

[Rasmus]

I havn't began working on it yet but later today I will. You are very generous if you would help me with some code But I think that I will first try to solve it myself And thank you about the SDK warning, saves me alot of work!! Do you have any links to "working" tutorials? I know what skinning is and I know how it works, but are still unfamiliar with the Direct3D coding.

[DSE]

Sorry, cant remember any tutorials. I did most the work myself for the instancing, very few people have managed to get it working and I dont think many would be happy to give it away for free. Its a black art. One hint I would give is to make sure that your exporter from Max (or whatever) is very precise and correct in its formatting. I ended up writing my own importer to sort out issues I was having. Calculating normals, birnormals, tangents, etc is a real pain as well. Good luck matey.

[Rasmus]

Calculating normals, birnormals, tangents, etc, I have already done so I don't think that will be the problem.. The thing is that I want to be sure that I export the file with bones etc. right before I start looking into the coding, otherwise it would feels like a will begin in the wrong direction :S But thanks for the support, I will keep in touch about the progress

[Roquen]

You might want to try a web-search on dual-quaternion skinning.

[Rasmus]

Thanks, I will give it a try!

[cowsmanaut]

So I'm sure this will be redundant since I imagine it's pretty obvious before even saying so.. but I think I'll need to give up. I have too many pots on the stove as it were, and I'm too easily distracted lately when I do have the free time. I really do want to help, but I'm no longer going to suggest that I'll make this or that and just settle with, if I finish something, I'll pass it on to you, and if not, no one is expecting anything. Doing a creature of the quality I want to do takes time, and I'm too damned picky that I keep making adjustments or redoing large chunks. So I may do something character or background in the future, but I won't bother mentioning it until it's actually done

[Rasmus]

I hope it's okey that I continue this little offtopic discusson, otherwise tell me

@Roquen: Thank you for the advise about dual-quaternion, it helped me get some more info and the net, and a exporter for 3ds Max. Saved me alot of time!

@DSE: I managed to export a skinned mesh from 3ds max as a .X file. And it works in the skinned mesh example from DX9, the only problem I have now is with either the ID3DXAnimationController or with the exporter (I'm using Panda directx exporter).. The problem is that the Animationset comes out wrong :S Either it is inconsitant in speed or only rendering half the animation.. Need to research this some more. But I am thrilled as *** that I managed to export it, can't wait to get in working
But now it's time for bed

[DSE]

When I wrote mine (about 4 or 5 years ago), there was much less info on the net and the panda exporter was rubbish. I am glad they have improved it for you but you might want to export the .x file in ascii and get an understanding of the file format yourself. It looks like there is a lot of info out there now .... lucky boy.

[zoom]

concerning *fail with creatures.
In the 3d course at uni a guy who is rather adept at using 3dsmax failed to complete a complex(high resolution) human creature. I would have suggested to ask around in the university who wants to help out with creature meshes and so on but
it seems this is quite a task.(not asking but the work) btw,Paying for creatures or assets is almost an outrage. Really shocked me the first time I saw and read that here. One virtual lamp: 50 Dollars. Ridiculous but then there is time spent and know how involved.still...
Anyways, I really thought about doing the creatures myself. I have had some courses (basics) of 3dsmax, the others could be asked about mapping and animating with bones.Good atmosphere there.
I need a new computer, however. Searching for the real thing atm. Probably a netbook(portability) + desktop pc(meat). For rendering I would use the Uni computer pool. So the theory..
If you don´t hold your breath I could eventually do something about it. Practicing stuff by doing monstermeshes. we will see.
Concerning the quality of the creatures: what are the specs.?
not just for me but if someone reads through the entombed thread, then she/he could find info on what to tackle in what manner.(what you need; polygon count etc.?)

--makes me wonder: couldnt you use for testing purposes- the extracted NEXUS creatures? They are very basic it seems, and for a place holder they are not bad, no? Or is this flawed thinking on my part... You could always add turbosmooth to get higher resolution mesh - wise. the problem is probably the skinning. But I digress