Legend of Bob: Trees, Fog and Smoke
Finally after a lot of effort, I got the tree model I had down to 40,000 faces, making it almost acceptable to put into the Totus Village Map in my AGT project. It still got that great, the game lags a lot around the camera is facing that direction, probably because it is being cel shaded.
I've also added a smoke particle effect, though I'm currently "borrowing" the smoke from Wind Waker.
At some point I'll be creating a campfire model to place below the smoke, and a small particle effect for fire. One thing I'd like to add to the map eventually would be some street lamps.
One thing last thing I'm happy about getting into the game is fog, though it wasn't needed it showed me how to do something I've been trying to figure out.
I was playing around with the values and different fog equations when I got distant objects to flatten to silhouettes like the landscape does in World of Warcraft.
Legend of Bob: GUI
After playing around a bit with Ogre3D, I decided making a 2D quad and rendering a GUI just wasn't happening when I tried doing it manually, so I've decided to use the built in GUI, despite its limitations.
Before setting up a ".overlay" file for the GUI, I decided to manually enter the information into Ogre3D, and despite the texture coordinates being messed up, everything was fine.
Using C.E.G.U.I (Crazy Eddie's Graphical User Interface), I setup an overlay file for the message box that would be displayed when talking to NPCs.
I brought in the edges slightly after a recommendation from one of my housemates, and then move the faceset image up slightly.
AGT: Legend of Bob
After getting my Totus Village model to a point where it can be used in a game, I've decided to use it in my AGT project "Legend of Bob". It is still a work in progress, at the moment I only have a fish and a player model.
Over time I'll be upgrading the models and effects to be better designed as more of the engine becomes active. At the moment I'm using a large texture (4096x4096 pixels) for the ground texture.
This ground texture is used to composite other smaller textures using a method known as "texture splatting", which gives soft transitions between different textures depending on the mixture of colours.
I've used this method for transitioning between grass, sand, and rock.
The water has been upgraded from its original appearance to be more cartoon like, originally it was a semi transparent water texture.
Now the water texture is an opaque Toon shaded graphic that I found in a Ocean based game on the internet. At some point I'll hopefully get around to making my own.
The town model is the most impressive part of the first town so far, being 52618 faces, 40000 of which are the tree (almost as bad as that 30000 face fish I had at one point).
But it is slowly being optimized, removing and merging polygons, and then afterwards, it will be split up and loaded as separate models, before being compiled into static geometry.
I've modified my shaders to give rings of brightness depending on the closeness to the player, this gives a more toon like effect, however I think the dark values are too strong at the moment, and need to be more subtle.
Texture Splatting Added
Added texture splatting to Tales of Phantasia for the ground. For those of you who don't know what texture splatting is, its when you use a texture with ARGB values on it which represent different textures. Their value out of 255 represents the percentage of the texture that should be mixed. So if you had 128 of green and 128 of blue, and green represented grass and blue represented sand, you would have 50% sand and 50% grass texture.
Using this technique, you can get gradient transitions between different textures, or have a bit of grass within your stone path, rather than using separate textures or splitting up the model.
Totus Village from Tales of Phantasia
A model of Totus Village I create for my A.G.T assignment for university. This model was made using Milkshape3D.
I started off my matching the ground to the size of the SNES version from the game Tales of Phantasia, one unit being one square. With this done, I could correctly map the walls and outer part of buildings to where they were in the game.
With that done I moved the vertices for the river, down one unit so that there was depth for the river. And extruding the wall quads upwards to creating a town wall.
To finish off the basic town setup, I created the buildings by placing new vertices for each corner of the wall, and forming two faces with them.
One problem when viewing the map in game is that it is possible to see the end of the world from a distance, that and the buildings are too tall.
So using a terrain generator within Milkshape3D and Photoshop, I made a height map for a mountain light region surrounding the town.
More recently I've started adding roofs to some of the buildings, and I created a rock object which I place around the town.
Some of the building are difficult to perceive what the roof looks like due to the way they were made in Tales of Phantasia.
AGT: Legend of Bob
My lecture module "AGT" for university has given me the new assignment of making a 3D game using Ogre3D. So I've decided to make a basic RPG which will be dubbed Legend of Bob.
Today I began working on the framework of the game, learned to use Ogre3D, and started looking for third party tools to use with it.
I'm thinking OpenAL for sound, XInput for input, and some kind of physics library for physics (I know, why does an RPG need physics, but I'm required to use at least three third party libraries).