Jump to content

Dnas

WFG Retired
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    1.854

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Dnas

    The Vale of Tempe

    in Screenshots

    Posted

    I've always thought a first-person RTS would be cool, or even a game where you play one of the characters in an RTS game instead of the God or leader position.

    Another thing I thought would be awesome is an FPS game where you play as a soldier in an ancient battle rather than these lame gun-oriented games.

    I did see something like that while randomly browsing the web at some point... this guy and that guy. Never tried them, but apparently the former is now freeware.

    To Blender...

    in Computer Desk

    Posted · Edited by Dnas

    HTML, Java, etc. won't help or hurt you with learning Blender.

    I would recommend you try it. It's a very nice program, and quite powerful... although somewhat different than others. Plus it's free, so it doesn't hurt to install it and try it. (y) (Install Python too if you're on Windows. It doesn't come with a Python install and Blender works much better with one.)

    People seem to either love the Blender interface or hate it. (Personally I'm in the former group. :) With the exception of the file chooser... that bit really needs work.) It's very different from the majority of programs out there, but I think it's a very good UI for what it's supposed to do, work with 3d. It does however take a bit of time to get the hang of it. Once you do, you'll (hopefully) appreciate its power.

    Another thing to note is that Blender relies very much on hotkeys. It started out as an in-house program for a Dutch animation studio, so the design is meant to be easy to use, rather than easy to figure out. Meaning, once you get the hang of it, you can work with it really fast, but figuring out may take a little effort. (Although it depends on what kind of programs you're used to... e.g. if you use Vim for editing, it should feel quite comfortable. :)) It's getting easier and easier to figure out though.

    Blender has very nice documentation though. And, more importantly, it has a very active user community. There are several forums where you can ask for help or show off pretty pictures. Click Community on the Blender website. (Blender Artists is good.)

    The best place to start is probably one of the guides that walks you through creating a nice model and animation starting from nothing. Then you can play with many parts of Blender and get of feel of how things tend to work.

    This one is one of my favorites.

    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Int...acter_Animation

    Mostly because, unlike Gus the gingerbread man, the final model isn't horrible-looking. :)

    It doesn't give a very good primer for the interface though. (The interface is really cool. You can split things arbitrarily and quickly shuffle everything around to fit your current task... and then save the layout and switch between various screens.) So I'd recommend you skim through this first.

    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartI/Interface

    And... this is a very nice place to look for a general reference. If some part of a tutorial is poorly explained (e.g. navigating in 3d) you can read the relevant section.

    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual

    One little note, it might be difficult for you at the start if you don't have much 3d experience, regardless of what program you use. 3d modeling is complicated, so it can take a bit to get into it.

    By the way, (not sure if you use a Mac or whatever) if you don't have one, you probably want to get a mouse with at least two buttons and a clickable scroll. Blender is really awkward to use without them. :)

    What tools are you using?

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    Moreutils: http://kitenet.net/~joey/code/moreutils/

    If you run a real i.e. UNIX-based OS*, these are AWESOME. Not quite as essential as grep, etc., but some of these are a real time-saver.

    For example, with vidir, you practically don't need any more batch renamers again. It creates a file with a list of the directory, and runs $EDITOR on it. When you close your editor, it make those changes to file names.

    More stuff:

    http://debaday.debian.net/2007/04/15/moreu...and-line-tools/

    * Well they work on Linux anyway, I'd expect in OS X and other *NIXs as well.

    vim and emacs. Best editors ever. QED. :)

    http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

    Mplayer. Media player, media encoder, plays everything you throw at it.

    Beryl: http://beryl-project.org/

    Despite the hype around the less sensible effects, it's actually an immense productivity booster if used as such. Before playing with Beryl, I had thought transparent windows were the dumbest thing ever. I still think that they're annoying when turned on, but it is actually quite useful to be able to fade out an Emacs buffer while Firefox is open.

    youtube-dl - Download youtube videos. I think there are Firefox extensions that do this too, but I like this better.

    http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

    fortune-mod: Should be installed on most unices. Great fun to put a fortune dubya in your .bashrc

    bash-completion: Gives bash smart completion. Very convenient.

    http://www.caliban.org/bash/

    LyX: Useful when you don't want to deal with LaTeX but still want to make a pretty document.

    http://www.lyx.org/

    bash: bash is an incredibly powerful shell, but most people don't ever learn all the amazing features of it. Taking the time to read the bash man page in full is a must.

    conky: A really nice system monitor.

    http://conky.sourceforge.net/

    apt/emerge/whatever: The best time saver of all! Can install everything in the above and more without having to click a single link!

    3D 'Virtual reality' computer modeling

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    InDex: That looks pretty fun to play with. Although, I'm not so sure how well I'd be able to model in it. It seems more suited for architecture stuff, which I'm not very interested in. Though some aspects of it may be useful in usual tools... I've never been fully satisfied with how one interacts with the world in traditional modelers.

    3d desktop: Looks like a fun game to play with... physics simulations are always lots of fun to use... but I'm somewhat skeptical of it having much use... (not because it's Windows... I believe I've seen something similar someone's been developing with Cairo and OpenGL on Linux... although this one has fewer of the problems...)

    The 3d desktop thing seems to have features designed with a mimic-the-real-world-for-fun mindset rather than a what-would-be-useful-and-natural mindset... for example, the folding of corners or how collisions move others around.

    When I use a computer to organize my data, one of the reasons is that it allows me to be very precise with what I do. Turning things into a real-world simulation completely drops that and I'm again left with the same old problem. InDex seems to solve this problem with various guides and things, which don't really work for a file management system....

    It also seems to suffer from the thumbnail-less world of Windows... but it seems the system supports it, from the end of the video. In a normal file manager, the situation is bearable, but I cannot see how this setup could ever be useful without thumbnails for each file... otherwise, how can one tell what the file is?

    And the final problem would be the obsession with 3d everyone is having these days... I really don't think 3d should enter the world of file management until some really different ideas for manipulating things come around that are really a ton better than a 2d approach. The input devices we have aren't quite yet fit to move around in it well enough and it adds an extra layer of seemingly unpredictable-ness to it... which is bad.

    Meh, personally I think what file management really needs is some intuitive and well-designed combination of the traditional folders approach and tags/labels/whatever-they're-called-now.

    My somewhat biased and skeptical 2ยข. :)

  12. Cinematics

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Awesome.

    This is very nice. The only problem I noticed is that for some reason, my VLC shows green squares on the first few frames of the videos I make, but QuickTime doesn't. I assume it's VLC's fault.

    Perhaps this mplayer warning is related.

    [mpeg4 @ 0x87e000c]warning: first frame is no keyframe

    The first frame is probably encoded fussily so some players do and some don't display it. And since (I assume) that video codecs store differences between frames, that would explain the green (or black in my case with mplayer) squares at the beginning.

    (For the record, it plays fine in xine and totem (gstreamer) for me, but not in mplayer.)

  13. Cinematics

    in Game Development & Technical Discussion

    Posted

    Well, if FFmpeg or whatever is integrated to the editor (I'm sure scenario designers would love to be able to render cinematics into movies) I don't think it would matter if there is a disable-tricks flag, since it's expected that rendering a movie wouldn't be real-time. (Plus it probably would be lower res too.)

    Awesome videos, Christoph. You make me want to have a decent video card even more. :shrug: (Integrated Intel chips are evil!!)

  14. Suggestions for 0 A.D.

    in Gameplay Discussion

    Posted

    AoK was constrained by its technology. With 2d graphics, it is EXTREMELY difficult to have unique art, etc. for as many civs as it had, without exploding in how much space you use (which is limited, and was even more limited back then).

    AoK, for its technology and time, was an amazing game. I am more of a modder than a gamer, so, yes, I did mostly abandon it for AoM, because AoK wasn't particularly easily moddable. But as a game, AoK was considerably more fun.

    AoM had a new 3d engine, and thus had all the advantages of a 3d game, but didn't go any further. So yes, you will see many things where AoM improves over AoK. With the new engine, it would be silly if it didn't.

    But we should have seen a LOT more. Not just the obvious things, but new things to truly exploit the engine. We haven't seen anything particularly innovative (in my rather sideways look on things anyway :shrug:) yet in even AoE3, much less AoM.

    Of course, AoM is a good game too. But not for innovativeness.

    This is why you'll find AoK has a much more loyal fanbase than AoM. B) The developers put more work into the gameplay and innovation, and it shows.

  18. Questions

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    The art is created by whatever programs the artists like working best with.

    I believe most of us use Photoshop for texturing and 3DS Max for modeling/unwrapping.

    A few of us (i.e. me :shrug:) use The GIMP for texturing and Blender for modeling/unwrapping.

    (Have I missed anything?)

    IE Question

    in Computer Desk

    Posted

    Oh, that's easy. Just download this upgrade. http://www.ie7.com/ ;)

    Or you can probably dig for the entry in your history somewheres and delete it there, but that's a huge pain and, in my opinion, really not worth it. :D

    Or do you want to just clear the entire history, not one particular entry? Then... somewhere under Options I think there was a clear history button....

    Lorian: Hey, that's cool. I never knew that before. :P

  20. 0 A.D. unrivaled?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1280x1024's not...? hmm, good point. Never noticed that. (Yeah, I'm rather inattentive for a math geek, meh, whatever.)

    Strange, all my monitors are currently at 1280x1024.

    How did that resolution come about anyway, if it's not the same ratio as the others?

  21. So what will be customizeable?

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    @Belisarivs: No, I'm working on a script that does that. :blush:

    What Titus meant by a skeleton is that we have for example a set of "Dude" models that contain a unit's body and such. Then another file specifies which props to attach where, for example the head, helmet, weapons.

    In addition, animations are separate from models, so as long as a model as the same bone structure as our standard dudes, the old animations can be reused.

    This way we avoid the need to recreate a lot of our assets, and modders will have a lot of material to work with.

    You'd probably end up not having to model that much. I would expect the majority of your work would be texturing and modelling small props.

    Yes, we use dds. We'll provide tools to convert textures.

    Editors

    in Computer Desk

    Posted · Edited by King Tutankhamun

    (Oooh the new poll UI is nifty)

    I was just curious what text editors* you use. (Please no emacs and vim holy wars.... although I doubt there'll be any here.)

    Sorry about the Windows and Mac list being small... I don't use either (and when I do, I tend to pull over ports of the standard Linux tools) so... yeah...

    I personally use vim these days although I load up emacs when I'm typing large amounts of text... as in.. normal text as opposed to code. And I'll occasionally use nano for just some quick note-keeping while doing something. (And, of course, copious usage of bash's output forwarding and tee.)

    * As in... plain text. word processor =/= text editor

×
×
  • Create New...