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Walkcycle WIP:

Just curious. Who and when first thought of priests as healers? This never happened in history. Priests participated in battles, but only for doing divination and asking gods for help. They never (until 19 century) acted as healers. Is there a possibility for a more realistic functioning of the priests?

The concept looks better, but the proportions are way off. The doors look tiny compared with the rest of the structure, or the structure is huge. We're not aiming for 100% realistic structure scale compared to units, (buildings would be too big for a RTS) but you should make some parts like the doors correspond with the unit sizes in the game. You should definitely try to import a dock or a building from the game in order to get better proportions. In the texturing side, you can see how small are the bricks in the big structure compared with the ones in the lighthouse. Or how the surrounding blocks in the square platform has much less texels than the other mapped textures. You should work on that too.

Very realistic. Maybe it's not necessary to have the toes of the hind legs going up.

I think the priests as healers are a game mechanic, which a player can use to buff her army. Having healers then becomes a strategical choice and opportunity to change the odds in a battle. Essentially, if two similar armies get into a fight, the one with healers will last longer and win the fight (even if the opponent goes for the healers first, leaving them vulnerable to the army's soldiers). While there may be no historical basis (as asking for help is not the same as actually healing someone), I think this is where a game can (and should be allowed to) deviate from reality to make the game more fun and deepen the tactical possibilities. Healing adds a restorative element, next to the damage dealing of the soldiers themselves (similar to the RPG trinity of DPS/tank/healer). If you do not agree, I'm curious to learn why not? How would you see the priest's role?

A brilliant idea just occurred to me. I mentioned in my previous post (from eight months ago ) that almost all of the Greek gods were pricks. In fact, I read recently that there were three in particular who weren’t: Hestia, Hermes, and Hades (though even then, it’s more to the effect of them not getting as pissed off as easily as the others ). In fact, iirc, the individual Olympians were so petty that they could get angry at mortals for worshipping a different god instead of them! Anyway, here’s the main idea. The Greeks in Godstorm have a unique trait where, when they choose a particular Minor God to worship in order to advance to the next Phase, they (metaphorically) lose favor with the other two gods from that Phase (even if they didn’t get the option to worship one of them in the first place since it’s always a two-god option) and get a negative addition to the benefits given by the other two gods for not doing so (for instance, if you choose to worship Artemis to advance, then you get all the stuff Artemis will give you, but Hephaestus would take away some of your weapons and armor strength and Apollo would weaken your healers as a result). The trade-off, however, is that Greek myth units are slightly stronger to make up for it in addition to whatever benefits they may have gained during the course of a game already (for instance, taking a Relic that would improve them in some way). I think this accurately represents the pettiness of the Greek gods and makes the Greeks more unique. I got a second idea at the same time as well. Remember my mention of Hestia, Hermes, and Hades earlier? I’m thinking that I’ll completely revise the in-game Greek pantheon so that those three are the initial gods that you can pick after selecting your Major God, and they don’t take anything away from you (as something of an early-game courtesy) to represent their not being as vindictive as the rest, as well as reflecting their comparative importance or power to the other gods presented. This means that Hades would no longer be the “designated villain” of the Greek Major Gods. Who will take his place? Why, Hera, of course! Arguably the pissiest of all the Greek gods (well, except maybe for her husband ) but she definitely would be the typical villain as far as Zeus—the “designated hero” of the Greek gods—is concerned. She was merciless towards any of Zeus’ children that weren’t her own (and even some that were her own; Hephaestus still hasn’t recovered from her throwing him off Olympus the day he was born!) and is always ultimately the villain in vaguely accurate renditions of the tales of Hercules (Disney notwithstanding) In summation: The Greek gods being jerks is represented by aspects of the Greek civ being slightly worsened by choosing to worship a particular godGreek myth units are slightly stronger than comparable ones from other civs to make up for the aboveThe Town Phase Minor Gods are revised to Hades, Hermes, and Hestia and WILL NOT subtract from civ elementsHera is now the “evil” Greek Major God in the good-neutral-evil setupEDIT: a small amendment--Demeter and Hephaestus were also among the less vindictive Olympians

What program did you use to animate it? Is Blender working for Collada animations?

Soo.... I decided to animate these elephants, I worked a lot on them and it's a little sad to see them sliding around. So I took the african elephant skeleton and modified it, applied bone wheight in vertex groups to make the deforms look good. Once rigged I started from the african elephant animations and modified them for these asian models. The death animation was done from scratch. Sorry for the crappy presentation I hope to get these ingame soon. (some further tweaking needed)