wraitii

LOD can certainly be implemented, it should not be that difficult to do, just takes some times and preparation. I'm not really seeing how not having LOD can limit you creatively, though. The game is basically in Beta without the name now, someday we'll actually get the whole team on board and call it that. It still lacks a few fundamental features but it's very playable, includes a somewhat complete and competent AI, and is not as slow as it once was.

Kicking_Bird: I suggest you check the configuration file and change the material quality to 10.0 We indeed do not have LOD currently, mostly because we would have no artist to make the lower quality meshes (it could be automated but that would give a meh result).

No, you should only need one UV. I'm fairly sure it's just because the code is not obvious and slightly buggy.

Updated with flatter back, a bunch of other things, a mouth, and a "proper" texture. At least the UV-ing is good.

I felt like trying to model this evening, so I went out and made a Hyena. I think the model itself is fairly accurate (enough for the game at least), I did some crap texturing job but I really suck at texturing. Will probably try to armature and possibly animate it later. Any comments? Edit: update below.

There's indeed some form of bug/misuse here. Right now you would need to also add a "<define name="USE_SPECULAR_MAP" value="1"/>" to your material file, and I'd recommend making the specular map all black (if you don't want specular) or all white. But that shouldn't be needed. You also need "USE_SELF_LIGHT", you need to set prefer GLSL, and you need to provide a specTex. (I won't fix it right now since we're in commit Freeze for A18 but it'll be fixed in SVN soon.)

That sounds like a bug. I'll see if I can fix it quickly.

Indeed I checked the shader and it's the specular map alpha that matters for self-illumination.

Did you change your configuration file so that "materialmgr.quality" is 3 or more?

Are you using "Prefer GLSL"? I'm fairly sure this material only works in GLSL mode.

BTW because of what I'll call a bug for now you need to set the config parameter "materialmgr.quality" to more than 2. Your "turn them into something else" feature doesn't sound entirely impossible depending on what you want, but it would require some engine changes. You could create your own meshes that have a special "transform" animation that you would slowly update to change their shape, but changing their texture dynamically is currently unsupported (it's not impossible to add though, might even be added as a mod-only thing, not sure).

Basic_glow uses the specular map (defined by spec_tex) as a "self-illumination" texture, so you can use that to make your texture self-lit. We don't support actual glow maps as so far the engine can only handle one light, though I think with the bloom post-proc shader you'd get some bloom effect. If you need to, you could make your own custom material that uses the normal map too and still self-illuminates or something.

I haven't recompiled my libraries in a while, so maybe that's it? It does look like you're right, so I'm just going to go with "my libraries are outdated".

I found why I had an error trying to compile AtlasUI: it couldn't find the linked library libjpeg. I added to the library search path the proper file and it worked. Then it couldn't find libtiff, so I added "/usr/local/lib" to the path (perhaps unnecessary, unsure?) and relinked in homebrew and it worked.

Terrain height is something we'd have to deal with (and rely on the mapmaker)... I hadn't thought about the LOS issue though, I'm not sure it still applies.

I'd like it if we add several more actor entities/props that were a lot bigger and could be used to plot, say, 20 bushes, more water lillies or about half a screen of grass at once. Since the game currently struggles with rendering many small entities rather than few big ones, it could be used to optimize our actor rendering and thus allow us to make our maps better. I'd like to have some "forest undergrowth" stuff too like they had in AoE 3, with some flowers, bushes, small trees perhaps added. Note that for efficiency it'd have to be a single mesh, not several props. Should I make a task for this?

It's not even a GUI change, you can already plop buildings form other buildings simply if you add those to the templates. And iirc it's extremely easy to have them self-construct but I can't recall how I did it last time. Anyway the idea sounds pretty cool so I say go ahead Exporting 3D models can be slightly tricky, yes. And that does look like you lost the UVs. By the way, the engine: -only handles triangles and single-faced polygons (so you have to do double-faced ones yourself) -only handles "smooth" rendering: to have sharp angles, you need to split polygons (effectively doubling the vertices) -can handle up to 4 textures (I think it's 4 though that can be modded to be higher, perhaps you'd have to change C++) for whatever you might need - shaders currently use "diffuse, specular, normal, AO" but it could be something else entirely. -can handle basically any number of polygons per unit that you would require. The biggest slowdown right now is that we don't instance so it's rendering several small units that is really costly. -cannot handle fancy transparency effect such as distortion through glass or stuffs like that. -has only one water plane.

Everything is collada files, including the animations, iirc .pmd are binary collada files generated by the engine's archiver. Some files are of this format in the public art because they're really old.

That's still a few years away, sadly

Yeah and if possible make it so that those smaller fields (I think you can comfortably fit 4 in this big one) should adapt to terrain height so it'd sorta look like terraced rice fields on hills.

The last version is too squarish, both in the wall and the rice plants themselves, but with just a little bit of fudging imo it'd work well. Just make sure we can plot them in-game so that the "ground" areas overlap. Maybe make it a bit smaller to give a more "condensed" impression? Since otherwise it'd quickly look weird on hills.

This has been thought about but isn't trivial to implement. We'll get to it someday.

Some comments: You might have done this already but you should probably separate each field to use an adaptative height like we do with farm trees. Everything I've seen about terraced rice farms suggests it looks more like a "step pyramid" than what you've done so far. I would try making it more regular and have more elements to make "thinner" rice fields (if you had 7 stages instead of 3, it'd probably look a lot better) I suggest you reduce the height of your walls a lot. On flat ground, it should basically look like a single, big water field, but shouldn't come out of the ground much. I would also try using the "adaptative height" feature to make it look like a single field on flat terrain. Basically have several terraces, but put them slightly below the water line (on flat ground). If there is some elevation, they will come up and be seen, but on flat ground it'll look like this. My suggestion is to think of it like a step pyramid: the lowest terrace should be the size of the whole thing, then each subsequent level slightly smaller. The rice itself looks somewhat fine but I'd make sure it looks less square-ish.

Quick design issue: I've noticed that in svn currently the game has a tendency to wildly rotate the camera when you use a two finger "swipe left/right" gesture on a trackpad (which is done often when you try to select stuff in a box). I think this should be changed before A18. (may have been posted before, I haven't checked everything)

For future references, SVN currently seems to compile fine against the 10.10 SDK. Can't try to run it just yet because I haven't updated to Yosemite yet. I'm still getting a linker error on the atlas UI but I think it might be my setup.