I offer contribution (mostly textures)

[Strongground]

Hi! here is my application form. ^^

Position: Textures and maybe building-models or stuff like rock formations, web-stuff as needed, I can do anything from scripting, maintenance to design.

Do you understand that Wildfire Games is a non-commercial project, work for 0 A.D. is volunteer, and work is done for free? Yes

Do you agree to distribute all your work for Wildfire Games under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license? Yes

Name: Noël Ströhmer

Email: noel(at)strongground(dot)de

MSN Messenger: I only use ICQ-protocol via Pidgin: 344859287 (at monthly basis if ever)

Location: Cologne, Germany

Availability: I am bad at boring long term assignments. I tend to burn out fast on a repititive tasks. I always complete an assignment, but am not always able to accept one due to much IRL-stuff happening. I will be available until August 2012 and then move to Strasbourg for half a year, undecided how much time I will have around there. In a typical week I am available from Monday to Friday and roughly every second weekend. I can do 2-5 hours per day.

Age & Occupation: I am 25, finishing my education as a web-designer thingy.

Skills and Experience: I started modding Unreal (the first game) and Half-Life back in the days when I got my first computer, when I was around 10. It was great fun and I learned alot every day (I still do, but progress tends to get slower, must be my brain aging I played RTS from the beginning, got AoE as it was brand new and as soon as a game had an editor, I usually spent more time editing then playing. I started learning Photoshop back with Version 6 (must've been around 2000) and consider myself good at it today. I also started learning Web-stuff (HTML, CSS) some decade ago and also couldn't help myself but stray a bit towards programming (I did a really nice text-adventure on the C64! It had random combat and a rudimentary inventory ) and also web-programming (PHP, JS mostly, some Python along the road). I recently started to dig 3D modelling in 3Ds Max. I tried Blender a few times, but it utterly confused me. Also the video tutorials for Max are nicer. I learned most of it by trying, some stuff via youtube (it didn't always exist though).

My skills in relative skill-levels from 1-5:

Texturing/Mapping, anything 2D: 5

Web-development without programming: 4

Web-programming: 3

3D-modelling: 2

Playing guitar: 1

Motivation: I just love being creative with the computer and also without (but I am badly out of practice with my analogue skills ^^). I used to draw and sketch as a child ALOT. I love games, played them my whole life. My deep love is with Age of Empires and Age of Kings. I am also interested in the game creation itself, often finding the process of creating assets and fusing them together to create a game more interesting, than the actual game itself. I know that I have a lot to learn, and I always want to know how things work. This drives me. I followed the progress of this game since 2006 (I believe) when searching for a Rome-modification for AoK. Guess who made one. ^^ After finding about this other project of Wildfire, I downloaded. I saw things that could be better in my opinion. Nowadays I think I actually can make them better, helping me to get better and helping the game to get better the same time (imagine dramatic music reaching its peak at this point and slow camera zoom-out and fade into sunset...)

Personality: I think you may actually have a good picture of me from the stuff I wrote above. If there are questions, ask me. I am curious, not too social, nice and lazy. Average nerd.

Short Essay: Oh, I thought that was part of the "Motivation" part. Do I really have to write it all again?

Interests and Hobbies: Well, at the moment the Skyrim effect starts to slowly wear off, leaving me with some spare time (strange feeling). Apart from playing what I like (golden oldies like AoK with Wildfire Rome mod, slightly expanded by me to have Gauls and Celts in it), I started doing my own little project which is stagnating at the moment over some unsolved problems in my approach to modular modelling, I love to watch movies, surfing the web, sometimes doing stuff in Photoshop. I also work too much. If any time is left after all that (and even if not), I visit my girlfriend every second weekend.

Community: I used to be in all sorts of modding forums for Half-Life (most notably thewall.de) but at the moment there is no forum where you would find me being active.

Favorite Game: Overall Favorite is very tricky and depends much on the timeframe, I think. I love TES:Oblivion, Skyrim, Age of Empires 1/2, Unreal, Half-Life, Sudden Strike but I played so much games trough all the years, I cannot really limit myself to these few. They just come to my mind first. At the moment the most clicked Icon on my screen is the SkyrimNesus ModManager (to start the game and my 100+ mods ^^)

Work Examples: I am going to upload stuff that is really old and very recent stuff, so this a very mixed display of examples. Not all reflects the best I can do. Thus I will comment each piece and post without any order.

These were supposed to be icons for a yet another "rome vs. gauls"-themed browser game, but they are general enough to be used in any kind of strategy game. The others (more buildings and tech icons) were created but I am unable to find the sources and I am afraid the dev-team doesn't exist anymore.The game is dead too.

Concept study of art-style for some kind of "mini-suddenstrike" where you could not directly control units, but merely watch - hence the filename "diorama". Sadly never went beyond concept status.

And while we are at iso-pixel-style, I did these for the open-source "transport-tycoon"ish "SimuTrans", which has a very broad fanbase and is entirely community developed. You can play with graphics set "PAK96 comic" to see all of my creation.

One of my few attempts at spaceship design for the - largely - crowd developed space 4X-MMO "Infinity: Quest for Earth", I also did some artwork concept stuff for a giant space-station inside an astroid, but that looks rather basic nowadays. This is before I actually learned to model properly (or at least trying to learn).

This is the recent WIP of my attempt to rebuilt the interior of the Cologne Cathedral (it will serve as a kind of base or save(sic!) heaven for the player)... not entirely textured. Runs not too fast on lower grade computers and/because has only basic occlusion culling implemented. Also ignore the messed up SSAO and rough lightmapping. :/

Attempt on papercraft, which in a way, is texturing very basic shapes (at least for me, I can't cut and glue too precise ) This is a space marine landing pod for a table-top game (Warhammer 40k to be precise). The Ultramar-logo thingy is ripped of google images, the rest is hand-made brushed and the odd photo-texture. Because it is made to look good even when printed out, here is the full-res version where you can see every detail: http://www.extern.st...od-textured.jpg. The basic shape and glue-laps and stuff were made by Louis Taylor and offered under CC license on his blog.

This series of pictures show my attempt at a 2D-topdown zombie shooter. Elements of the gameplay design went into the new 3D-project. And I do not mean only the zombies! ^^ It had some cool features, like ammo system (pick up, reload takes time to scare you and allow zombies to get closer), reeally scary sound samples and background (all cc licensed) and this kind of dynamic light system that tends to get stuck with ordering layers and ... a missing player model? It should still sit somewhere on my rig or in some cloud storage service.

Its a roof texture, duh! 512px diffuse/normal/spec maps and a basic model with only 4 polys, normal map generated using heightmap, giving a quite nice effect.

This is a building that actually sits right over the street if I look out of the window. Was done for the new project and exploring possibilitys - windows, dirt and small details are completely modular, giving random assigned window-textures for example (only 3 types per window-form to choose from in this example). Looks also really nice with normal maps, not visible in this screen 'cause of prerendered lightmaps disabling dynamic lightning.

This is about it. I got tons of other stuff but in my opinion most if it is crap, but if you may want to see a special area closer, just tell me.

So this is it, my application into this great project. I really really hope to take place in development - the first thing that itches me is to change the particles, I found them to look quite bland in Alpha 10. Next step will probably to get SVN-version up-and-running.

Whatever decision is made, thanks already for this great game!

Best regards,

Noël

Edited May 28, 2012 by Strongground

[feneur]

Thank you for your application. Our Art lead is a bit busy at the moment, so it would be great to have you work on something as a test both to have something to do while you wait for his reply and to get more familiar with the art files Since you mention the particles, why not that? Remember to use only your own or other resources with compatible licenses.

How would you feel about creating icons? Looking at your first examples it looks as if you'd be good at that

[Strongground]

Hi feneuer.

Of course I'd like do an example. I already read the document describing the XML which controls any given particle emitter.

One quick question though: If I extract the public.zip and start editing XMLs, are these extracted files automatically taking precedence over the zipped file? How does hotswapping work else, because editing or opening the public.zip after the game is running is not possible.

Okay, somehow I failed to realize it works exactly like that. I am tweaking particle-effects right now.

I love doing icons, any particular ones you are unhappy with? Are there already any guidelines concerning icon design (in the art doc I couldn't find any)?

Edited May 28, 2012 by Strongground

[Pureon]

I love doing icons, any particular ones you are unhappy with? Are there already any guidelines concerning icon design (in the art doc I couldn't find any)?

Could you create an icon for Vision LOS increase and/or Population cap increase similar in style to the icons below?

[Mythos_Ruler]

Hi, Noel. Great application. As far as icons go, we need tons of technology icons for the game. So yeah, what Pureon has shown you there, if you could try your hand at attempting to make something like those that would be great. We're also looking to make new units textures for a Mauryan India faction too, so if you're interested in unit textures for soldiers, then show what you can do there.

[Strongground]

Hi!

@Pureon: Thanks for the assignments, I'll do those two and we'll see if I fit the art style.

@Mythos: Thanks! Yep, I am interested in texturing, also because it is something I don't have soo much experience as with traditional 2D artwork.

First I will finish my particle overhaul of some of the smoke, flames and building dust, and then concentrate on the icons.

[Pureon]

@Pureon: Thanks for the assignments, I'll do those two and we'll see if I fit the art style.

Sounds good