Development Blog

The problem with components is that they don't always play well together, unless they are from the same manufacturer.

And in almost any game, you need all of the components anyway, so a complete library would work often better.

I used to actively do model rail-roading as you american chaps call it few years back, good thing to do with the lad. It was very expensive in terms of materials. Recently Steam had a special on the Railworks 2012 simulation which was great fun if a little buggy at first. The total cost of all the DLC available comes to something like 900+ UKP. As a simulation product it's done quite well, selling over 40,000 units according to the BBC. I guess deep down some of us still want to be train drivers.

 

Consistency is the problem with buying lots of off-the shelf components. You buy Hornby products and your layout looks like a Hornby layout. It will lack that hand-crafted look but still looks quite good...as a toy.

 

When started our project the intent was to buy in as many assets as we could to reduce the workload. How naive I was (I'm a programmer, not a 3D artist). The reality was that the quality was so variable even the ones we did buy and kept required some level of remodelling or at least re-texturing. Sometimes the amount of work would have been the same as building from scratch.

 

We bought a lot of veg from Pure3D and the vegetation packs were too good. Nothing else we had matched the quality. We needed to re-work the trees, dress them down to fit but unable to do that we switched to using our own "Elwynn Forest" (World of Warcraft) like trees which fitted our more simple, less natural looking feel. And quite often in a particular game title some smoke-and-mirrors are used to fool the player. Bushes the size of a house for example. Ground clutter that fills screen real-estate to give an overall impression rather than adhering to an artists attention to realism.

 

If you bought most of your stuff from Dexsoft or Pure3D you need to good pick-list to choose from. Of course if it's just hobby programming it doesn't matter at all. Unity is happy to sell you loads of rubbish that doesn't quite fit in a multitude of script languages.

 

One of the attractions of the Leadwerks engine is the restrictive nature of the assets you can use. DDS and GMF may seem like an awkward addition to the conversion process but it means you don't have JPGs, BMPs and GIFs littering your project and streamlines internal handling.

 

I recall someone from one of the now "free" SDKs giving a keynote speech, "You can make any game you want, so long as it's our game." And sure enough, most games made with that SDK look and play the same (to me).

 

If think once a store has a critical mass of content that comes from the same source, or at least built to the same specs and style, and offers multiple styles then it has potential to really take off.

 

Look at Ricks board game WIP, his characters come mostly from the same source and looks all the better for it. That's what's needed IMO.

i like the idea of reusable components... but for me i think it's more of a code component like than an art asset like...

 

that's why i'm such a fan of the oop approach to programming...

 

of course there are times where a good off the shelf wire fence, or a set of wood planks or concrete pillars reall save a lot of work... things like that i find valuable as far as art assets are concerned...

 

a fully rigged generic character model or a fully operational vehicle also would be a good "component" to have available...

 

but it would have to be easily customizable...

 

like someone alluded to above... seeing the same assets in different game would quickly become quite boring...

 

--Mike

Some interesting observations here. It seems like for premade models, it's all or nothing. If a single character has a value of n, a complete pack of characters has a value greater than 10n. So it would be best to focus on producing large sets of complete game assets instead of individual items.

I think the things taht looks like that toys pakcs in games are the MMO Side :

Like if you would have some range of 3D characters, with a range of hairs, armors, skins etc ...

like toys you could pick up and play with

 

If we would like to do same way with models for general common things like characters, the wya could be :

-Standard body character

- A set of heads (like in Oblivion)

- A Set of skins (monster, futurist, medieval , today etc ...)

- A Set of Armor pieces (up front , fore arms, front legs)

- A set of Weapons

ect ...

People could buy the basic model , than all Set that they need fo exmaple in a futurist game :

- Hats , skins, amor , weapon related to SciFi

 

Same things for house :

-A Basic shape

- Different skins, futurist, medieval

- different Roof types (plane, curved, standard , complex etc ...)

- Big windows, Doors that could be at place of the Doors and Windows drawn on the skin

etc ... all that in different sets like (Sci Fi, medieval etc ...)

 

But perhaps the best way could be like games using 3D tiles sets of ready to go 3D houses and assets, plus 3D terrain Tiles.

I think 3D tiles could be great to really let people express themselves freely.

(Liek people using FPS Creator, the yhave tiles, even if i don't like their system and if teh yhave could use real 3D tiles like in some AAA games (Dungeon Siege etc ...)

 

A Last way of doing Packs , could be in the style of Dragon Age games :

Some premade 3D Terrain ready to deform, selled with :

- several skin types

- 3D Assets in a style (medieval,, Si Fi etc ..)

- 3D effects in the same style for outdoor or environement

- 2 or 3 Music

- some ambient sounds

We bought a lot of veg from Pure3D and the vegetation packs were too good. Nothing else we had matched the quality.

lol thanks. Sorry that you have to dress down the models. ;-p

 

I buy model collections for arch-viz renderings a lot. its very cost efficient. but like in game-dev i dont mix several manufacturer of those models. Having coherent models in style is very important forthe audience eye.

lol thanks. Sorry that you have to dress down the models. ;-p

 

Well I hope you don't take it as a slight. It is a testament to your quality and should you be persuaded to publish a whole collection no one will be more pleased than I.

 

 

I like what YouGroove suggests, a coherent character system that's uniform and integrated would get people up and away moving custom characters around. Clothing packs sell quite well for other systems that are infuriatingly locked away by license restrictions from indie game developers.

 

That's one of the better, if not best Unity add-ons, the character builder system they just started. Mix and match skins, buy an animation and plug it in. Leadwerks has the TController, it would be awesome to have that combined with a TCharacter to deal with all the animation matching for clothing, walking and other animation.

 

Pick a skeleton, pick your animation to fit it, add the clothing/body mesh, bake as necessary, add to scene.

I agree with the above and I think someone was starting this as I remember a post about it. Not sure where it is yet, but a character building system would be so nice. So many games require basic human type characters yet you don't really see this kind of assembly line character creator. Everything is so specialized.

 

Make a base character for $25 and start selling accessories for .99 cents and you'll get a ton of transactions. I would assume this would be easier for the artist as well because making a fireman hat and texture is less time consuming and more modular than creating a fireman model. The more accessories you can pump out the more likely you'll hit the look someone is looking for and that you'll get a sale.

I agree with the character system as well. I would say go the route of Oblivion (supposedly much improved in Skyrim).

*insert witty comment about GIANTS software related to those images*

 

hehee

Some insane customisation : Decals adding lot of freedom !

With decals like that , you won't have all people having the same tatoos or Clothes in game

 

Insane Customisation APB Game

Wow, that is nice.

Oh my, I want some of THAT. That's an incredible level of customisation. How the hell do they do that?

Wow, that is nice.

 

Ya, the flexibility is awesome.

 

I have been playing APB a lot and studying how they layer all hundreds of images. It seems it's procedurally created in memory and applied to the texture of the model. I was trying to accomplish this in Leadwerks, but the decal bug kept killing my framerate...

 

*cough* texture rotation *cough*

I'm sure they're programmatically altering the texture's pixels, since character rendering is relatively expensive.