Springheel's Stuff

[New Horizon]

Wow Spring, that's awesome.

 

Seriously, with skins...you would think it's a brand new model.

[Ishtvan]

Yeah, that looks pretty awesome. Maybe we could include a head with a leather cap instead of a helmet, since heads are so easy to mix & match?

[Springheel]

We just need some modellers to make some leather caps or hats, and they can be attached fairly easily. I've given that task to two different contributors, but they both vanished.

[Springheel]

Here's a new design for the prelate model--the Inquisitor.

 

Since the Builder religion is based on an Inquisition-style Catholicism, I think it makes sense to have a character like this.

 

(click for larger image.

Image over-bright to show detail)

 

While Builder Guards are the foot-soldiers of the Church, Inquisitors are the judges, lawyers, and executioners. They are charged with rooting out heresy wherever they find it. It is the Inquisitors who enforce Church Law, and who seek out the enemies of the Church. They are highly trained in the art of 'assisting' confessions, and are also responsible for assigning appropriate punishment once the confession is made.

 

The Inquisitors rank somewhere between guards and priests in the heirarchy of the Church, but they are by far the most feared by regular folk, who speak of their uncanny ability to spot signs of heresy where others could not.

 

In game terms, I thought it would be appropriate to give these guys a higher visual and auditory acuity than normal, to represent their highly trained senses (they're used to listening to faint whispers or spotting hidden signs of heresy). I thought we should also make them a little more threatening in combat than an average guard--I don't think we'll be able to animate the two-hammer fighting style Oddity originally proposed, but I wondered if we could keep the idea of them being able to heat up their hammer when in combat? Kind of suits their penchant for using burning iron to extract confessions.

[Crispy]

He does not look friendly...

 

So you mean the head of the hammer starts glowing like hot iron when they go into combat mode, and does extra damage with appropriately fire-y sound effects (like sizzles)? Interesting idea. Is it technically doable? I guess the hammer would need to have an additional skin which is faded between... I think materials can do animated fades, but I'm not sure how one would trigger it from within code.

[Gildoran]

It's certainly possible from scripting... For example, if the hammer is a separate entity, you could write a FadeTo script function which starts a thread to fade the hammer's shaderparms over time. (you could even have it check if there's an already existing thread to do that)

[Crispy]

I was thinking more along the lines of "without adding extra SDK support". But of course we can do that, it'll just make it take longer to implement.

[Gildoran]

I mean it would be possible with scripting, without using SDK support. And I don't think scripting would take any longer than the SDK.

[Crispy]

OK. Never mind then. When you said "script function" I thought you meant implementing a scriptevent, implying SDK modification... so I'll shut up and go back into my corner now.

[OrbWeaver]

I like the glowing hammer idea - Doom 3's ability to have materials emit particle effects is very cool, and should be used more often IMO.

[Springheel]

I think we could do it even easier...just have the 'sheathed' hammer as a separate entity than the 'held' hammer. So when he draws his weapon, the sheathed one is destroyed and a new one (with the 'hot' skin) is spawned. It would be nicer to have it fade in and out, but it isn't absolutely necessary if it becomes tricky to do.

 

Having a very faint orange glow coming off the hammer would be really cool. Imagine sneaking around an extremely dark church dungeon, and suddenly from the corner a hammer flares up, illuminating the face of an otherwise hidden inquisitor....

[Crispy]

The scarier, the better!

[Ishtvan]

We could also have the script to start the hammer a-glowin (fade in material) called in the draw animation. Anim frame commands can call scripts already AFAIK. That way they'd draw the hammer and it would start glowing. I added a scriptfunction a while back for doing things like this that returns a script entity-pointer to an attachment with a given index. So you'd need to know the order of attachments and remember which one was the hammer. Or, if you want, you could call the function to get the total number of attachments and iterate thru each entity until you get the one with the right soft classname for the hammer weapon.

 

Out of curiosity though, why couldn't we do two hammer fighting? It would require unique animations, but other than that it wouldn't be that technically complicated.

[Springheel]

Mostly because of the animation issues. We'd need unique drawing/sheathing and attacking animations for this one model. Maybe we'll have time to do that later, but for now I think we should make him useable without them.

[Springheel]

Here are three different spider skins. The one in the middle is actually designed to match the colour scheme of the spider queen, so they can be 'spider children'.

 

(They'd be on SVN by now, except after trying to do it twice and getting that stupid error about "no meaningful comment" I've decided I'm not going to bother uploading them until I'm absolutely sure I don't intend to make any slight changes later.)

[ascottk]

Here are three different spider skins. The one in the middle is actually designed to match the colour scheme of the spider queen, so they can be 'spider children'.

Geez Spring, how hard is to make a comment? Here's what I've been commenting:

ascottk: several changes to belcher & spider def & added a few more animations & added new aas entityDef

ascottk: head gear for inventor engineer

ascottk: new ragdoll for spider

You don't have to sign your life away. It is irritating when there's nothing in the svn email. It's like, yeah, but what did you commit? Just put a comment like this:

added spider skins

It's that easy. In tortoise just type in the box while committing:

 

Sorry about that but yeesh. Get over it.

 

BTW, nice skins

[Crispy]

AIIIIE! Redback spider. Someone fetch me a mallet.

 

Nice work!

[sparhawk]

(They'd be on SVN by now, except after trying to do it twice and getting that stupid error about "no meaningful comment" I've decided I'm not going to bother uploading them until I'm absolutely sure I don't intend to make any slight changes later.)

 

Well, that's a good thing then. If you know that you still need fixes, it's better to keep it and fix it first.

 

The skins look good though.

[mikebart]

the redback, I find a few of them around the house, my only crit is I think the redback should have a black head apart from that they look awesome

[Crispy]

Is it just me or are these guys missing a couple of eyes? They have 6, and I thought spiders had 8... *researches* According to Wikipedia, 8 eyes is most common but some species have 6 and even 4 eyes. Guess that's OK then.

[OrbWeaver]

the redback, I find a few of them around the house, my only crit is I think the redback should have a black head apart from that they look awesome

 

That's exactly what I first thought. Normally I would expect the body and the head to have similar colouring, since it is most likely the colouring evolved for camouflage reasons and both the head and the body would need concealing. It would be quite cool to have a mostly-brown spider for the rocky cave setting and a mostly-black spider for city dwellings, for example. The one on the right could have the same greeny-yellow colouring on its legs, and become a grass or forest spider of some sort.

[Springheel]

That's exactly what I first thought. Normally I would expect the body and the head to have similar colouring, since it is most likely the colouring evolved for camouflage reasons and both the head and the body would need concealing.

 

That's the one that is designed to match the spider_queen colouring. The head has the same kind of fleshy colour as the spider queen 'human' bits. The suggestion is supposed to be that it might one day grow up to be like its mommy.

 

Would be easy as pie to make another version that's all black though.

 

re: Camoflague: I'm not sure what would make the most sense for giant spiders, but with real-world spiders their heads are usually pretty bland, and if there are interesting colours/markings they're generally on the main body.

 

http://homepage.mac.com/wildlifeweb/invert...pider_02tfk.jpg

http://www.shadygrovetrainingcenter.com/Wi...mate_003_sm.jpg

[PinkDot]

Skins look very good, although a bit too smooth for me. I'd add there some subtle normal map and/or specular map with diffrent intensity for each colour...

[Springheel]

Not quite sure what you mean about the specular map. There is a subtle normal-map to give them some texture, though it doesn't really show up in that screenshot.

[OrbWeaver]

The black ones would certainly benefit from a "glistening" shiny look, if they haven't already.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Victorian_funnelweb.jpg