So, what are you working on right now?

[Sotha]

Nice work Amadeus! It is clear you have a knack for atmosphere.

 

Obst covered pretty much everything I had in mind too. Keep up the good work!

[Amadeus]

Thanks for the kind words! coming from you guys, it means a lot. Obst: I will keep your recommendations in mind and definitely work on the texture alignment.

[Bikerdude]

and definitely work on the texture alignment.

Dont sweat it too much, every new mapper does this. just get into the habit of doing as you go along.

[Melan]

Amadeus: That's looking good! Your scenes are impressive, especially if you are a novice - nice lighting and texturing, and a good attention to fine detail. If you are looking for suggestions, the most important thing I would recommend is to make your spaces less rectangular. Of course, that's common with houses, but environments look more organic if you break it up a little. Use a few different shapes and angles (e.g. by cutting apart your rectangles), and hide cubical architecture with overlapping squares, support beams and so on.

 

Although all of your screens work, it is no wonder the first is the best - even if the houses are all using rectangles of some kind, the crumbling masonry, planks against the walls, or the protruding beams on the higher floor give variety to the place (it also helps that you are using different textures for foundations and upper floors, and that the windows are different - the boarded up one in particular is great!). If you didn't have that long stretch of even mud - like by using a patch mesh and hitting "V" to make it into a deformable piece of terrain - it would be even better.

 

But with all that said, it's all going in a good direction. Keep it up! (And of course don't sweat it.)

[Amadeus]

Melan: Thank you for the suggestions, I am currently learning how to use patches to make uneven terrain and small puddles, ponds, etc.. The line of even mud is definitely on my list of things to work on.

[Springheel]

@ Springheel: Currently the sword is part of the viewmodel used for the player swordshort. It would be great if there would be a model without any weapon but with a joint mappers could attach any weapon onto. I think AlumniumHaste was the one who once asked for a way to give the player an axe instead of a sword, and this would be a way.

 

Any chance that this is happening (as you seem to be the person to ask for )?

 

Making an empty arm model is easy enough...finding the proper rotation values for whatever weapon you want to def_attach would be a chore, though. Where would you put the def_attach spawnarg?

[RJFerret]

Impressive visuals Amadeus, another tip I'll offer, windows look very distinctive/copied if you don't also rotate/flip their textures (if asymmetrical obviously). For window textures the player isn't likely to see up close, can also enlarge and shift some of them to reduce the number of panes and offset the lit hotspot. For the poor symmetric window textures you may overlay transparent decals to alter their distinctive glow, or light them with a low performance spotlight (no shadows, etc.)

[Sotha]

Spring, alternate weapon def_attach spawnarg could go into the player start position entity. Seems like a logical place for stuff affecting the player itself.

[Obsttorte]

Making an empty arm model is easy enough...finding the proper rotation values for whatever weapon you want to def_attach would be a chore, though. Where would you put the def_attach spawnarg?

In the weapon definition, like it is done with arrows for the bow (they all use the same viewmodel, which has a joint barrel to attach the arrows to).

[Springheel]

Ok, I've added an empty hand .md5mesh to the md5/weapons/broadsword folder. Anyone interested can play around with the attachments.

[Obsttorte]

Thanks.

[Sotha]

Thanks.

 

I sense something very useful coming to the Obstipedia later on.

[Obsttorte]

[Sotha]

 

Very nice!

 

Will the hitting distance match with the custom weapons? Will the sound match weapons, too? I mean not a sword-like slicing sound for a hammer but a bone crushing thunk.

 

Also, could the melee system with arbitrary weapon be used for blackjack, too. No more hitting the low ceilings, because you could choose between up->down, left->right, right->left blackjack hit. A thrust with the BJ would not make any sense. Should not be able to parry with it, also.

[Obsttorte]

I have to test whether the hitting distance is correct. At a first look it seems so, but I'm not yet sure about it. To be honest, I guess this needs tweaking.

 

The sounds can easely be changed in the definition file, no big deal.

 

The blackjack has one joint less then the sword arm, so you would have to do custom animations for them (or tweak the existing ones, I don't know much about nims so I can't really tell).

 

You can however redefine the animations, so if you want to use something else instead of blocking, you can do so. You can also leave the hand empty and use the attack plus movement key thingy to select spells for example, which than get casted by pressing the parry key.

 

It's more or less up to you and the amount of time you want to invest.

[Obsttorte]

Not as spectacular as the recent shots, but I thought I post it anyways

[Deadlove]

Candles hanging from the sky! Abstract! I like it, reminds me of something you'd see in TDP.

[Obsttorte]

Well, it's not finished. The lights were only put there to make it look more interesting. In the end there will be a ceiling

[Obsttorte]

Will the hitting distance match with the custom weapons? Will the sound match weapons, too? I mean not a sword-like slicing sound for a hammer but a bone crushing thunk.

As espected, the collision model is not taken by the model itself. However, the cm is a simble box which is defined in the weapons def itself.

"att_cm_maxs_overhead"		"1 20 1"
"att_cm_mins_overhead"		"-1 6 -1"

Those are the lines handling the cm for the overhead attack for example. The only value I've changed is the second number in the first line. This basically defines the length of the weapon, which is by default twice as long. This short value is for the dagger.

 

EDIT: What I've forgotten to mention is that you can also quiet easely change demage done by the weapon, also done depending on the material you hit with the weapon. So you can for example implement a warhammer that even does damage if you hit an elite guard at is armor plates (something where the sword does no damage), and vice versa use a dagger which does not deal any damage on any kind of armor etc...

[Obsttorte]

-

[skacky]

This reminds me of Masks.

[Obsttorte]

This reminds me of Masks.

Lol. Actually I was referring to this mission in my Let's Map as I was exaining what I am aiming for.

[Obsttorte]

Something else

[Goldwell]

Something else

http://youtu.be/_K3hYbxntqQ

 

That's really cool! Another thing I saw in a Thief 2 FM I was playing recently which I liked was when you opened a door with a key it removed it from your inventory. I thought that was another handy solution for getting rid of unwanted keys but your method is even better because the player has better inventory management and they can still choose to lock the door if need be.

[ERH+]

From other side, some TDS players complain that they don't even know doors were closed -too much automation is also not good. Depend on particular mission.

Edited April 30, 2014 by ERH+