Cats and dogs?

[MirceaKitsune 249]

Regarding to the wolf model: I have an improved blend in the works, which I'll publish here when ready. It will mostly contain various cleanups, lower-polygon shadow mesh, and improved normal / specular textures. I'm not touching the animations like I said, but it should be easier to work with it from there on.

[NeonsStyle 572]

I'd like to see cats and dogs. Cats I think would have a very narrow use mostly for immersion where a guard either patted, or talked to a cat on his patrol.

Dogs are bit more obvious, as in alerters. Chained dog would probably be the easiest to use, as you only need about 3 animations. Laying down transition to sitting, transition to standing straining

against his chain and back.

 

A murder of crows should be able to be done with a shader or emitter, triggered by a trigger_once, they take off and that's the end. With careful placement, it could

look quite convincing. Much easier to do it that way than to bother with modeling and animating.

[SeriousToni 480]

Cats I think would have a very narrow use mostly for immersion where a guard either patted, or talked to a cat on his patrol.

 

Just let us use the standard conversation / greeting script! It would be hilarious to watch them be like: "Meow" -"Yup. Guess you're right." Or: "Good evening Sir!" -"Meow"

[Anderson 316]

 

Just let us use the standard conversation / greeting script! It would be hilarious to watch them be like: "Meow" -"Yup. Guess you're right." Or: "Good evening Sir!" -"Meow"

BTW cats react to humans in the same way as they would react to a cat.

 

For keeping in line with the mood of TDM it would be good to have them have a sound cover of a mature cat, none of the kitty cute approach. If the models get finished.

[MirceaKitsune 249]

Sorry for the delay. Here's my prepared version of the BGE wolf:

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5lE6Cy2gg_rT3FsYzlNSWJiVkU

 

Changes I made:

• Generated lower-polygon shadow mesh.
• Improved the UV mapping in some areas.
• Prepared materials with names, which should be friendly for Blender's md5 exporter.
• Included 4 fur color patterns: Black, white, gray, yellow.

What's left to do:

• A few new animations might have to be added. I'm no expert here, so I simply left the animations offered by the original blend.
• Convert the images from png to tga. I left them png since I believe that makes the file a bit smaller and easier to share.

Notice: The textures are all packed inside the blend file. Just select File - External Data - Unpack All Into Files, in order to unpack them. You might have to first deselect Automatically Pack Into .blend, within the same menu. I hope someone can pick up on this and finish the integration, and my work on those improvements weren't for nothing and will help to do this for TDM

[demagogue 1252]

Thanks for this!

 

Would it be possible to set up a simple triggered animation of the dog running in the distance as an ambient event with this, no AI or anything fancy? I think something like that would really add to my WIP.

[MirceaKitsune 249]

Thanks for this!

 

Would it be possible to set up a simple triggered animation of the dog running in the distance as an ambient event with this, no AI or anything fancy? I think something like that would really add to my WIP.

 

The md5mesh + md5anim(s) would need to be generated first. I'm not good with animation for TDM, but I left the stock ones included for anyone with an exporter to continue from. Might be best to wait until there's an AI, then use path entities to animate it altogether... you'll probably need a special kind of animated entity definition otherwise, which is probably pointless once a functional AI will exist.

[VanishedOne 543]

On the evidence of the werebeast thread, that could be a long wait. The prospect of a full AI brings up all those questions about how canine/lupine hearing and scent acuity are to fit with the gameplay model, on top of everything else it needs. idAnimated entity defs have been used before (see Arcturus's grass demo map for examples including fish) and func_animate entities were used for animated characters in a scene in Requiem.

[MirceaKitsune 249]

What is the progress on this? Last time someone was working on a cat model I believe, which was nearly done? Also I spent time optimizing that dog / wolf model, and posted it above for inclusion in TDM... has anything become of that as well? I assume they won't be making it to 2.05 as I got the impression that's happening relatively soon, but maybe 2.06 is a possible target!

[Destined 614]

I wanted to take a look at it at some point, but am quite busy right now. BTW: It won't make it into 2.05 as this is out already.

[MirceaKitsune 249]

Though the years have passes I'm still keeping this thread closely in mind. Especially since I already tweaked and simplified a model so that it's ready to animate / export, but there hasn't been an update for over 3 years now! This was especially brought back to my mind on learning that TDM 2.08 included new characters and I'm thinking that maybe the developer who worked on those could help with this as well?

I just checked that the link to the blend file still works and to my surprise Google Drive hasn't dropped it. I tested to make sure that it will open up in the new Blender 2.8 which it does. Note that for the textures you'll have to use "File - External Data - Unpack all into files" but I verified that works too.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5lE6Cy2gg_rT3FsYzlNSWJiVkU

Do we have anyone willing to pick this up please? All that's needed is some base animations for starters (idle, walking, attacking), exporting the md5 / md5anim then creating the def and material. I don't have the full knowledge nor presently the time to setup a test map, but do know we can start from the spider AI which should provide the proper starting functionality.

Edited July 11, 2020 by MirceaKitsune

[Springheel 4628]

On 7/11/2020 at 6:07 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

Though the years have passes I'm still keeping this thread closely in mind. Especially since I already tweaked and simplified a model so that it's ready to animate / export, but there hasn't been an update for over 3 years now! This was especially brought back to my mind on learning that TDM 2.08 included new characters and I'm thinking that maybe the developer who worked on those could help with this as well?

I just checked that the link to the blend file still works and to my surprise Google Drive hasn't dropped it. I tested to make sure that it will open up in the new Blender 2.8 which it does. Note that for the textures you'll have to use "File - External Data - Unpack all into files" but I verified that works too.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5lE6Cy2gg_rT3FsYzlNSWJiVkU

Do we have anyone willing to pick this up please? All that's needed is some base animations for starters (idle, walking, attacking), exporting the md5 / md5anim then creating the def and material. I don't have the full knowledge nor presently the time to setup a test map, but do know we can start from the spider AI which should provide the proper starting functionality.

 

A working dog would certainly be a lot more useful than a dragon, and significantly easier as well due to the size, lack of wings, etc.

[Dragofer 1346]

On 7/11/2020 at 11:07 PM, MirceaKitsune said:

Do we have anyone willing to pick this up please?

I think it's the nature of a community-driven project like TDM that people should be the change they want to see. Implementing a character takes a lot of steps and it's rare that a single person has the knowledge and time/motivation to do all of them. So if you have - or can reasonably learn - some of the skills needed to get some of those steps out of the way, then that's the best thing you can do to make it happen.

In this case, that'd probably be completing & exporting the animations, and sticking around to make the modifications that'll inevitably be necessary. That way, whoever should pick up this character doesn't need to be both a Blender-based animator and an asset manager or coder. That's basically the approach we're going for with the dragon, too.

[Elian Waters 0]

On 12/23/2014 at 4:45 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Hello. There's one suggestion I wanted to make in regard to potential new entities and assets. I noticed there are now rat and horse NPC's, which can be placed on maps and offer a nice touch. Since the action usually takes place in towns, and players can break into people's houses or encounter civilians, I was wondering if cats and dogs could ever be expected. I think they'd add some nice extra detail to towns, and could even have a few roles in regard to gameplay. I was thinking of something among these lines:

 

Cats: Can run about as fast as rats, and have the ability to somewhat block the player (slightly impede movement). Additionally, they can jump and may bump into objects... causing a noise that can alert guards, just like the player throwing objects at walls does. Obviously it should be a very small alert... we wouldn't want an entire army / gang running around the place because a cat bumped into a vase

 

Dogs: Slower than cats and rats but still faster than players, blocks movement like a human NPC. I believe there should be two categories: Dogs that attack, and dogs that only bark (potentially attacking if attacked first). An enemy dog that barks can make a lot of noise, and alert guards from afar to your location.

I like the idea MirceaKitsune, is it applied?

[thebigh 102]

Speaking of the spider AI, I noticed that it really struggles on sloped floors. Testing my own level I found it couldn't handle a slope as gentle as 15 degrees without embedding itself in the floor and becoming immobile. This is a problem because intuitively one would expect a spider to hang around in caves and other natural environments where the ground is not perfectly horizontal.

I got marginally better results, or so it seemed to me, by putting a horizontal monster clip underneath it at level start and letting it walk off onto the sloping floor but it still wasn't very good.