Orc riders.

#21 Phil,

Seems to me that he could go around 1,500-1,800 in the highest detail. The second LOD may be around 1,000 since that is where you would see it most of the time. I think it is a little easier to make it lower detail later than raise the number of polys if need be.

Jeff

#22 Thats true jeff, I was thinking more of the orc and beast as a package. The more poly's put into the beast, the less riders could be grouped easily :))

I guess a high detail of 1800 and a low of 1000 is a good ballpark.

Phil.

#23 Matt, dont worry about 100% accuracy either. Its all kind of fantasy stuff anyway, so I doubt there's a template.

Maybe look at some dinosaur models for proportions? (or better yet, get a star wars ref with the 2 legged walker for empire strikes back.

Good luck.

Phil.

#24 Alright, I'll just fill in the blanks, I'll collect all teh reference I can, if you guys have any idea's or good reference pics send em my way, MattCrawford@comcast.net

I'm starting the model on monday since i've been so busy with my RL job at EB. I have off monday/tuesday so I should get some of the model done. Also how is this thing going to be segmented or do i not need to worry about that. Also you guys are going to have to deal with scale, unless you want me to model the rider also, then i'll just guess it. If i had the model data for the demo player model I could make it fit with that in terms of size, i'm still clueless as to the function of the riding beast yet so i'll just stick to modeling it, unless i'm needed further. I'll post screenshots tuesday night probly.

#25 Phil if you do get "animal" vehicles in the engine will you be so kind as to submit the coding. Once you get something like that then you could ALSO do a "trailor/carriage" vehicle which would be AWESOME. . . you could lay seige to castles by pulling catpults up with animals or who knows what else.

#26 Why not have these riding beast be players? Instead of a player piloting the vehicle and functiong as "gunner", the piloit IS the vehicle and the "gunner" sits on the back. Just have this beast be somewhat intelligent(story-wise), and then have it as a player choice, ie choose to be an Orc, Elf, or Big-scary-beast-thing. This would solve the animal vehicle problem, because it would be a player, and you could just mount another player with a mount point(I guess).

#27 Here we built a simple Life class ..
with some path following, and some simple object handling.
this object was started from the Player logic.
tho at this time you cannot actually "Be" this object.
you can mount them and all that of course...
so they dont take a player slot and are ready for travel :)
plan to use this class as a base for creating all lifeforms in the game.

#28 Oh, hell, I totally forgot.. I shouldve updated the AI TCP project.

Anyway, Alex has worked out a high level for "being" level AI called "FEAR". I'll post a link once its abit more complete.

Basically, the idea is that you write your creature AI to sit within the FEAR API framework, so that the creature AI can use the API to sense its surroundings.

Once youve done that, any FEAR enabled AI can then talk to your application.

The idea is to have a wrapper interface which allows you to basically write AI for ANY game using the fear interface. (Imagine that, dropping your AI from Torque into Unreal or vice versa).

So thats the plan. I'm implementing the fear interface for torque.

Phil.

#29 Oh Matt!

Btw: there is an example model in the exporter docs which you can use for size/mount reference.

Phil.

#30 Thanks, i did'nt quite notice the sample model, I'll start with the mount. And by the way, I dig the one player controls the animal thing one controls a gunner, we could just make this a 2 seater, OR i dont think it would be tough to create a beast master class of sorts that can posses these units to gain control, it would simply be an artistic affect to the transition of the new model, or maybe a shapeshifter. I dont see why you cant have a player mount a player, I've done it with the lithtech jupiter engine. But for playability sake I think i'll stick to a one manned beast ala a vehicle in tribes. But perhaps at the wepon purchace terminal or whatever shop thers goign to be for wep trading, have mount guns, so that you can have different weps on the beast, not sure if it would be easy, but i assume you can just have an extra wep/item slot that would activate a switchwep code while your on the beast. So you can have net guns or spearguns flame throwers, whatever =), and yes I could model a gun mount. I'll start first thing tommorow, and i'll hurry as fast as i can. I'm used to 4k models for lithtech, so I may take a few hours to get back intot he groove of lower poly stuff. If you wanna see some progress stuff for a personal model go here:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/painiac/temp3.jpg

Unfinished human female face model, about 2 hours in, 400 polys so far limit of 1k, movable eyelids and seperatable mouth, top eyelids are not modeled yet so it looks a bit open in the eye sockets, no texture. Just so you can see I can model. Btw max screenshots suck for lighting, so excuse the w.i.p. It's also a photoref from a friend of mine, so it's not barbie doll super model based hehe.



Matt.

#31 @Phil
So "FEAR" can basically give our Mounts a "mind of their own" to limited extents?

#32 This guy is still in the top 10 from polycount:
www.planetquake.com/polycount/reviews/quake3/dragon/dragon.shtml

Make him sans front legs or T-rex style and it'd be pretty neat.

#33 Jeff: Fear is the outer framework for replacable AI internals. The internals can then be applied to anything pretty much (as long as it has the fear interface implemented for it).


The upshot of this, is that you can write the AI in a modular fashion, applying it to anything fear compatible.

So if we have say, a human, a horse, an ant and a cow, we could interchange thier AI's for different effects.

Its a great idea, because it makes AI development seperate from the platform.

Phil.

#34 Sounds pretty cool, but all the technobabble is kinda out of my league :P . I can appreciate the impression of its functionality though.