Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[Mastermind]

shitstorm

that's called "marketing campaign"

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

 

[Viata]

shitstorm

that's called "marketing campaign"

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

Unless you are making a VN that includes school girl, that is not going to happens.

 

[Bad Sector]

I started prototyping a tool that should allow me to paint directly on 3D models by "stamping" textures/patterns directly from the viewport on the texture itself:



It does have a few bugs i need to solve (e.g. the discontinuities between seams) but i think it is promising for quickly texturing 3D models.

 

[Bad Sector]

Here is a quick and dirty test with a character model i made some time ago:

This is only rough stamping since there isn't currently any real painting tool work (all you can do is click at some point on the screen to paste a round-ish shape with the pattern you have loaded). Also there is "leaking" when painting (notice how, e.g., the pattern for the shirt is leaking on the forearms) because there isn't any form of masking. In the future i'll add the ability to create masks (select polygons), but for now i'm working on the pasting algorithm itself.

As a sidenote, the face and overall front side look a bit garbage-y because they have almost no texture space assigned to them. The character is for a topdown-ish game and you most see the top and back side.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Here is a quick and dirty test with a character model i made some time ago:

This is only rough stamping since there isn't currently any real painting tool work (all you can do is click at some point on the screen to paste a round-ish shape with the pattern you have loaded). Also there is "leaking" when painting (notice how, e.g., the pattern for the shirt is leaking on the forearms) because there isn't any form of masking. In the future i'll add the ability to create masks (select polygons), but for now i'm working on the pasting algorithm itself.

As a sidenote, the face and overall front side look a bit garbage-y because they have almost no texture space assigned to them. The character is for a topdown-ish game and you most see the top and back side.

Any fixing those seams in the middle?

 

[Bad Sector]

Any fixing those seams in the middle?

Not with the tool as it is (this was just a test for it). You can minimize the seams by going very close but this is cumbersome and ideally it should be handled better by the tool. You can also try to fill the unused space manually in a texture editor of course, though if the UVs are all over the place you can't avoid them no matter what you do. Even modern 3D AAA have them, they're just smarter about hiding them and the large texture resolutions used there make it harder to notice them, but you can still do that in lower settings (e.g. take a look at Lara's butt here or her wrists here).

Also since the model i posted was meant to be viewed from above with a small angle from behind it has most of the texture space assigned there and the front side (with the boundary being at the leg sides where the seam is) gets much less space so even without the white line, there would still be some visible seam (unless i'd be going for high fidelity graphics, but early 2000s level graphics are the best i can do). Also why the face gets pretty much no space - it isn't supposed to be visible :-P. Models that are meant to be viewed by any angle usually try to hide these seams by placing them between the legs.

 

[supervoid]

Here is a quick and dirty test with a character model i made some time ago:

This is only rough stamping since there isn't currently any real painting tool work (all you can do is click at some point on the screen to paste a round-ish shape with the pattern you have loaded). Also there is "leaking" when painting (notice how, e.g., the pattern for the shirt is leaking on the forearms) because there isn't any form of masking. In the future i'll add the ability to create masks (select polygons), but for now i'm working on the pasting algorithm itself.

As a sidenote, the face and overall front side look a bit garbage-y because they have almost no texture space assigned to them. The character is for a topdown-ish game and you most see the top and back side.

What's the difference between this and existing material painting solutions?

 

[Tavernking]

please kill me

 

[Mastermind]

Time to code a proper room transition script in gamemaker, which may or may not resemble getting your dick caught in a vice.

Almost as painful as dealing with the shitty pathfinding.

edit: making the room transitions wasn't that bad actually.

 

[Bad Sector]

What's the difference between this and existing material painting solutions?

Right now? Probably that existing material painting solutions actually work :-P.

But i'm only aware of painting in Substance Painter, Blender and Nendo. Substance Painter seems to be oriented towards very high fidelity art, with its PBR renderer, multitexture materials (normals, etc). Also it is quite expensive and i'm not a fan of subscription software (i am not against paid software but i want that if i buy something to have full control over it - so no subscriptions, no (un)necessary accounts and no DRM).

Blender (at least version 2.79, i haven't used 2.8x because i am not a fan of the changes in the interface) has a nice painting mode as far as functionality goes, but the UI has the usual Blender awkward complexity due to Blender trying to be everything for everyone. Even then all it provides is brush painting.

Nendo is an obscure shareware 3D modelling program from the late 90s/early 2000s that apparently the only reason a few people still remember it is that the developers of the Wings3D modeller tried to buy Nendo but couldn't so they made Wings3D as an open source clone of it. Nendo is really simple as far as programs go and has a painting mode that i found very simple and intuitive to use (Wings3D doesn't have any form of texture painting, it was the one feature they didn't copy). You can see it in a video i made some time ago here (AFAIK it is the only video that shows Nendo in action - there are a couple of others but they only show the included demos and none shows the texture painting mode). Nendo would be neat but its developers have closed shop many years ago (so you can't buy it) and even if they didn't, it can only use its own UVs which are complete garbage (it triangulates the mesh, splits the texture in a grid and assigns two triangles per grid cell).

What i have in my mind to do is something like Nendo's painting mode, but just painting - no modelling or UVs, those can be done elsewhere.

 

[Bad Sector]

please kill me

FWIW this should have had at most a quad as a face, like the models in Quake 1/Hexen, since the face is never shown - but when i modeled it, i wasn't thinking about that :-P. The head has almost as many polygons as the rest of the model and there is even a scalp underneath the hair:

(i had to lower the vertex at the top right in the right image to avoid clipping with the hair, that should have been a hint i should remove all that geometry in the first place :-P)

If i ever decide to finish that game i'd have to redo this model, but for testing purposes it is fine .

 

[Mastermind]

Here is a quick and dirty test with a character model i made some time ago:

Man Hitler has seen better days.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

Will Steam kick you off due to behavior that wasn't on Steam? Can the mobs with their pitchforks deplatform your game? Has this happened to other games on Steam? I'm guessing that Valve can do whatever is best for its bottom line, and they would kick you off in a heartbeat if your presence caused a boycott of Steam. But I would also guess that the people who would deplatform a shitposter aren't the people who would have a lot of sway among Steam customers.

 

[The Avatar]

Valve has taken a more hands-off approach and will allow pretty much anything on their store as long as its legal and you're not just trolling. Source: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1666776116200553082

 

[Tyranicon]

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

Will Steam kick you off due to behavior that wasn't on Steam? Can the mobs with their pitchforks deplatform your game? Has this happened to other games on Steam? I'm guessing that Valve can do whatever is best for its bottom line, and they would kick you off in a heartbeat if your presence caused a boycott of Steam. But I would also guess that the people who would deplatform a shitposter aren't the people who would have a lot of sway among Steam customers.

Hatred got kicked and then re-instated due to pitchfork mobs.

 

[Mastermind]

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

Will Steam kick you off due to behavior that wasn't on Steam? Can the mobs with their pitchforks deplatform your game? Has this happened to other games on Steam? I'm guessing that Valve can do whatever is best for its bottom line, and they would kick you off in a heartbeat if your presence caused a boycott of Steam. But I would also guess that the people who would deplatform a shitposter aren't the people who would have a lot of sway among Steam customers.

I don't know and tbh they've been decent on this issue so I don't want to cause them unnecessary headaches.

 

[samuraigaiden]

Quick question, not sure if this is the right place to ask. How were the wireframe dungeons from 80s RPGs (Wizardry, Ultima, etc.) made? Was the image being generated on the fly or did the game load premade wireframe images with each step?

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Quick question, not sure if this is the right place to ask. How were the wireframe dungeons from 80s RPGs (Wizardry, Ultima, etc.) made? Was the image being generated on the fly or did the game load premade wireframe images with each step?

I think this book might be what you're looking for.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

won't be much of a campaign if i get kicked off steam

Will Steam kick you off due to behavior that wasn't on Steam? Can the mobs with their pitchforks deplatform your game? Has this happened to other games on Steam? I'm guessing that Valve can do whatever is best for its bottom line, and they would kick you off in a heartbeat if your presence caused a boycott of Steam. But I would also guess that the people who would deplatform a shitposter aren't the people who would have a lot of sway among Steam customers.

Valve takes an almost entirely hands off approach with regards to curation.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1666776116200553082

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Quick question, not sure if this is the right place to ask. How were the wireframe dungeons from 80s RPGs (Wizardry, Ultima, etc.) made? Was the image being generated on the fly or did the game load premade wireframe images with each step?

Akalabeth has its source distributed with it if you really want to know. You can probably find an annotated version somewhere I'd imagine, Ultima fans are weird and that's something they'd do for fun.
Pretty sure some of the other early Ultima games were written in basic and should have their source with them too, btw.

 

[Alchemist]

Quick question, not sure if this is the right place to ask. How were the wireframe dungeons from 80s RPGs (Wizardry, Ultima, etc.) made? Was the image being generated on the fly or did the game load premade wireframe images with each step?

I don't know for sure, but considering the paltry amount of memory they worked with in the early days I imagine it was drawn line-by-line on the fly.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

I made the lava material years ago, but I decided not to use it right away because lava is too dramatic to use in the early levels. Lava belongs in the endgame. I'm making the endgame now, so I figure I should use the lava more.

I made some "billowy" Perlin noise in World Machine, tiled it in Photoshop, then I gave it a color ramp, either in World Machine or After Effects. I used the black-and-white pre-color-ramp image in the alpha channel and used that for a bump offset. I put the lava material on a landscape, shape the landscape, and the lava flows downhill. It looks pretty cool when you see the whole thing in motion.

I also made the arches. I'm not a 3D artist, so I felt pretty cool after finishing them. I started with a torus, cut off the bottom 3/4, and then flattened the top and pulled down the bottom. The materials on that are scale-independent, so I can make big or small arches, and the level of detail remains the same. The rim lighting is built-in and it changes with time of day. It would be cool if I could give the whole scene an orange glow from underneath (and I do that in the lava cave map where I don't have to worry about dynamic time-of-day lighting), but I think I'm satisfied with how it looks for now.

 

[Ninjerk]

I made the lava material years ago, but I decided not to use it right away because lava is too dramatic to use in the early levels. Lava belongs in the endgame. I'm making the endgame now, so I figure I should use the lava more.

I made some "billowy" Perlin noise in World Machine, tiled it in Photoshop, then I gave it a color ramp, either in World Machine or After Effects. I used the black-and-white pre-color-ramp image in the alpha channel and used that for a bump offset. I put the lava material on a landscape, shape the landscape, and the lava flows downhill. It looks pretty cool when you see the whole thing in motion.

I also made the arches. I'm not a 3D artist, so I felt pretty cool after finishing them. I started with a torus, cut off the bottom 3/4, and then flattened the top and pulled down the bottom. The materials on that are scale-independent, so I can make big or small arches, and the level of detail remains the same. The rim lighting is built-in and it changes with time of day. It would be cool if I could give the whole scene an orange glow from underneath (and I do that in the lava cave map where I don't have to worry about dynamic time-of-day lighting), but I think I'm satisfied with how it looks for now.

Do you think you could work some "heat distortion" into it? Not sure what's called, but I'm talking about when the air looks turbulent and warps whatever you can see behind it.

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Do you think you could work some "heat distortion" into it? Not sure what's called, but I'm talking about when the air looks turbulent and warps whatever you can see behind it.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. You can see when it's moving that the lava also has a subtle distortion to it. I don't know if I could do that to the surrounding cliffs though. I could do it with a particle effect or a sheet with a distortion material on it, but it would also distort the lava. Maybe I should try it and see how it looks. Maybe I should also add an orange fog. There's probably a lot I could do, now that I'm thinking about it.

 

[LESS T_T]

Quixel Mixer, PBR texture painting tool alternative to Substance tools (which has became subscription only after Adobe acquisition), preview version is released. It's free for everyone thanks to Epic's recent acquisition. (But be aware Megascan library is free for Unreal Engine use only.)

https://quixel.com/mixer