Michael Stearns ([info]helldray) wrote,
@ 2007-07-30 00:19:00
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More 3D Guys
Here's a couple more guys! Previously we had a heavy hitter and two mages, so here's the speed characters, Archer and Ninja, with emphasis on long range and close range respectively. Since neither of these guys look quite so Guardian Heroes-ish I suppose the idea would be to show everybody together so they can all "blend" but.. But I only posed the two of them together! :( I've started working on some monsters, so they'll probably turn up next.

A particular difficulty so far in development is that Danny keeps switching engines (Sorry for ignoring your question last time Baines, because I didn't know the answer!) because it's really hard to tell, when you are trying to use one that's free, if it's any good without doing a considerable amount of experimenting, so I think we're on what now, engine 4? 5? One of the problems with the ones that are freely available is they are not geared for the type of game we're doing, with heavily "tiled" 3D stages, they're more intended for stages that are just dropped right out of a 3D program, whereas ours will be somewhat programatically generated. So now we're looking at a pay-engine called Unity, which develops on Mac (and for browser plug-ins, oddly--but I'm very impressed with what they can run in a browser!) and can publish on either platform once we pay for it. I am not sure what prompted this decision entirely but Danny spent a lot of time converting a PC into a mac in order to develop with it, so.. maybe this time? It seemed so counter-intuitive to me to do it this way (being that both of us own PCs) but he managed to convince me at least as far as I stopped complaining about it. Being able to provide a Mac version this time would be cool, at least! Anyway THIS time in a proper development environment where we don't need to scratch-build quite so much, we've already got something that vaguely resembles the very beginnings of an environment, which is further than we've been so far.



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[info]dock
2007-07-30 08:53 am UTC (link)
Nice work dude! I like the specs of red on the ninja costume.

The important question is... does your new engine support fractal generated clouds? XD

You should be able to generate a whole grid-based environment and use basic frustum culling to keep it running at a fast pace. This is usually enabled by default, as it makes a lot of sense, and should work fine on any engine.

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[info]baines
2007-07-31 12:05 am UTC (link)
Heck, wondering what engine worked for you was why I asked. :)

From my experience, a decent amount of 3D engines look like they were designed with FPS foremost in mind. Beyond that, you get PC-style third-person games, or maybe flight. Anything else just seems tacked on or assumed as handled by aiming for the primary design. (Sure, I've seen people do a 2D side-scroller with the Quake engine, but I'm not entirely sure why you'd *want* to, and I'm pretty certain it isn't as efficient as doing your own.)

The Mac development does seem weird. Having the end result on both Mac and PC shouldn't hurt, though.

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