Contributing in 3D?

[cathuria]

Greetings!
I'm happy to see WZ2100 getting some active development -- it's given me far too many hours of entertainment over the years.
So I'd be glad to give something back.  I noticed on your contributions page you were looking for some 3d modeling; I've never done game development work before, but I can certainly learn.  Most of my professional jobs have been architectural visualization and general illustration.  If you're interested in checking out some samples, see my gallery site:
http://www.cathuria.com/improbable/

Let me know if there's anything I can help with.
Meanwhile, keep up the great work, and thanks for keeping a terrific game alive.

[Rman Virgil]

--------->

* Very fine work & an easy flowing terrific sense of humor on top of that - now that is a rare combo.

* How do you feel about creating new & immersive textures to go with the 3D modeling ?

- Cheers, RV

[cathuria]

Thanks!
Textures, certainly... although I'm not sure what one would mean by an "immersive" texture... (Quicksand?  Now that's immersive...)
Anyhow, I have used mostly procedural textures rather than maps in most of my work, but fortunately with my main tool of choice these days (Modo), baking those into UV maps should be fairly simple.  Plus, I have all the usual 2D tools for creating more defined image maps.

[Per]

Hello and welcome. I love your gallery! We really want more and better artwork in the game, although at the moment you may have to jump over some hurdles to get some tings done. We are actively working on making it easier.

The things I would love to see the most right now are

• improved version of the classic terrain textures. They were originally made for 64x64 but are now scaled up to 128x128 and that shows. Also not all of them are properly rotationally seamless, and not all of them have a proper 1-pixel border for linear filtering.
• models for an ECM turret and an ECM tower. I imagine it could look like some kind of reinforced antenna with a support structure of some kind around it. It would have to be modelled in the pieslicer tool, or Blender using the PIE plugin, though, as our model import options are a bit limited right now.

[DevUrandom]

Renderer may change in the next half year, which would require an adaption of the tile textures.
Obviously you'd have our support with doing that.

[kage]

• improved version of the classic terrain textures. They were originally made for 64x64 but are now scaled up to 128x128 and that shows. Also not all of them are properly rotationally seamless, and not all of them have a proper 1-pixel border for linear filtering.

so that's the official stance? new tertile textures should be designed to be (power_of_two - 2) rotationally seamless, and all the very excellent power_of_two textures that people like eikei, grim, and others have done are forsaken?

if that's so, i think we better update the docs immediately, so that newcomers that may be interested on working with those textures know how to design them correctly from the beginning.

[cathuria]

Being new here, I don't know what's been done before, but I'd be happy to work on terrain textures.  Seamless tiles are no problem, but... "1-pixel border for linear filtering" is all Greek to me.    You'd have to spell out what you need there, as well as color depth and format.  Are the original tiles available in the game resources somewhere, or could I download some samples?

The ECM turret & tower sound like fun -- I would model in Modo and then probably use Blender to convert to PIE (unless there's a more direct route).  Again, I would need a brief on poly-count and UV map standards.

So... did you want me to actually start working on some of this?

[DevUrandom]

I would recommend modeling and texturing those... (Safest for you.)

[Buginator]

First off, cathuria, VERY nice stuff you got there!  All very high quality  stuff!

so that's the official stance? new tertile textures should be designed to be (power_of_two - 2) rotationally seamless, and all the very excellent power_of_two textures that people like eikei, grim, and others have done are forsaken?

if that's so, i think we better update the docs immediately, so that newcomers that may be interested on working with those textures know how to design them correctly from the beginning.

I find it odd that we would use PoT-2 pixels?  Every other game I have seen are all PoT textures.
Per said it is for linear filtering?

Devurandom mentioned a possible new engine, and if so, I am doubting it would need such a limitation?

I think it would be best for any & all artists to stick with PoT textures (128x128/256x256/512x512) and if need be, those can get later processed to PoT-2.

[DevUrandom]

Sorry, Buggy, partly wrong...
1st: Squeezing the tiles later on will look not as nice as when it would have been done pot-2 in the first place. Conversion inaccuracies...
2nd: Due to linear filtering, the edges of adjacent tiles in the texture page (we upload several tile-textures into one texture-page to reduce the binding overhead) "bleed" into each other. Check with and without linear filtering (search for GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR in the source). Anisotropic filtering makes it even worse.

For the new renderer we want to use some kind of a splatting technique which doesn't use per-tile-textures anymore, but per-ground-type-textures instead. These will then be splatted into the final chunk-texture. The exact details are still to be written...

[Rman Virgil]

Thanks!
Textures, certainly... although I'm not sure what one would mean by an "immersive" texture... (Quicksand?  Now that's immersive...)

* Hehe... good one, the "quicksand" (Actually I already know how... not just as a texture but as a "terrain penalty".)

* Anyhow, cathuria, I see the WRP crew have all jumped in to inform you already. They definitely need an artist of your caliber for their project. Your personality / disposition & sense of humor are also a big plus, IMHO.

* If it's a good fit for you & makes you happy to involve yourself - great !

* If it turns-out otherwise with the WRP, give me a "jingle" - I'm sure we'd have a blast working together.

* Fun meeting ya & all good things in your participation.

- Cheers, RV

[cathuria]

I would recommend modeling and texturing those... (Safest for you.)

I assume you mean the ECM gear?  Jollies... but you'll have to guide me a bit to get started.  Where can I find the specifications on poly-limits, textures sizes & formats, etc.?

[Per]

so that's the official stance? new tertile textures should be designed to be (power_of_two - 2) rotationally seamless, and all the very excellent power_of_two textures that people like eikei, grim, and others have done are forsaken?

if that's so, i think we better update the docs immediately, so that newcomers that may be interested on working with those textures know how to design them correctly from the beginning.

It is not an official stance, it is my recollection of how the current (and original) texture system works. We want to change it eventually, though, as devurandom said.

I have started to document how trunk works at http://wiki.wz2100.net/Terrain_textures

[DevUrandom]

#define pie_MAX_VERTICES 768
#define pie_MAX_POLYGONS 512
#define pie_MAX_VERTICES_PER_POLYGON 6

Textures are currently 256x256 px, but there is no limit on that.
I know from talking to Grim that the poly limits are more than enough and I think he used 512x512 textures, but per object and not shared as is used currently.
Max vertices I think should have been 3, but there are some incompatible files left which need more.

To get the best view you are probably best off with experimenting a bit...

Format can be anything which can carry the info you need and is loadable with Blender. Wavefront OBJ, AC3D and .blend are probably good choices.

[cathuria]

Okay, that gives me something to get started with.  I'll come up with something and you can tell me what's wrong with it 

It's been a long time since I've messed with Blender; I'll take some time to download it soon and poke at it with a stick a few times.  Meanwhile, I can model the pieces in Modo and export to OBJ.