Great to see this is being done, want to HELP!

[yahodahan]

Hi all, and I have to say AWESOME work and so great to see Warzone 2100 being "resurrected"! I was hooked on WZ the first time I played it, and have never lost the love of playing it, no matter the shiny new toys these days...

That said, I WANNA HELP! I'm not certain if you have a set "standard"/other for helping with the process, but you can see examples of my work at "www.ofgabriel.com", I would love to throw my 3D skills at WZ modding I didn't see a forum just for this- is there a "doorman" i should speak to?

One other thing- and believe me, I'm putting on the heavy-duty-flame-retardant-gear-and-helmet for this one - I am very experienced with several game engines (me quickly ducks and looks out for flames as it begins...) and would just like to say WARZONE 2100 DESERVES PORTING TO A NEXT GEN ENGINE!

And I would totally be willing to start the process, I do have plenty of experience, I know it would be a HUGE task, but it would be amazing and a triumph of the masses!

Even better, the (smallish) 3D studio I work for is looking to get into games, and this would be right up our alley...

Long live Warzone 2100!!

(me runs screaming, probobly on fire already by time you have read this...)
sorry to beat what is probobly a dead horse folks

[Zarel]

Hi all, and I have to say AWESOME work and so great to see Warzone 2100 being "resurrected"! I was hooked on WZ the first time I played it, and have never lost the love of playing it, no matter the shiny new toys these days...

Great to see you. It's always nice to see the old Warzone fans find us.

That said, I WANNA HELP! I'm not certain if you have a set "standard"/other for helping with the process, but you can see examples of my work at "www.ofgabriel.com", I would love to throw my 3D skills at WZ modding I didn't see a forum just for this- is there a "doorman" i should speak to?

Well, there's:
Mapping/Modding, and
Showcase

Mapping/Modding is more for planning, while Showcase is for showing off finished works, but we don't enforce the difference too much.

In any case, your works at ofgabriel.com are pretty awesome. I should point out that Warzone's current engine requires significantly lower poly counts. Not as low as the current ones, but we don't want to break the engine. :/

If I could request somethign specific, one thing I'm looking for is new propulsion models - specifically, wheels, half-tracks, and tracks. Currently, the wheels look too much like tracks. I think it'd be better if the wheels didn't have guards that extended all the way across:


This is kind of what I'm thinking of.

And we might as well bump up the polycount. Our current wheels are hexagons and octagons - I think we can have 12-sided polygons for wheels now. (I don't want to go above 12 sides; though - the game is usually played with the tanks pretty small, so 128-sided near-circles would be strain on the rendering engine for no added benefits)

And next, maybe animated propulsions. Currently, the only animated model is the oil derrick, but propulsions should be animated too.

One other thing- and believe me, I'm putting on the heavy-duty-flame-retardant-gear-and-helmet for this one - I am very experienced with several game engines (me quickly ducks and looks out for flames as it begins...) and would just like to say WARZONE 2100 DESERVES PORTING TO A NEXT GEN ENGINE!

And I would totally be willing to start the process, I do have plenty of experience, I know it would be a HUGE task, but it would be amazing and a triumph of the masses!

Oh, dear.

Our current engine is kind of custom-brewed, and supports Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It uses OpenGL for pretty much everything, and SDL for some other things. Very few current engines do this, which is the first problem with switching engines. Furthermore, our current engine, like the rest of the game, is written in C, which many modern engines are not, so that'd be a second problem. And although we have some support issues, we can also support some pretty old systems, and we'd like to keep that.

But if you can deal with all of those issues and port the entire engine yourself, feel free. I'm afraid I won't be much help; rendering engines aren't exactly my strong spot (else I would've had colored cursors working in hardware by now. :/ I blame SDL.)

Even better, the (smallish) 3D studio I work for is looking to get into games, and this would be right up our alley...

Keep note, we're free and open source. Not exactly revenue-generating, which is a pretty big turn-off for most 3D studios.

[Buginator]

Hi all, and I have to say AWESOME work and so great to see Warzone 2100 being "resurrected"! I was hooked on WZ the first time I played it, and have never lost the love of playing it, no matter the shiny new toys these days...

That said, I WANNA HELP! I'm not certain if you have a set "standard"/other for helping with the process, but you can see examples of my work at "www.ofgabriel.com", I would love to throw my 3D skills at WZ modding I didn't see a forum just for this- is there a "doorman" i should speak to?

One other thing- and believe me, I'm putting on the heavy-duty-flame-retardant-gear-and-helmet for this one - I am very experienced with several game engines (me quickly ducks and looks out for flames as it begins...) and would just like to say WARZONE 2100 DESERVES PORTING TO A NEXT GEN ENGINE!

And I would totally be willing to start the process, I do have plenty of experience, I know it would be a HUGE task, but it would be amazing and a triumph of the masses!

Even better, the (smallish) 3D studio I work for is looking to get into games, and this would be right up our alley...

Long live Warzone 2100!!

(me runs screaming, probobly on fire already by time you have read this...)
sorry to beat what is probobly a dead horse folks

Wow, *very* impressive stuff you have there!
If you looked at this thread: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2379 you will see the terrain improvements has some nice eye candy.

The current models (units & buildings) are (IMO) pretty crappy compared to the terrain.
If you want to try making new models, that would be great!
May I suggest you try to upgrade the model textures first, just to get a feel on how it will look on the low poly models. The textures are pretty low-res right now.

If you want to improve the 3D models, then there are others than can explain it far better that I, but what you end up doing is using a converter to convert from .pie (what warzone uses now) to .3ds (or perhaps .obj--I forget), and work on it that way, then convert it back to .pie. There is a blender script/plugin that people use, but again, I never tried, so I am not sure of the exact details.
Oh, and for now, the 3D models are low poly, but if you can make high poly ones, I am sure we can put together a utility to scale it down to what the end user's system can handle.

If you want to show off some backdrops, then here is a example of some prior stuff that has been made, and is now in warzone:
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2638

The only thing that we really require is that you have a license that works well with what warzone has, so we can distribute your work with the game itself. (The license types can be Public Domain, GPL 2(+) or http://creativecommons.org/license/ (that is a generator for the license) or perhaps something else that fits with warzone's license type, which is GPL 2+.)


Looking forward to see what you can cook up!

[yahodahan]

Wow, gotta say, that was a great reply, haha- really glad to hear such an in-depth and solid feedback. To tell the truth, I have been rather bummed out by many other mod communities that turn out to be so much fluff...

More to the point- you want wheels/etc, you got wheels (and etcetera) and yes, low poly is of course fine haha I know all my work online is rather high poly, as I normally work with the bleeding-edge stuff, but it's fun to drop down to low-poly as well, and a good challenge, to do it well! ha, 128 sided tank tires... (but, but, but what if the player zooms in REEEEEEEEELLY far and needs to see those wheels!)

Nice drawing- I shall build exactly to it! Well, I 'spose I'll have a few questions- how many wheel models do you need? If I remember correctly, 3 models, right- one for the light body, one for medium, and one for the heavy body style? What texture size? 256/512/1024?

"Oh dear"- Engine issues, engine issues... I definitely realize porting to a new engine is a big can o ugly with extra spicy headache sauce on top, but damn it would be fun to really make Warzone 2100 beautiful! Then again, the gameplay and unique style was really what made it so good, and too many games these days forget that in favor of eye candy. Certainly wouldn't want to go down that route. I'll look into it some more from my end!

As for the studio, yep, I realize it's no profit currently, and probably never- but I like to dream that the rights could be obtained somehow and make a brand-new-full-fledged-commercial-release somehow... or just make it in a way that rights would not be an issue, enough original content/concept that it could duck that barrier. Meh, I dream...

Thanks again for the fast and informative reply, I will try to find time tomorrow at work to model some bits 'n pieces

[Zarel]

More to the point- you want wheels/etc, you got wheels (and etcetera) and yes, low poly is of course fine haha I know all my work online is rather high poly, as I normally work with the bleeding-edge stuff, but it's fun to drop down to low-poly as well, and a good challenge, to do it well! ha, 128 sided tank tires... (but, but, but what if the player zooms in REEEEEEEEELLY far and needs to see those wheels!)

Nice drawing- I shall build exactly to it! Well, I 'spose I'll have a few questions- how many wheel models do you need? If I remember correctly, 3 models, right- one for the light body, one for medium, and one for the heavy body style? What texture size? 256/512/1024?

Yep, three models. Texture size can be as high as you want (that's what downscaling is for ) but they'll probably max out at 512 ingame. (The texture options go to 2048, but that's for terrain texture splatting that spans multiple tiles)

After that, new building models would be nice. There are a few of those already, but more is better.

"Oh dear"- Engine issues, engine issues... I definitely realize porting to a new engine is a big can o ugly with extra spicy headache sauce on top, but damn it would be fun to really make Warzone 2100 beautiful! Then again, the gameplay and unique style was really what made it so good, and too many games these days forget that in favor of eye candy. Certainly wouldn't want to go down that route. I'll look into it some more from my end!

Maybe as a long-term goal? Honestly, my reply was just trying to say "no" nicely. We really don't think porting the engine is a good idea - I can't even think of an engine that meets our requirements, and even if there were, it's too much work/time/effort to be worth it.

As for the studio, yep, I realize it's no profit currently, and probably never- but I like to dream that the rights could be obtained somehow and make a brand-new-full-fledged-commercial-release somehow... or just make it in a way that rights would not be an issue, enough original content/concept that it could duck that barrier. Meh, I dream...

Oh, obtaining the rights to make a commercial release is never gonna happen. You're hanging out with open-source people here, we won't touch anything commercial with a ten-foot pole.

[yahodahan]

I'm all set to work on those models then, like I said will try to start building them today. Including animations on all the buildings would be great, at least in some small way- will the engine handle this? I assume so, since you mentioned you would like to see more than just the oil derrick moving.

Can you give me a direct poly count I should shoot for (tris) when making these? I would assume from 50 to 200 tris at max? Also, does your engine support normal, specular, bump, etc? Or just diffuse? I can always bake all those into the diffuse, unless you have gotten real-time lighting/etc going on that would make use of the normals/specular. Oh and MUCH more important- how about opacity maps? so things like fences/etc can be made with a single polygon...

Thanks, excited to get to work on these!

Engine issues/commercial = no eh? If that is the simple answer, then no worries, I'll leave it be But that's not saying I won't be personally working on a way to make it happen, deep in my secret laboratory...

I can't even think of an engine that meets our requirements

Hmm, out of curiosity, I know I just promised to leave it alone, but technical challenges always drag me in- what exactly are these requirements? Again, this is purely..."hypothetical" talk, I'm just interested in the issue and some extra info to mull over... As an example, an engine I have been working with recently is "Unity 2.5", which is a very cool little engine that can do amazing things, and also create builds for everything from PC to Xbox to Wii or even iPhone, and even better can do pure in-browser games. Much of it is built with low-power hardware in mind. Just a recent engine I have been involved with.

Well, it's obviously something I'll be delving into on my own, and that's all good Besides, it sounds like you guys have built up (modified or built from scratch?) quite a nice engine yourselves already, and that's no ordinary feat, quite extraordinary in fact! So, in retrospect, please don't take my new-engine-talk as insult, sorry if it came off that way!

[elio]

hey yahodahan

awesome work, cool

well i tried to match a new style http://developer.wz2100.net/wiki/NewBaseStructures perhaps you can adapt it somehow but i don't want to give you any restrictions what you may do and what you don't have to of course. It's an open source game.. yeah so..

there's a howto about creating content, but it won't help you that much http://developer.wz2100.net/wiki/Creating3DContent
i've nearly rewritten it and then firefox hung up (of course i forgot to save backups which is rather dumb..)

Actually getting it ingame is the point you're interested in. I'd explain it in IRC, just chat to me (I'm 'ohyeh'). I'll update the howto as soon as i've got free time.

All the new artwork (including wheels by mysteryem which you may modify, improve of course) is available at http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/warzone/originals/

regards
elio

[Zarel]

I'm all set to work on those models then, like I said will try to start building them today. Including animations on all the buildings would be great, at least in some small way- will the engine handle this? I assume so, since you mentioned you would like to see more than just the oil derrick moving.

Currently, the radar on top of the HQ/CC rotates, and unidentified blue things spin around the main generator spike thing. Maybe give factories some sort of animation? I'm thinking "current style, but with more detail" would be nice. The tutorial comes with an FMV (which is sadly not available in 2.1) of a factory. I'll see if I can find it for you. I think Pumpkin had concept art lying around, too.

Can you give me a direct poly count I should shoot for (tris) when making these? I would assume from 50 to 200 tris at max? Also, does your engine support normal, specular, bump, etc? Or just diffuse? I can always bake all those into the diffuse, unless you have gotten real-time lighting/etc going on that would make use of the normals/specular. Oh and MUCH more important- how about opacity maps? so things like fences/etc can be made with a single polygon...

D: I'm not a 3D artist, nor do I do much work on the 3D engine. I believe 200 triangles was the suggested maximum for base structures, but we might want to go [significantly] lower for propulsions. I mean, Pumpkin's wheels only have ~12 vertices per side; they were pretty ridiculous in their optimization.

Engine issues/commercial = no eh? If that is the simple answer, then no worries, I'll leave it be But that's not saying I won't be personally working on a way to make it happen, deep in my secret laboratory...

Feel free. It's not so much "no" as "if you meet our requirements, sure, but we can't help much, and it really isn't worth your time."

Hmm, out of curiosity, I know I just promised to leave it alone, but technical challenges always drag me in- what exactly are these requirements? Again, this is purely..."hypothetical" talk, I'm just interested in the issue and some extra info to mull over... As an example, an engine I have been working with recently is "Unity 2.5", which is a very cool little engine that can do amazing things, and also create builds for everything from PC to Xbox to Wii or even iPhone, and even better can do pure in-browser games. Much of it is built with low-power hardware in mind. Just a recent engine I have been involved with.

I seem to remember listing these before, but here goes:

1. Free and open source. GPLv2-compatible.
2. Support for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
3. Support for reasonably specced computers.
4. Works with a game written in C.

Those are the major requirements. Unity doesn't satisfy #1. Sorry, we can't do anything even remotely commercial. We're also not going to do a complete rewrite of the game, so anything that's not compatible with a game written in C is a big no-no.

Well, it's obviously something I'll be delving into on my own, and that's all good Besides, it sounds like you guys have built up (modified or built from scratch?) quite a nice engine yourselves already, and that's no ordinary feat, quite extraordinary in fact! So, in retrospect, please don't take my new-engine-talk as insult, sorry if it came off that way!

It's just some hacks to get the original DirectX engine running in OpenGL. It's decent, but improvements would definitely be nice.

[elio]

for base structures i have a limit around 1500+, but we can always reduce it by using a polygon reducer plugin.

the new terrain renderer requires faster hardwar anyway, so you can easily go much higher as warzone's original.

HINT: devs please implement LOD ^^

regards
elio

[psychopompos]

HINT: devs please implement LOD ^^

you mean scalable LOD?

i think i read something about the current engine not supporting it in an old wishlist thread.
could be wrong.

[Zarel]

We already have LOD for terrain textures. We may or may not have it for other textures; I'm not sure. LOD for models would be... an interesting idea... We probably don't want to support more than two levels.

[cybersphinx]

I seem to remember listing these before, but here goes:

1. Free and open source. GPLv2-compatible.
2. Support for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
3. Support for reasonably specced computers.
4. Works with a game written in C.

Well, that's the basics, no engine that doesn't fulfill those points would be even considered. Point 1 is required by the game itself being under the GPL, points 2-4 are fulfilled by the current engine.

Point 4 doesn't really exclude engines in C++, though those might be somewhat problematic (years ago I made the source compile as C++ code (with one g++ flag to loosen restrictions), don't know if it still does).

There's also the problem of converting the data (models, terrain, textures) from Warzone's formats (which were optimized for low polycount and fast rendering with the hardware of 10+ years ago (there were renderers for the PSX, 3Dfx cards, Direct3D, and a software renderer), and include some quirks like connectors, teamcolours or moving vertices) into one the engine understands (either the files themselves or on loading). And the graphics code is not really separated from the rest of the engine (well, there is some separation, but only regarding the abovementioned renderers, not today's hardware and its requirings).

the new terrain renderer requires faster hardwar anyway, so you can easily go much higher as warzone's original.

Really? I'd guess it mainly requires more memory and capable drivers that support the needed features.

HINT: devs please implement LOD ^^

First thing should be better model rendering, LOD for models won't do much good now. LOD for terrain might be nice, but you'd have to interpolate the current terrain data to include intermediate vertices (since right now I guess we could push the complete terrain to the graphics card every frame without much impact on performance).

[yahodahan]

Thanks for all the replies everybody- wasn't able able to get a single thing done today unfortunately, or even start, had a loooonnng work day, yech.

Hopefully tomorrow, then. Will at least make a little better post then

have a good night/morning/afternoon/whatever you all may be currently experiencing!

[Per]

HINT: devs please implement LOD ^^

You mean in model format or something automatic? It would be no big deal to add it to the model format when switching to WZM, but how to get a LOD from the 3D program and into WZM is more of an open question.

[yahodahan]

ahhhg I was a bad person today and got lost in playing TF2 forever...tsk tsk no excuse...

so no models/etc yet.

but, they WILL be on their way
working on 'em as we speak!