new art in progress

Talking about releases, do you plan to use that ruined ruins niffile I composed for you david? IIRC, you never asked to make a hill version, so...

I think from the discussion in the other thread davidlallen linked in the ruins discussion, i know how to make on nif adjust to hills/rivers/roads. But i hadn't the time to try it yet (and probalby won't come to it before next week, so i think it's something for the release after the next release)

seZereth said:

here is the fort. I think Refar should be more than capable to extract the watchtower from it and present it to you

thats it from my side until further notice, as I will work on FfH again. cheers.

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Thanks for all your hard work, seZereth.

GeoModder said:

Talking about releases, do you plan to use that ruined ruins niffile I composed for you david? IIRC, you never asked to make a hill version, so...

Click to expand...

At this time, I think "ruins appearing on top of rivers and roads" is a big enough problem to prevent me from using it. I think it's an excellent path to pursue, and it sounds like refar will work on it some more.

Now that I have the fort and watchtower, I can put them all in and turn out the new release, maybe tonight.

Okay, no need for me to make a hill ruins then, except perhaps for my own.

davidlallen said:

...I can put them all in and turn out the new release, maybe tonight.

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...

Can you tell I'm a bit excited?
Of course, if it's out tomorrow, I'm not complaining either.

I have been thinking... Maybe it would add to the atmoshere if we tone down the ambient lightning a bit. Not fully dark - something like evening twighlight - bright enought so we can still see the map (maybe with a wee bit brighter textures)... just dark enought so effects like window lights, campfires (fallout glow...) and such become visible.

A few things come into play here...

For once darker atmosphere will make the feeling - well - darker... Which should be more dangerous, desollate.

Als "Turning the Lights back on" is one of the themes from Fury road.
So if the game is dark in the beginning, we could add more and more lights as cities get rebuilt, cottages and populations grow...
It would also give the map a distinct, different look...

There is also the one wonder of Davids - the dig city light which would certainly benefit from this.

Interesting thought. I agree it would look cool to see cities which are advanced enough to have lights at night. But, when I switch from vanilla to Fury Road, I usually have to squint a little at first to find the important objects among the detailed texture. In vanilla (without Blue Marble) I find units and resources easier to spot quickly, while with detailed textures it takes a little longer. If we also make the map permanently darker, I am afraid it may be too hard to spot units and resources.

The idea is that most things the player want to find will stand out somehow - Ressources could glow (many - like metals and minerals - have a glow effect by default), pastures farms and towns would have campfires and window lights. Units carry a environmental light source with them afaik, so they should stand out as well.

I can't of course be completely sure how it work out, but i think i will try to set up a experimental "night mod"

C.Roland released a collabo of ours (it was done on his part a while already but got delayed as i was quite slow on the anims )... It is a completely new, all custom und unique hell/matant type unit.

I think it could be of some use. It does not look like a Radscorpion nor like a deathclaw (tho it has pretty huge claws and i had a bit of deathclaw on my mind when animating it), but i think it can easily pass as a "dangerous mutation"

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=288829

I saw that, and it looks awesome. Was it built for some specific mod (I assume FFH)? I may replace the modified werewolf deathclaw with this.

I assume it will go in FFH, but i had no specific mod set in mind - and i hope it could be usefull for more than one - perhaps necro cristi and warhammer as well... C.Roland asked if i want to animate it, and as it looked quite interesting and would be completely unque, so i did.

While working on the animation i realized that it's body proportions and stance are somewhat similar to how i remember the deathclaw from the Fallout games so i kept it in mind a bit...

Adding it a tail would cause some animation issues. Mainly because i already hit the bone limit - its not a hard limit, but adding one more bone would have significant negative effect on performance.
But making the skin more brownish is easy (I think deathclaws also had horns ?), and might actually look closer the original deathclaw than the current model...

Refar said:

I assume it will go in FFH, but i had no specific mod set in mind - and i hope it could be usefull for more than one - perhaps necro cristi and warhammer as well... C.Roland asked if i want to animate it, and as it looked quite interesting and would be completely unque, so i did.

Click to expand...

It looks like something you'd expect between a Drown would promote up too!

davidlallen said:

I saw that, and it looks awesome. Was it built for some specific mod (I assume FFH)? I may replace the modified werewolf deathclaw with this.

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BTW, does everything have to be a result of mutation due to radiation?

A very common cyber-punk theme is that bio-warfare brings the need to have troops resistant to it so you get all these 'super-soldier' programs. David Brin's post-apocalyptic novel "The Postman" has this with the groups of surviving 'homo superior'.

So perhaps some of the animals might be the result of these sort of experiments of bio-tinkering gone bad. (Once after too much to drink, some buddies and I crafted this whole back-story to the kid's show Thundercats showing how they started out as bio-engineered humans spliced with cat DNA to make them more disease resistant.)

Plus, it could add some hero units. Sort of like the FfH event where you get a few units if you pay this roving mercenary band. Perhaps here you'd get the option of allowing some of these genetically alter people to settle in your lands. If you agree, you get 1-2 units that might have disease resistance promotions or are stronger, but the penalty is a big hit of unhappiness as your people worry about these 'mutants' in their midst.

Just an idea.

The idea of Biolabs (which possible hero unist and unpleasent side-effects) came up already and is cool.

Actually, while radscorps are probably indeed radiation created, the Deathclaw (at least some groups) were bio-engineered. The Super-Mutants (not in the game yet, due to no art) are the product of an mutagenic virus or something...

But i am not sure if it i necessary/desirable to actually state/differentiate how the mutations came to be - the poor survivor farmer whos family got eaten by a deathclaw most likely does not know nor care...

Overall only few people alive would have the knowledge on how the mutations happened, as most - if not all - of the data probably was lost in the apocalypse.

Refar said:

But i am not sure if it i necessary/desirable to actually state/differentiate how the mutations came to be - the poor survivor farmer whos family got eaten by a deathclaw most likely does not know nor care...

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Oh, I quite agree. I was just thinking of it from an art/style point of view if people out there wanted to make units but wasn't sure where to go from. I mean a animal horribly mutated from radiation would probably look a lot different from some animal genetically altered for a purpose. Of course the same results is folks getting eaten from the stand point of the game.

On the other hand, such genetically units might have a chance at being captured after combat. I mean if you have these special canine units design to be smart, recon units that have gone feral; they might accept domestication rather than extinction after a losing fight.

A progress report on tree [ruins] cutting on rivers/roads...

I identified the NiStringExtraData attached to the objects in the forst nifs as beeing responcible for the cutting. It is basically a list of coordintes (which do correspond to the trees in the nif).

I was however so far unable to reproduce the effect on another nif

If you remove the coordinates from some/all of the existing forest nif, can you see that the cutting no longer happens? That is a negative proof, I suppose, but it is another proof that you are looking at the right data.

Yes. And it comes back if i reattach the data to the same nif. (Otherwise i would have said "i suspect" or something, rather than "i identified")

However if i supply another nif with a correct - as far as i can tell - list of coordinates, it does not work.

I assume some clipping approach - if a normal at this coordinates hits a road or a tree-cut polygon, everything connected to a face (vertex ?) this normal hits is removed...

The coordintes are given with a huge precision - like .000001 - which i can't recreate, i assume they used some script... I wonder if it has to hit something very specific in the model. So far i wasn't able to find out if and what.

I tried around a bit more...

I can now import and properly reexport the forest files - if i attach the original offset list to it, it work as it should - trees get cut, trees get adjusted to hills...

If it try the same with a file of my own - like a collection of boxes, to represent ruins - it doesn't work

There is another effect: the very same Offset List apparently also causes the trees meshes to be distorted and sway in the wind... While the distortion (it's minimal) is something we could live with, the movement of the sway is noticeable enought to be disturbing on ruins...

And yes, while the boxes i export do not get cut on roads, nor adjusted to hills... They do sway... (And they do cease to do so, if i remove the Offset List from them...)

There is something really phony about this all... I am sure the Offset List has to do with this (Because removing/reattchaing it on the original tree model has the expected effect)... But i am also sure i am missing something (Because removing/reattaching it on new models does affect Sway but does not cause Cutting...)

I would really like to know, what exactly these coordinates are supposed to hit.

Do we see any way to disable the sway from XML ? because from what i see now, i can't have Cutting without sway on the nif side...