Dune Wars Art Thread

[davidlallen]

Thanks. That rar seems only partial, as if it went on top of a previous rar. The nif refers to several dds which are not in the file.

I know we had several different sandsunami versions. I would like one which looks like a "nice, pleasant rainshower" rather than a "big angry tsunami". Is there an obvious way I can modify the sandstorm unit into an effect, given a very limited knowledge of nifskope?

EDIT: I am a dummy. The missing files for the sandsunami effect are in art/units/sandstorm. This is working now. I would like a "nice pleasant rainshower", without lightning, and rain effects optional. But it is not an emergency.

EDIT2: Now I remember one of the reasons I did not like the "sandstorm as effect". It leaves a ghost. There is no way to untrigger an effect. So when the storm moves to a new plot, it shows up in both plots until the loop time of the old one is expired. So for a ten second loop, the ghost is there in the old plot for up to 10 seconds. You mentioned that the Gods Of Old plague effect does not have this ghost because it is particle effects. I understand the idea of particle effects but not why that means it doesn't have a ghost. Is there a different way to do the storm nif so that it doesn't leave a ghost?

 

[Deliverator]

The difference between the Sunami effect and the Plague effect is that the first is a conventional animation via bones and meshes, whereas the second is a particle system. The Sunami has a fixed length animation stored inside the NIF whereas the Plague particle system just specifies a number of particle emitters. The game engine then takes care of the making these particle systems generate their particles.

The ghost with the Sunami is caused by the built in animation having to complete its current cycle. We proved this by shortening the animation loop to 10 seconds which reduced the lingering ghost time accordingly. Unfortunately, the only way I can think of to have no ghost is to have no animation whatsoever which means a completely static cloud. I've attached a Sunami NIF without any animation data so you can try this out.

You could make the animation really short, but then there would not much point in having it at all and it would probably look quite unnatural.

 

[keldath]

hey guys,
deliverator,
the art looks awesome.

the new heavy thopter - maybe you can enlarge the winds, its seems its a heavy weight on small wings.

but its really cool.

 

[davidlallen]

@ Deliverator,

New thopter art looks promising! Looking forward to the files.

I added the harvester to the game. Is the nif set too low somehow? In the dune-o-pedia, it is partially underwater, and in-game, the coastal edges obscure it. See screenies. I am using fScale 5.0, fInterfaceScale 1.0.

Thanks for the explanation and the no-animation nif. I can view the cloud in nifskope. But in-game, there is no effect visible. I switch back to the WORM_DUST2 effect and it is visible, and I double-checked my paths. It may not be possible for you to test this using CyEngine.triggerEffect(). By now my local install directory differs a lot from 1.4.x; I could upload a private release of everything I have except the fpk, if that would help to understand why it isn't working for me.

 

[Deliverator]

I guess there needs to be some animation for the cloud. I can try and make a really short animation loop and we can see if that works.

There is this general problem with stuff looking like it is hovering when over the desert tiles, seeing as the default level is sea level but the sea is now invisible. I tried to lower the harvester to compensate, but it is clearly not a great solution as your screenshots show. I'll see if I can do something better.

 

[davidlallen]

I dug the cloud bonus out of 1.3.8. The graphics are related to the sand sunami. It also does not show up when used as an effect. If you put a short animation onto the sand sunami, can you put same/similar one onto the cloud? Then we will have sandstorms that damage units, and rainstorms that start from terraformed terrain and destroy spice.

 

[Ahriman]

Playing David's newest version with the new scout thopter picture.
Is it possible to make the wings look more mechanical and less feathered? The animated model looks a bit too much like an animal. I'd suggest that more straight edges on the wings rather than the feather effects would look more like a vehicle.

 

[Deliverator]

Personally I like the style of the feathered wings. It was something that attracted me to the original model in the first place. It is more interesting than flapping aeroplanes which is what many representations have looked like. I think the feathers are stylised enough not to look like a real bird, and to make them look more like a vehicle would equate to making them look more boring.

 

[keldath]

i like the feathers as well,

but maybe deliverator, you can make another thopter, that will be one of the more heavier, that will have a more metallic element to the wings.

 

[Deliverator]

If you put a short animation onto the sand sunami, can you put same/similar one onto the cloud? Then we will have sandstorms that damage units, and rainstorms that start from terraformed terrain and destroy spice.

I have curtailed the Sunami animation to 0.25 seconds and put together the sandstorm and rainstorm/cloud versions as requested. This will hopefully deal with the lingering ghost issue. The rain animation may look a bit jittery due to the ultra short loop time, but see how it looks in game.

 

[Ahriman]

Quick idea:
Could the Citadel building art give cities some kind of bubble energy shield? IIRC there is something like that with the arcologies and shields in Next War.
I think it would be fantastic if we could somehow get Dune-style shields into the mod in a clearer way. It would be more obvious why melee ignore city walls if the city walls are actually shields.

It would also be cool if some of the infantry units could get some kind of shield aura, like shock troops, Ginaz warriors and Sardaukar.

 

[Deliverator]

Yeah, proper energy shields for both cities and units is something I have been wanting to try out. I'll probably start with something for city shields.

I took another look at the 3D elements of Emperor:Battle for Dune. Initially I thought it was impossible to port anything, but it turns out with a couple of obscure software tools you can get stuff out of there. Since it was a 2001 game the models are quite primitive, but some of the buildings could definitely find a home. The units don't port successfully but they are really low poly and not particularly impressive anyway. Even the buildings are a bit hit and miss since I have to manually decide which texture goes on which section of the model. It looks like all the base buildings for the 3 factions Atreides, Harkonnen and Ordos will port OK. These are: Construction Yard, Barracks, Refinery, Factory, Outpost, Landing Pad (more of a helipad), Starport, Hanger, Palace. It would probably best to just cherry pick a few of the best ones. The 3 factions have different art styles (see screenshots) so that all the buildings look similar, but we can always reskin some of them if we think it is worth the effort.

 

[The_J]

...whatever you don't need......

 

[davidlallen]

@ Deliverator, I will try out the new storms tonight, thanks. What does the Art Queue look like? I guess the heavy thopters are #1. Is the Worm Rider on the queue?

 

[davidlallen]

I have curtailed the Sunami animation to 0.25 seconds and put together the sandstorm and rainstorm/cloud versions as requested. This will hopefully deal with the lingering ghost issue. The rain animation may look a bit jittery due to the ultra short loop time, but see how it looks in game.

I tried it out. I wish I understood how this actually works, so I didn't feel like I was asking around at random. With 1.4.6 and your new rar, the storm appears for about 0.25 sec, then disappears for 3 sec, and loops. The 1.4.6 code uses redraw(), which I understand is called every 0.25 sec. But then following the model of Gods Of Old, it has an internal loop counter of length 12, so I guess that means it assumes the effect lasts 3 seconds.

I changed the code to get rid of the loop counter so every time redraw is called, it triggers the effect. That should mean the effect triggers every 0.25 sec. Now it seems to strobe. It seems constant, but it has a bright flicker every 0.25 sec.

I have nifskope and I can push buttons given a formula. Can you describe how to modify the loop length so I can experiment until it looks right? I suppose we could also try a 3 second loop, but that guarantees a three second ghost also.

We have established that a static nif never appears, and a purely particle nif appears to work correctly with no ghost. It may also be possible that an effect which has a static item like the cloud, plus *one* particle effect, may appear correctly. This may be just a random guess.

If you are interested to experiment, you can just replace sunami.nif in directory art/effects/sandstorm, in patch 1.4.6. You may not want to mess with the loop counter in the python, but in case you do, look for function StormDraw(self) in file DuneWars.py. There are two functions named StormDraw, one is short and just calls the real one later in the file, because of the way python import and classes work.

 

[Deliverator]

On the Worm Rider, I'll probably jump it to the top of the queue seeing as people seem key to have it. You've probably gathered that I like to work on several things in parallel to stop myself getting too bored with one thing, but I'm always open to requests. I try to keep the second post roughly up to date with what I'm looking at or am planning to look at.

Modifying the loop length is pretty easy as NifSkope operations go. View Blocks in List by selecting the menu option (rather than viewing in tree format) and then for every node with a name ending in Controller, look at the Block Details and change the 0.25 in the stop time to whatever value you want to try. Make sure that you do all the Controllers - to check - save and reopen the NIF and press play at the top - the animation should loop for the amount of time you entered.

It may be necessary to edit/remove some of the animation keyframes as well as just the loop times, in order to remove the flickering, but that is a more advanced subject and trickier to explain. I can remove keyframes to make sure that we are not catching a bit of storm flash.

 

[Ahriman]

Very very minor issue; is it possible to take the US Marines insignia and US flag off the side of the suspensor transport (=hovercraft).

 

[Deliverator]

I've adapted the Acology graphic from Next War to make shields for the cities. I can tweak the orange shield glow a little if we want. I think we should rename Defence Grid to Defensive Shield perhaps.

Spoiler :

Here's the Art Defines entry I was using, note the LSystem tag:

		<BuildingArtInfo>
			<Type>ART_DEF_BUILDING_DEFENSE_GRID</Type>
			<LSystem>LSYSTEM_ARCOLOGY</LSystem>
			<bAnimated>1</bAnimated>
			<fScale>0.6</fScale>
			<fInterfaceScale>1</fInterfaceScale>
			<NIF>Art/Structures/Buildings/Arcology/Arcology_AdvShielded.nif</NIF>
			<KFM/>
			<Button>,Art/Interface/Buttons/Buildings/Courthouse.dds,Art/Interface/Buttons/dunebuildingsatlas0.dds,6,5</Button>
		</BuildingArtInfo>

 

[Ahriman]

Shield looks cool.

Is the defense grid though actually a shield? Do we have shield technology at tier2 techs? I imagined it as being actual physical fortifications.

I wonder if we should use this graphic for the Citadel, and leave the defense grid as a wall? We could rename the Citadel to defensive shield. Also, should it really still give +1 trade route?

Maybe we should also tweak the values?
So the wall is like a FFH palisade; its low defense strength 10% or 15% and stacks with cultural defenses, and then the Citadel is a much larger bonus (75%?) which also stacks with cultural defenses?

So, you really can't invade shielded cities except with melee, or heavy bombardment.

 

[Deliverator]

I'm not sure what the Defense Grid is either. It looks suspiciously like a medieval stone wall right now! We could just make it a building - some kind of early warning system or miltary communications post. Alternately, I can make walls that look more Dunish - and we give the building a more appropriate name.

More generally, I'd like to pilfer/adapt some more appropriate citysets from Cultural Citystyles and replace a few buildings. I've spotted a few that would look good in this mod that I don't think we are using.