Dune Wars Art Thread

[davidlallen]

Here is a patch over 1.5 with the unit buttons. I didn't do missionaries, great people and a couple of others were left as they are.

Looks great!

DA66. I guess you know some buttons are missing, but to make sure none are missing by mistake, the infiltrator, inquisitor and stoneburner missile are the only ones I saw (besides missionaries and great people.)

DA67. For missionaries, at some point we will have to agree on unit art. Let's assume that the proposal in the religion thread is final, just not implemented yet. What unit art would make sense? We might keep some of the existing missionaries, and maybe one of the existing executives with a proper logo painted. Any thoughts?

DA68. At some point we should rename the Master XXX units so they match your specialist info, and probably we should think about unit art for them as well.

 

[Deliverator]

DA68 - I'd suggest doing the renaming now - it is inconsistent and easy to fix.

 

[davidlallen]

DA68 - I'd suggest doing the renaming now - it is inconsistent and easy to fix.

Good point. I copied your names out of specialistinfo into unitinfo. Now the icons look kind of silly. I could not find a good way to show all the icons at once, this is from the pedia. By the time you zoom, you may still be able to see the icons. The spy and noblemen are especially bad matches.

 

[Deliverator]

Well there are still quite a lot of things in the mod that look a bit silly. Can't fix everything all at once.

I'd suggest either going back to vanilla icons which would be better than the Planetfall ones. Or dig some out of another mod for now. I'm all icon-ed out...

 

[Lord Tirian]

It looks fine in NifSkope. I've had this issue before. The only way I know how to fix it is to use a shader on the mesh. Do you have any idea why this happens?

I assume it's the export from Blender with a skin partition. I made the experience that if you export the skin partition, you need to slap on the shader or the model will either end up distorted or CTD-producing. However, I'll look into it later today to see what's going on exactly.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Deliverator]

I assume it's the export from Blender with a skin partition. I made the experience that if you export the skin partition, you need to slap on the shader or the model will either end up distorted or CTD-producing.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I guess this is just one of those things... maybe changing the export settings in Blender might make a difference.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I guess this is just one of those things... maybe changing the export settings in Blender might make a difference.

Got it working. I removed the shader *and* the skin partition in nifskope, reattached the NiTextureEffect and removed the glow map.

If you disable the skinpartition part in the Blender export (see attached screenshot), it should work straight out of the box. Of course, without skin partition, you won't get shaders.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Deliverator]

Cool, thanks for the info.

I know you've done some particle fx tinkering before. Have you seen this guide? At some point I'd like to try it. Now that I've discovered that SceneViewer renders particle fx it becomes a more feasible thing to do. I'd really like to make a particle effect for the sandstorm - the current version is a bit lame. Another candidate would be the spice blow. I'm thinking it may be possible to adapt some of the vanilla or FFH2 particle FX or even do something from scratch with the info in the guide.

Edit: Emperor post - woo.

 

[davidlallen]

I'd really like to make a particle effect for the sandstorm - the current version is a bit lame. Another candidate would be the spice blow.

If you make a particle sandstorm, could you make a rainstorm at the same time? I can tweak the Gods of Old tsunami to have the same duration as the current sandstorm, but it would still have the same flicker/jump problem that the sandstorm has. The rainstorm should be a "chrome" reward to the terraformers. It will travel just like sandstorms, but it will kill spice and sandworms in its path instead of killing units and improvements.

 

[davidlallen]

Art request: I was thinking about how to make the map have a "sense of wonder" and I was thinking about wind-carved desert features. I went looking for heightmaps of Monument Valley, which has some of the most famous of these features. I didn't find heightmaps, but at Google 3D Warehouse, I did find some 3D models. Here are two:

plateau by sketchycat
desert terrain

I am sure that more searching would turn up hires heightmaps, and I am pretty sure most graphics tools can turn heightmaps into polygon structures.

Having some of these as impassible terrain objects, just for chrome, would be cool. Given an unwrapped nif, I can probably go the rest of the way with a primitive texture, the xml, and the mapscript parts.

While I was there typing in search terms, I stumbled across some other models which would be great for bonuses:

Mature desert saguaro tree1
agave by novel

But, the art request list gets longer, and I can hardly claim these are very critical.

 

[Ahriman]

Cool, some more desert features would be good.

 

[Deliverator]

I was thinking about wind-carved desert features

I've thought about having a similar sort of thing. I'd particularly like to have to have one with an arch like this. The trick will be to make them look like they're part of the terrain, but I think it's possible. Once the new terrain system feels bedded in I can certainly look at this.

I need to do a sweep over bonus resources at some point anyway. I'll probably replace a few models then.

I think next up I'll go back to sorting out the thopter fleet. When I started working on the mod, I thought I'd be doing mostly units, but I've hardly done any. I seem to have touched nearly everything else though now.

 

[Ahriman]

I've thought about having a similar sort of thing. I'd particularly like to have to have one with an arch like

I know the FFH "Orbis" modmod has a feature "gate to the underdark" that has a big arch. Probably a workable starting point. I'm not sure where they got the graphic from.

 

[Maniac]

That's from the Age of Ice scenario.

 

[davidlallen]

Anybody want to take that and paint it brown, and take out the bushes? I can randomly place that somewhere on the map during onGameStart. You already have the files, Beyond the Sword/Mods/FFH Age Of Ice/assets/art/terrain/features/Rock Arch.

 

[Deliverator]

I can do a quick reskin for it.

 

[Deliverator]

Here you go. I've included this in the 1.5.2 patch. We can create a variety of nice rock formation features like this.

 

[davidlallen]

Here you go. I've included this in the 1.5.2 patch. We can create a variety of nice rock formation features like this.

Awesome. This kind of stuff will make peoples' jaws drop when they open their first map.

 

[davidlallen]

Nif/art request for terraforming. I have finished the terraforming rewrite. The main goal is to add oases, and make spice/worms stay further away from water. I have run into two art related problems as shown in the screenshots.

1. You may recall that base terrain upgrades to "plains", whose texture is a copy of vanilla plains, and then to grass, which is a copy of vanilla grass. In the first screenshot, that groundwater/well at the lower right is on plains. Unfortunately, and this was probably true before, plains is only one shade different from desert. It is slightly greener. So my first request is to make two distinct shades of grass. Maybe we can use vanilla grass as the first one, and something even greener for the second one. Anyway, it fails the "David's Color Difference Test".

2. The code now adds an oasis, once the terrain has been grass for a while, as long as there is no feature or bonus in the plot and no oasis in any adjacent plot. You can see a good oasis at the left of the second screenshot. However, the red arrow points to an oasis which is in sink terrain. Oddly, since sink is lower, the oasis appears to be sunken into the ground. You can only see the tops of its trees. Can you do whatever magic you did for the other bonuses, to the oasis feature? The feature itself is already in the game files since 1.2 or something, but it was never placed by the game before. So you can see the problem in WB as well.

 

[Ahriman]

What effect does the oasis have? I would suggest adding oases to desert waste tiles (for +1 water) rather than grassland tiles; to grassland tiles, I would add scrub forest (for +1 hammers), and maybe this can only happen in sinks.