Guys, some great news!
contacted me and he said he’s going to be creating a model for this project
He’s going to be building something like this, and I think we should call it like a command center/HQ? Should look nice, especially since you, , wanted a more cartoon style
So, to all the rest of you that wants to help with models, please let’s all focus on different things so we don’t end up getting a multiple submission of the same model… The rest model we need consists of barracks, towers, wall(I think it’s a good idea that’s rarely seen in newer RTSs), something like upgrade facility, and rest…
If rest of you would agree this model looks right for a command center, I’d be happy to consider it W.I.P and let anyone else take on building something else that another Command Center, except if it would be for another race in-game…
@
I had one in like 2004-06, I need to check whether that email I’ve been using still exists, and if so, try to reset my password
@
I for one, wasn’t all that excited when you mentioned tile sets at first, but after watching the video you linked, I think that’s a great idea! It would be so easy/fast to create a bunch of maps from the in-game editor without need of World Machine and other commercial software + if someone is really savy enough (like programming-wise) it could be made into a full blown editor that would allow players to create their own maps…
@HeadClot
I’d wait for official words from , but I, for one, would like to see them
It’s sort of easy to make the in game editor, the hardest part is saving the map data.
However I think that in the early stages that this game is currently in, we should focus on in editor creation, and leave the in game editing for later. (But still leave room for it, overhead wise)
Quite possibly, but at least the idea of map data seems easy enough… Like imagine we have 50 different tiles available to our in-game editor for placing and the map size of like 500x500 tiles… Why map data couldn’t be just a matrix of 500x500 integers ranging from 0-49 (possible tile pieces…) ? But just asking, because I never tried manipulating map data…
Oh right! But still, we could like then make matrix of Vector3, where the three value Vector3 stores would be like ‘type, rotation-value, scale-value’ and in-game editor tool should know what number tile represents what static mesh and load it while parsing map data… But this is so off-topic, and I’m basically making a wild guesses so I’ll stop now!
Well, like I said, it is possible, but we should focus on making the tiles first, and the in editor map making. If someone would like to give me some tiles, I will happily program this feature, but until we have some assets, there’s no real point in talking about it.
Hi. I have to give my personal opinion on the type of assets you said you wanted . Although the cartoonish style might seem easier to make is actually a lot harder than the style of age of empires 2 or 3. The cartoonish style requires an artist who can draw very well and it requires that the artists making it are consistent with the style ( this is good for a team of artists that have worked together for a while and can compliment each other) . The other style like age of empires 2 or 3 is much easier for the majority of artists that you will find in the community because it involves photo-manipulation rather than artist painting skills. I strongly recommend that you do not make the project cartoon style. If you do, contributing assets will become a bit problematic because the styles will not be consistent. I know cartoon looks nice but i can assure you the other style can look good as well.
is a great example of an age of mythology building that is not cartoonish but holds the fantasy style.
This last one is much harder to do than the wonder from age of empires 3 or the town center from age of empires 2. The only advantage with the cartoonish one is that once you made the texture for one you can reuse it multiple times. For this particular project that is not an advantage because different artist will be making the assets separately.The style will not be consistent. Even for warcraft most assets were a mix of hand painted textures and photo-based textures. I’m warning you about this as soon as possible so you can get more assets for your project and do not limit yourself to only artist that are very committed and have a high level of experience. If you had a team of artist i would say go for hand painted textures. However many people who have offered to supply assets say that they will model them but not texture the assets. This is a major problem for hand painted textures. I’m just saying all of this before you invest your 60$ in a style that most community artists will not keep up with unless is paid. Remember if you buy those buildings you are pretty much forcing everyone who wants to contribute to follow that style which is a huge hindrance. I suggest you to not purchase those assets unless they are just placeholders. Also realistic textures can easily be given a more stylized look later on.
I agree with @. It is much harder to create cartoonish textures for a game than it is to create realisticish, and also,at this distance away, you can still get away with 512p textures for realistic.
I myself would never think of that, always though the cartoonist style was easiest, but yeah, I definitely underestimated the textures… I agree with @ as well, seems like he knows what he’s talking and at current stages of this community projects we just need to keep rolling instead of being picky with assets…
BTW, @, since I guess you know your tools (modeling) well enough, could you really, really quickly create some basic placeholders for a few buildings that at least look a tiny bit different from each other (like cubes, with some details we can differentiate town center from tower etc, so we can start working more on building and building connections in-game while waiting for assets…
I started following this project’s BPs more in-depth and also started learning C++ side of UE4, so hopefully will be able to add some functionality soon…
@
You are right about cartoonish textures being harder to do. However I think we can create a post process shader to make things look cartoonish. But I do understand that we need coordination between artists so that stuff look similar. Anoterh thing to note is with toon style, the lighting must change. ie instead of using the interpolated normals inside the Material, we should recalculate them based on dx and dy (whcih is doable in UE4). What this does is all faces that are in the same orientation receives the same amount of light which will give us a ‘blocky’ look.
However one advantage of toon shading is lower poly-count. Since blocky look is what we need, we can reduce mesh complexity a lot (espceially for buoldings, charcters and trees). I think even terrain can be less detailed.
About modular terrain:
I like the idea. However I have some concerns about parth-finding and other optmizations. As far as I know the navmesh is generated by the editor and not at runtime. Ofcourse the navmesh gets modified at runtime to accomodate for moving elements. But I think most of the time-consuming stuff is done from within the editor (youmight have seen the ‘buling nav mesh’ notifications). So if we allow the player to create maps (ie in-game), when do we generate the nav mesh? If there is such an option in UIE4 to generate navmesh at runtime and save it we are good. Otherwise we will need to come up with a dynamic navigation/pathfinding system of our-own (like did). However since our map will be on a grid, pathfinding will be much easier.
Another possible problem is terrain deformation. With the UE4 landscape this is easy. IE when we place a large building or structure, we can flatten the underlying terrain to match it. But with tiles, this is not possible (since they are static meshes).
About the navmesh, i believe if we want things like buildings to update the navmesh, the entire navmesh is rebuilt when pressing play so that shouldn’t be a problem (at least if we can decrease navmesh build times).
@ We can quite easily just replace the tile under a house when you build it, its not very hard (To allow for deformation). We can also not have blocks appearances by creating loads of different modular tiles (Once you have a few assets this is very easy)
In terms of control, you are of course right, we can never achieve complete control with tiles as we would with landscapes, but with many tiles we can still make it quite possible to make anything.
And in the navmesh department, I believe there is an update at runtime bool that you can turn on for a navmesh.
All in all, I think that the pros way outweigh the cons, but that’s just me
About navmesh. Have you ever noticed message like ‘NAVMESH NEEDS REBUILD’ while playing a game? I think the initial navmesh is built during the ‘Build’ phase. If you check ‘update at runtime’, I think it updates the already built-navmesh to accomodate moving/dynamic elements. I am not sure that the entire navmesh is generated at runtime. I will do some research and see how this is done.
Also how about foliage? Does foliage painting work on static meshes?
But like I said previously, I like tile-sets. It helps to generate terrain faster. And with some Material instance tricks, we can switch an existing map to different themes (autumn, winter, summer…). All we need is to change the texture and some other material params.
UPDATE: Found this: Dynamic navmesh - Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums Looks like generating Navmesh at runtime is possible. However we should create Navmesh volumes for it to work. Perhaps we can make tiles a blueprint and when placed create a volume. Is it possible>?
Yes, Static mesh painting is possible with the foliage tool, however considering we are making an RTS, and you will be able to cut down foliage, I do not think that we will use that. Instead we will use Blutilities as shown in the video.
DISCLAIMER!!! I am by no means a modeller, I am many other things, but not a modeller.
I thought it would be good if we had at least a few assets, so I have just quickly modelled this barnhouse thingy.
It is very low poly [1100] and I just quickly threw the textures together (I will put a little more effort into it once I import it to UE4)
But what do you think?
I’m not too sure, but I do not think we can instance navmesh volumes at runtime, we can however put a cap on the world size (a large cap though) so the creator has freedom.
However, like I have previously said, we should focus on in editor creation, not in game, as if there is no in editor, than we can’t do anything anyway.
Yes. For now, we do not need to worry about the saving of user created levels, as, for now, we are not implementing any user toolkit as we need to focus on the actual game first.
Or at least, thats what I think we should do.
(PS. It wont be too hard to program the saving, its just the toolkit which will require some work to get functional, hence why we should not do it now )
