[Community Project] Real Time Strategy Game. NEW MODELS AVAILABLE. SEE POST #1

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That barn house is pretty sweet… Please do more in the free time! :slight_smile:

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Haha! Thank you :slight_smile: I will.
(Have imported it into UE4, but will make some changes, but the materials are all working :slight_smile:
(I’m pretty good with materials)

You’re welcome! That house deserve some love… :smiley:
Great to hear it, tease us with in-editor pic…

On the second note, if everyone else () agrees that it looks neat, I think it would be really useful if you could post the texture used , especially for the rooftop… That way, if anyone else wants to contribute, the style (the look of the rooftop for example) could stay consistent to some degree and could look like a team of dedicated artists worked on it :wink:

I present to you, my first Blender model EVER! :slight_smile:

Like it, hate it, it’s available for this project… If it’s disgusting, we can wait for better one…
Because everyone needs a little farm to keep food rolling, is my first take on it… :stuck_out_tongue:

~1700 polys

The foliage hasn’t been made by me, but I found it online with CC-0 license which means you can do whatever you want with it…

EDIT: If we decide to go with a farm of some sort, it would be cool to hook those plants into blueprint, and have them scale up as time progresses… we could scale it by 0.0 in the beginning (so they’re not even visible) and as time passes by, and our crops grows, we scale it more and more until the player can harvest them… Just an idea…

Pretty neat :smiley:

I have created 3 props yesterday. All of them are greek style pillars (good,fractured and broken). Poly count is around 150 vertices. However I am having some problem importing it into UE. Something messes up the normals. Some of the areas get very dark. I checked if I flipped the normals by accident; but that is not the cause. Your model looks properly imported (I believe the screenshot is from unreal). Can you tell me how you went about importing it?

Anyway I think the issue happens when the model has curves surfaces. I tried importing some blocky stuff like walls and blockades and they are pretty good in UE. Or it could be because of the baked normals. I baked normals from a high poly version (around 20,000 vertices).

Anyway I will try to fix it myself over the weekend. If it does not work, I will push the original .blend files to the repository and you guys can take a look

Like I said in the previous post, I have deicded to get my hands dirty by trying to model some stuff. Now I have a question: So far what I know about this project is its going to be an RTS. But I dont know what is the theme, is it multi-player or single player, is it war related or like civilization… So I’ve added some questions about the game below

Gameplay

Era?
Modern, Fantasy, Medieval, Sci-Fi, Renascence

Geography?
European, Asian, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, African, All

Theme?
War, Tower Defence, Civilization building, City building, Government (like tropico)

Scope?
Whole planet, One Continent, Smaller area

Realism?
Very realistic, Moderately realistic, Has fantasy elements, Completely Fantasy (magic and stuff)

Style?
Normal, Stylized, Toon shaded, Cel shaded, Flat shaded

Technical

Area of map?
Unlimited (like minecraft), Preset area (in sq KM)

View distance?

LOD levels?

Recommended poly count?

Recommended tex resolutions?

Character skeleton to rig against?

Unit scale (eg height/width of a person)?

What modelling program are you using?
I use Cinema 4D and to get mesh smoothing you need to have a phong tag on the object in question.

It looks pretty good, however two points of interest;

  1. I dont think we should have fences otherwise we’ll need to make a way for AI to get it,
  2. It seems you have the dirt plane as a flat plane slightly raised off of the ground, I think it would be better if you make a small mound, like this :d1b2a0dde2a71af3e9d6bab215e9a63ee6867951.jpeg

Also, I can’t tell very well, but I think the plants are too high poly, I think leaves with only around 7 polygons in length would be better for performance, and we just don’t need super high quality for an RTS. :slight_smile:

Community Announcement

Ryan Jon asked me to let you all know that he is going to be offline for a few days, and so if he doesn’t reply to this thread for a bit don’t worry! He will be back!

:heart:



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Wow this is really really good for your first ever model!

Great work!

I’ve been working on modular system for creating maps. But then I thought about a problem. Since each module will be a block, it will have 6 faces. However in most cases only 1 face is visible (the top face). But the engine will try to draw the other 5 hidden faces anyway (doing transformations, projection and shading). In UDK you could apply the default material on hidden faces (atleast on BSP bushes) to gain more performance. Is this still applicable in UE4?

Can you guys think of a way to avoid unnecessary overdraws?

About fences:
Actually as long as you dont have a collision volume for the fence, we dont have problem with AI navigation. They will simply walk through the fence (like in most RTSs).

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I think we should handle the foliage with a blueprint instead of making it a part of the mesh. With some simple vertex shader, we can make it appear to come out of the ground with time (sort of like animated).

I am using blender 2.7

When exporting I am using Shading: smooth (to reduce vertex count) and within FBX export properties, I set smoothing group to Face. I will try to post an image soon

Yes I know that we can just not enable collision for the fences, my point is that will look weird, unless we made a gate too, which would require extra collision polys and slightly less performance. In the Age of Empires series the farms have no fences, and it still looks fantastic.

And I do not think we can do the faces material thing, however UE4 features many types of culling, including occlusion culling, which may, if they are using it the way I’ve seen in other engines, mean that they are in fact not rendering any polygons that cannot be seen. Regardless, A few extra polys will be a minor hitch in F/S (Frames/Second) as the overall complexity of all meshes will be quite low.

Occlusion culling is applied for an entire mesh, right? I dont think it is applied per face. And eventhough poly count per block is very low, the shading cost is per pixel and considering the fact that the entire map is filled with numerous blocks, they could result in reduced performance (if the material applied to the blocks has a moderately heavy pixel shader). The bottom-face will be almost free becuase of the normals pointing in the other direction and that will be culled away. But the side faces are drawn as far as I know.

Well, I didnt say only occlusion culling, I said others too :stuck_out_tongue: Which may include the one that I cant remember the name of which doesnt render occluded faces.
Also we wont need bottom facing polygons on the tiles as we will never see them.

Ok.

I am not sure about this, but since UE4 uses deferred shading, they are supposed to generate the depth buffer before actually doing actual shading. So they might be testing against the depth buffer before calling the pixel shader by deciding if the pixel is visible or not. If that is the case, we dont have much to worry about (all that is lost if several projections, which can be ignored)

Added Teams!
Still a basic version of teams.
From now on only buildings and characters that belong to the player can be selected (resources are considered neutral and available for everyone).
Added a bool on BP_RTS_Character that allows editor-placed characters to look for a player owned team. Maybe this is also needed for buildings?

I got the chance to check it out, but not locate where things are going wrong (i would need to dive into it but i was hoping you would know how to fix it)
The problem is that the camera suddenly jumps to a location, i think the starting location, when zooming in or out. This doesn’t always happen, sometimes when i’m moving, sometimes when i’m not moving. Is this a known issue?

The rest seems solid and i’m looking forward to seeing more of it.

Yes it would be nice to hear what you guys think about this.

What comes next are just my impressions i had after first reading the first post of this thread:

Era:
I’d think a mixture of modern and fantasy, though AOE is also mentioned.

Theme:
both AOE and Rise of Legends seem pretty war-oriented to me.

Realism:
Moderately realistic at it’s base and fantasy elements at the side.

Area of the Map:
Unless we can find a way to build the navmesh before runtime and it only updates at runtime, a preset area is the only way.

These are just the things i had in mind after reading ryanjon’s post and the rest of this thread, personally i am open to a lot of things and willing to cooperate with almost anything.

On a final note, if there are any comments, bugs or suggestions about the teams feel free to tell me.

Wow, you guys have been busy!

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Hey, thanks! Sorry to say, but it was rendered out of Blender… I didn’t even tried to export it to UE4 yet, because as a first time doing this I’m wondering something… How should I go about texturing? Like, make complete textures/materials in Blender and just export/import into UE4? Or make use of UE4 great material editor and do all of the texturing/materials there? But then like, if I wanted to create one material for fence and other for dirt, how can I be able to manipulate them separately inside UE4? (I guess it’d bring it as a single mesh)…

Gameplay
I’m agreeing with what Tommie said…

Technical
Area of map?
Preset area (in sq KM)

View distance? LOD levels? Recommended poly count? Recommended tex resolutions? Character skeleton to rig against? Unit scale (eg height/width of a person)?
Wondering the same…

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Hey thank you! Wish you could say the same for my C++ programming… lol :frowning:

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Thanks… :slight_smile: Ehm, you’re wrong actually… I did some kind of similar thing… 's wireframe to see it better…

pic.

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Alright then :slight_smile:

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Seems too simple to be the actual answer, but why couldn’t we make a modular map out of planes as a tiles? that way you’d only have 1 face… Is there any cons to doing it this way?

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Great, will check it out! :slight_smile:

I’ll take a look… At least I know what I’m looking for, but I’m not that experienced with BPs yet so who knows if I’ll be able to fix it…

QUESTION: How hard/easy would it be to create it so that that when we click on a building and place it on the ground, the transparent image of the building stays there and then our worker goes there, and a small progress bar appears… Then, as progress bar is filling up, building become more and more opaque? Like having alpha channel go from 0.1 to 1 in a given time (time being the time needed to build a building, a variable of some sort)

  1. Not very hard. :stuck_out_tongue:
  2. Sorry, I just couldn’t see the shape from the camera’s angle :slight_smile:

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Np man… :slight_smile:

Guys, I fixed camera… However I’m not too good with GitHub :frowning: So 's the picture…

Works flawless :cool:

Then lets do it… right now! Give me some pointers and I’ll try to do it… I really want to see that functionality :stuck_out_tongue: