Two of the more exciting features we’ve added to the editor are the ability to paint terrain textures on objects and make pathable objects that aren’t “tiles”. We’ve pretty much done away with the old system of “tiles” that stitched into the terrain. They are a pain to make, a pain to use, and they were bad for performance. Now we can make any object pathable by modeling a pathmesh on the surface we want players to be able to walk on. Using them is much easier since all you need to do is shove them into the heightmap or another pathable object and players will be able to path onto them.
The images below show two pathable objects - a bridge and a cliff rock. The bridge is made up of a center piece capped off by two end pieces. The bridge can be made infinitely long by repeating the center piece. To make it pathable, all you need to do is join up the ends in the editor. The bridge end could have been connected directly to the heightmap but I’ve decided to use one of our new cliff objects to create a better looking transition.
Thanks to our new object painting tech, I’m not stuck with a distinct, ugly-looking transition between plain gray rock and textured heightmap. In the bottom picture you can see how I’ve blended 3 terrain textures onto the rock at varying opacity to create a seamless transition.
Sweet, I’m guessing this means a lot more potential for interesting environments? I remember in TQ there was this huge spiral ramp towards the end of the game, is this the type of thing that was awkward to do back then?
I must admit I’m a little disappointed at the rock texture not bleeding into the bridge. We’d call it art.
Sweet, i love screenshots! It is really helpful to have the TQ engine and editor. You can use it as it is or make it better to make development easier and faster. I’m glad you’re making you life easier.
About the terrain making technique, I though for that all games have easy editor to make terrain. Guess I was wrong. Look likes it depend on the game editor/tools. Must be a pain to make all the terrain in TQ. Did Rhis the one who program for the tools used in GD?
If I understand what you’ve said about using tiles to determine pathing in TQ, it sounds like the pathing around the edges of the terrain should be better in GD.
Yes, Rhis is our only programmer on the project, so if a feature requires coding - Rhis is responsible. One of the reasons it is possible for us to do this project on such a small budget is that almost all of the technology is already done. So almost all of the work Rhis is doing is to make improvements and create new features.
Oh man, dude… the dirt on the bridge is SO COOL. Not in itself, though it is pretty nifty, but in technique because that will open up so many possibilities. RHIS RHIS HES OUR MAN, IF HE CANT DO IT…
I think you know the rest? I still can’t get over how those guys at battle.net thought the game textures look horrible, I can’t get over how godlike they are.
You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of all the custom made scenery (read as by players) on WH40k miniatures for the table top game. some of it was really REALLY good quality.
Thank you, although, I do think some of the critical posters had constructive comments - granted some of them did not. The game was looking a little too brown and muddy. We actually made some lighting and slight texture changes since the original screenshots. Nothing major but I think it is a significant improvement. The field stone path, for example, has been lightened up a bit and shifted from a brown to grayish color. The biggest problem is that we forgot about the day-night-cycle light values and they were adding in a lot of warm color values that were making the scene a little flat and brown.
We will probably post some new screenshots in a couple weeks.
