Everquest UT2004 maps - continued

I've finished fitting out the level and testing it with bot pathing and pickups, and I've moved on to cleaning up/reworking the geometry and textures. I'm taking a lot of care not to take aware from the classic old feeling area but there are things that just plain ugly, and the UV unwrapping and texture resolutions of the originals are beyond hideous.

I've spent some time chamfering corners and unwrapping the level as well as adding some more geometry to make the castle feel more like a castle.

Before:

After:

As you can see there's some extra trims and castle details, which are still quite blocky and keep with the old school geometry of the castle but add a lot to the aesthetics of it. I then decided to move on to recreating my first texture.

I modelled the bricks in 3ds max and imported them into mudbox to sculpt. Using screenfiltering to extract the base texture and normals (not that UE2 uses them xD) I also extracted some cavity maps and other masks to help my in photoshop while painting. I put a lot of time and care into making sure i matched the colours shape and values of the original texture to keep it as authentic as possible.

                                                                    Original texture:  

New texture:

I took a lot of inspiration from modern sculpt to handpainted styles as they make as much as of the diffuse channel as possible, the only channel ut2004 and everquest uses for textures as it's all vertex lit.

Here's the new texture in game

It made me realise I have a lot more UV's to sort out xD especially on the inside of the castle but it's a lot more pleasant too look at already. I also made a quick spec and took a render in marmoset showing the tiling texture with full diffuse specular and normals for future use on my portfolio website.

That's all so far this evening, I'm going to sculpt plank textures from the bridges and wooden flooring soon and perhaps make a mesh and sculpt the cobblestone wall just outside the castle. Thanks for reading

-Andy

Everquest UT2004 maps

So I've started this year playing and looking back on good old classic fast paced shooters. Mostly playing UT2004 and also deciding to play some classic Everquest Project 1999 and I thought it would be a bit of fun to take the dungeons from Everquest and make them play or work as a classic arena shooter map.

So I've started with the dungeon known as Crushbone, which is one of the most famous newbie dungeons from the game.

I've kept a lot of the classic old school modelling in tact and fleshed out the rocks and wall areas with some ut2004 cliff meshes.

Thanks for reading
-Andy

Selesnya environment nearing completion

Made further progress on the interior props and lighting.  As mentioned in my previous post the project is an Unreal 4 environment based on concept art of the Selesnya Guild plane from Return to Ravnica : Magic the gathering. The world of Ravnica is a plane of existence made up from various cityscapes built around guilds of magical creatures and magicians. Selesnya is a cityscape which contains a faction of forested and plains based environments and creatures.


The interior of the building is now decorated with braziers and hanging banners.

Selesnya environment

Spent the last week or so working on a Unreal 4 environment based on concept art of the Selesnya Guild plane from Return to Ravnica : Magic the gathering. The world of Ravnica is a plane of existence made up from various cityscapes built around guilds of magical creatures and magicians. Selesnya is a cityscape which contains a faction of forested and plains based environments and creatures.

The cityscape is depicted in illustrations with gardens growing within allotments of grand clean classical architecture. Existing designs appear heavily inspired by both Greek and neoclassical architecture.
Existing concept art can be seen on the mood board below.

Below are some screenshots of the current state of the environment in-game.

Quick Update on things (Warcraft 3 Survival TD Map!?)

Hey, long time no post. Have been doing a lot as always just been busy with some physio exercises and distracted from my Blog in my extra time. I've been switching between a lot of things recently I've been doing less Uscript, made Third/half the framework for a Magic the gathering card game setup and worked on some platformer AI practising Ray-tracing and States. Also practised using the material editor (UDK) Making several materials. 

Made a quick UT3 Map with a 3d skysphere/box and some weapon Mutators.

Been working on some 2D Animation and Parallax Backgrounds for a Android Game, not sure if it's going anywhere yet. Here's a sample of one of the combinations...

Spent the last 3-4 days play-testing and heavily reworking my Warcraft 3 Survival Tower Defence Map which is going really well, been working in some music and sorting triggers out for more waves and Boss fights tonight.  Besides fixing the usual list of this was supposed to work and why is this change done yet. xD Finding it great fun to have some keen play-testing for once it really is helping me take this map much further to completion both in morale and feedback.

Also got some Morrowind Fanart and Age of Empires 2 : Forgotten Empires cover art in the works which I'm slowly crawling through. xD I really just need a job x3 ah well. Hopefully I can use some of my more polished  recent stuff to help get me work in the near future. For now I'm going to try and enjoy the freedom the best I can. Although I find it much easy to work with others around, probably half the reason why I've been going at this Warcraft 3 map so much.

Spirit Day and Blockade Map

Been working on a death-match map for blockade, still works with the power progress I've decided to keep that consistent throughout the game. Been interesting designing maps with a heavier emphasis on verticle mobility and jump distances. Especially since most the plat-former stuff I've done before besides my Kirby map for CS has been quite linear. So mixing Multi-player pathing with plat-forming paths has been a good challenge so far.

The map also contains teleport/portal like pipes and moving platforms. Been ill for the first time in awhile yesterday but i got around to redoing one of my paintings for Spirit Day http://stormandy.deviantart.com/art/Spirit-Day-Inner-Universe-333255181

Blockade Progress 18th oct

Been 10 days since my last post so I figured I'd post another update on the games progress. 

I've got quite far mostly over the last 4-5 days, sorted out the camera, planned out the player characters proportions, which are very similar to Bomberman. Made icons for the movement abilities (the icon in the top right hand corner of the screen) sorted out a health and power bar. Tested out some basic split-screen.

Little update for the progress with my Unreal Game Blockade

So i've got an atlas (1 texture maps) for all my 64x64 materials and cut it up into 16x16. Got the ideas from Minecraft textures packs/sheets. Using the material editor I've divided up the texture space and altered the UV's to view one section and offset the UV's for each material I've made referencing to the same texture.

Also used the same material set-up to pixelize drop the rez of the results in the sky-dome materials to create I nice looking voxel sky. The done the same to one my own grass textures for a quick floor placeholder.

I've coded the destructible blocks to store an up-datable material instance, so I can offset the uv's of a texture which stores a damage overlay for my materials, I can eventually make a better looking and unique one for each material however for now I've made a quick generic ones for testing purposes.

Scalar Paramater setup which is passed to the code which calculates the blocks health percentage remaining and uses a case statement to update the block to the appropriate UV space of the damage overlay.

 Test texture

Game Expo and a day of Magic

Been down to EuroGamer Expo down at Earls Court in London on the 27/28th which went well didn't find the Indie stall till 3 hours before i left though, which was the best part for me really. After so much traveling followed by a whole day of Magic Draft for the new set, i can finally sit down and rest and get back to reading more of the UDN.

I met some pretty interesting indie devs down at EuroGamer, whilst play-testing a game called Proteus i recognized from a website a friend had sent me. The programmer for Proteus  spoke to me whilst i was discussing the game with another play tester who was insistent on finding a meaning/goal to the game trying to follow the stars. We got talking about the game, sprites and programming in general and i mentioned that i've been working on my voxel art game in unreal with growing entities and that I've been trying to find resources to help me learn algorithms for growing patterns and other theory. He told me to just drop him an email and he'd quickly try gather some links of the resources he used which is pretty awesome, so I'm going to send a email later today. Been practicing and writing notes on all the UnrealScript state commands and syntax and practicing compiling some really basic test entities with demo states.


I met a few other indie devs one working a relaxing puzzle/exploration game in Unity called Kairo which i quite liked, it reminded me of TFC(Team Fortress Classic) and CS (Counter Strike) Jump/Explore Maps with more music. Another 2 were making a side scrolling jumping/rhythm game similar to the likes of Bit Trip Runner with some smoothly animated vector graphics, which caught my attention for the wrong reasons at first but i got into them. Names slipped my mind so I'll update it with the name later, i also quite liked a game called Barbariball i think.

Been thinking about setting up a Specular sheet for  my terrain pixels since specular maps show so much properties for a material and i don't feel the need to keep the lighting style too retro may as well make use of the unreal engines visuals. Considering normal maps also and maybe even different geometry meshes for blocks done it a voxel style of course like my gun meshes.

Went to a place in Liverpool to play a Magic the Gathering draft with friends and my best friends family which was quite good, minus the occasional stuck up rule nerd. Always like doing drafts for Magic since they always introduce small new mechanics which completely change how the game plays. Its like a endless resource for game mechanic ideas and some of my best mod and game ideas stem from them in some way or another. Also love reading the art since they're on small cards they usually always have a stronger focus on thumbnail composition and silhouette.

Got a nice shiny Slime Molding Card and another normal and a lot of populate cards a new mechanic which allows you to make a copy of a token card you own on the battlefield. So my deck was centered around that. Put a larger emphasis on the difference between normal and token creatures which was normally quite a subtle part of the game in most Magic I've played previously.