new midwife. - by Eldron
RocketMan on 11/3/2009 at 01:50
Quote Posted by Digital Nightfall
Do you have any plans to do more, Eldron? or maybe some for Thief? :)
He's ours! Go get your own modeller:mad:
Goood Eldron (strokes lovingly)
Zeph on 11/3/2009 at 11:21
Nice work Eldron! Any luck getting it into the finicky dark engine?
Eldron on 11/3/2009 at 14:24
I've only ever exported static meshes before, I'm a bit clueless on how to go about with AI meshes.
as for thiefmodels, It would be fun to make something for that :), but it's on my own terms, as any of you might have noticed with ss2, a bit random.
Lucky Hand of Glory on 11/3/2009 at 20:11
wow...nice!!
catbarf on 11/3/2009 at 20:14
Shit, that's terrifying. Great job! That said, I've got to agree that the more spindly look for the legs would be more true to the original concept.
Zeph on 11/3/2009 at 22:06
Why are the mesh tools for the Dark Engine so awful?
Did LGS and Irrational really have to go through that horrible shit every time they wanted to make a game asset? Also is it impossible for a good coder to take what we have and make it work better?
Zygoptera on 11/3/2009 at 22:25
The tools aren't really that shit, they're just hard to work with if you're largely working blind, don't have all the tools' documentation and aren't experienced in their use. They are of course wildly unfriendly by today's terms, but then they were developed for an engine now well over ten years old.
That isn't much of a problem, as you can strip the joint planes off a T2 model then simply drop them in and adjust to fit. A non-standard pose (ie non cruciform/ Leonardo) would make that more difficult but not impossible.
The difficult bit is working out which points are generating errors, and why.
Zeph on 12/3/2009 at 01:08
Quote Posted by Zygoptera
The tools aren't really that shit, they're just hard to work with if you're largely working blind, don't have all the tools' documentation and aren't experienced in their use. They are of course wildly unfriendly by today's terms, but then they were developed for an engine now well over ten years old.
Makes sense.
Does the community have any skilled coders who've attempted to take the tools apart and see what makes them tick? Do the full version of the tools still even exist somewhere?
It just bugs me that there's such a barrier to making updated or new assets for these games due to the outdated tools. Granted some people have managed to make great things nonetheless but I wonder how much time and effort they spent fighting the tools.
Zygoptera on 12/3/2009 at 01:33
We do have most of the tools, IIRC, and things like making 'new' motions and adding motions to the motion database have been accomplished. Obviously we don't have Maya w/RTG for making proper motions, the DE source code for creating new AI, or the guy who wrote the programs sitting down the hall from us giving tech support, but we have most of what LGS had. So far as I am aware.
The main problem is that successful modeling requires a lot of time, patience and skill, and all this for games which are all near a decade old.
