Legends of Tacendia

[Falagard]

I've been working on the tools and processes to get content into Legends of Tacendia (working title). http://www.legendsoftacendia.com


These shots include temporary assets borrowed from other games as placeholders. The most interesting thing about this shot is the shadows on the terrain and on the buildings.

So, here's the screenshots and a description of what you're looking at:

A 256x256 block of terrain representing 512x512 meters was loaded into giles. Meshes were then placed into the scene. The grid in Gile[s] is set to snap such that the meshes snap together nicely - the wall is made from about 12 different pieces snapped together. It's really cool to be able to snap those pieces into place easily.

http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-1.jpg
http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-2.jpg
http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-3.jpg
http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-4.jpg
http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-5.jpg
http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LOTMarch05-2005-6.jpg

The terrain will look much better than this in the final version, those are sample textures I threw together. An artist will be doing the terrain textures, as well as the terrain layout and texture painting onto the terrain, instead of some stupid programmer like me

The game is a MMORPG with a few interesting twists, such as tactics style combat (otherwise known as strategy rpg combat) similar to Gladius and other "tactics" games such as Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre. The other key feature is the ability to control more than one character at a time, both during world movement and combat. The game has been in development for years (7 years), but like most MMOPRG projects, is progressing slowly. Unlike most MMORPG projects, I understand the complexities of what is necessary to bring a game together. Which is why I've been concentrating on tools for the last year or so, figuring out what tools I need to build or integrate into the content creation process, so I can give the tools to the artists and let them go.

Also, the terrain only has shadows on it near the buildings - in the distance the terrain will look much better once shadowed. Currently it takes me 1.5 hours to simply load a 256x256 block of terrain in Gile[s] due to some strange slowness in the importer. I should be able to get this to under 1 minute once I write a custom importer, but in the meantime, I didn't have the time to load up those 15 other 256x256 maps in the distance, so I just loaded the one near the buildings and generated shadows for it.

The terrain is receiving shadows and casting shadows. The meshes are receiving and casting shadows.

I'm using the PagingLandscapeManager2 plugin, and OgreODE in for player movement and collision detection/response, colliding with terrain and other objects in a realistic manner. Gile[s] for lightmapping with a modified version of Walaber's exporter. Freeworld for terrain creation and painting. 3DS Max for model creation with Octopus for exporting.

More to come soon.

Here are the development forums in case you're interesting in weekly updates. We're currently looking for programmers to assist us.

http://www.legendsoftacendia.com/forums ... pendev_lot

Clay

[Clay]

Wow, that's very nice. How far along are you guys?

BTW, it's confusing having two people named Clay in one place. =D

[Falagard]

Hey Clay, ya I've seen you around the boards lots and said to myself... "Great, I've only met 2 other Claytons in my whole life and now there's one on the Ogre forums" hehe. We'll have to hope that people don't get us confused.

I've updated the original post with better screenshots that have better lighting, shadows and textures, because they were bothering me. The final game will of course look even better, but I couldn't stand those poor ones up there.

As far as progress goes, it's coming along. In the past we've had full demos with logging into a server, player selection, and then walking around the world, but then we took a few steps backwards and switched engines to Ogre because it was the best decision for the project. Now we're trying to catch back up, but hopefully over the next few weeks I'll have another demo up without networking, then soon (tm) after with networking.

Clay

[Xinc]

That looks fantastic!
by the way, whats the player-size to the castle-wall ratio?

[helloween]

looks very nice ! good work !
Can you tell about the technics you used for the terrain/castle and the FPS ?

[stodge]

Very, very nice!

If I had time and energy, I'd offer. But good luck at the same. I'd only hold you back!

[Falagard]

by the way, whats the player-size to the castle-wall ratio?

I definitely need a player in there to give you a sense of scale, but our one player model that we have isn't working properly yet. Perhaps I'll put him in there just for a screenshot, untextured

The scale is about what you'd expect - the units are in meters, so it's easier to get the scale right. 1 unit = 1 meter, a player is about 1.8 meters tall, etc.

Can you tell about the technics you used for the terrain/castle and the FPS?

Techniques, well - I'm doing like I said. Meshes are created in 3DS Max, and exported to a format that Gile[s] can read. Gile[s] is a lightmapper program, but I'm using it as a world editor too. The best format for getting stuff into Gile[s] seems to be .b3d (Blitz3D) format, so I export from 3DS Max to .b3d. The castle is a bunch of mesh pieces that fit together. The terrain is was created and textured using Freeworld3D - I exported the terrain as 16 bit heightmap. The terrain is rendered using two fragment programs.

This post has tons of info on how I do the terrain:

http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... highlight=

Currently, getting terrain into Gile[s] is a major pain. I won't describe the process, but needless to say I need to create a mesh, load it into 3ds max, cut it up in 16 pieces, export the whole lot as .b3d, then open in Gile[s], and Gile[s] takes 1.5 hours just to load the 256x256 terrain. The screenshots you see above are made from 16 pieces of 256x256 terrain!

Anyhow, after using Gile[s] to position meshes, I export them to a .scene file, and load em up in Ogre.

I'm using OgreODE, especially the terrain collision callback, for moving around the terrain and colliding with the castle in first person (soon to be 3rd person). I'm currently working on this part, because I need to create ODE trimesh collision geometry.

Clay

[DarkSun]

Hi! This looks very cool!

I have a question about gile[s]/fsrad. I was considering to use fsrad for my next project (after the bubble thing is done). Have you tried it? Any opinions about it?

Alex

[sinbad]

Lovely pictures

[walaber]

beautiful shots!! I'm glad to see another Gile[s] user, it's a fantastic program.

I'm a bit curious, what kind of changes did you make to my Exporter? perhaps cleaning up the code, and removing my crappy containers?

[Falagard]

Walaber,

Yes, thanks for your exporter. I didn't clean up your code, although I did remove your containers and use std::vector instead

What I did was modify the code so that instead of outputting one big mesh, it outputs a mesh for each model, and a .scene file specifying position/orientation of those meshes. I also modified the names of materials to match the .scene file name, so if the scene file was called helloworld.scene the materials and meshes outputted would be prefixed by helloworld so that I can output multiple scenes without conflicting file names and materials.

That, and a few other changes. I'll release them once I'm happy with the code, but good work on your exporter.

Clay (Falagard)

[Mickael]

very good !

if i do a terrain with FreeWorld3D i can open in ogre ?

[charlie]

Woww, really nice pictures...

Mickael said:

if i do a terrain with FreeWorld3D i can open in ogre ?

Same question here.

[walaber]

good point. I tend to use Gile[s] just to lightmap large background levels, so I made my exporter just export single mesh files, but Gile[s] can definately be used as a scene creator, and exporting to the .scene format is a great idea.

[Falagard]

if i do a terrain with FreeWorld3D i can open in ogre?

Yes. Freeworld exports heightmaps in 16 bit raw format that can be opened by both Sinbad's Terrain scene manager, and the PagingLandscapeManager. Also when you paint textures onto terrain in Freeworld, you're actually painting alpha maps that can be exported and used for the technique called "texture splatting" which can work in both the Terrain and PagingLandscapeManager with the right .material and config setups.

Clay

[charlie]

Yes. Freeworld exports heightmaps in 16 bit raw format that can be opened by both Sinbad's Terrain scene manager, and the PagingLandscapeManager. Also when you paint textures onto terrain in Freeworld, you're actually painting alpha maps that can be exported and used for the technique called "texture splatting" which can work in both the Terrain and PagingLandscapeManager with the right .material and config setups.

Sounds really great. I'll try the trial version since the homepage looks really promising

[Sputnick]

Nice work Falagard.

If you're still interested to make some tests of your billboard tree code with my tree generator, just send me the detail of your XML format.
Then I'll export some meshes.

- Sput

[Falagard]

Sputnik,

Thanks for the offer, and yes I'll follow up with you on the tree XML format very soon. I spent some time trying to implement impostors on the trees, (render to texture of tree when in distance, and then regenerate texture whenever view angle to tree exceeds a certain tolerance) but didn't get too far there. I found some great code on gamasutra but had a bit of a problem translating it to ogre since it had some interesting matrix operations and such.

CLay

[Ramirez]

nice terrain great work.

Did you have any improvement on PagingLandscapeManager2 in your great work?

Ramirez

[Falagard]

Ha, well yes I did improve on the PLM2 plugin, but Tuan implemented my improvements on his own and so eventually I'll be adopting his implementation to keep it consistent. I added 16 bit raw file support for heightmaps.

One thing I did add is different rendering code for the materials for texture splatting. My terrain materials render 5 splatting textures and 1 shadowmap in 3 passes using a 1.1 shader. I now have a GeForceFX 6600 so I may write a 2.0 shader that does it in less. These material scripts can be used by anyone, but you also have to figure out how to generate coverage maps in a way that the shader expects. A coverage map is basically just a texture that contains the alpha information needed by the texture splatting. In my case, I have 5 textures that can be applied to the terrain, 4 of which have alpha maps that define the blending amounts. These are stored in two coverage maps, called CoverageMap.tga and CoverageMapPass2.tga, in the B and A channels of the images.

Also, I use a completely custom map splitter which runs photoshop macros to do the splitting and generate the coverage maps. Crazy but true. I could release this map splitter, but you'd have to have Photoshop 7 or above to run it.

Clay

[Ramirez]

These material scripts can be used by anyone, but you also have to figure out how to generate coverage maps in a way that the shader expects...

It would be interesting if you release some code snippets working with shader on PLM2.
My experience working with shader are most humble.

Also, I use a completely custom map splitter which runs photoshop macros...
Clay

it would be great to directly direktly from photoshop.


thx,
Ramirez

[Falagard]

Here's an update on these screenshots. This is taken directly from a post on the Legends of Tacendia message boards:

http://www.legendsoftacendia.com/forums ... o=&fpart=1

Two demos to show off this time:

First, a new terrain demo with castles, you've seen the screenshots, now witness the excitement!

To be honest, this is a work in progress demo, but since I put it together to show another programmer my current tech demo for LoT, I decided to share with you. I'm currenty working on the collision code for colliding with the castle meshes, but it is disabled in this version because it was unstable (it crashed all the freaking time).

http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LoTDemo-09-03-2005.zip

EDIT - fixed version here, old will be deleted within 12 hrs.

http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LoTDemo-10-03-2005.zip

Note, you'll need a 3d card with vertex shader support, it won't work on GeForce 2 MX or 4 MX cards. GeForce3 and above, Radeon cards that support shaders. Only tested on GeForce4 Ti 4200, GeForce FX 6600 and Radeon 9800 cards though.

Please run using DirectX renderer, OpenGL not tested (read: will crash on startup).

Use standard FPS controls, WASD plus Space for jump. You'll notice the jump and movement is "floaty", that will obviously be fixed. Hit "C" to change to free camera, and while in free camera, Ctrl key will enable super duper fast warp speed movement. Hit "C" to revert to first person controls (drop character from current camera position back to terrain using physics).

Additionally, the long lost tree demo is back. That's right, it's an old demo, but probably new to you!

http://www.larabie.net/ogre/LegendsOfTa ... Demo01.zip

Clay

[Clay]

Your first demo link doesn't work...

[Falagard]

You were too quick, it was still uploading when I posted. Try again!

EDIT - I've just had the first person actually download and try it and tell me that they got an error with missing folders for:
media\scenes
and
media\config

Sorry, that's my stupid stupid zipping program that decided that they were empty folders so not include them in the zip. I'm going to upload a fixed version of the zip, but in the meantime, either create empty folders under media, or modify the resources.cfg file to remove those folders (that's what I'm doing).

Clay, tell me when you're done downloading and I'll upload a new file (don't want to interrupt).

Clay

[djedj]

to be able to alunch it you must create folders config and scenes in media directory