Office Level

Richard Kain

I've been working on making my own little mod recently.



I feel that I've been makeing a decent amount of progress. Especially for the time I've put into it. The HUD, font, gun model, and hand model are not mine. Those elements came with the engine. But everything else is my own original work. I made the textures and models for a screensaver that I made for my office a while back. Now I'm recycling them into a mod, to get some practice in polishing projects and work on level design. (office environments make somewhat bland, but easy levels)

indian_boy

the table top textures are stretching?

Otherwise, this is great! good luck with the mod. Which game are u modding though?
Oh, and some windows would be nice !

Bad Sector

It's Sauerbraten aka Cube 2. A very interesting engine, editing is done via extruding and "intruding" surfaces from other surfaces in realtime and it's just another game mode which can be even done in multiplayer (that is many people edit the same level). Although the levels look a little blocky (because of the method used - although there is fine tuning there, but it's time consuming to fine tune everything), you can create big levels in a magnitude of time less than most other engines. The engine calculates visibity in realtime and is capable to render vast areas.

The engine/game is opensource and can be found at http://sauerbraten.org/ for Windows, Linux and Mac.

The only bad part about this engine/game is the 3d models. It excels in every area except that :-P.

Richard Kain

Yes, it is Sauerbraten. I do not have access to full copies of major 3D software packages, so I prefer to stick to open-source projects where possible. And yes, Sauerbraten is pretty limited when it comes to 3D models. I believe that it only supports loading md2 and md3 models. (the formats used in Quake II and Quake III) Also, I've noticed that the framerate/performance tends to chug a little when you have a lot of models in one area.

At the moment, though, it is meeting my needs. The level editing is way, way faster than any other engine I've used. And being able to actually construct levels within the game environment makes it a true WYSIWYG experience. I'll post some shots of the models I constructed later.

Bad Sector

When i talked about 3D models i meant the existing 3d models included with the game, not the 3D model support :-P. 3D models are barely used in Sauerbraten because in most cases you can use the editing capabilities of the engine to create what you want.

Richard Kain

Heh good point. The models that can be constructed using the game engine are fairly limited, due to the fact that they have to be constructed out of adjusted cubes. While you can construct some fairly elaborate shapes, you don't get the same control that you would with an md3 model.

As to your comment about using the engine to construct most of my objects...it might actually be better for me to construct the cubicles using the engine, rather than importing them from md3 files. I will have to experiment and see if there is any performance advantage in this method. The more detailed items, such as the chair, keyboard, and mouse, need to remain as imported 3D models. But it could be rather advantageous for me to change how I handle the cubicles themselves.

I've only been using the engine for level construction so far. All of the 3D objects in my little mod are md3 files. I have noticed a dip in framerate when md3 models are filling the screen. The game is still ticking over at 60 fps though, so I'm not too worried. Since I'm constructing what is essentially a recreation of the office I work at, the complexity of the levels does not have to be very high. Getting the md3 files running in the engine was a lot easier than I had expected. (always a plus) I haven't gotten any animated models into the engine yet. I imagine that will be a much greater challenge.

Richard Kain

Okay, I've actually got an update, of sorts. I've been working on a protagonist for this environment. Here's a link to a video I made that shows a bit of his progression. It's a very rudimentary character, I was mainly using him as an exercise in producing normal maps.

He's a plucky little fellow!

Grrrr....unfortunately, you have to right-click and save as to view it. Also, I really don't want to embed it in the page. It isn't polite to embed multi-megabyte files on a messageboard. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I already have a low-poly version generated, complete with UV mapping. screenshots will come later. He's been bouncing from one game engine to another for a little while, so I haven't been able to nail anything down for certain on him.

Richard Kain

Bump/Update

I've actually managed to re-skin the GUI of Sauerbraten. For the most part, its just been a re-skin. I didn't change the actual style of the GUI. (with a few notable exceptions) I haven't settled on a particular style for my mod, so I didn't bother changing it too much. All of it is my own creations though, I didn't sample at all from the existing GUI elements.

Since I'm planning on having this mod focus on zombies, I decided to go for a green theme. In hindsight, it would probably look good with a "Polycount" mod. But that's another project, for another day. (or perhaps year)






Grrrr...having trouble with my image hosting.