OA3 progress thread
polycounter lvl 14
OA3 = OA reboot branch.
Quality control focus and the (pre-moe revolution) animes. 2500~ish budgets on players, no alphas, normalmaps or >1 textures. All GPL v2+ licensed etc. Avoiding q3 derivativeness conceptually, thematically, etc. Same gameplay, but with new gametypes, and new presentation to keep it fresh. Several engine updates to break past its 1999 barrier and into.......the 2001 barrier. (particle system, widescreen, ui, EAX, content lock, etc)
I hope that's brief enough. and here's a rough glance of in-game which shows an OA0 level with an OA3 character, weapon, hud
My current focus right now is player animation - it's a tricky field. and Blender's scale system works against the pipeline, the rigify system, and i'm still learning animation techniques as I go
Quality control focus and the (pre-moe revolution) animes. 2500~ish budgets on players, no alphas, normalmaps or >1 textures. All GPL v2+ licensed etc. Avoiding q3 derivativeness conceptually, thematically, etc. Same gameplay, but with new gametypes, and new presentation to keep it fresh. Several engine updates to break past its 1999 barrier and into.......the 2001 barrier. (particle system, widescreen, ui, EAX, content lock, etc)
I hope that's brief enough. and here's a rough glance of in-game which shows an OA0 level with an OA3 character, weapon, hud
My current focus right now is player animation - it's a tricky field. and Blender's scale system works against the pipeline, the rigify system, and i'm still learning animation techniques as I go
Replies
Some time ago AndroidArts made a bunch of concepts. A lot of these are great and helped me get out of a creative slump and pick up the speed and modeled some of the less skimpy characters for a change
which is a nice fresh breath of air from the other designs, which fall into typical "ecchi monster girl OC" territory, the kind you'd either find in some '90s anime or someone's deviantArt:
I still can't shake off the bad habit of bad arms and rigs
Crits on any of these welcome, though what I really should do is fix everyone's arms and focus on arms arms arms (my new years resolution involved arms). I'm showing the most maturely representatively polished player models here in an orthographic view mid walk animation, and the walk animation isn't that great either.
Concerns about nudity/fanservice are handled with a _safe variation made after model is considered working and finished. Succubus will be marked _lewd requiring manual enabling (demonstrating the content lock going both ways). This engine feature is already implemented and working as intended
Male players will probably really start happening after the female animation/rig bugs are ironed out which is something I really want to do. Would be nice to talk on steam about this or something since I haven't had an instant message with a polycounter in ages (And it shows)
any resemblance to anything existing is purely coincidental and i'd like less resemblances if possible.. none of this is fan art. none of this is a remake of a design in Q3. and all of this are intended to be GPL'd
That said, I have to admit that I think the new characters are a step back from the quality bar that was set with some of the old characters, such as Angelyss, Sergei, Gargoyle and Arachna.
To be completely honest, that's what put me off of making any additional skins, knowing that the characters were going to be scrapped, and the style changed to something that I personally think is less appealing. You may remember this skin I made for Arachna.
Rather than scrapping some of your better content and starting over from scratch, I would have aimed to bring up the quality of the some of the lesser assets.
Since I know i'm unable to skin as good as enkthan, and many of the performance complaints involved the use of multiple surfaces and blending functions, i've thought an anime style would help compliment the fast gameplay better along with more clarity and refactored opaque surface usage. Cue years of blind solo practice and style reiteration of Sorceress (The worst model in OA imo) .
During this evolution i've also hacked in some lighting shader hack and dynamic UV eyes (which works similar to Source) which helps the style a bit more giving a bit more life to the characters
The more fantasy characters (arachna, etc) are a bit on the backburner as they require unique skeletons and i'm prioritizing more on the common humanoid rigs first in the hopes of quality consistency.
Though what really hurts OA is that it's essentially "done". Like many FOSS games, it'll linger looking like that for years and perhaps decades (bzflag and supertux) because it's not spewing warnings every second so there's no need to polish or contribute new art. and i'm not letting OA die on a too dark mishmashy stiffy hill.
The eye shader you came up with is pretty cool.
How come you are facing performance issues? Are you looking to have this run on a legacy PC, and if so, why?
There's still no VBOs/vertex shader optimization yet either and part of the plan is to use all MDR for players, so there'll be hardware vertex skinning with mdr's bones later on maybe. while saving memory at the same time since md3's a hog with 2k+ polys etc. which has a side effect of targeting legacy PCs better and crashing less when more players on different models join the server (which had led to players forcing all players as a Grism to ensure that doesn't happen)
I hope this explains and clears up the case for rebooting enough. I do have many more concepts (not-bikini angelyss) and some models that are made (kitsune, princess/aristocrat, cleaver, demon, sergei) but they're far rougher than what i'd like to show publicly. Also what's not shown are sound effects, and the menus/UI, as those aren't very polygony.