Times of War Development Team

Isn't 'monsters' a bit wide category? Monsters can be orcs, dinosaurs, rhinos, aliens, werewolves, gient flies, dragons, etc. We should probably specify the category more. And, are we going with three races? And we HAVE TO have orcs in it. Sorry, but I just have a thing for orcs and goblins. I have a bounch of metal figures and I used to paint them. They're really neat.
The fearies, are they going to be small, flying creatures, spreading dust or are they going to be more like elves in D&D or that type(More like humans, "sharp" ears, good with bow etc.)

HEY

I sat there, looking at the posts, thinking "This is gonna be GREAT!" But I felt there was something missing. I could'nt put my finger on it, but something was'nt there. Something important. Suddenly, it struck me. MUSIC. Background music is extraordinarily important. Who can do music? I can(I'm a music man :p)

Music will be in there, Sas as doing some, youll have to talk to him =P.

Z.

OK, when Sas is concious again, I'll suggest we have...
(clears throat)

humans, orcs, demons, fairy folk, and reptiles (from a big volcano)

I want humans to be able to build, at a very high step in the tech tree, steam powered ,junkie,iron and wood,mechs....but not too powerful. They could have variable abilities, depending on the unit driving inside.

We could have a new race of cats.
Some sort of...werecats or something. Orcs and reptiles, I think, don't match. They're too similar in appearance. In gameplay, of course, they're totally different, but not in looks. Deamons sounds good. But what will the faeries look like?

Pointy eared people in tootoos!:D LOL

In tootoos? Like unga-bunga-elves?

If the humans are developing machines (catapults, steam-stuff and similar high-tech, would'nt it be just too much if they also had a lot of spells? I say we skip all the human spells and say that fairies and maby deamons are born with the power of manipulating environment and elements. What do you think?

I'm kidding. Pointy eared people with green clothes and wings. Ofcourse they could have clothes of different colors other than green. Low attack and slightly low defense, but high magic attack and defense. And magical weapons.

Daemons and Faeries are born with magic, but Daemons also use brute force, Humans use machinary and brute force (not very strong though) and orcs use brute force (strong)

Yeah, that's it. But I think deamons should be very strong. Let's see:

Fairies: Magic, fairly weak, weak armor
Orcs: They're practicly braindead, so I guess we'll call them Strong
No armor
Humans: Brains, and not so strong, ARMOR(Knights and Soldiers)
Deamons: Magic, Very Strong, No Armor

It seems Deamons have become a bit too powerful. You know, they should be balanced.

We could have an alien race. Crashing here from outer space, they begin from scratch, Magnificent Technology, but weak as hell in hand to hand compat. Not much armor.
Just a thought :)

Let's fix this:

Daemons:
Attack: Not very strong but tends to cause status effects on
units
Defense: Normal
Magic Attack: Strong
Magic Defense: Weak
Armor: None
Specialty: Curses (posses mechs), Status Effects

Faeries:
Attack: Weak
Defense: Weak
Magic Attack: Strong, either attacks or status effects
Magic Defense: Strong, they can cast healing spells and
protection spells
Armor: None
Specialty: Magic Item Production and Protection/Healing
Magic (barriers)

Humans:
Attack: Not very strong but can cause status effects when their
weapons are upgraded
Defense: Normal, modified through Armor
Magic Attack: None
Magic Defense: Weak
Armor: Yes
Specialty: Machinary and Blacksmithing

Orcs:
Attack: Savage!
Defense: Weak, modified through Armor
Magic Attack: None
Magic Defense: Weak
Armor: Yes
Specialty: IQ of a pig, Thieving Skills

Igor, I hope you are up to modelling 20+ units per race... =P. If that is what Jorj and Sas decide they want, that is. It IS their game, after all.

Z.

OH MY GOD! 20+ per race??! No Way I can handle all that! You know, I'm actually a busy person. Hehe. No, I'll be happy to model a 100 models. However, I can't handle that on my own, NO WAY. I need more ppl...

BTW. What about payment??


Naah, I'm only kidiing:D

Sorry to have not posted in a while my scanner is still busted, but not too worry....I hope


Igor....... I am Norman......the concept artist if you want to know what anything yould look like I will give you my artistic opinion...but I agree with sas here, as much as I like Vivi I would prefer a more powerful, mage.


Email me at [email protected]

Zaei: That is an amazing idea!!! I have access to several of such writings and would be glad to help.

KamikazeKiwi3: I have MSN.

As it stands, the monsters that I had listed will be in the initial release, for purposes of lightening the download, the modeller and coder's workloads. Only the ones previously suggested will be in the initial release. Also, these monster can join your cause if they are summoned or hired from "wandering monster" status.

Lizardmen, Brownies and Boggarts, and Dragons will be in the initial release.

However, if you wish to do more monsters, you're free to create them and we'll put them up as a monster expansion pack, having full support.

Oh yes, we will also figure out a black market system where such monsters (and even humans!) can be bought.

Roll call; all MSN handles, please.

[email protected]

A list of possible military treatises:

- Sun Tzu: The Art of War
- Flavius Vegetius Renatus: Epitoma Rei Militari
- Karl von Clausewitz: On War
- Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Art of War
- Miyomoto Mushashi: The Book of Five Rings
- Niccolo Machiavelli: The Art of War
- Frederick II: Military Instructions

Any more?

Jorj, sir! ([email protected])

ok, Norman. Nice to know you, by the way. Guess we'll stay in touch...

The mage is fine by me. You want a stronger one, I build him bigger than ever. But I still think we should make hime less muscular. After all, he's a mage, not a fighter. Besides, we're probably skipping the human mage. Unless Sas prevents it...:)

It's just. Two things things that bother me:(This is to you and Sas, and the rest)

1. Don't expect too much from my models. I'm not a professional, I'm learning. I know some cool things and for my age, especially, I'm quite adequate. But I'm NOT a pro.

2. I can't do 80 models alone. That's just TOO MUCH. My computer probably can't room all of those. No, that's a lie, but it's a lot of pressure, you know. Just get somebody who's good in skinning and materials, and I'll be fine.


Hail Sas:p

Don't have any messaging services. I gave them up about a year ago. Get me here, or on email, please.

As for writings, Miyomoto Musashi: Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings). I posted a link back when you posted that slew of links, Jorj. It's about 40 printed pages, and deals specifically with hand to hand combat, but the concepts can be moved to a larger scale.

As to creatures. Remember that everything in the game will be loaded at run time from configuration files. New creatures can be easily created with a new model, and a config file. Basically, we can distribute a new unit every week, etc.

Z.

Downloading.....

Hehe! that would be kinda cool.

Instead of 'Map of the week' It would be 'Monster of the Week'. If we ship a little, easy-to-use VB program that makes you config your monster, everyone can make an own unit.

Oh, by the way. I'm [email protected]. Call me iGoR(or Lars)

I've updated the military texts list.

See above.

What are those? Books on military tactics and weapons?

Exactly, Igor. We will break those down into separate AI modules so that the enemys will all fight in a different way. With a bit of tweaking with each, we can have an infinite number of enemy AIs. NO ONE has ever done this before >=).

Z.

So you mean you're writing like 10 AIs and make each computer randomly pick one?

Exactly.

Z.

Hey, I know this is a bit standard, but how about an undead race. After all, the skeletons are pretty cool. :)

That about the AIs are a work of a genious, nut won't it take a lot of work? I mean...some ppl are working their asses off just to write one. Just make all the AI's fairly good, because nothing is worse than playing against a simple computer!

Aaaaand we need multiplayer support. Absolutely. But I'm sure you all thought of that allready

Damn, I'm active on this forum!

I've completed the 1st task. A Boot! It's a low-poly boot, meant for a middle detailed Peasent. And don't complain about the material. I'm fixing it.

Voila

By low poly, i mean below 200 polys per unit. It looks nice though!

And yes, the AI will be a lot of work, but that is ok.

Z.

Dont worry about what we expect from you, were all human. and ameturs here (I hope no one's ego gets busted).....

Less than 200 per unit?? With that sort of budget, We'll end up with something like a stick-man! If we won't have to skip the arms :p

Oh man
Sorry, I blew it! Let's say this did'nt happen! I'll come back later when I've got something

When you say polys, you mean faces(triangles) or polygons(2 triangles put together as one square)

You have to have to use more than 200 faces, at least. 3DSMAX's polycounter counts faces, you see, that's how I was surprised with the boot, cause it consisted of 336 faces. With less than 200 faces, I might be able to create a crippled...

I'm recreating the peasent and I see that 200 polys(NOT faces) is extremely little! A VERY low-poly guy without arms costs 204 faces(102 polys)...Which means: Low detail. I'll form the best I can, and we'll see what we get out of it, ok?

One peasent, comming up!:)

We're going to have 4 detail levels. Try making a unit with whatever detail makes it look GREAT. We'll save that for the ULTRA detail. Then scale it down, call it the high detail. Do the same for the middle and low. The best way to do this is to destroy curves and stuff. How bout we have a limit:

LOW: around 200-300 polys
MID: around 500 polys
HIG: around 800-1000 polys
ULT: anything, try to keep around 2000 polys if possible.

With a budget of 200, I can make a movie character :p
No, I can not, but I guess it will be a nice piece of art in the end. However, I'm making the low poly peasent now. He' turning out to be pretty neat. Well...to a certain degree, Of course. It will be a type quake/half-lipe sort of model.

KamiKazeKiwi3, Sir! [email protected]

Damnit! My power went off since my last post. Sas, can you consider my suggestion of groups.

I'm away eating, I'll be back soon.

Hey, KamikazeKiwi. Where do you live? In Norway at this time, it's 3:11 AM (In the middle of the night)...:p

*Tired as hell*

Good night

Puerto Rico, 9:18, I'm back

The wizard in the screen shots is about 100 faces (im talking faces =). I wouldn't say "If its not under 200, we can't use it", but around that number is good. Perhaps we can switch the models depending on the number on screen.

I found a copy of the Röttger paper on terrain rendering. I will try to implement it later tonight. I decided that my algorithm was a) far too memory inefficient, and b) would have been a pain to fix the t-junctions. I selected the Röttger algorithm because it is similar to the one i had (uses QuadTrees), and because it creates regular square "tiles" for rendering.

Z.

Oh, and don't play D2. That game is horrible. I beat it, oh, 6 times in two months last summer. Ill give you my arguments if you want. After that game, Blizzard has to prove that it can make quality games to me.

Z.

Zaei, why don't you like messengers? I mean, I HATE MSN Messenger, but I hafta use it so I can communicate with the others.

D2 was great for a while, but I got sick of it after 1 summer. However, I guess there's a reason why all of blizzards games has been best sellers and why games like StarCraft and D2 is still being played by incredibly lots of people today. In Korea, they have an own channel just showing Starcraft games 24/7. It's like their national sport or something...

And Zaei, you're talking about faces. Ok, but it will be hard to keep 'em below 300. Just saying that, cause my low-poly peasent has 320 faces, and that is almost an absolute minimum. I've used xtra polys around the neck, elbows and knees, but without them, the animations will be quite ugly...

Just for showing. Here's my low-poly model at the time being(Haven't had time to fix the legs yet :p). He has 296 faces. And I ain't got no hands. Hehe. There's no way cutting down on the details here. Because there are none!

:eek:GOD DAMMIT:mad:! Hate it when I forget to save :(
Where is everyone?

Hey. I took another peak at the screenshots and..Are we using popupmenus? Just for note: Popupmenus are not very comforting to use. It's easy tomiss and so on. Honestly, I would prefer a sidebar and hotkeys. My opinion...

I used to chat on Battle.net for about, oh, 7 or 8 hours a day. That led to several very bad events, and put me into a very bad emotional place for about 2 years (and I do me VERY bad). Since then, things have straightened out, and I have given up just about all communications software (any chat, AIM, ICQ, etc).

Igor. Remember, the units dont have to look perfect. They are, for the most part going to be about 100 pixels square on the screen when rendered at any time. A few face saving tips for ya =). Hands can pretty much be a cube. The head for the wizard had... umm... 8 faces, I think. The hat is part of the head, but I added the brim, so It looks good. What you should do, is once you are finished with a part of a unit, go ever it, and see if you can subtract a few detail faces the don't really change the sillouette of the character. That is the most important thing, really. If the sillouette looks good, and the texture looks good, most people won't notice that a model only has 200, 300 faces.

Z.

I want to keep away from having an Onscreen GUI. The player is suppposed to be a general in the army, so most things will look like scrolls of paper on screen (map, mission orders, unit status, etc. The system I am using right now is very usable, even in its current (crappy) state. It's next on the rewrite list.

Z.

Ok. You have things under control, I see. Hehe. I feel I'm saying too much I want this and I want that, complaining and stuff. Hope I'm not bothering any of you. It's just that I want too to make this project as good as possible, that's why I'm just sending signals so that people would know at least how I would think be the best alternative. However, I know I'm totally wrong in several places, so if I say something stupid, just ignore it.

To defend my work: The Yeaman.jpg shows what I made. It's the absolute minimum, allmost. I don't want a head formed as a cube, so I added a little detail on the top to make it look more round. Else, we haveno details, only those necessary to make the figure look somewhat like a human. I men, those vertexes who builds the body. As you can see, there are VERY little details on the dude...I would rather say none...

I have discovered (actually re-discovered) VRML and have found that I can make pretty good buildings with it. So I'll be on those. I've almost finished a church/monestary, I'm doing 2, one will be bigger and more 'grand'.

I'm almost done my church model. It'll have 350 triangles in the end. (303 now) Real Igor, does 3DSMAX import VRML files? If it does, give me the version it supports and I'll give it to you to lower it's polycount.

I'll give you the WRL in an hour or so, and I'll put up the unit list at the same time... Which means you can just do the unit models if you want, leave the buildings to me ;).

And with good texture usage it will be easy to make them look 3D, just with low polys. Also (hope I'm not a bother to say this) could you make the peasant model look a bit more muscular, to make it look like it's someone that works a lot every day?