Community Modeling Project Final.

[Induane]

It has been quite a journey.  We set out to create a whole new area for PlaneShift.  I think we succeeded to the extent that it reached game quality, but unfortunately I couldn't convince everyone of this, so while its not going into PS, I'm going to provide it all here, boldly licensed now under Creative Commons.  Perhaps some more time put into it could have pulled it up by its bootstraps and  polished it enough that it could have made it in game, however I simply ran out of steam alone.  Many people helped a great deal with this, especially at first, but near the end it was me alone trudging along on and on and on. Not that that was bad - it was a great learning experience for me and I had an immense amount of fun along the way.  I know public posting and licensing will prevent it from being used in game but I had a good time making it so no love lost - at least not much!

Update:  I touched up a few things and corrected a license violation. Fixed the waterfall and landscape export. Water is animated to rise and fall a little bit as well.  Also some modifications to the terrain LOD settings have been made for performance reasons. 

Lets have a quick list of those who contributed:

Initial Proposal:
 - JosePhoenix made the initial proposal and provided a hidden forum for us to do much of the planning work. KUDOS!

Technical Assistance:
 - Wired_Crawler didn't do any modeling or anything but helped me solve so many problems I couldn't even count it all.  His knowledge of PS and CS were invaluable.  I can safely say we would have failed without his council.

Concept Artists:

• Jekkar
• Minetus

Mesh Modeling:

• Lordbug - A good portion of this is his meshing - most notably the cave itself.
• Archon - some rocks and the first real cave entrance
• Minetus - Cave entrance, and a few of the rocks.
• Induane - Terrain, Fishing shack, lamp posts, lanterns, dock and tree's.
• Gorzhuul  - Various Misc Meshes

Texture Work:

• Jekkar - many things - notably the lanterns and lamp posts.
• Minetus - Some grass and stone textures
• Induane - Most everything else - but a lot of sending textures to Jekkar for final touches
• [Nikodemusss - stalagtite texture

There is also a good deal of background story but I never managed to have time to get it all into readable form.  My sincere apologies. 

Lets get this party started shall we?  How about a few early screenshots so you can see how bad things started out!  I'll try to progress screenshots so people can see some neato things I hope.   Later on I'll provide a finished world file and all the source files and textures associated with the project, all in one handy zip file.  Be warned though - it will be one big file. 

Upon second inspection I don't have all the old shots I thought I did! OH NO!! Well... that just means a few older shots then a tour of the real thing. 

Here is an early shot of some experiments with some forests:



Some work on the trees:



More early landscaping and bad ground textures:



Did I mention bad ground textures?



More fun with attempting landscaping:



Our initial cave entrance by Archon:



Another shot of our old entrance:



But something just didn't quite fit and so Minetus came up with this concept work of a new cave entrance (yes there is a cave - we'll get to it!)



Which he later turned into this:



And finally another shot of some of our old terrain with a lake:



Newsflash! Found a shot of our old cave  stuff! - Bad isn't it?   Well, live and learn!



Now lets descend into the cave shall we?   Here is some of the tunnels leading to the main cavern:



and



Long ago when you entered the cave one of the things you saw was a waterfall.  The waterfall went through a lot of revisions, and then once I had it just right... the particle system I was using was brutally removed from CrystalSpace! Oh NO!! I cried and cried... metaphorically of course - I'm currently investigating new methods of putting the waterfall back in.  As of the time of this writing however I've been forced to remove it.

Still though here is the first iteration of it:



Looked great from a distance but up close was very very ugly.  Later versions looked more like this:



And here is a shot of us testing it ingame on a test server.  Notice the bad experiments I was doing with waterfall color.



One of my favorite parts of the cave is the bridge that lordbug modeled. You can see it in the previous shot, but this shot shows it a bit more clearly:



As you can see the lamp posts and ground textures needed work, and the flames looked awkward.  Obviously we needed to do more hard work!  The textures were later easily fixed.  The hard part came when I decided to do the fire so that it looked nice.  Not all the fire is perfect yet, but it all looks good enough I think.  While those render lets have a look at the shack and a few more interior cave shots.  I still love those luminescent fungi growing wild lighting the cave.

This shack shot is just how the shack looks in blender - I'll have a better render soon.



AND some more shots of the cave interior:



and



Whew! That was a long wait!  I'm exhausted from it!  Good thing you guys don't have to read this post in real time as I write it!   I don't like the new waterfall quite as much but its better than nothing.  Feel free to improve it if you know how.  Anyways this is the view when you first enter the cave itself:



And now a shot of the new lamp posts and their flames!!



And now a lantern!



Or perhaps some vids would help!  You need the theora codec to play them!

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/Downloads/Video/lampfire3.avi

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/Downloads/Video/fire.avi

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/Downloads/Video/campfire3.avi

Or how about the landscape? How did that turn out?  Well, sounds like time to check it out!!









And now for some of the updated screenshots:





And now the grand finale!   Download this file:

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/Downloads/cmp.zip

And if you want just the world file to explore:

http://vaalnor.mine.nu/Downloads/CommunityModelingProject.zip

The souce files and a world file "cavetest:.zip" is included in the archive.  BIg project though - about 90 mb so be patient.

A big thanks to everyone who helped! If I left anyone out then let me know.

P.S. There are a few glitches left that I'm aware of in case anyone feels like having a go:

• Tree bark texture loops badly
• Campfire angles strangely
• Some flames look weird
• LOD on landscape needs tweaked.

And if you want to export the project for yourself, here are some tips:

• After exporting, unzip cavetest.zip
• Then replace the landscape_basematerial.png with the one I provide in the download.
• Open the materialmap in the gimp and apply the default noise ---> pick  filter 3 times to smooth transitions
• When exporting play with various splat distances and see the results
• Also consider lowering block resolution for better performance.

[Nikodemus]

Thats disappointing, nice shots though...
Maybe showing your great efford is better than waiting for a miracle? I gues at some point it may be just too much to wait for something what won't come.  ;/

[Induane]

Maybe showing your great efford is better than waiting for a miracle?

Not just my effort.  The project is the work of the community, not any one person.  But yes I figured it was finally time

[Gondric]

Looks awesome. way good enuough to go ingame i think. but alas for some strange reason stuff on the forums cant be ingame *sigh* meh id luv to see it ingame

[Acka]

Congrats on the work done to everyone who contributed. It looks like it turned out pretty well. Too bad it didn't make it.

[LigH]

I remember I've seen early stages of the "mine" level. Especially the outside and the entrance was a bit "choppy" (on my old hardware - 800 MHz, GeForce2 GTS), and the ladder stairs a bit too high to be climbed in "walktest". That was the state a few months ago...

I will have to download the new state and check again to see the development. For now, the screenshots look already promising.

I am quite experienced in creating heightfield terrains (I know e.g. Terragen very well) - if you need some support here, call me.

[Induane]

I remember I've seen early stages of the "mine" level. Especially the outside and the entrance was a bit "choppy" (on my old hardware - 800 MHz, GeForce2 GTS), and the ladder stairs a bit too high to be climbed in "walktest". That was the state a few months ago...

With a few exceptions the map works well for me on my geforce2 mx400 at work, but thats a p4 computer.  I don't know how older graphics card plus older computer hardware would handle this. 

Also some of the original choppyness came from some double exported portals - thats fixed though other problems are sure to endure

Looks awesome. way good enuough to go ingame i think. but alas for some strange reason stuff on the forums cant be ingame *sigh* meh id luv to see it ingame

I knew that posting it in the forums or anywhere public would completely ruin its chances of getting ingame but I'd given up on the waiting game   Perhaps I"m just not patient enough.

[neko kyouran]

Woah.

I present thee with a Gold Star of Kickassness.

josePhoenix

[Proglin]

My mouth was open the entire thread.

All who helped... you guys are amazing. Wish I could do something to  help getting it in-game.

[Ralleyon]

All I can say is... wow... Awesome work from the Vaalnor team, don't lose hope guys. 

[ThomPhoenix]

Wow, so that is why you went missing for the four last days!
Great job on this Induane! And of course everyone else who worked on this project too! 

 

[Akaye]

  Nice work, must have been very time consuming. Thumbs up to all who worked on this project. Practice makes perfect, and who knows maybe we are looking at future PS dev's. 

[Nikodemus]

Overybody look at this with so positive attitude. I would say wow if it made it in game. Not only because it is great piece of art, but also because PS would start developing in more rapid way. Every screenshot is really cool and everything, but a lot of it is wasted efford for me. I just look at this from all sides.
Great, Inuade and everybody else did so much, probably learning a lot at the same time, but the whole story is depressing and sad.

[Akaye]

but a lot of it is wasted efford for me. I just look at this from all sides.
 

  Obviously Jekkar, Minetus, Lordbug, and Archon didn't feel it was a waste of time. They have talent. Maybe they didn't have what they made put into the game but maybe that will only make them strive to do bigger and better. There is obviously a certain standard you have to meet for your creations to go into game and they didn't meet it. Who's to say they won't after this little project? Maybe then the sad story you see will turn into a happy one and then you can look at this thread in a positive light as the rest of us do as you pointed out.

[Nikodemus]

The thing is that creating such thing is not only a mater of talent, but time you need to spent on creating specifig things, something what can't be used in future work, if any...