[Role Playing Game] Memento Mori

[Manoo]

Hi there folks. So Talavaj suggested me to post a preview what i done so far with male protagonist, any way there it is. He doesn't look that good how I imagine it, but still , gona try few texture upgrades.

06-07-2013

06-14-2013

06-17-2013

06-30-2013

07-05-2013

 

[Talavaj]

It is an amazing job, really.
He will have some extra accessories that will be added in-game (backpack) but the overall design is final.

I'll try to push my schedule and get some things done so that the official announcement trailer can go out as soon as Manoo gets the protagonist done.
It will probably contain some cinematic sequences and a few minutes of gameplay.

The protagonist is mostly likely gonna be voiced by me (if I get it right really) unless I find somebody who would like to contribute.
I want to ask some youtube people whether they would want to do some non-profit voice work, not being a story-driven mod (more a thought-provoking piece open to interpretation) the protagonist does not talk that much so I'm hoping somebody will take it.
If not I can at least ask, rite ?

 

[Gastromancer]

Could I drop my 2 cents?
I honestly don't like the cheesy finger-less gloves he has (like Nico Bellic's). How the hell would he find that stuff in an apocalypse? and they look bad too
I ain't hating, I'm delivering harsh criticism.

 

[Heinvers]

The protagonist is mostly likely gonna be voiced by me (if I get it right really) unless I find somebody who would like to contribute.
I want to ask some youtube people whether they would want to do some non-profit voice work, not being a story-driven mod (more a thought-provoking piece open to interpretation) the protagonist does not talk that much so I'm hoping somebody will take it.
If not I can at least ask, rite ?

I may be interested, but it's your call!

 

[Talavaj]

They aren't cheesy, track mitts protect the palm of hand from damage while providing enough grip as fingertips are exposed.
This gives him needed protection as he is frequently negotiating environmental hazards, may have to climb over things and encounter debris, and search through debris which can contain broken glass, wires, cans all sorts of nasty stuff.
They also serve for protection while crafting stuff.

Also, the setting is in an apocalypse yes, but not in a middle of Alaska. There is huge amount of stores in downtown LA, being in apocalypse doesn't make everything disappear.
Idk what reason Nico had to wear his but our protagonist is well concepted, he isn't supposed to look stylish or douche, just wear useful stuff.

Also hain039wilderness, you can record some stuff and send me by PM ! Attempt a late twenties, laid-back slightly tired male.

 

[Gastromancer]

Haven't considered that in my blind rage, but the cheesy factor is there. Almost all video game characters have it.
Now, to stop bashing; ever considered the idea that releasing the .w3x will soon gain this some fame and allow you to turn it into an .exe? A donate button would make this goal easier, and I'm sure I would click the hell out of it.

 

[Talavaj]

Heh, yeah I get you. The protagonist is designed with convenience, mobility and protection in mind.
Plenty of pockets to store smaller items and consumables in which visually represent the "hot slots" for equipping items such as bullets/thrown items without having to go in inventoy and use them from there.
Some extra clothing on torso to slow down core body temperature loss in rain but less fabric on arms for less mobility impairment.

There may be more silly things to encounter, ones that may make you initially cringe but later realize they are actually handy and perfectly practical. (such as the way you will be able to bathe, make makeshift protection or things to protect your hideout with)
The setting is supposed to be very harsh but Damien won't go like "ok an apocalypse and this is it, I'll chew cans without opening them, wear the same clothes forever and won't have toilet needs from now on"
I don't want to make a macho fantasy, you won't run and gun and sit by a fireplace holding onto your shotgun during breaks.
I want to depict survival in a less superficial way.

 

[bethmachine]

Awesome as always looking foward to trailer

 

[Karassu]

As for that, yeah making a standalone game is far beyond my skill. I have zero knowledge in programming.

Whatta humble person.

Whatta humble person

Yeah you're right, he's humble...

Yeah you're right, he's humble

Yeah we're right!

 

[Talavaj]

Animated platform pathing, demonstration.
In-game with depth of field and ambient occlusion turned on. The geometry is otherwise unshaded and would appear completely white without shaders.
Sorry for the awful camera control, it was in windowed display and moving there with a mouse is pain in the ass.

 

[Manoo]

As I aspect u using walkable destructables. So you gona need system that doesn't allow u move on steep objects and it leads to walking detection system or costum walk. Detection system gona couse some performance.

 

[BallisticTerrain]

I'm pretty sure the only thing that pathing system is is the walkable data field checked, which as he says makes warcraft use the mesh for pathing.

Btw Talavaj, any chance we could get all of the pixel shaders/ambient occlusion tech in a zip file or something? I'd like to experiment with it.

 

[bethmachine]

Talvaj is the model pack complete

 

[Talavaj]

Unfortunately, not yet. I have been spending a lot of time with my girlfriend and trying hard on some freelance work. (tackling some simpler product visualizations)

And yep it is just the walkable destructible, but as Manoo said there will be need for some pathing system as it does not prevent pathing so units can simply walk off and scale huge drops.
I was thinking of simply making custom pathing texture, instead of tiny pathing blockers. That would be applied per "chunk" basis, but then the limitations of pathing textures kick in. That being the fact it can only have certain fixed size (that I'd have to scale my models to fit into..) which would make designing the level design clumsier by like a ton.

 

[BallisticTerrain]

I would just add small pathing blockers on the ground below the ledges you don't want to be walkable. Not sure if that works though.

 

[Manoo]

I think best way to create pathing blockers by hand putting on the map. Pathing texture gona cost too much size and your time, don't forget theyre .tga that's means they are more heavy than .blp.

Or you can make system that split map into boxes ( every 32 range) and then check every boxe with nearest boxes (it should be 8 or 4) and if they have move than 50 height difference gona create pathing blocker. Any way I think it's quite a bad idea compilation would be very very long however it depends from map size.

Visualisation

 

[Talavaj]

Yeah, but they are also very small as a single pixel on a pathing texture is fairly large unit on the map.
But yeah, there are many annoyances with the custom pathing textures, especially positioning them right.

I think it is possible to make smaller pathing blocker than the regular ones (which are 4x4 on the grid or something), though I'm not sure how efficient hundreds of pathing blockers are.. performance wise.

The grid idea is interesting, is it possible to detect height of a walkable destructible in relation to the terrain or another platform though ?

 

[BallisticTerrain]

I've never had any performance issues with pathing blockers. I make custom ones by copying a current pathing blocker and assigning it a new pathing texture, allowing me to make large pathing blockers that can be easily rotated to put on the sides of buildings and rocks and the like.
For smaller things I use the small blockers when I need to but usually use the largish square ones.

 

[Manoo]

Talavaj yea i think soo, I had some practices with walkable platforms. GetLocationZ(location) can detect walkable object locations height. By the way u can make 4x4 blockers but they change theyre position as 16 unit blockers, so no point.

 

[Gekigengar]

the tcx arena map has bridges that you could walk below it, or above it.

i dont know how it does that though.

the map has a custom gravity physics, where a heavy rocket explosion while you jump can send you flying and a few force physics.

should check that out!.

 

[Manoo]

Tcx arena using triggered walking with arrow keys and there's no blockers, system detects unpathable ways. Also with this system you can use only plain platforms and that won't work for talavaj, 'couse his gona use it for all kind of bridge as I understand from videos.

 

[Talavaj]

It is very easy to make platforms walkable up and under with walkables. As many layers as you want.
You simply make your layout from stacked walkables then turn off every layer that is not active by playing an animation in which the walkable has all geosets hidden.
That being said, it is probably not doable in multiplayer, and pathing becomes even more of a problem because you would have to track pathing of every separate layer..

It is good however for level design that has identical pathing blueprints, such as in a building complex with multiple floors of the same apartment designs or for such things as top OR inside of a train. (yezz those are the settings I want to use it for)
You can do this completely seamlessly too.

Tcx arena is nice indeed, not sure if I could or should apply similar features though.
There will be physics in MM, not actual real-time physics but pre-baked physics using Havok 3 engine to enhance animation quality and for extra spectacle.
As for projectile physics Idk, most items will trigger on impact (glass bottles) and the player won't be able to jump.

 

[bethmachine]

I wonder how it is going to look throwing a monster with a bottle must look cool.

 

[Gekigengar]

It is very easy to make platforms walkable up and under with walkables. As many layers as you want.
You simply make your layout from stacked walkables then turn off every layer that is not active by playing an animation in which the walkable has all geosets hidden.
That being said, it is probably not doable in multiplayer, and pathing becomes even more of a problem because you would have to track pathing of every separate layer..

It is good however for level design that has identical pathing blueprints, such as in a building complex with multiple floors of the same apartment designs or for such things as top OR inside of a train. (yezz those are the settings I want to use it for)
You can do this completely seamlessly too.

Tcx arena is nice indeed, not sure if I could or should apply similar features though.
There will be physics in MM, not actual real-time physics but pre-baked physics using Havok 3 engine to enhance animation quality and for extra spectacle.
As for projectile physics Idk, most items will trigger on impact (glass bottles) and the player won't be able to jump.

And yet tcx arena is multiplayer,

Anyone has any idea how he made a multi layer bridge?
Playing animation wont work as stated above.

And you can even jump below the bridge,

Or get thrown into the bridge from another loc through force physics,

I wish it were unprotected, many couldve learned a lot from it

 

[Manoo]

I just said before, everything is done by system there's no walkable options. It's probobly even created with rects, if u enter the rect in 0 height that's means nothing happens. if enter it in 100 height it gona sets your height to 100. After u leave rect it gona make falling trigger. Something like that I'm sure he made more complex system, any way it's toadcop. Problem is it won't work normaly with wc3 walking, 'couse then u gona click move on platform you actually gona click some random point on ground, this system useless whitout systematic walk.

 

[Karassu]

You're askin' how it's made? Why not ask the map author instead?
Who's the author and I will ask him!? Behold!

Well, I checked the TcX site and I saw 2 downloadable open maps. Meaning they can be opened by WE, but I don't know if it contains the triggers you want... But you can check.

 

[Talavaj]

Elevated/stacked platforms are perfect for my needs.
I cannot make arrow based walk system because arrows are already occupied by camera control in outdoor environments.
In indoor scenes, the camera will switch to fixed camera angles (that will change and follow you as you move) these will often be from side and all kinds of different cinematic angles, this would result in clicks hitting terrain behind/under where you would want to actually click unless you would somehow make the clicks detect in the appropriate height for every single layer and elevation that the platform has.
The last major reason is that my thrown projectiles target the ground, that is fine because clicks on platform are recognized and you can even make effects at that exact spot.
And finally (kinda most exciting reason), elevated platforms can be animated and they will work properly.
This means you can use a big creature model as a platform and walk its back, or you can make walkable collapsing geometry using Havok physics.
You did not notice, but the seesaw animation in the test model is a vertex animation converted into bones, the same way that I converted Havok physics with.
This means I can also turn all physic objects into walkables (wooden palettes floating on Havok water for example).

It would be simply too troublesome to work with custom movement system while platforms do all the work for you already.
I'm not even sure if I could make clicks target mid-air.

 

[Manoo]

If you gona use warcraft 3 water, walkable destructable still doesn't allow u move on the water u gona need pathing texture.

 

[Talavaj]

No, I'm not gonna use wc3 water. There will be lots of water but that will be doodads, most water will be too shallow anyway.
Deep water will serve mostly as not-so-obvious invisible wall as you won't be able to swim because of plot/setting related reasons.
There will however be ways to get over flooded passages which will mostly involve some puzzling (pushing floatable objects into water), I also hope to make two small levels that will connect levels 2 and 3 this being a flooded subway which may have more of such watery puzzles.

By the way ! I've realized that Dex can export animated Noise deformation. Which is absolutely flippin amazingly AMAZING, because it allows me to easily animate things I couldn't animate well before such as plants in the wind and interaction with plants when hit or stepped over and possibly even water when you walk into it.
I know it is gonna be another taxing feature so you will be able to set whether you want animated foliage or not (in case you don't want to the animated foliage will disappear and be replaced by unanimated one) on top of regular optimization (hiding of small doodads and lowering LOD of big doodads that are away from the protagonist)
It is a lot less taxing than animated cloth/havok water because those plants will be only planes with a few vertices so I expect most people to run it without performance drops.
It won't be any more taxing than having a regular army battle in skirmish, I hope. It will however look so much better than animating wind manually.

Small update on noise based foliage animation.

Le Bumpage,
Do you have a really powerful rig ?
I have added two custom shaders by Petka on top of the ENB setup I'm using.
The additions is a hugely enhanced DOF with Bokeh, Light Scattering and Anamorphic flare.
All thanks to ENB Series devs and enthusiast.

This shader package will require a minimum of a GPU of the 2gb vram range, looking at radeon HD6950 and higher.
Sample screens taken in XDestr by NanO and in my test map showing Light Scattering on a tree.

Unfortunately, at this point I've still not managed to make the new DOF work together with ambient occlusion because of how is depth perceived in wc3. (you can either have occlusion and old DOF or new DOF without occlusion).
You will still be able to have flare and light scattering in whichever case.

 

[Binsu]

Looks really great, been long time Im not looking at this thread and I can say you've done a lot of great job.

+4 REP

 

[bethmachine]

I just asking if that is the terrain of the map?

 

[BallisticTerrain]

That light scatter effect looks like it would be really good at simulating the sun.
My computer is fairly powerful, and is a decent bit higher than those recommended settings.
Also, it that pic with all the trees, are the shadows pre-rendered or created some other way?

 

[Talavaj]

Also, it that pic with all the trees, are the shadows pre-rendered or created some other way?

The terrain map ? They are made using the render shadow function in wc3.
And yup, Light Scatter is specifically made for Godrays. But problem is it detects all contrasting brightness. (so it bugs up with other sources of light too)
There are like 15 shaders in Master Effect but those are the only ones I tested on wc3 so far. The rest is mostly color altering filters such as Reinhard Tonemapping, Vibrance, Dither, Filmic Pass, HSV color grade and Cross Processing shaders. It also has some distortion shaders like Grain, Chromatic Abberation, Lens Distortion and a couple of vignettes however those are really up to the viewer's preference.
I will definitelly test grain and vignette at least.

also @bethmachine, no no that is not the terrain from MM the terrain is not mine. It is a russian map called XDestr by NanO and coded by Toadcop.
Check it here.

I just used it because I consider it one of the prettier maps, MM does not have that much terrain done to show off the shaders well.
The shaders look even better in Refuge in Ruins by _Ogre though and in Toby's maps.
I mean they look gorgeous, I can't wait how my resulting level design will look like.

 

[Gekigengar]

I never knew you could do shaders on wc3 o.o

Can you tell us more about it?

 

[Talavaj]

It was discussed throughout the thread and why couldn't you ?
Warcraft 3 uses Direct3D (the 3D rendering API portion of DirectX) while warcraft 3 itself is old and designed with only limited rendering functions you can force the game to use extra rendering functions that the Direct 3D itself can handle.
The shaders and rendering has very little to do with the actual game, in theory you could apply these shaders on every game that uses DirectX 8 or 9.

ENB series is a bunch of config files and modified direct 3d libraries made by Boris Vorontsov, when you turn it on the game is forced to use custom rendering functions, it even allows for programmers to code their own shaders in a simple text file.
These shaders are of shader model 2 (and 3) requiring at least directX 9.0c support GPUs.
ENB series is one of the most widespread graphic "mods" for pc games, if you have seen those "photo realistic" mods for GTA or Skyrim it is very likely that ENB series was involved in them.
It is also used by indie devs because it saves them the effort of coding their own shaders.

The one I'm using is designed for GTA San Andreas. I'm slowly going through the settings and testing which shaders work and what is their quality like.
The setup I'm using right now has various:
- Bloom (default small bloom with some color/saturation)
- Gamma correction (makes image a bit more darker)
- Depth of Field or Depth of Field(+Bokeh) by Petka
- Ambient Occlusion (advanced shader, first time used in Crysis)
- Light Scattering (also known as godrays)
- Anamorphic Flare (light effect on lens, it looks like horizontal lines coming out of a bright light spot source)
- Grain (noise, works well and will probably fit the mod but it is really up to the user)

These are modern shaders, expect to have modern hardware to run them.
They don't overwrite any parts of wc3, however as a drawback they aren't capable of things that would otherwise require the game to provide extra data.

I'll distribute the mod with these shaders, it will come with multiple presets that will differ in number and quality of the shaders. You will be free to tinker around with the settings yourself but these presets will be guaranteed to work and look decent.

Bumpage
CARS ! is what I have been working on all day today.
I have never made a low poly car before so it went like "I have no idea what I am doing".

The topology is all shit and it has crapped up normals all over the place. But hey, I think it does not look too bad and when it gets textured and placed in the scene nobody will ever notice.
What I have been thinking of doing is, modeling the body separately and adding generic wheels (with only varied rim design) afterwards.
I'll model a generic 4 seat interior wrap it with maybe 2 ~ 3 texture variations and place it inside the cars to save time.
Most cars will have interactive trunks that may contain loot, but nearly all will require you to spend some effort.
SUVs and Hatchbacks will be easier to get into because you will only have to break the rear window to pull stuff out of the trunk.
Sedans like this civic will require you to either spend shotgun shells or stamina and tool durability to open them.
Cars will also generate randomly across the map ("loot cars") when you start the game. But some may have fixed position or be part of the level design and scenery.

 

[bethmachine]

Your modeling skills are awsome. Is there in anyway you could drive some specific cars?

 

[Talavaj]

I'd love that, I'd even have some neat mechanics on mind that could be used if cars were available.
That being said, it just can't be done. Wc3 maps are too small, I could see driving cars being a thing in huge open-world environment with randomly generated stuff.
But even on the biggest of big wc3 map sizes you would roam from a place to place in a couple of seconds if you had a car, it just wouldn't work.
Secondly, the environment is completely ruined. There is more water on the roads than there is asphalt and trees, bushes and foliage demolish their way through the few parts of the road that are not flooded.
It would be logically not feasible to use cars there, if you found a working one that is.

So the approach I took is smaller but more detailed level design. You won't be able to for example run around streets and just pick a building you want to go into.
You may have to negotiate your way through buildings C and D in order to reach point B.

Also some news, I have nearly finished the medieval model pack. I had very little time (like 2 hours a day) to mess around with wc3 stuff and that little time I usually spent on MM. Hence the delay but it will be coming shortly.

And about MM, I can't show you the terrain yet. (simply because it just isn't done, there are doodads and models but not enough to piece everything together)
But I'll show you the 3d blueprints of the map (a big 3d model of the entire town that I use to scale things to and see how much environment will fit onto the map) which should give you an idea how of the first level is gonna look like.

 

[bethmachine]

Imagine having had a car in Loderon you could have escaped from the undead. And when arthas turns into the Lich King ride him how quick would that be?

 

[Talavaj]

Well well ! Whad'ya know ! Manoo has just finished his amazing work on the protagonist.
This means we may potentially see gameplay footage in the near future. (in form of a video trailer/demo)

I also hope you didn't like the original inventory design too much ! Reason for this being that it is gonna get a redesign.
I think the original design was goddamn gorgeous *ego* but it lacked in the functional department.
I'll replace the background with a new one (which will change the overall look) but the form should be around the same.
Two new frames are gonna be added to display item count (only for small items such as bullets) and durability and the crafting (or "combine" as it is called in here) is getting extended to display additional information. Apart from showing what your items are going to combine into it will also show the required components and their amount or lack thereof. (in red)
Combining will always require only two active components such as a firearm and a scope, but it may require others such as nails, screwdrivers or duct tape.
Those small components won't require you to select them or require you to know what kind of other tools are required (because that would be too much of trial and error on the player) the crafting will recognize the stock you have and inform you whether the combination is possible or not.

Also the medieval pack is going to be out tomorrow (or maybe even later today, I'll see)

 

[Binsu]

The new character looks really good that I do thought at first that its a completely new game and not wc3. We only see maps that are these goods so I advice you to keep going. Cheers =)

 

[BlinkBoy]

hmm I ask myself if through ENB there's a way to get normal maps into models or even edit wc3's model format to support new type of emitters and maps.

Have you tried anything special for your mod like extra maps or something? maybe emissive maps. I know wc3's mdx saves some data which is not used, i could make NeoDex export more options using this unused data, ofcourse if a modified version of ENB could load it.

 

[Talavaj]

I'm afraid not, or not that I know of.
From what I gather ENB does not communicate with the game directly, hence why it can be used on virtually anything that uses direct 3D 8/9 to render the graphics.
This build has some experimental support for bump and parallax mapping, however I believe this is faked from the diffuse map (and ends up looking hideous as a result) but it does not seem to work in wc3.
These and reflection/water shader seem to be tailored specifically for San Andreas and won't work in other games.

Speaking of which, I noticed magos can add an environment map material tag but this does not seem to do anything in the game.
Heard anything of that ? Sphere mapping is simple but would be amazing to have even that. This is the kind of data that is not used I assume ? What else is there ?

 

[Vinz]

OMG everything is so realistic. Do you make these models?

 

[Talavaj]

Yes, all the models and rest of the art are made by me exclusively for this mod. The main character is made by Manoo.

 

[BlinkBoy]

I'm afraid not, or not that I know of.
From what I gather ENB does not communicate with the game directly, hence why it can be used on virtually anything that uses direct 3D 8/9 to render the graphics.
This build has some experimental support for bump and parallax mapping, however I believe this is faked from the diffuse map (and ends up looking hideous as a result) but it does not seem to work in wc3.
These and reflection/water shader seem to be tailored specifically for San Andreas and won't work in other games.

Speaking of which, I noticed magos can add an environment map material tag but this does not seem to do anything in the game.
Heard anything of that ? Sphere mapping is simple but would be amazing to have even that. This is the kind of data that is not used I assume ? What else is there ?

I'm currently making NeoDex export directly to MDX format and i've found some extremely weird shit. There are many unknown flags in materials. Models can have external animation files which I don't really know what they are for or how they are used. There's a type of particle emitter which can emit models and works differently to particle emitters 2, sadly testing it is a pain because magos erase them, a big motivation to make NeoDex export directly to mdx and forget of mago's crap. I also found Animations have an extra value called sync point which I have no idea how it works. There's plenty of unused data in geosets like types of faces (triangles, trianglefans, quads, etc). There's a flag called DropShadow on geosets which I haven't tested. There are more types of colission objects like planes and cylinders.

Material flags:
//#1 - ConstantColor
//#2 - ???
//#4 - ???
//#8 - SortPrimitivesNearZ
//#16 - SortPrimitivesFarZ
//#32 - FullResolution

there are 2 flags that exist and no body knows what they do.

 

[BallisticTerrain]

Fascinating. I hope you can figure some of that out. You've already made NeoDex nearly as good as art tools, and better in several aspects. If you can figure some of that out and find some super awesome feature hidden within warcraft 3 NeoDex will go above and beyond art tools.
That drop shadow flag is particularly interesting. Drop shadow usually refers to a type of shadow used in 2d art, but if it's on a 3d geoset I have no idea what it means. Maybe they were trying to make a better shadow system? I have no idea.

Do you know anything about those two ??? flags?

I have no idea what constant color could be for.
I also have no idea what the sorting primitives flags are.
The full resolution flag sounds sort of like it might turn of mipmapping? Who knows.

Maybe some of this stuff was used in the Arthas vs Illidan model. If you open up the model file, you'll notice for one thing it actually has no animations. External animation file?
Also, if you watch the fight, you'll notice that both arthas and illidan have what I think is real time shadows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB82pF_64mw Here is a video of the fight.
If you open the model up in the editor and look at arthas's face, you'll notice that although it has no animations, arthas's hair is blowing in the wind with what appears to be real time shadows cast by the hair.
There are several large black planes in the model, which are sort of shown in the fight, and several interesting particle effects, including what looks like snow falling up, and a bunch of smoke coming from the cave entrance.
You can also open up the cinematic illidan model, which appears to be the same or almost the same model used in the pre-rendered illidan cinematic in TFT where he summons nagas. Except the textures are messed up.

EDIT: After looking in the MPQ, I found that the arthas vs illidan model was bundled with a bunch of textures that seemed to be an animated texture sequence for the shadows. However, when I opened them, every last one was just a 16 x 16 black square.
I also opened up the map with said model. This is how blizzard activates it.

call PlayModelCinematic( "Doodads\\Cinematic\\ArthasIllidanFight\\ArthasIllidanFight.mdl" )

In addition I found 6 files with the extension .mrf under Doodads/Cinematic/ArthasIllidanFight in war3xlocal.mpq
They are named ArthasCape0000 - ArthasCape0005

And guess what else I found. I converted it to mdl and opened it in notepad and found a crazy amount of weird shit, including the constant color material.

I've attached a zip with the mdl and mdx versions of the fight model, the map in which the arthas v illidan model is used, and all 6 mrf files.

I suggest you look at the mdx in magos, look at the mdl in notepad, and look at the map.
I'm going to take a look at the cinematic illidan model now.

 

[BlinkBoy]

Fascinating. I hope you can figure some of that out. You've already made NeoDex nearly as good as art tools, and better in several aspects. If you can figure some of that out and find some super awesome feature hidden within warcraft 3 NeoDex will go above and beyond art tools.
That drop shadow flag is particularly interesting. Drop shadow usually refers to a type of shadow used in 2d art, but if it's on a 3d geoset I have no idea what it means. Maybe they were trying to make a better shadow system? I have no idea.

Do you know anything about those two ??? flags?

I have no idea what constant color could be for.
I also have no idea what the sorting primitives flags are.
The full resolution flag sounds sort of like it might turn of mipmapping? Who knows.

Maybe some of this stuff was used in the Arthas vs Illidan model. If you open up the model file, you'll notice for one thing it actually has no animations. External animation file?
Also, if you watch the fight, you'll notice that both arthas and illidan have what I think is real time shadows.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB82pF_64mw Here is a video of the fight.
If you open the model up in the editor and look at arthas's face, you'll notice that although it has no animations, arthas's hair is blowing in the wind with what appears to be real time shadows cast by the hair.
There are several large black planes in the model, which are sort of shown in the fight, and several interesting particle effects, including what looks like snow falling up, and a bunch of smoke coming from the cave entrance.
You can also open up the cinematic illidan model, which appears to be the same or almost the same model used in the pre-rendered illidan cinematic in TFT where he summons nagas. Except the textures are messed up.

Let's continue the discussion here. So we can stay in topic here:
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/modeling-animation-276/mdx-secrets-discussion-238635/#post2389252

 

[tobyfat50]

Truly if you can develop neodex to be better than the art tools then I'll have to give up on the art tools. Some of the dex features are very useful and you can't find them in art tools also haven't figured out how to make them work in art tools but they contain one thing that is crucial to my work and that is the Composite material multi uvw that works.

Travaj, The main character made by Manoo looks great, makes me wonder how it would look with bumpage. You could make a texture directly with bumpage on but I'm guessing you will use some new tech for that wich is which is why I have to ask, are you going to make this features work the ENB exclusively?

 

[RiotZ]

Undoubtedly this will require explicit amounts of imports and likely a major change to the MPQ, yes?

 

[Talavaj]

Yes, pretty much everything is gonna be custom assets.
As for MPQ change, dunno. Didn't consider that.

Also there is this, I scrapped a lot of resources from the mod. Because the overall look was really weirdly inconsistent. The separate models were ok but it didn't go well together.
A lot of unpleasant shit happened in my life recently which resulted in a creative meltdown, I keep making things but always end up dissatisfied.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do more research, and wait around for a while for BlinkBoy's NeoDex 2 and do a tiny experiment meanwhile.