[Role Playing Game] Memento Mori

[Hexcellion]

Those models just look so good.

 

[Gekigengar]

Thats real dedicated man o.o

 

[Hades17]

This is like developing a whole new game just using the wc3 engine as fundament.
Very fantastic job mate. The hours of work you must have spent in the WE trying to create these menues with doodads must be tremendous.

+rep, looking foreward to this fantastic singleplayer map.

 

[Talavaj]

Well, I'm almost about to resume work on this project. The modular manor pack is nearly done, I've just finished all the types of doors and doorways. The doorway and the doors will be separate models so you can mix-match them, their scale should fit perfectly if you will set the same scale in the doodad editor.
The doors are animated, they have close and open animations as death/birth so you will be able to trigger those animations. They don't have open state animation but the open animation is non looping so when you play the doodad/destructible animation it should get stuck in its last frame which is the same as the starting frame of the death animation.
I've tested it in the game and it works flawlessly. People may use in combination with pathing blockers for locked doors maybe ? Or purely for cosmetic purposes and trigger them to open/close when units are passing through.
The problem is, I'm not willing to create copies of wall with cut out space for the doors because of filesize constraints. So I have extended the doors and gave them a black gradient inside, that way you can clip them into the wall from each side.
The units passing through will clip through the "blackness" but in my opinion it is only a tiny quirk in exchange for not needing another wall model.
The bigger quirk is.. that you can put the door on only one side and have the other side black but I assume that isn't too much of an issue either.

Window shutters work in the same way except they have two wings. I designed them along the lines of:
- during day the window is in default stand animation an the shutters are open
- at dusk (18:00) you would trigger the window to play the stand alternate (where the window changes into bright and glows)
- at midnight (24:00) you would trigger the window to play the regular stand back again (turned off light) and play the shutter animation to close.
Ofc you can do with them whatever you please, that is just a suggestion.

I only need to organize the stuff into a pack and make some more variations. After that I'll upload it to the terrains sub forum.
YARP onto the forum, because of reasons. (mostly this silly resource approval process and a nonsensical way of uploading packs)
That will be prolly in 2~3 days.
The thread will be open to feedback and requests, I plan to update it with new things when I have time or add more packs to it (such as furniture/indoor foliage/alternate texture maybe ?) based on what (if anything) gets requested.
How about that ?

By the way, I've finally got around making the supporter signature. If you like the mod feel free to put it in your signature.

[URL="http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/map-development-202/memento-mori-231499/"]
[IMG]http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/members/185888-albums6426-picture69722.png[/IMG][/URL]

Also thank you about positive feedback !

 

[Drunken_Jackal]

Cool! Maybe you could also share some of the environmental ones.

 

[Hexcellion]

Do you do post these screenshots the time you finish those models? If yes, then that's one fast modelling right there. Good job.

 

[Talavaj]

Yeah pretty much. Well these models are very simple geometry so it doesn't really take too long.
Matter of a couple of minutes really, just the wrapping takes a bit longer plus I'm not particularly good at it heh.
Texturing is not a thing either because the textures are shared.

 

[Strydhaizer]

So im expecting a good looking characters in the map?
Its also very nice that none of the models are ripped from the games and made by just one author. I really sure that this will take a year to finish.

Nice project sir.
Oh how russians made a very good models?

 

[Talavaj]

Character design is not finalized, I'll be using placeholder models for the most part. I may actually end up searching for somebody else who would model the character.
But yes, I don't plan on using a wc3 looking character of course.

Also no idea, I'm not Russian.

 

[Strydhaizer]

I thought your a russian because of your name.

BTW , why you dont make the real game than using Warcraft Editor? I know its bit hard to program . And , what will be the suggested video card for this , that was too High Quality.

 

[Talavaj]

Because I can't code XD, I'm an artist not a programmer and if I was not alone I couldn't expect everybody to just do what I tell them to do.

As for graphic requirements ? Not much more than your regular wc3 map for the most part, just something with slightly higher video ram to handle higher resolution textures.
With ENB ? Pixel shader 2.0 minimum (Or pixel shader 3.0 for the better shaders) so about GeForce 6100 and above or Radeon 9550 or above, that doesn't guarantee good framerate though.
You may want 1gb+ ~ vram gpu for decent framerate with shaders.

Le bumpage
I was mildly sick these past few days so I didn't progress much. I've just worked some more on the doodad pack. I've made low poly versions of most of the high poly parts and also curved some models so that people can make circular architecture.
These curved models are modeled so that they snap perfectly to each other when you rotate them 90+ degrees each side.
They are designed for towers/rooftop patios and stuff. Currently only walls and parapets are curved and only some.
I will release the pack before continuing on MM.

*The tower on the picture is made of high poly cobblestone, the curved wall next to it is the same model but low poly variant.*
*The walls supported by a wooden frame are intended to be used as interior walls in combination with cobblestone wall as exterior, but can of course be used for both purposes if the terrainer desires. The log wall is intended to be used without an interior wall and it is the only wall that is two sided.*
*The small rectangular pieces are supposed to be used as wall foundations, either on the ground floor or in between multiple floors. As demonstrated here.*

 

[UgoUgo]

The cylinder wall reminds me very much of TESV: Skyrim's color scheme.
What I like the most is those textures, they look beautiful. Are they handrawn, or you found it on web?

If its handrawn, mind telling me how you get those crisp looking textures (especially the cobblestones)? Did you merely used brushes, or you added several filters... etc?

 

[Talavaj]

All parts are inspired by Skyrim yes, the game is an unmatched source of inspiration for this considering its vast asset library. The textures are inspired by it as well however I stylized them in a slight cartoony fashion.

As for the textures, they are not hand drawn nor stocks. They are procedurally generated using Filter Forge or by me using diffuse maps and bump maps using photoshop's rendering capabilities and in case photoshop rendering is insufficient they are rendered from high poly models using projection mapping in 3ds max.
This particular model set uses a bit of both, diffuses generated by filter forge and subsequently rendered in photoshop.
If you are curious what Filter Forge is, it is a plug-in for photoshop (and other softwares) that is capable of rendering generally 3d properties (normal/bump/reflection/displacement/specular) into a flat texture while sustaining seamless properties and hundreds of thousands of variations.

This one is made using photoshop rendering capabilities alone with, as you can see, a very crappy diffuse map made in seconds with regular brushes. Spend more than a few seconds ... on your diffuse/bump map and you can achieve terrific results.
That is about it, Memento mori uses mostly textures made like this but also some textures generated in max.

 

[UgoUgo]

Oh, wow. I didnt know there's such tool to make textures. So, that's how the textures of games these days are produced?

Man before you told me this, I always wondered how people are able to make that super-realistic textures.

 

[Talavaj]

New Bumpage:
About the modular manor pack, kind of slightly went overboard. As seen below:
It is not quite done yet, I'll post it soon.
I'll keep it as a recurring theme thing for future medieval resources, if requested.


Well, I'm back to MM. Manor models are mostly done save for some extra variations I wanted to make, but yeah. I pretty much only need to compile them now.

I got amazed by projection mapping so much I started applying it on some objects other than the rocks too.
Made some ultra-poly meshes for trees (really weird trees) and can't wait to see how they turn out when mapped.

I also have a neat thing to announce, I asked somebody to do character design for me and they pretty much agreed to help. So we will see how that goes. This person is far more skilled than me in so I thought it would be far more appropriate.

And here it finally worked although it only uses default smooth shading, not raytraced light:
The resulting mesh has below 500 polys. The texture is also quite poor, but can't do nothing about it, blame it on silly wc3 texture resolution limitations.. Obviously, that is just the ambient occlusion generic diffuse map will go underneath so the low quality will be barely noticeable.

Old Bumpage:
Pretty much, textures in games nowadays are very rarely "hand drawn" completely unless we speak of games that are supposed to look hand drawn of course. (torchlight 2/cartoony games etc etc etc)

"Hand drawing" got dumbed down to drawing diffuses (and often bump maps unless they are generated from the diffuse) which are just the color maps, the shadows are either generated from extremely high poly objects (tens of thousands of polygons) as either ambient occlusion (which is overlaid over the diffuse map) or into normal maps that are then used to generate those shadows in engines that support normal mapping.
I made some textures like that in this example.

Because wc3 has no bump or normal mapping, I make textures where they are "faked" by photoshop by simulating light and bump maps (as alpha channel) into the texture.

Le Bumpage
I lied, I actually did work on something for MM while making modular manor blab.
The thing being rendering of environmental effects. Some outdoor models (mostly streets) will have rain effects displayed on them (when it will rain), they will gradually go darker and reflective until they get covered in a layer of water and rain ripples will appear.
Vertical surfaces will have streams of droplets on them instead. The rain ripples are very troublesome to animate, I couldn't find any suitable software to make the texture with so I'm drawing the texture frame by frame.. manually in photoshop.
That being said, it will be worth the effort wouldn't you say ? (Picture from magos)
It was inspired by this vid and Dead Island riptide that I recently played.
The similar technique may possibly be used in some models from the modular manor pack to put snow on top of them over time. (Roofs and beams I guess ?)

 

[Karassu]

The models are eyegasmic! And about the character models? Your team should have animators, meshers, and boners... Oh wait, boners?

 

[Talavaj]

I can animate (somewhat) I can (and most likely will) model most of the enemies, most doodads won't probably be animated manually as they will use havok physics. (courtesy of tobyfat50)
The main character won't be made by me because I lack the experience for that.

Also, behold ! The prom materials.
-end of self praise-

 

[BallisticTerrain]

I wanna download it. Where can I download it?

 

[Talavaj]

Didn't compile it yet, also some things need to be ironed out such as animations/variations and assets with dynamic snowfall variants.
I also need to make a list of all assets with tags based on what attributes they have so that people without magos/viewers aren't confused about it.

When I'm finished I'll probably up it to the terrain forum in its own thread to detach it from here.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

What's the filesize of the whole pack when finished?

I'm definitely going to use that for Gaias Retaliation, especially since it's snow compatible.

 

[Veritas 117]

I think you are going to make a lot of people very happy when you release this pack. Hopefully you start a trend of making more doodads that involve animations like that. Keep up the good work and good luck with the project.

 

[Sin'dorei300]

Awesome stuff u got 'ere!

 

[Karassu]

When will the map be uploaded? Do you know how long? Week? Month? Year?

 

[Talavaj]

The 15 textures are 186kb for the HD pack and about half of that for the LQ texture pack before any optimization. I'm guessing I could cut about 20%~30% off that using BLP lab and remove a couple of mip maps.
The models go around 6kb to 18kb each. The more detailed ones have low poly variants that go around third/half of their filesize however.

I could squeeze the filesize by putting more variants into a single model with animations but it would probably impair terraining and people would have to trigger it up more.
Also how do you like the snow ? So far I only put it on a select few models such as roofs/beams logically on those that are the most likely exposed to it but I could put it on most even those that are less likely to be snowed on or aren't directly exposed to it (but still have a few upward facing faces) I thought of making only these faces covered such as on this barrel:
The process is quite easy and it doesn't seem to take much filesize, I could make most snow compatible if people like the idea. (the barrel is not part of the pack, not of this particular one at least)
Drawback on this will be that you will have to import the snow texture for all the models that will be compatible with it even if you won't want to use it yourself.
Guess I can release a version without snow sometime down the road though.

As for the ETA on Memento Mori, no idea. Months likely.

 

[zlowly]

you really should make Memento mori.exe
not .wex xD

 

[bethmachine]

you really should make Memento mori.exe
not .wex xD

If you read the posts you will know why it will be w3x not exe.

 

[Kithraya]

you really should make Memento mori.exe
not .wex xD

If you read the posts you will know why it will be w3x not exe.

"You really should make", not "You make".

 

[Talavaj]

"You really should make", not "You make".

I didn't get tis.

Also more questions about stuff, I already made snow for the medieval models.. Would you also like rain versions ? or underwater even ?

As for that, yeah making a standalone game is far beyond my skill. I have zero knowledge in programming.
Not to mention even if I was joined by people who can code making a standalone game of this scale would require huge amount of effort and time. It would simply be not worth it to work on a free project of this scale.
Make it commercial ? Good luck, without funds that is. Even with crowd-funding and such, you still need some funds to make something to show off on kickstarter, plus those games aren't really made by hobbyists, they are usually people with fair amount of professional experience.
I studied applied digital/traditional arts on high school and traditional arts on two universities that I didn't particularly like. I don't think there is place for traditional art in the world now, unless you want to sell your oil paintings on ebay ofc.
I'm not skilled or experienced enough to work even on IOs/Android games let alone on anything bigger than that.
That being said I know it was more of a compliment than actual suggestion and it is appreciated as such !

I modded Vice City/San Andreas for personal use (adding custom tuning modifications and stuff like that). I was pretty much hopeless in the code but reverse engineered mods of other people and it worked somehow. *derp*
I also made mods for minecraft for myself. (once again reverse engineering because I can't do nothing in java)
I dunno why I do that, I always see flaws in products or what it is lacking and enhance it myself.
I started MM because for once I actually ended up thinking, "wow" what if other people would also appreciate the things I appreciate ?
I have been modding wc3 for myself for years (since 2005 maybe ?) I have made an undead campaign extension for myself, it was about events following Arthas becoming the lich king and returning to lordaeron to clash with Sylvanas, then I made a gothic 2 remake, a map based on Sacred (the diablo clone) a bunch of wow inspired maps and a whole lot of other stuff that I no longer remember.
Looking at it back now this behavior of making things for myself and never sharing them was frankly nuts.
I wonder if I still have any of those wc3 projects left.. but I'm afraid they are long lost on my old dead computer, lol.

I also made huuge amounts of assets for minecraft that nobody had ever seen or used.
I don't even know. I also start many sentences with "I" for whatever reason.

 

[Zwiebelchen]

I personally think you should not rely on doodad animations too much.
The reason for that is that "Play Animation for Doodads in Region" is a quite costly function, performance wise, especially since modular doodad systems will usually require HUNDREDS of doodads to be placed.
It's a neat thing for special purposes and there should definitely be models that have this, but I highly recommend - especially for all those standard doodads like planks, pillars, columns and barrels, make two versions of them aswell (snowed and non-snowed).
This is both to keep the filesize low (in case people only need snow or non-snowed versions) and also to save performance ingame, since doodads with animations played require more cpu than doodads without.

Of course, importing the same model twice (snowed and non-snowed) requires more file size, but since the MPQ compression and ZLIB compression of vexorians map optimizer uses dictionaries, importing the same model with two different textures used compresses the second model very much anyway.

 

[Talavaj]

Yeah I was afraid that would be the case.
It's fine though, I decided to split all the different animations as stand alone models too.
From what I know there is no actual way to display doodad animations in the editor so editor-only terrainers would miss out on lot of stuff and those people who want only certain variant could get only that one without being forced to also import all the other textures that the model requires in the rest of the animations.

 

[neo_sluf]

Watch your map size.. even though it is a campaign but still if it has normal filesize it can be distributed it fast..

I am really amazed the way you modelling.. what are you using GUI or JASS?..

Make sure also it will not lag as much for other computers because not all computers are good most are junk..

Anyways good project..

 

[Talavaj]

There are some optimization features in place, so that it would run even on lower end machines.
That being said, I'm afraid it wouldn't be possible to have both low filesize and high graphical fidelity and variation.
Similarly how you can't expect high graphical fidelity and low performance requirements. The basic settings will be so-so on lower end machines, although they will still require higher VRam than regular warcraft.
If you will also want to try out the bundled pixel shaders, expect poor performance unless you have GPU of the 1gb+ vram range.
There won't be any advanced texture maps that you see in modern games, but there will be raytraced shadows and physics emulation using Havok engine for rigid body, soft body physics and water physics, the optional shader pack contains SSAO (among other things) which is a pixel shader that was first developed by Crytek for Crysis 1 so, yeah.

TL;DR. - It will be big but you will be able to download it by parts if your connection is slow, possibly from multiple hosting services.
- It will run acceptably on lower end machines, but expect performance drops when you are near water and things with physics.

More interestingly, character designer behind Memento Mori is slowly getting the protagonist done.
He is doing an amazing job, I'm super excited. I'd show you his WIPs but I assume he would want to present it himself when he is done, moreover I feel like showing the final thing is usually more exciting.

I'm also closely following and dissecting The Last of Us (ps3) for inspiration, even thought the game itself is a complete disappointment for me it still has great overall design and I would love MM to feel, look and work similar.

Bumpage:
So, I've added a new software to my workflow. This being the Houdini 11 FX (with free apprentice license for limited personal use)
It is a powerful 3d animation software with some real-time rendering capabilities not as widespread, powerful or popular as Maya or 3DS max but it is still used in game development and cinema. I'll try to use it for dynamic fracturing and fluids generation.
I will use havok for physic animation still, but Houdini seems to be best free option for variety of uses, I aim to use it for fluid dynamics generation.
Such as here.
Houdini is the program used in such games as Uncharted 3 and Killzone 3.
If lucky, I will be able to port similar effects into MM.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

If you will also want to try out the bundled pixel shaders, expect poor performance unless you have GPU of the 1gb+ vram range.

I have 8 GB of vram, I will expect good performance.

 

[PROXY]

Are there even gamers out there, that have less then 1gb? I mean, you can't really run new games without atleast that.

 

[Talavaj]

Well it is still much higher than regular wc3 requirements. (64~256 mb GPUs)
You should be able to run it at 1gb mobile GPUs (HD 5650 ~) but it may lose fps here and there.
Not to terrify people, by that I mean while using higher resolution with DOF and SSAO, without shaders you won't require much more than what is wc3 recommended.
You will be able to run depth of field without SSAO on lower specs, SSAO will have the biggest impact on performance, especially on higher resolutions.

Also, I have almost compiled all the medieval models. It ended up being quite a mess so it took some time.

 

[saphiree]

I have 8 GB of vram, I will expect good performance.

I'm pretty sure you don't have 8GB dedicated vram. Also, crossfire and SLI doesn't mean you get the RAM from all the cards. You still only have the RAM from the first (primary) GPU

 

[tobyfat50]

Once again you have cool stuff going on there and the pack looks great. I've been busy lately so I made no more updates but I'm getting closer to finishing the cinematic. I would be finished it faster If I could boost my work on it but time and chores...

 

[Deleted member 219079]

I'm pretty sure you don't have 8GB dedicated vram. Also, crossfire and SLI doesn't mean you get the RAM from all the cards. You still only have the RAM from the first (primary) GPU

I have 2 4GB cards on a SLI. Didn't even check for that fact about SLI not giving RAM from 2nd card.

 

[Talavaj]

That is more than enough, it runs at 60fps on my HD 6950. (2gb of GDDR5)

I'm amazed by Houdini so far. It uses similar node based interface as Blender which is for me (a max user) a bit confusing but I can see it being intuitive once you get used to it.
The modeling is poor but I'll import stuff anyway. I'll be using it to fracture the buildings, it will save so much time compared to modeling the fractures myself.
The nicest thing is you can download the full build for free and use it with the "apprentice" license while the commercial license costs $4500~, I wish more softwares did the same.

Stuff like:

 

[BallisticTerrain]

That looks cool. I'll have to check out this houdini software.

 

[Talavaj]

Yeah, well the learning curve is steep, lol. Have fun.
I'm trying whether it would be possible to fracture objects in Houdini and use them with havok to simulate physics.

Also fun test, of Havok 3 physics. (Courtesy of tobyfat50 who conceived and shared this feature with me)
It is a real poor test, I was only testing whether it would export properly with havok 3 and what filesize it would have, it does not actually "lag" in-game it is just the video capped at 10fps.
Also the vid is without ENB shaders.

 

[BallisticTerrain]

If you could get some falling debris and small (or maybe large?) buildings falling with that method it would be very cool. That might require some major setup though, and you would probably have to export the building and everything it collides with as one model.

 

[Talavaj]

It will be mostly debris and things you will be able to push over. I've tried out Havok water physics and it is pretty brutal.
I'm afraid the water surface won't be able to be converted into wc3 because it uses a warp on a plane which isn't animated itself. If it could be then that would be awesome.
Things in water will still be animated using this though.

if I get it working, the water mesh detail would be about this detailed:
Much lower precision but the strength is much higher and the mesh complexity is much lower for it to be doable in wc3, (the animated cloth was about this or higher complexity).

 

[Manoo]

I think u should be carufull with this animation tricks, as i aspect u gona convert engine rendered water to tones of moving bones. I'm sure it gona couse bigger lag and filesize than using normal engine that wc3 can't support.
By the way don't forget wc3 is created on old engine so it requires more pc power than usually games.

 

[Talavaj]

Yep, it would require a bone per each vertex. I know it would be huge load for something as detailed as the water surface.
It is fine though, I did not have plans to make the surface work as well. It is more about the objects (debris and stuff) reacting with the water.
It would be barely noticeable in-game too seeing how the mesh shading isn't all that apparent in game and it lacks things like refraction and fresnel which normally make it more apparent.

That being said I can't get it to work anyway, I can't find a way to bake space warp in a way that would work in wc3.
If I find a way I may still do it with much lower mesh detail and vertex count. Something like the water in the frozen throne menu screen, except it would be generated and it would still look better than if I tried to animate the bones manually myself.

 

[tobyfat50]

I haven`t found a way to bake space warp physics in max myself. I made a animated cape but with a tone of bones to it. After adding more of those capes for testing purposes the result was a horrible crash in which the objects from the map, in the dozens mixed together. Good thing that I managed to undo it (hardly) because of windows 7, if it were xp the map would be lost, validating mr Manoos words.
For the water maybe you could animate the textures instead and if possible animate the mesh a little to match the texture.

 

[Talavaj]

Yeah, I'm still cracking my brain over it. Water will form a lot of the environment but so far it looks like it will be the worst looking part of it, which is a shame.

I'm searching through each and every notable old game to see how they did water in there without the use of shaders and with only diffuse maps. But so far, most of those are pretty much shit.

 

[tobyfat50]

So... water is pretty much your greatest challenge yet. Good luck with it bro!

 

[BallisticTerrain]

Warcraft 3 actually has fairly good water for its age.
I did manage to find more realistic replacement textures for the original water here.
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/maps-564/realistic-flowing-water-223443/
I used those in Hunter for a bit, but then stopped when I tried to use water models instead.

 

[Talavaj]

Ya I've seen that but with all due respect to the creator, it looks crap.
Confession bear:I actually prefer wc3 default water over the water model too...

Still working on it, I'll see how it turns out. I'm still contemplating to make it the way I did there.
But make the fresnel highlights as unshaded overlay so they appear really bright always.
Still that is not particularly feasible, it would require ridiculous amount of textures to create something like that per object basis.