$12256 / $11500
Hello, OGA folks.
I have the following proposal:
Free the dungeon-themed resources pack by making a small
but fully completed game. Here is a brief description what is
offered in the pack (see the previews):
1. Wall tile with diffuse, normal and specular textures (D/N/S)
2. Floor tile with diffuse, normal and specular textures
3. Ceiling tile with diffuse, normal and specular textures
4. Column model with diffuse, normal and specular textures
5. Double wall with D/N/S textures and moving up/down
animation + sound effect.
6. Grated door with animation and D/N/S textures
7. Throw-switch with D/N/S textures, animations and sound
8. Chain-lever with D/N/S textures, animations and sound
9. Button with D/N/S textures, animations and sound
10. Pressure plate with D/N/S textures, animations and sound
11. Torch with D/N/S textures, and sound
13. A lock with D/N/S textures, and sound
14. A key with D/N/S textures
All sound effect files in OGG format.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
All resources are licensed to use in OGA Dungeon-related
Project ONLY. This resources are NOT FREE to use, they are
NOT under Creative Commons of any sort. Exclusive permission
is granted to use them ONLY in OGA Dungeon-related Project.
CONDITION:
If the game is completed within 6 months, all resources
will be released under CC0 licence.
I will post the link to the archive containing all the resources if the project kicks-off successfully.
Proposed game description:
It is a 3D first person dungeon crawler with a grid-based move-
ment, similar to Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, and
Legend of Grimrock. The difference is that it is not a party
based, player has no attributes and does not have to enter a
combat (yet). Your goal is to “escape the dungeon”.
Game must have the following features:
Menu items (apart from start and quit)
1. Save/Load
2. Options (screen resolution, music and sound effects volumes)
Sound
1. Soundtrack
2. In-game ambient background tracks ( 3 for a good variety )
3. In-game sound effects (ideally, all actions are sndfx-ed)
4. 3D sound.
Gameplay
1. Simple yet flexible logic of switches. Sort of like in the
Legend of Grimrock.
2. Free camera look with right mouse button.
3. Basic adventure-game style inventory (for keys, stones and
some other simple objects).
4. Simple object interaction: take an object from and to an
inventory, press a button, throw a switch etc.
5. All game objects have a text property: explanatory text that
you can see if you “explore” the object. E.g. “an old rusty
switch”.
6. Teleportation from one place to another via activated portals.
Graphics:
1. Support for diffuse, normal and specular textures
2. Dynamical lighting, particles (e.g for fire, teleport).
4. Flickering/randomly floating torchlight, mist/fog.
6. Context-sensitive mouse pointer.
System requirements:
Must run smoothly on a computer with 256Mb video card, CPU 2.0Ghz single core, requires under 2Gb of
hard-drive space. Linux platform must be supported.
This website's content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
That's great, good luck all. I don't think I will be doing a lot of programming. But if there are isolated segments in the logic code I will try to help. I can also deal with level design/story. Who will be managing the team? Just toss me tasks to do and I will try as much as I can.
@yd - you may be over estimating my technical knowledge. Getting art into engines has been, in my experience, precisely the point of failure on most projects. My appologies, but I'm not the man for that particular job. I'm mostly a flaky artist.
"Dammit Jim, I'm an artist, not a software engineer."
@ulf, it fine. No one can blame you for that. However I'd advise you to give it a try and may be learn something new along the way. Right now, I think, it will be necessary to split all the models (wall, floor etc) into separate *obj files, possibly preserving animation. Anyway, andrewj may know more about what kind of models are needed for Darkplaces.
For Darkplace we want all the non-animated parts of the level in one big mesh (OBJ format), and I assume that yd's script can do this already.
Animated things are a bit harder. The wall switches and buttons should be separate objects (called "entities" in Darkplaces). All the objects in a level, including lights, get placed in a "ENT" file which the engine loads. So a wall switch should be exported as an IQM (InterQuakeModel) file. The IQM website has an up-to-date Blender export script.
For doors which open, or a grating which goes up, these don't need to be IQM format, OBJ format is fine, and the game code will take care of moving or rotating the model -- i.e. the animation is done with code instead of by the model itself.
An open question (for me) is how we can place objects using Tiled -- I haven't used it before (compiled and installed it today). It is surely possible, just a matter of specifics and getting the Blender script to read those objects and create the ENT file.
So I think the main task now is sorting out the mapping pipeline. I will start learning about Tiled and get more familiar with Blender, and see about getting the example level to load in Darkplaces.
@ulf : do you think you could extract the wall torch from yd's blend file into a stand-alone blend file (ideally with its texture too) ? Even better to export it as an OBJ file, and the texture as a file too. And I'll look into importing it into Darkplaces.
@cemkalyoncu : I'm happy if you want to work on the (back-) story for the game. A solid story can really help set a direction for everyone to work towards. We don't even have a name for the game yet, hehe, though there is plenty of time to decide that.
@andrewj: I've pm'd you a link to the obj version of the wall torch. The texture image is a separate file (also included). Let me know if it works.
"Dammit Jim, I'm an artist, not a software engineer."
@ulf : thanks for that, screenshot below. It took a little fiddling, one issue was the general scale of the model, Darkplaces expects objects to be a certain size, for example the player is usually a cuboid of size 32x32x56 (for physics), and I suspect one of yd's room tiles will need to be something like 128x128 or 256x256 units for the engine. But the torch was about 1/20 (roughly) of the needed scale. So in the screenshot it is not the right scale.
The other thing that stops it being usable as-is was the texture definitions in the OBJ model. I need to look into it further, but we probably want the OBJ itself to not contain any "usemtl" statements (disable the materials), and then Darkplaces picks up a texture from the OBJ name + image extension (like "torch_wall.obj.png").
Ulf, if you are up for something a bit more challenging, please try installing the IQM (InterQuakeModel) exporter for Blender, and extract the wall switch (with the big lever, which I assume is animated) and export is as an IQM model. You can find the IQM development kit here: http://sauerbraten.org/iqm/ -- I will see about getting it animated in the engine. Oh yeah scale it up 10x or 20x times.
@yd : I need to know if you want your resources to stay private during the development of this game.
That will mean keeping the snapshots of the game private too (just the team members, maybe allow interested testers too), which will make development a bit more cumbersome than it would be if using a public repository. But it is completely up to you.
@adnrewj: If that helps, make the resources public in the sense of the access, not the re-destribution. After all I'd like to keep them non-free until the project is successfully over. Just make sure that the sharing platform is compatible with these requirements.
PS. Glad to see you are making progress.
I can keep your resources separate, e.g. in a "yd" folder, and make it clear in the README documents that all those resources are under special licensing terms (the ones you have specified for this project.) OK?
Ok.
@andrewj: will attempt to do so within the week.
"Dammit Jim, I'm an artist, not a software engineer."
@ulf : that's cool, no need to hurry.
P.S. I did get the test level into Darkplaces. I am concerned about performance though. I will make another snapshot so people can try it and see what framerate they get. If it is too low, we will need a different mapping pipeline (still using Tiled though).
I wonder what happens if you try turning normal/bump mapping off, judging by the image there is too much of it, which makes the image grainy.
Nice progress, I have some weird idea about a story. It is something about a solo archeologist discovering ruins of an ancient human colony on a planet, and stumbles on a dungeon (actually a living complex). While exploring, floor breaks and he falls a couple of levels below. After a while he regains consciousness and he finds himself trapped. During the game, he finds interesting facts about the colony which had a single aim, survival. Surface of the planet is somewhat toxic and very harsh. During the first floors he finds that the colony survived much longer than initial estimations. In the later floors, he starts to realize there should be reason for the fall of this mighty civilization which was completely disappeared. After some point, some sort of stalker predator starts to follow him, which he should run from. This predator could be blind and uses sound (?) to find his prey.
@yd : yeah it looks very grainy here too, at first I wondered if mipmapping may have been disabled for some reason. I will try some other settings (there may be a setting for how "deep" the bump mapping is).
@cemkalyoncu : that story sounds good to me, more in the "aliens and technology" genre than "wizards and magic", which is fine by me (and does not rule out magical or demonic elements). Perhaps he accidentally triggers a teleporter which places him deep underground, and figuring out how to use these ancient teleporters is a big part of the how he must escape.
Any ideas about the eventual gameplay? Already specified is (a) real-time and (b) grid-based movement. I keep thinking that we will need some combat to keep the game interesting. Ever played the original Tomb Raider game? It had lots of exploring with only occasional fights, and that might be a good model to follow here.
I will try to bargain against grid based movement. FPS + realtime + grid base = pure mess. I can't even keep track where I am. 3rd person is quite ok though. It would be nice to be able to look around to search for clues. In the engine you are using, is it possible to have some sort of info on every single object on the scene? Even it would be nice to grab anything that is small enough. This way I can design multiple solutions to some problems. However, this will not go well with grid based system at all and would require a true 3D map editor. In worst case, I can simply give coordinates for objects.
I don't think combat would be really necessary. I am planning adventure exploration style play for the first part. Second part would be survival/thriller where the guy tries to escape from the entity that killed off the colony. For the setting, it will not be sci-fi as these guys lost their tech origins. In a small colony where the environment is barely survivable, sustaining technology is almost impossible. A point to note, colony did survive many generations, cut off from the earth. On earth however, people thought they simply died soon after they have landed. The main aim of the archeologist will be to uncover the history of the colony, before he realizes he is trapped and not alone. It would be amazing to enlist a person who can do narrative/voice over for the archeologist. Narrative would be very nice as the player should know the background abit. And day after day, gamers are getting more and more lazy about reading. I don't know if it is possible, but some sort of Dark Corners of Earth like effects would be very nice to build up tension in the last part.
If everyone is ok with the idea, I can add more details, even some sample puzzles and adventure elements.
@cemkalyoncu: several games pulled off nicely grid-based/rt/fp combination (Eye of the Beholder, Legend of Grimrock being an example). Keeping track the position of the player is done via auto-map.
But I am ready to give in on this, if is hard to make it work and fun, then you CAN do it WITHOUT grid-based movement. It's fine.
How do you plan to do view culling? AFAIK Without a bsp tree a quake engine will not handle larger levels very well. Maybe you can add some simple level geometry and auto-run the bsp calculation step?
Without grid based movement it will be just another dungeon FPS no? Although some rogue-like elements like in the game Zigurrat could be introduced.
--
http://freegamedev.net
It seems to me that grid-based movement would make exploration a bit too mechanical, for lack of a better term. The aforementioned Legend of Grimrock has this limitation. If a room is a square, you just have to step in each space and look at the wall to find the switch. It becomes a routine. Contrast this with the Amnesia games and you see a big difference. There you have to search every nook, alcove, and corner to find what you need. You're free to explore, and indeed you have to. You have to look up, look down, and look around, and consider what things you might be able to interact with. If anything, I'd say grid-based movement was a technological limitation of the early dungeon crawls (much like the text-based interface), not a feature, and games that include it nowadays are mostly doing it for retro nostalgia.
Obviously I haven't contributed anything to this, so feel free to shut me up or ignore me if you'd like. :)
If you need random scary dungeon stuff, I could probably get these game-ready without too much effort:
http://opengameart.org/content/iron-maiden
http://opengameart.org/content/knee-splitter
grid-based movement: I think it can work, but like yd said if it turns out to be too limiting then we should ditch it.
@cemkalyoncu: I'm ok with your story and gameplay idea. The engine does allow you to look in all directions (up and down), and to describe every object in the world. Adding these objects may be a bit painful in Tiled, probably have some layers like "north" which places an object near the north wall, and you have to edit some properties to move it from there.
@Julius: there is no occlusion culling when using an OBJ for the whole map, and yes I am concerned that performance will be bad once the maps become a normal size with many lights and objects.
So last night I had an idea, I could modify Darkplaces to load the Tiled TMX file directly, and compute a visibility matrix (PVS) from the tiles (I already have code for doing that). I will investigate this possibility more to see if it is really feasible.
I have been working on modifying Darkplaces to load TMX files and construct the map itself from pieces in OBJ format.
So far I have been able to load in the "column" piece, place it in three hard-coded places and get them to render properly (a lot harder than it sounds actually). Today I worked on reading the TMX file. All this is going to take a while to complete, maybe two weeks, maybe longer. I also have to figure out how to compile Darkplaces for Windows, that can be a non-trivial task too.
I realize no-one else can do much until this mapping pipeline is ready and there is a snapshot you can actually play with, and I am hoping to have that by the end of November. Of course more will be needed, so by the end of December I hope enough will be in place that we can really get stuck into developing the game itself.
@andrewj, why do you need to compille the DP into Win?
Btw, I already have a pyhton script that reads TMX file and constructs 2D arrays describing each layer. The version in the Blend file works, but I re-wrote it recently using classes. If you want I can share.
I'm using Linux, so I personally don't need a Darkplaces binary for Windows, but it will be needed for test packages so people using Windows can try it out.
The TMX loading code is quite straightforward and is coming along, it can already load the floor pieces. Thanks for the offer though.
Some progress: this screenshot shows the test map (in TMX format) loaded directly into Darkplaces. Plus the player position and light positions are also in the TMX file (using object layers).
Next thing I want to do is support adding torches and switches on the walls, and the gratings which can rise to open, and the ability to press a switch to open a grating. That plus grid-based movement will mean we have an actual game (albeit a very basic one).
Great work so far!
--
http://freegamedev.net
I decided to throw in some extra stuff into the offered dungeon pack. Mostly wall chains, floor and wall tiles (with textures, of course) as seen in the preview.
They look good to me.
Hi folks, just wondering how the project is faring so far. Any updates/news?
Hello,
I understand that this project probably isn't quite ripe yet for sound design/scoring, but when it gets to that point, I'd be happy to participate with either task (possibly both).
Canto, ergo sum
I haven't done anything on this for the last two months, some bugs in Darkplaces got be demotivated, and I have been working on other projects instead.
Nevertheless I plan to do a bit more work on it, quite soon, and make a test package for people to play with.
OK I have made a test package (Windows only I'm afraid), available here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/krawl/files/Other/
As you'll see, it is a long way from being an actual game. What it _can_ do is load the map directly from the TMX file (see oga/maps/test2.tmx) and you can edit that file with Tiled and change things. Also the user interface for the game itself is fairly finished (but menus need major work, of course).
There is a key near the table which you can pick up, and here you can see one of the Darkplaces bugs I was talking about, since the place where the mouse pointer "sees" the key can be wildly different from the place where it is rendered on-screen (in the current map it is not too bad).
Please let me know what you think (good and bad) -- if people think this has some potential then I will keep working on it.
Hi andewj, thanks for the update.
I gave it a try and saw some progress. Did not find the key, though. Liked the lights.
But as you said it does seem like a long way from being a "game"-game. I do not know how much time and effort you may put into it during the next 2 months. If you are working alone on this project it will be really hard to finish by the agreed deadline, regardless of the potential of the current state. I do not want to discourage you, simply being realistic.
May be we may try attract more people into the project? It feels like OGA is not the place where 3D-related projects/art attract much interest. Do you have any ideas where we can "advertise"?
PS. can you place the camera a bit higher and make the field of view smaller (60-65 degrees)?
Thanks for trying it yd.
To be honest, I really cannot muster any enthusiasm to develop this any further. Gonna call it a day.
I don't have any regrets or any blames, I learnt quite a few things about Darkplaces, and also how hard it is to make any kind of game from scratch and get it into a playable full-featured state (especially 3D games).
yd, I can delete this demo package (which contains some of these Dungeon resources) if you think that is necessary.
The github project only contains a few OBJ models (floor, ceiling, wall, column pieces) and none of your textures or sounds, so I don't think the github project needs to be deleted.
No problem, andrewj.
I understand, working alone on a project even as seemingly small as this one is hard. Making it to the finish line requires not only programming skills, but input of artists, designers and lots of other people. Too bad we did not have a full crew for this project and it failed. May be some other time and day.
Yes, please, delete all files associated with this project (inlcuding OBJ files for floor, ceiling, wall columns pieces, anything derived from my blend models).
Thanks for your efforts, everyone.
OK, removed all files containing your resources.
@yd, any chance you could release the dungeon doors (only) in rendered .png for a 2d game?
The whole set is great but the doors are what I'm after... Maybe 4 frames? Front and Side view, closed and opened :)
I've found plenty of doors with an arch above it (which would require blending with its neighbor tiles for a matching pattern), but rectangular ones are scarce...
Ps.: My project has a orthogonal/frontal view, thus preventing me from using some diagonal/isometric door tiles I've already found.
Well, that set is awesome :)
I'm working at my own dungeon exploration game (at the moment it's rather random dungeon generation), which would eventually be a part of a huge RPG game project.
Old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYq4KGaLKE8
Recent screenshots:
http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=6517
Maybe I could give it a try? However, your "Proposed game description" is off my schedule. However, all of those were eventually planned and the model set seems to be really worthy of breaking the schedule.
And I think that participating in this challenge may motivite me enough to finish the work in-time. However, I have an upcoming Ph.D. theses defense, so not too sure about my free time availability.
Programming language: Lazarus/FPC
Game Engine: Castle Game Engine
Platform: Windows, Linux. I hope for Android soon.
License: GPL v.3
What's already there? Tile manager. Random multi-storeyed maze generator (no doors and windows yet) - may be huge (I've solved 27x27x23 maze - 6000 square "meters" - in around an hour). Support for 'placeholders'. Walk around, simple gameplay - find a rose.
Nearest plans (were...): Improve placeholders logic (Placeholders atlas). Optimize to make almost infinite map possible with high efficiency (slice it into chunks). Make support for windows logic. Fix lighting bugs. Add monsters and items. Fix normal map support. Android. More control over map generation process (Tile&placeholder frequency).
I planned to make a 'library' tileset. But that one may be postponed.
P.S. JUST SAW IT WAS 2014 year :D :D :D Sorry for disturbing the old thread :D
@lukems-br
Luke, you can grab the models here http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/80701
and render them in the way you like.
@Eugene,
you can download the resources here: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/80701 and try to incoroporate into your project. Good luck.
Yeah, thanks for such generous submission!
I think I'll include them a little bit later.
Yay! Tx @yd, and congratulations for such a great set!
What is needed for this so far and what engine?
@vipergames: If you read the proposal carefully you will see that the offer expired, the project did not succeed and the topic closed. Regardless of that I shared these and some other resources via blendswap (http://www.blendswap.com/user/yd). Everyone is free to play with them and use in any project they like.
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