Before I knew how to write game code in Batch language I only knew how to script 3d models and construct a group of Brushes to turn them into movers and keyframe them, or link Events, waypoints, with the Red Faction Red Editor. I loved that editor for its powerful texturing tools that it had. But I didn't particularly like doing cutscenes with it because it had a bug that would sometimes crash the editor. But the Red engine was limited...
Now I don't yet understand how to take my ideas I put down in batch to bring them all into a 3d game engine yet because I have a huge gap on the new 3d engines that are being used these days in my knowledge except for what I know about the Red 3d game engine which is an old 3d game engine.
So I did the massive Rpg outdoors game instead in dos shell batch language so I can beable to see the ideas that I want for the game starting to form, it allowed to shape the game while developing it and scripting in all the enemies. That's why I been pushing the envelop as far as I can with the batch language and pushing that engine near its limits before taking the next step to putting all those ideas I developed into putting them into a 3d game engine environment.
So the batch language is really just a stepping stone.
The thing is I can afford to muck around writing out the game in batch for several more months because I have extremely quick typing ability and can write thousands of lines in such a short time.
So that's why I figured that since I have the typing skills to beable to get things done quickly, I might as well go ahead and develop this game as far as I can and push the batch engine near its limits and then worry about getting it all interactive on a proper 3d engine with 3d models later on... although I am still looking around for what 3d engine will fit this type of game because of the size of it....
I liked Batch because it allowed me to have huge outdoor game environments by linking up all my screens but its not a walk around all freely game, No its screen for screen basis movement with turn battles, . So the engine is very good for that....
But the thing is ok you can have your massive outdoor game that goes on for miles of different environments to move screen by screen in, you can have your trading stores, have all your other things, and that brings the game half to life, but everything is all mostly dead, still, lifeless. because your player is not moving, the enemies are not moving, the birds are not moving, its like someone came along and just hit pause, everythng is all frozen.. So its like walking around a morgue even though there are plenty of sound foley effects, so the game has some life but its still like a stiff wooden shell when there's no sprite animation of npc's moving about and doing their different tasks as you get in the 3d interactive games with the 3d models. And not even my music is enough to bring the whole thing to life, so what I've got is a zombie game, a game that is half-alive, and half dead. Because that's what the limits areof the batch engine.
I don't know how to make huge outdoor game environments yet with today's modern 3d game engines because with a game of this size it has over 600 screens of graphics, it needs to have seamless back loading of all the sectors to load sector by sector of the region as you walking around in if its going to be a massive 3d interactive game.
I only have knowledge of how to make and design and link Red Editor maps for seamless loading when it comes to working with 3d engines. Because the Red Editor was the easiest game engine for me to learn....
Blender is a 3d game engine, but boy is it complicated. ts a 3d game engine that relies on 3d modeling knowledge.
Well its a 2D Massive outdoors RPG game. about 600 Screens of GIMP Windows Bitmap Graphics, which is about half a gigabyte.
It was coded in windows Batch language. Code is 8 megs in size. The Graphics is not a windows GUI, its actually using the dos console window using a bitmap executable program hat allows bitmap graphics to overlay over the top of the dos console allowing you to display graphics in the dos console but the windows console has the following limits:
(A) No alpha channel, so i have limited ways to animate the sprites on the screen... I can make the pictures move, but its not with transparency. And you need transparency for sprites.
(B), Batch is not really interactive with the game environment.... So I can't use 6-8 frames of animation for the player sprite to blend in all game environments in the regions because there's no alpha channel transparency as the console only allows bitmap images to be displayed in 24 bits, not JPG or PNG with alpha channel.
(C) The mouse and keyboard do not interact with the batch file at the same time for some reason, although playing sounds from the batch file using sound.exe will interact, allowing me to play more than one sound at the same time without halting the operations in the batch file. Try to do that with the mouse and keyboard, and the keyboard just halts all dead (you can't type anythin) while the mouse is waiting to be clicked. I might have to ask someone if they know of a program or a driver that allows batch files to interactive with both the mouse and keyboard to treat the windows console like a windows gui so you can use both the mouse and the keyboard without this conflict..
I've now added in a Mount now into the Game, so you can beable to ride around the regions on a horse. But riding in this sense it pretty limited because there's no alpha channel to allow me to do the riding animation in real time to blend the horse into the game environment. which sucks. This is why you need 3d models in a fully interactive environment.. I want to put quests also into the game, but these things need the animation. so at the moment each time you ride the horse if its from one end of the region to the other, it costs you 100 gold each ride, (saves you going through 20 screens) and if you want to travel 3-4 regions 200-300 gold depending on how far you take the horse and I think I will have a few random encounters along the way too so sometimes you get a clean ride without any encounters and othertimes you get attacked, so I think I will give the horse also a health flag, so if you get attacked during an encounter while riding the horse, if they do enough damage to it, you lose the mount and have to find a horse trader to get another.
(D) Batch file game is TURN BASED. play the animation, wait till its finish before you can move on with the game. Same in the scripted turn battles, I did, you have to wait your turn all the time. in 3d interactive environments, there's no need to wait a turn or pause you can just go straight into the battle.
This is why I trying to turn my 2d screens into 3d mesh, so I can get all the graphics into a 3d interactive environment and turn them into one big seamless scrolling terrain, for each region and then script all the pawns (have to figure that out), so I don't have to have do turn battle scenes no more.... and if i can do that, then add the little mini map at the top of the screen.
But I don't know what tools i need that will do the job for a game like this to turn it from a Turn based game into 3d interactive.
(E) Doing the game in batch code did have advantages, it allowed me to see what the game would look like when linking up all my game screens, it also kept resources down low in memory, didn't need to load texture libraries up in memory, but batch is not an interactive 3d environment with 3d models. it is a 2d turn-based environment with 2d pictures with scripted battle turns.
So the sounds are interactive, but not the graphics. and that's the limits with batch. unless someone makes a breakthrough and allows jpg or PNG graphics to interact with the batch file.
Well I used that Mona Lisa 2d image to 3d mesh tutorial method, because I didn't know how else to get Blender to turn my flat 2d screens into 3d meshes as I'm new to Blender..
So I imported my flat 2d bmp image into blender then scaled it using S then subdivided the mesh to 6 levels, then put a displacement modifier on it,then went to texture icon and changed the texture to the image's own texture to get Blender to render in the 3d heightmap of the texture using the displacement modofier to map it so it turns the 2d texture into 3d heighmap and then set the strength down to 0.80 or so and it worked, but was really blocky. So I added another subdivision and cranked that up to another 4 more levels. and that was a little bit better but still blocky and now my machine is really starting to slow down, so I stopped it at level 4 and just rendered it. Didn't turn out as well as I hoped it would and came out a rendered mess....
Here's the tidy flat 2d 3d isometric look of my game (there are over 600 screens like this because its a big outdoors rpg game. And this is the 3d mess from Blender. Maybe if I make another copy of my flat 2d bitmap and just turn my bitmap copy all into Greyscale have no colors, and do what I done above. I might get a better result. And then I hav to find a way to dump the 2d color flat color image on top of the untextured 3d mesh to give it back the color, but Blender might not be capable of dumping 2d color bitmaps unto 3d meshes to texture overlay them like you can do in the GIMP. I don't know.
Somethings wrong with this rich text editor... It is possible. How easy it will be to do and how well it will perform are what you will be needing to keep in mind.
My answer: "That's true... keep within the engine's limits' I learnt that with the Red Faction's Red Editor when designing my own levels. But not all game engines have documentation listing all the limits or the boundaries of the engine, like max number of faces, max number of lights you can have on a face, max number of objects you can have rendered, half of these Indie engines give you the tools to design your own maps with the pre fabricated samples, but don't even explain the limits very well. and you really need to know what the limitations are of the engine are so that when you start to map your game out in the engine, you won't break the engine or end up corrupting your map......"
Are you trying to remake the batch game in a game engine (or framework/API), like how it looks in the screenshots you posted in your other thread? Or are you trying to make a new game based on your old one that is fully 3D, i.e. you can walk around, look around, 3D environments, hills etc., like Sacred 2 and Morrowind? (My Answer: Well I prefer full 3D if possible, full interaction with the pawns... But if going for just a 3D makeover since I've done most of the graphic work, if I can turn those graphic screens I made into 3d meshes that the game engine can load in a bit at a time for the terrain. And the tool to do it with to turn 2d screens into 3d mesh terrrain would proabably have to be Blender. I think I would first have to turn my 2d gimp screens into inkscape vector graphics so Blender can then load the 2d vector into Blender and render 3d with it. So you will have a 3d flat square terrain but with raised 3d terrain on it. That would probably be the way to try to do it. Then you have to link the meshes together so they are all seamless when the pieces fit together.. Then the game engine just loads in the meshes in as 3d terrain a bit at a time when the player moves around. Because I would like to know how they did it with Morrowind and Sacred II the huge 3d environment, I;m not quite sure how they set it all up. I get the feeling we have different ideas of what '3D' in this context means.
Either way you can create a '2D' game with a 3D game engine, but not the other way around. I would also say Unity and UDK are good choices. There is a lot to learn about them to get started, but they are well documented and have active communities.
What a cutesy little game, Browserquest, But yes Because my game is written in batch yes it uses 2d renderings of a few 3d models.
But yes I do mean Smooth Transition Scrolling, New areas will scroll in from the edge of the screen when the player moves in the middle. Morrowind had this effect it was a 20 square mile or so terrain and the land just scrolled continually that's the type of scrolling I'm looking for in a game engine but that will allow me to put together all my screens so they can be scrolled around like one big smooth terrain like Morrowind or Sacred II are the best examples I can think of.
The Adventure Maker engine (free edition) did allow me to put my screens all together but not allow me to scroll my screens for smooth transition and supported Browserquests scroll method instead (scroll one screen across at a time when the player reaches the edge of the screen boundaries) instead of smooth transition scrolling with the player walking around in the middle.
If not possible for my type of game to have smooth transtion scrolling for all my screens using a 3d engine with 3d models because of the size contraints, then I wonder how they managed to do it with games like Sacred II and Morrowind and Skyrim have these huge 20 mile outdoor game terrains with all the 3d models in them.....
Before I knew how to write game code in Batch language I only knew how to script 3d models and construct a group of Brushes to turn them into movers and keyframe them, or link Events, waypoints, with the Red Faction Red Editor. I loved that editor for its powerful texturing tools that it had. But I didn't particularly like doing cutscenes with it because it had a bug that would sometimes crash the editor. But the Red engine was limited...
Now I don't yet understand how to take my ideas I put down in batch to bring them all into a 3d game engine yet because I have a huge gap on the new 3d engines that are being used these days in my knowledge except for what I know about the Red 3d game engine which is an old 3d game engine.
So I did the massive Rpg outdoors game instead in dos shell batch language so I can beable to see the ideas that I want for the game starting to form, it allowed to shape the game while developing it and scripting in all the enemies. That's why I been pushing the envelop as far as I can with the batch language and pushing that engine near its limits before taking the next step to putting all those ideas I developed into putting them into a 3d game engine environment.
So the batch language is really just a stepping stone.
The thing is I can afford to muck around writing out the game in batch for several more months because I have extremely quick typing ability and can write thousands of lines in such a short time.
So that's why I figured that since I have the typing skills to beable to get things done quickly, I might as well go ahead and develop this game as far as I can and push the batch engine near its limits and then worry about getting it all interactive on a proper 3d engine with 3d models later on... although I am still looking around for what 3d engine will fit this type of game because of the size of it....
I liked Batch because it allowed me to have huge outdoor game environments by linking up all my screens but its not a walk around all freely game, No its screen for screen basis movement with turn battles, . So the engine is very good for that....
But the thing is ok you can have your massive outdoor game that goes on for miles of different environments to move screen by screen in, you can have your trading stores, have all your other things, and that brings the game half to life, but everything is all mostly dead, still, lifeless. because your player is not moving, the enemies are not moving, the birds are not moving, its like someone came along and just hit pause, everythng is all frozen.. So its like walking around a morgue even though there are plenty of sound foley effects, so the game has some life but its still like a stiff wooden shell when there's no sprite animation of npc's moving about and doing their different tasks as you get in the 3d interactive games with the 3d models. And not even my music is enough to bring the whole thing to life, so what I've got is a zombie game, a game that is half-alive, and half dead. Because that's what the limits areof the batch engine.
I don't know how to make huge outdoor game environments yet with today's modern 3d game engines because with a game of this size it has over 600 screens of graphics, it needs to have seamless back loading of all the sectors to load sector by sector of the region as you walking around in if its going to be a massive 3d interactive game.
I only have knowledge of how to make and design and link Red Editor maps for seamless loading when it comes to working with 3d engines. Because the Red Editor was the easiest game engine for me to learn....
Blender is a 3d game engine, but boy is it complicated. ts a 3d game engine that relies on 3d modeling knowledge.
Well its a 2D Massive outdoors RPG game. about 600 Screens of GIMP Windows Bitmap Graphics, which is about half a gigabyte.
It was coded in windows Batch language. Code is 8 megs in size. The Graphics is not a windows GUI, its actually using the dos console window using a bitmap executable program hat allows bitmap graphics to overlay over the top of the dos console allowing you to display graphics in the dos console but the windows console has the following limits:
(A) No alpha channel, so i have limited ways to animate the sprites on the screen... I can make the pictures move, but its not with transparency. And you need transparency for sprites.
(B), Batch is not really interactive with the game environment.... So I can't use 6-8 frames of animation for the player sprite to blend in all game environments in the regions because there's no alpha channel transparency as the console only allows bitmap images to be displayed in 24 bits, not JPG or PNG with alpha channel.
(C) The mouse and keyboard do not interact with the batch file at the same time for some reason, although playing sounds from the batch file using sound.exe will interact, allowing me to play more than one sound at the same time without halting the operations in the batch file. Try to do that with the mouse and keyboard, and the keyboard just halts all dead (you can't type anythin) while the mouse is waiting to be clicked. I might have to ask someone if they know of a program or a driver that allows batch files to interactive with both the mouse and keyboard to treat the windows console like a windows gui so you can use both the mouse and the keyboard without this conflict..
I've now added in a Mount now into the Game, so you can beable to ride around the regions on a horse. But riding in this sense it pretty limited because there's no alpha channel to allow me to do the riding animation in real time to blend the horse into the game environment. which sucks. This is why you need 3d models in a fully interactive environment.. I want to put quests also into the game, but these things need the animation. so at the moment each time you ride the horse if its from one end of the region to the other, it costs you 100 gold each ride, (saves you going through 20 screens) and if you want to travel 3-4 regions 200-300 gold depending on how far you take the horse and I think I will have a few random encounters along the way too so sometimes you get a clean ride without any encounters and othertimes you get attacked, so I think I will give the horse also a health flag, so if you get attacked during an encounter while riding the horse, if they do enough damage to it, you lose the mount and have to find a horse trader to get another.
(D) Batch file game is TURN BASED. play the animation, wait till its finish before you can move on with the game. Same in the scripted turn battles, I did, you have to wait your turn all the time. in 3d interactive environments, there's no need to wait a turn or pause you can just go straight into the battle.
This is why I trying to turn my 2d screens into 3d mesh, so I can get all the graphics into a 3d interactive environment and turn them into one big seamless scrolling terrain, for each region and then script all the pawns (have to figure that out), so I don't have to have do turn battle scenes no more.... and if i can do that, then add the little mini map at the top of the screen.
But I don't know what tools i need that will do the job for a game like this to turn it from a Turn based game into 3d interactive.
(E) Doing the game in batch code did have advantages, it allowed me to see what the game would look like when linking up all my game screens, it also kept resources down low in memory, didn't need to load texture libraries up in memory, but batch is not an interactive 3d environment with 3d models. it is a 2d turn-based environment with 2d pictures with scripted battle turns.
So the sounds are interactive, but not the graphics. and that's the limits with batch. unless someone makes a breakthrough and allows jpg or PNG graphics to interact with the batch file.
Well I used that Mona Lisa 2d image to 3d mesh tutorial method, because I didn't know how else to get Blender to turn my flat 2d screens into 3d meshes as I'm new to Blender..
So I imported my flat 2d bmp image into blender then scaled it using S then subdivided the mesh to 6 levels, then put a displacement modifier on it,then went to texture icon and changed the texture to the image's own texture to get Blender to render in the 3d heightmap of the texture using the displacement modofier to map it so it turns the 2d texture into 3d heighmap and then set the strength down to 0.80 or so and it worked, but was really blocky. So I added another subdivision and cranked that up to another 4 more levels. and that was a little bit better but still blocky and now my machine is really starting to slow down, so I stopped it at level 4 and just rendered it. Didn't turn out as well as I hoped it would and came out a rendered mess....
Here's the tidy flat 2d 3d isometric look of my game (there are over 600 screens like this because its a big outdoors rpg game. And this is the 3d mess from Blender. Maybe if I make another copy of my flat 2d bitmap and just turn my bitmap copy all into Greyscale have no colors, and do what I done above. I might get a better result. And then I hav to find a way to dump the 2d color flat color image on top of the untextured 3d mesh to give it back the color, but Blender might not be capable of dumping 2d color bitmaps unto 3d meshes to texture overlay them like you can do in the GIMP. I don't know.
Yeah I been trying to turn my flat graphic screens into 3D and I used blender, and it did work,
but the resolution of the 3d mesh wasn't fine enough and was too blocky.....eve though I
got the subdivisons up to 11 levels. Blender has a limit.......
The style sounds like Commodore C64 Game Sid Chip Music
Maybe we could turn it into a car with a rocket booster, thnking of adding some racing
also in my rpg game, instead of just having hack 'n' slash but it probably only
work with a 3d engine.
So How do I credit you for all these assets you made you have some really nice stuff. I want to
use some of it in my non-commercial Rpg game. At the moment I'm not working with
actual 3d models in the game but with 3d pictures of 3d models in my game.
So do I just put "3D Graphics Artists then have a big list of people's names
like Jordan Soloman, Joe Brown, and your name, or do I need to list also all the
3d assets I use?
You have the type of bridge I need to put in one of my screens in my game
would like to use this in the game.
Somethings wrong with this rich text editor... It is possible. How easy it will be to do and how well it will perform are what you will be needing to keep in mind.
My answer: "That's true... keep within the engine's limits' I learnt that with the Red Faction's Red Editor when designing my own levels. But not all game engines have documentation listing all the limits or the boundaries of the engine, like max number of faces, max number of lights you can have on a face, max number of objects you can have rendered, half of these Indie engines give you the tools to design your own maps with the pre fabricated samples, but don't even explain the limits very well. and you really need to know what the limitations are of the engine are so that when you start to map your game out in the engine, you won't break the engine or end up corrupting your map......"
Are you trying to remake the batch game in a game engine (or framework/API), like how it looks in the screenshots you posted in your other thread? Or are you trying to make a new game based on your old one that is fully 3D, i.e. you can walk around, look around, 3D environments, hills etc., like Sacred 2 and Morrowind? (My Answer: Well I prefer full 3D if possible, full interaction with the pawns... But if going for just a 3D makeover since I've done most of the graphic work, if I can turn those graphic screens I made into 3d meshes that the game engine can load in a bit at a time for the terrain. And the tool to do it with to turn 2d screens into 3d mesh terrrain would proabably have to be Blender. I think I would first have to turn my 2d gimp screens into inkscape vector graphics so Blender can then load the 2d vector into Blender and render 3d with it. So you will have a 3d flat square terrain but with raised 3d terrain on it. That would probably be the way to try to do it. Then you have to link the meshes together so they are all seamless when the pieces fit together.. Then the game engine just loads in the meshes in as 3d terrain a bit at a time when the player moves around. Because I would like to know how they did it with Morrowind and Sacred II the huge 3d environment, I;m not quite sure how they set it all up. I get the feeling we have different ideas of what '3D' in this context means.
Either way you can create a '2D' game with a 3D game engine, but not the other way around. I would also say Unity and UDK are good choices. There is a lot to learn about them to get started, but they are well documented and have active communities.
What a cutesy little game, Browserquest, But yes Because my game is written in batch yes it uses 2d renderings of a few 3d models.
But yes I do mean Smooth Transition Scrolling, New areas will scroll in from the edge of the screen when the player moves in the middle. Morrowind had this effect it was a 20 square mile or so terrain and the land just scrolled continually that's the type of scrolling I'm looking for in a game engine but that will allow me to put together all my screens so they can be scrolled around like one big smooth terrain like Morrowind or Sacred II are the best examples I can think of.
The Adventure Maker engine (free edition) did allow me to put my screens all together but not allow me to scroll my screens for smooth transition and supported Browserquests scroll method instead (scroll one screen across at a time when the player reaches the edge of the screen boundaries) instead of smooth transition scrolling with the player walking around in the middle.
If not possible for my type of game to have smooth transtion scrolling for all my screens using a 3d engine with 3d models because of the size contraints, then I wonder how they managed to do it with games like Sacred II and Morrowind and Skyrim have these huge 20 mile outdoor game terrains with all the 3d models in them.....
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