Plan for L Foster

GG.com ate my plan! This one is laced with cianide in case it tries anything funny. In the meantime though enjoy a little update regarding Realm Wars and visit my new blog site.

Like the topic says, the GG.com site ate my last blog, which isn't something I am entirely too happy about because stuff like this always seems to happen when you didn't make a copy of all the stuff you just submitted so you have to spend even more time trying to write it all out again, but I digress and should get on subject to the actual content of my plan.

Before I begin my update on Realm Wars 2, I thought that I would also let you know that I have setup my own personal blog on my portfolio web site. The benefit of the personal blog is that I can update it more frequently without feeling like a moron by flooding the GG blog list with stupid updates like some of my peers do. So if you are curious and want to see more art development progress, 3D tips and tricks and my thoughts regarding indie game development (and other things) then check out the site.

Realm Wars 2

I found myself with a bit of a lull this weekend where I didn't have to worry about completing some contract work for 21-6 production (who are making probably the best indie title I have seen come out of this community yet... oh and did I mention it's an educational product too?) so I actually had more than a few hours to sit down and really focus on my roles in the development of Realm Wars.

I have recently begun to learn how to create BSP DIF shapes for use in Torque, which all started out with learning how to make a simple box, texture it and put it in the engine. Now this might sound incredibly lame to you but you need to understand that this box served a secondary and far more important purpose... as a proxy shape. The box that I created was specificly made 1x1x1 unit in size so that I could place it in my mission, scale it up and know roughly how everything would fit together and how the mission will flow before any art really gets done. It was a great test of my idea of being more iterative with the mission and DIF design process so that there is less time spent tweaking and more time spent moving in the right direction. It also allows the entire team to continue to work and test out their own tasks while not affecting anyone else who needs access to this mission.

So with that complete I moved onto my first real test shape for the map, a bridge. After two hours of modeling and texturing this is what I came up with, its rather crude and feels a bit too boxy for my liking but I feel that it needs a bit more very simple modeling work done to it and better textures then it will be pretty awesome and with likely only 2 hours of extra work involved :)





The other thing I spent time on this weekend was getting a new sword going for the Orc. Like most of the existing art for Realm Wars the current sword (which I had done 3 years ago) was pretty basic and wasn't really stunning. What was needed was a real badass sword that looks like it would maul you to pieces and would scream "Orc Sword" when you saw it. Then end result is this...



Ok so aside from the new swoard what exactly are you looking at? Well the image shows off a few things. The first and most obvious are the new Sword and Sheild that the Orc is using. The sword acts as normal but what is cool about the shield is that Markus Neubel has developed an advaned new sheild blocking system for it to use. How it works is that not only are melee attacks blocked, but projectiles too, plus should an attack hit it it fires off a spark spray particle system (to visually denote that you hit the shield). Should a melee attack hit the shield it is stopped dead in its tracks (note: if you hit the player you get a blood spray particle system). The image also shows the difference between the normal hand to hand combat pose (on the left) as well as the sheild blocking pose (on the right). Lastly you will notice that the upper torso of the Orc is slightly twisted, what is going on here is that if your left/right look movement is less than a certain angle only the upper body adjusts. This prevents the infamous turn on a dime crap that most FPS games have and it looks pretty awesome in the game.

Thats all the time I have right now to update you on Realm Wars so I want to end by thanking the team once again for their awesome work as we continue to move towards completion. Everyone involved has done an outstanding job at taking a rickety old community project and slowly transforming it into a solid FPS product.

Oh and dont forget to check out the Realm Wars Blog, its our way of posting news and updates as they happen on the project.