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RPG Series: 160pg Character Creation Course

Name:	Dave Young
Date Posted:	Feb 08, 2008
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RPG Series: Character Creation for AFXA

Quote:
The heroes of the world desperately await to enter your game and become the world-saving, maiden-rescuing and villain-smashing characters they were born to be!

Yet you can't let them in... you don't have a character creation and appearance customization system!

Through hard won victories and the dusty ever changing Dusts of Change we bring you this first course in a new series:
RPG Series: Character Creation for AFXA
Course Cost: $50
Course Length: 160+ pages (Roughly 4 weeks)
Included: Complete Source code, GUI screens, Engine Code, Scripts, and assets (excluding character models)
Course Start Date: February 21st, 2008
Table of Contents Link

About the RPG Series
This series, when complete, will chronicle the full development of an online RPG and will provide you with the skills necessary to add major RPG features to your game. Each course comes with fully documented working code, engine code, GUIs, necessary art assets, and examples. Pick and choose the functionality you want, and learn the skills necessary to customize and build your own modifications by following each module's evolution from design to finished work.

About the Course
This introductory course, Character Creation for AFXA covers novice and expert level coding, and is designed to teach you everything you need to know to get together a complete character creation and avatar appearance system for use in your game. From selecting an avatar to customizing appearance attributes down to skin color, hair style and color, facial hair, clothing textures and geometry, all the steps in character creation are meticulously explained. The course also includes an example of a player stat system, skills/talents, name generation, and starting location selection. It's over 160 pages of education and documentation, designed to launch you into getting the most out of your project and game making career.

This Internet-based course will run about 4 weeks, though the full materials will continue to be available to you. Attendance at weekly IRC sessions is not taken; you take the lessons at your own pace online, and there is an instructor dedicated to helping you through the materials. There is a dedicated forum and a weekly IRC session to talk live to the instructor. Students who successfully complete the course will receive a course completion certificate, along with their newfound power!

Not only do you get the tips, best practices, technical detail and design principles that go into such a system, but it is given from an editorial perspective which chronicles every moment along the way for you. Engine code has been enhanced to overcome problems and offer new functionality. Learn how to use straight GUI to make your system, or use a local mission to do a full character creation scene. Included are many new GUI Profiles. Learn the differences and benefits of techniques like skinning VS mesh hiding and object mounting, and when to use each one. Many different techniques for building complex GUIs and achieving specific looks are covered in depth. Most of the design issues and technology issues translate to other game engines, though of course syntax will vary from the Torque platform.

The Platform
Most of the RPG Series will be written specifically for ArcaneFX for TGEA, to take advantage of this premier product's additions, making it the perfect platform to begin an RPG on, and demonstrate the glitz and glory of advanced graphics.

The very first of its kind, you get full working source code and full documentation for all of it! This is not a tutorial, it's a glorious manifesto of a course which you will walk away from with a bag full of tricks and skills.

Features:
*Full Character Creation Framework
*Fully functional GuiObjectView for TGEA with Mesh Hiding, Material Swapping, Camera Positioning
*Fully functional appearance customization GUIs and Script
*Fully functional Player Stats GUIs and Script
*All GUI Assets as pictured
*Many New GUI Control Profiles
*New GUIControl: Skinned Popup (Dropdown) Control
*New GUIControl functionality: render background image
*New GUIControl functionality: change bitmapbutton font state
*New GUIControl functionality: left, right, top, bottom align
*Fully functional server code to display appearance customizations
*Server side character validation
*Network Optimized Multiple Material Swapping
*Network Optimized Multiple Mesh Hiding/Showing
*Local Mission/Optimized Server for Character Creation
*Naming Convention Use
*Bitmap Arrays explained in depth

Here are some of the screens (included) you will learn to build from scratch:

Step 1: Heritage/Race Selection

Step 2: Appearance Customization

Step 3: Profession and Attributes Selection

Step 4: Talents/Skills Selection

Step 5: Name and Starting Location

Scene Based Step 1: Heritage/Race Selection

Scene Based Step 2: Appearance Customization

Notes: This course is built upon the incredible framework provided by the REQUIRED ArcaneFX: CoreTech for TGEA product, found here. A version of the course ported to AFX for TGE will follow.

Many examples in the course are built using the art provided in the Frogames' CS: Warriors and Commoners Pack, found here. The pack is not included or required but is recommended, if you already have it you will be using it in wonderful new ways :)

This course is *free* to previously licensed MMOKIT or TITAS owners, products originally sold through www.mydreamrpg.com which are no longer available. Signups for those people are available on the mydreamrpg forums, here.

Class begins February 21st, sign up now!

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Submit your own resources!

David Montgomery-Blake (Feb 08, 2008 at 21:35 GMT)

VERY COOL! This is one hell of a course that should excite RPG developers everywhere!

EDIT:
Just thought I would subscribe and try out the course!
Edited on Feb 08, 2008 21:48 GMT

Prairie Games II (Feb 08, 2008 at 21:51 GMT)

Hey, that's awesome. You guys are just full of surprises! :)

Joseph *Nailo* Rick (Feb 08, 2008 at 22:00 GMT)

Great work Dave, looks like I've got another class to take from Torque School, awesome work!

Mikael Pettersson (Feb 09, 2008 at 00:02 GMT)

bummer .. wish i could sign up as well ... not easy being broke.

Jeff Faust (Feb 09, 2008 at 15:54 GMT)

It seems like nearly every game I play these days has some kind of player customizable avatar system, and that includes non-RPG games like Rock Band. This course topic is right on the mark, and looks to be useful to developers working in many genres. I'm looking forward to seeing the whole RPG Series evolve.

Pesto126 (Feb 10, 2008 at 19:31 GMT)

Wish this was the type of stuff that people were sharing for FREE in the TDN... isn't that was that was created for? Since TS was introduced... no good stuff comes out on TDN.. why when you can get paid for it....? Nice RPG course... just wish others shared this stuff for free...

Dave Young (Feb 11, 2008 at 11:46 GMT)

The courses we do on TorqueSchool are miles and miles past the point of a TDN article, though we have plans to release much smaller pieces which will be free. It's almost 200 pages, comes with source code for engine and script enhancements, art assets, etc. They are not tutorials, they are classes which take months to develop. We target items which we most wish were available to us when it came time to learn. There are almost 50 resources that have been released since TorqueSchool launched its first class, and the fact that now some people are thinking about various ways to educate the developer community in needed ways is pretty cool.

When the free mini-courses come out, come tell me they're not worth it.

Why make games and ask people to pay money for them when you can get some games for free?

Pesto126 (Feb 11, 2008 at 13:51 GMT)

I guess I would have preferred these course to instead be shared for free as you were developing them on TDN... Sure, they are large in scope but why not just post them as mini-series.. or forget TDN (which is a mess anyway) and just post them as part of a series on your own website.. others are doing free video trainings etc... but then they catch work of this school and say, forget about free... I can make some $$ so they halt them and stop sharing..

But I guess that's just how things are... sounds like a great program.. I hope you do well with it.

Dave Young (Feb 12, 2008 at 04:34 GMT)

I added a course Table of Contents above so you can check out what is inside at a glance.

Scott Doerrfeld (Feb 21, 2008 at 20:18 GMT)

If am not an AFX owner, do I have access to any part of the course? Actually I am wondering about the method of Character Creation in the course --- does it use mesh-hiding or mounting, neither or both? The screenshots indicate that it uses reskinning, but not necessarily mesh-swapping of any kind.

Dave Young (Feb 21, 2008 at 23:02 GMT)

Scott, the Series will use AFX as the base platform as we construct an RPG. The example models don't make use of multimesh, but there are code changes for multimesh as well as an updated guiObjectView which works in TGEA and uses multimesh as well. All of the engine changes that are published right now are against the AFXA platform.

A more advanced system using a multimesh avatar is done and awaiting art and edits, it will follow as a course annex or advanced course.

Scott Doerrfeld (Feb 25, 2008 at 18:56 GMT)

Sounds great, Dave! I'm close to putting down money for AFX so I can take your courses, but I'm curious to get more specific information about the course content. I was particularly interested to know whether the multimesh method you've described will incorporate mesh-hiding (with a single DTS as with the current MMOKit) or a mesh-mounting system (multiple DTS objects that mount to each other).

Dave Young (Feb 25, 2008 at 20:56 GMT)

Scott: 1) As a legacy kit owner (scottobot right?!) you don't have to pay and 2) The main examples use reskinning and mounting for hairs/facial hairs but we also coded in engine support for multimesh, going over it only briefly in the course. Multimesh is much more advanced and there will be an advanced class with some pretty sweet GUI for it. In no case do we endorse a mesh *mounting* system in general for body parts as they just don't animate well enough when attached on the main skeleton without vertex weighting that mesh subobjects get. This doesn't hold true sometimes for extremeties like heads/hairs/gloves/etc.

Scott Doerrfeld (Feb 26, 2008 at 15:39 GMT)

Thanks for clarifying, Dave. My team has run into a snag using the single DTS "mesh-hiding" method --- our DTS characters, with all their different clothing options, have become too complex for the DTS exporter to handle (the Max exporter has around a 20,000 poly limit). There is a clothing system mentioned on one of the GG blogs (possibly with a code release to follow?) that allows for a separate clothing DTS that mounts/skins on top of a body DTS and automatically deforms with the body DTS. So I am eager to see the system implemented in your courses, and will be particularly interested in the advanced course you mentioned. Thanks again. - scottobot21
Edited on Feb 26, 2008 15:39 GMT

Dave Young (Feb 26, 2008 at 16:11 GMT)

The clothing system mentioned in that other resource requires the clothing pieces to also be animated, and the animations synched with the main dts model. I'm surprised to hear about that poly limit. I've seen some pretty massive .dts files (over 150k polies) with hundreds of pieces inside including LOD. The technique works incredibly well.

Scott Doerrfeld (Feb 26, 2008 at 19:18 GMT)

Hmmm...150k polygons you say? Maybe it's because I'm using an older exporter. Was never able to get the newest Max2DTS exporters working for some reason.

Anthony Potamitis (Mar 06, 2008 at 00:14 GMT)

I cant wait for the AFX/TGE version of this course. I still cant believe its only $50. Thats price of meal for 2, and a meal is over in a night, while this will last 4 weeks and the knowledge and skills gained will give years of pleasure and help.

Come on Dave, TGE FTW!!! =D

Rajesh Kumar (May 07, 2008 at 21:58 GMT)

when does this course end? plz dont end b4 july plz!!!

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