New Year, New Packs and New WIP...and a lot of Screens...
by Alan James · 01/10/2010 (7:09 pm) · 29 comments
Hey Everybody! Happy New Year!
Thought it was about time to let everyone know what I've been up to and what's planned next.
Kyle was home from the Navy for a couple weeks in late December, so that was great to have him around and spend some time with him. I'm very proud of him and he's doing great.
He has lofty plans of being involved with the space program or advanced AI research, and as motivated and singular in drive and purpose I really believe he'll reach his goals.
We picked up the binary version of T3D for Joshua, since I'd believed the offer to be expiring the end of December, it's a little heavy for his system, but we'll get him all upgraded soon enough. I really want set him up with T2D, but that'll have to wait 'til next month. I think he'll take to that much better and do some cool stuff. I've got my own ideas in the back of my head regarding some content work for it also, so that ought to work out well.
I'm just hours worth of work away from completing actually three different content packs. The first one is the "Flower Power" Pack. It was originally intended as a add on to the "Sticks & Twigs" Pack, but it evolved into a companion piece with something like 28 flowers models, nearly 40 plant models, 28 new trees, vines, moss, rocks, all with 3-5 LOD levels and ambient animations (at least the plants...the rocks just sit there). Should work fine with all three flavors of the Torque engines since it's all DTS objects, but probably only the T3D level will have a half dozen to dozen demo levels. It is just WAY too much work for one person to manage supporting all three flavors.
The second I've been working on for a while, I've finally settled on naming it the "Gold Mine" Pack. It's a bunch of interconnectable mine sections with companion assets (explosive crates, barrels, lanterns, barricades, lamps, etc). I really like how it's turned out. It's primarily for T3D, but there's actually no reason it shouldn't work with TGEA either (it will include DIFs also, but for TGE there's no guarantee).
The third is a "Destruction & Damage" Building Pack. It's one of the ones that I don't have any screenshots of today, since the models are complete, but I haven't set up any demo levels yet to show them off.
I'm part of the way through work on the "Caves & Caverns" Content Pack. I don't have a solid ETA for it, but I have included a few screens below. I think it will turn out well.
For those of you who are interested, I haven't forgotten about the "SciFi Construction Kit". I began some conversion tests back late last year and have discovered that I have the proper tools to convert from a .MAP to LOD'd DTS objects in about a fifteen minute process. Now it's just a matter of time to get all of the assets converted and exported to a proper scale for TGEA & T3D. Stay tuned for more info on that in Feb. or March. I'll be utilizing the process on some of the smaller assets for the "Ancient Empires: Persia" Pack, although I'm pretty happy with the LOD setup on the main models, and I've not gleaned any great performance with the new pipeline anyway.
So without further ado, I though I'd post some screens of this stuff. I had a lot of trouble deciding which ones, so...as usual there are a lot! =)
What can I say? Thanks again if you've read this far, and watch very soon for these new packs! (Like this month, almost for sure...) They'll be available on www.monsterpacks.com, so be ready to check them out!
Alan
So I figured I'd start off with the "Flower Power" Pack:
Next are a few from the "Gold Mine" Pack. I'll try and post some videos at the time of the release of the packs, but stills of this one in particular don't really do it justice:
Here are a few from the WIP on the "Caves & Caverns" Pack:
Here are a few from stuff I've done using the "Ancient Empires:Persia" Pack:
Finally here are a few from the updated DTS/Collada Models in the "SciFi Construction Kit":
Thanks for checking it all out and I'll post soon as the Packs go up! Yeah!
Alan
Thought it was about time to let everyone know what I've been up to and what's planned next.
Kyle was home from the Navy for a couple weeks in late December, so that was great to have him around and spend some time with him. I'm very proud of him and he's doing great.
He has lofty plans of being involved with the space program or advanced AI research, and as motivated and singular in drive and purpose I really believe he'll reach his goals.
We picked up the binary version of T3D for Joshua, since I'd believed the offer to be expiring the end of December, it's a little heavy for his system, but we'll get him all upgraded soon enough. I really want set him up with T2D, but that'll have to wait 'til next month. I think he'll take to that much better and do some cool stuff. I've got my own ideas in the back of my head regarding some content work for it also, so that ought to work out well.
I'm just hours worth of work away from completing actually three different content packs. The first one is the "Flower Power" Pack. It was originally intended as a add on to the "Sticks & Twigs" Pack, but it evolved into a companion piece with something like 28 flowers models, nearly 40 plant models, 28 new trees, vines, moss, rocks, all with 3-5 LOD levels and ambient animations (at least the plants...the rocks just sit there). Should work fine with all three flavors of the Torque engines since it's all DTS objects, but probably only the T3D level will have a half dozen to dozen demo levels. It is just WAY too much work for one person to manage supporting all three flavors.
The second I've been working on for a while, I've finally settled on naming it the "Gold Mine" Pack. It's a bunch of interconnectable mine sections with companion assets (explosive crates, barrels, lanterns, barricades, lamps, etc). I really like how it's turned out. It's primarily for T3D, but there's actually no reason it shouldn't work with TGEA either (it will include DIFs also, but for TGE there's no guarantee).
The third is a "Destruction & Damage" Building Pack. It's one of the ones that I don't have any screenshots of today, since the models are complete, but I haven't set up any demo levels yet to show them off.
I'm part of the way through work on the "Caves & Caverns" Content Pack. I don't have a solid ETA for it, but I have included a few screens below. I think it will turn out well.
For those of you who are interested, I haven't forgotten about the "SciFi Construction Kit". I began some conversion tests back late last year and have discovered that I have the proper tools to convert from a .MAP to LOD'd DTS objects in about a fifteen minute process. Now it's just a matter of time to get all of the assets converted and exported to a proper scale for TGEA & T3D. Stay tuned for more info on that in Feb. or March. I'll be utilizing the process on some of the smaller assets for the "Ancient Empires: Persia" Pack, although I'm pretty happy with the LOD setup on the main models, and I've not gleaned any great performance with the new pipeline anyway.
So without further ado, I though I'd post some screens of this stuff. I had a lot of trouble deciding which ones, so...as usual there are a lot! =)
What can I say? Thanks again if you've read this far, and watch very soon for these new packs! (Like this month, almost for sure...) They'll be available on www.monsterpacks.com, so be ready to check them out!
Alan
So I figured I'd start off with the "Flower Power" Pack:
Next are a few from the "Gold Mine" Pack. I'll try and post some videos at the time of the release of the packs, but stills of this one in particular don't really do it justice:
Here are a few from the WIP on the "Caves & Caverns" Pack:
Here are a few from stuff I've done using the "Ancient Empires:Persia" Pack:
Finally here are a few from the updated DTS/Collada Models in the "SciFi Construction Kit":
Thanks for checking it all out and I'll post soon as the Packs go up! Yeah!
Alan
About the author
#22
01/12/2010 (5:29 pm)
Awesome job as always. Keep it up making these great packs! 
#23
anyways, the models look great.
01/13/2010 (12:34 am)
I bought the sticks and twigs pack and am very happy with it. The only thing is that I would like to have the .dae versions of the models to make my own lods. It's a long story but basically my parents wont let me buy ms3d. I bought maya student edition (because my parents would perfer that I learned "professional software")If you are planing on making .dae exports, I will definetly buy the new packs. anyways, the models look great.
#24
LOL. We parents can be funny, huh? The best answer I can give is probably. T3D definitely is moving in that direction, but it's converting the Collada files to DTS anyways "on the fly", and since most of my work as of late has been with Lightray3D (poormans 3D Max...circa version about 5), *and* it's doesn't have a .dae exporter (but an actually pretty nice DTS exporter), I've not been making the Collada versions.
With that said, there has been a bit of input from folks that are using Unity also, and some folks here are infatuated with collada, so I'll "probably" end up doing both, just watch the plans and the actual product page and I'll definitely explain what's included.
01/13/2010 (2:07 am)
@jack,LOL. We parents can be funny, huh? The best answer I can give is probably. T3D definitely is moving in that direction, but it's converting the Collada files to DTS anyways "on the fly", and since most of my work as of late has been with Lightray3D (poormans 3D Max...circa version about 5), *and* it's doesn't have a .dae exporter (but an actually pretty nice DTS exporter), I've not been making the Collada versions.
With that said, there has been a bit of input from folks that are using Unity also, and some folks here are infatuated with collada, so I'll "probably" end up doing both, just watch the plans and the actual product page and I'll definitely explain what's included.
#25
01/13/2010 (2:54 am)
Thanks for the quick response. I will be waiting for news. 
#26
edit: these come in regular DTS/DIF format, right? So they're ok for old-fashioned TGE games? (yeah, I know.. I know..)
01/13/2010 (8:24 am)
Awesome! I haven't seen your work in a year or two Alan, but it's better than ever :-)edit: these come in regular DTS/DIF format, right? So they're ok for old-fashioned TGE games? (yeah, I know.. I know..)
#27
01/13/2010 (1:10 pm)
I tried to make an account on monsterpacks. When I try to log in it says welcome, but then switches to the please log in thing. I tried it on three computers and got the same result.
#28
try a longer login name or password. Kyle originally wrote the code for the site and I believe it has a minimum number of characters.
(I asked him when he was back visiting, and he wasn't sure if it was 5 or 6 characters, so I'd go with 6 to be safe). Also it won't accept any "special" characters. He intended on elaborating on the error message, i.e. actually giving one with the reason, but it didn't happen before he left for the Navy...and if I touched his code I'd probably ruin the whole site.
Let me know if that does it. If not email me (alanjames AT charter.net)I can enter you in manually into the database.
@sam,
yes...sort of. Just about all of the structures have DIF counterparts to the DTS or Collada models, they just may not include LOD versions (I finally figured out how to use the Lightray3D DTS exporter with LODs).
The "Flower Power" Pack also should be fine, although again I've leaned towards polysoup engines regarding the collision meshes, i.e. most of them don't have them...yet. I might re-export them one more time with a collision mesh version included but I don't know -- it could turn into a lot of work for not that great of a return for the time involved. The only reason I might is that there are some issues with polysoup, alpha channels and collision, i.e. I don't think you can turn off collision of alpha channeled meshes -- so you have bulletproof tree leaves. If I collision mesh the trunk of the trees things seem more realistic.
As always the original MS3D files and MAP files and any other files I used to produce the assets will be included so they definitely could be "worked up" for TGE.
01/13/2010 (7:15 pm)
@jack, try a longer login name or password. Kyle originally wrote the code for the site and I believe it has a minimum number of characters.
(I asked him when he was back visiting, and he wasn't sure if it was 5 or 6 characters, so I'd go with 6 to be safe). Also it won't accept any "special" characters. He intended on elaborating on the error message, i.e. actually giving one with the reason, but it didn't happen before he left for the Navy...and if I touched his code I'd probably ruin the whole site.
Let me know if that does it. If not email me (alanjames AT charter.net)I can enter you in manually into the database.
@sam,
yes...sort of. Just about all of the structures have DIF counterparts to the DTS or Collada models, they just may not include LOD versions (I finally figured out how to use the Lightray3D DTS exporter with LODs).
The "Flower Power" Pack also should be fine, although again I've leaned towards polysoup engines regarding the collision meshes, i.e. most of them don't have them...yet. I might re-export them one more time with a collision mesh version included but I don't know -- it could turn into a lot of work for not that great of a return for the time involved. The only reason I might is that there are some issues with polysoup, alpha channels and collision, i.e. I don't think you can turn off collision of alpha channeled meshes -- so you have bulletproof tree leaves. If I collision mesh the trunk of the trees things seem more realistic.
As always the original MS3D files and MAP files and any other files I used to produce the assets will be included so they definitely could be "worked up" for TGE.
#29
01/13/2010 (10:58 pm)
Thanks, it works now. I was confused because it said that I was logged in but then would switch. 
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