Torque 3D Environment Pack: Still alive.

Hopefully some of you still remember the T3D Environment Pack I was working on. If not, then you can learn about it now, I suppose. :) While it was supposed to be released a while ago, there's been a pretty big heap of drama that came up. Once that was cleared up I started to second-guess pretty much all of my work and decided to just take a total break from it to figure out exactly what I want the direction of my work to be. Thankfully that's all sorted out now.

Part of the issue I was having was that I've always had very mixed feelings about the content pack approach and I started to wonder if it would seem like I was trying to take people for their money. After some more recent thought I sort of came to the conclusion that in a way I am, as is anyone who makes any product. With college expenses adding up as well as a certain planned romantic foray to another country, I could use some extra money. So, yea..

And to make myself feel better I have to realize that I've been working on this project for over a year now, on and off. I've put more time into it than I could ever hope to count up, so it isn't like I'm simply looking to make a fast buck by deceptive marketing but rather putting a TON of my free time into it to try to make sure it's fair to the people buying it.



So, enough of the ethics talk, on to the recap and refresher!

The T3D Environment Pack is a content pack containing a set of 50 complete textures at 1024x1024 resolution (this is base texture, normal map, and alpha channel for parallax). Each component of each texture has been specificly designed for its purpose, not simple ran through a Photoshop filter for a normal map, or a greyscale copy for the parallax map. Each one has been adjusted with specific settings to make it look as good as possible. Textures come in an uncompressed .PNG for the base textures and .DDS for the normal/parallax maps. While the uncompressed .DDS makes for a very large size for total files, it preserves all of the original details, I will leave compression and the tossing out of detail to the user, not to me.

The textures are made for a set of 6 different "climate" styles: wetland, temperate, tropical, desert, arctic, and badlands (while I know a badland isn't a climate, it's so specific of an area I made a climate for it). These climates cover all of the basic types of areas one would want to make. The terrains and climates were built around the textures, not the other way around, so some textures are used in other climates, some actually don't get used at all. I did it this way to improve versatility of the artwork, rather than have certain things that are tweaked to only fit one specific scene.

Each climate type comes with a pre-made sample terrain, L3DT climate file and tutorial, set of applicable ambient sounds, and a series of environmental particle and precipitation effects. For some of the terrains, there is still work to be done in some of these areas, content which will be added in a post-release update. (I promise this time I'll stick around and actually keep working post-release. ;) )

Last but far from least is the water shader and pack updates. Some of you may have seen it in the past, some may have not, but I have made a shader for water color that attempts to follow the real life physics of water and light interaction allowing for a very controllable and realistic water body. Also with the pack comes continual free updates. As someone who always improves their work by redoing things or adding to it, I'll pass that benefit on to the user. Some features that are already planned will be put out in a post-release update as mentioned above, and any new ideas will be added after that. Also I've always been very open to suggestions with anything I've done, this being no exception. If there's something the users want adjusted, I'd be happy to do that for an update as well. You won't have to purchase and go off on your own, the support and updates is part of the deal.


So, here is a set of videos and descriptions on all of the climates included. Each video only shows what will be available to you at the time of purchase, there is nothing added in there that isn't part of T3D's stock art or part of the environment pack. Also as a heads up, the audio quality is a bit poor on a few, had some complications with recording the video/audio.

Wetland: A simple swampland kind of area, makes heavy use of mosses and thick grass, as well as mud. Has a low use of rocks and is not intended for use with cliffs and mountains but more of low, rolling hills at most.




Temperate: Your standard temperate climate area. Supports hills, mountains, forests, oceans. Makes plenty of use of grasses as well as rocks and rock/grass combinations for varying degrees of water and slope. Also has certain grasses and maters for bodies of water and high snow-capped mountains.




Arctic: A fairly simple climate but still able to have great visual results. Has varying degrees of snow, from smooth, rolling, wind-shaped snow to rough, dirty, roughed-up snow. Also has textures for grasses existing in the arctic area, from a bit of frost to almost full snow.




Badlands: A climate made to represent a rough, harsh wasteland with a few rogue remains of the water that was once there. Designed for rocky, rough terrains and cliff faces. Also has cracked mud in wet, dry, and salty forms.




Desert: This climate is made with a rocky desert in mind, not so much of the cliche rolling sand dunes. Since those kinds of deserts are really much more specific and regional although there is still support for the smooth, wind-whipped sand in the climate file.




Tropical: Made for a general tropical region with future tweaks planned for a dense tropical environment. Would already work for such an environment however I've found that the tropical environment becomes extremely complicated, especially once saltwater gets added into the picture. At present, salinity is disabled for the tropical climate, I may end up simply making a second version of the tropical for salt containing terrains. Makes use of muds, stones, grasses and moss. Supports cliffs and mountains but with a higher tolerance for grass and moss on slopes than the temperate.






Some of these climates may get broken down into multiple types, such as Tropical (salt), Desert (dunes), etc. Trying to pack everything into one climate file has a tendency to make things a bit excessively complex. Currently the terrains lack the precipitation and particle effects to be included however they are in fact being worked on.

The pack will cost $100 USD for everything. Considering how much work went into the entire pack and work that will be put into it in the future, I can guarantee that you wouldn't be able to get as much for the same price from a hired artist. As mentioned in the beginning, I have minor ethical issues with content packs so I'm willing to package a very large amount of resources for a price that is well below the actual worth of it. It's my way of making myself feel better about the matter. :)

The pack will be sold from my main site, www.darkphoenixsoftware.com. The site is still far from actually being completed however that won't affect the release date of the pack itself. And the good side of all of this is that everything is made except for the tutorials which I can write up pretty quickly. So all I have to do is write those and package it all together. I have a lot of school work to catch up on but this should be doable pretty quickly.

So, that's that. I'd like to hear any feedback anyone has, including anyone mentioning just general interest and planning to purchase the pack. Knowing people are at all interested certainly helps me to plan things out.