RPG Template - More Elements

Time to start the year off on a productive note. Here I have a few more advances in my PRG Template with a week off I have been able do a lot of research and actual development. Here's a peek of what I've got done.


T3D - Modular Buildings - RPG Template


So I've been reading on making Modular Art for games. So I gave a very poor try at it. Took about an hour to make the elements and 2 hours aranging them to make, 5 Shops, 1 INN, and 2 homes. They all use only the same two 2048x2048 textures png's for now till i convert them into DDS. Over all it came out pretty interesting. Atleast for a test. There are 9 modular pieces that make up all of the building objects.

Largest poly count is 56000 for the inn. I will make the real parts smaller. One thing I did as well is for T3D since i wanted to use polysoup option for the buildings I have saved the buildings into two structures. Base and Details. The bas is just a collection of the base wall floor and ceilings. This part is very low in polys. Which allows polysoup to work fully without slow down.

The other part is the details mesh which requires a little bit of fine placement but it brings the rest of the building together also i do not care that the details have a collision since the details only are used to bring a more realistic depth into the buildings.



T3D - Player/Party Object Intergration - RPG Template



So in the video I show how i have intergrated the database with the actual loading of playable characters.

1) I start with a player that I already had in the database.

2) I delete the player and reload the game to show that no player was loaded and all there is is the floating observer cam

3) I create a NewGuy Player that adapts the warrior class.

4) I enter a custom number for the starting stats for the player to help add more customization to the class object and to allow a little character tweaking to make certain characters differ in abilities.

5) I select the shape for the model (NOTE: Fraps dose not show the dialogue box.)

6) The players stats can be viewed in the side window using the calculate button. You can also adjust the level to see how your player will progress in stats according to level. (Armor is not included in these stats.)

7) I have to reload the whole engine for the new players to be loaded.

8) I load the game now with a player. But I want to beable to switch to my other party members.

9) I create a OtherHero players and reload the game.

10) Now I can switch between my players using the L3 button on my controller.

I still have some things to tweek here but for the player object intergration most of the object is in the engine code. The main reason is because scripting made more of a clutter for this complicated object. In the end this was much more faster to handle and operate.



T3D - Pause Menu - RPG Template



So far the only Pause menu pallet i have working is the Items menu where you can look through all items and use the usable items on a given character. Also there is the ability to drop. I will not be doing much with the pause menu until i start the battle system.



Release Plan:

I plan on releasing this by next month but one thing I have to do first is remove the fluff that I wanted to have as part of the first release but have ran out of time to implement. It will not be much but could easily be expanded on at a later date.

My next phase is to test all types of NPC's that will be part of the release including:

Static
Looping Animation
Store
Path following
And Event Controlled

I should have the majority of the event panel done with an exception for the vehicles, and movie playback.

My top priority currently is:

Store Creation (For items mostly)
Event Driven Cut-scenes
Saving Progress
Spells
Customizable Battle AI
Melee system with Lockon



I'm looking forward to get all this working and tested.

Wish me luck.