Plan for Robert Brower

A couple of years ago, as I was skimming through the forums, I noticed a general desire by the community for walking vehicles in Torque. I also got a lot of feedback from people who had purchased the Environment Pack Pro. They were hungry for more animals for torque. I considered a few different angles and decided that creating a Horse vehicle class was the best thing I could do. I created a horse model, and animated it the best I could. I also created a saddle. Then I bagan working in the C++ to create a new vehicle class which I called Horse.

Now, I can pump out meshes but I'm not much of a painter. I contacted a friend at ExileWorks (http://www.exileworks.com/) and told him what I was working on. He expressed a need for some code that I offered to write and we were able to work together on cleaning up my mesh and exporting it and all my animations. He went far beyond my expectations and provided me with a few different textures for the horse. Thanks Peter!

I tossed around the idea of making a horse game, but then I realized that without a team, this would be impossible given I had a fulltime job and just the horse alone was eating up a lot of my time. So in the end I decided that releasing the horse as a content pack was the kind of acheivement I was looking for. I showed my horse pack demo to some more friends at Bravetree and they gave me great feedback. I had some problems. My animations were not good enough. Also, as someone in the forums pointed out, the shape of my saddle was horrible. Thank you for the criticism, comments, and your valuable time Joe!

By this time, I had the engine class finished, and all the script written. I could ride my horse around in my demo and even jump over fences and haystacks to score points. When I found myself spending too much time having fun riding the horses and not enough time working on finishing my pack I knew I had something good!

People began to ask me about the horse pack so I established an early adopter program for people who wanted to get a jump on things and start working with horses right away. The feedback was fantastic. I want to thank all of the early adopters! Good luck with your games. And please don't forget to brush your horses before saddling them up.

I wanted to make some changes to the textures and provide more kinds of horses so I asked my friend Eric Elwell if he would be interested in touching up the textures that Peter had created and he agreed. Eric has serious painting telent. I knew this the first time I layed eyes on a submarine model that he had painted for me. We intend to release the submarine class, model, and art as a pack in the future. It's very cool. It has a mechanical arm that the player can control and use to pick up and drop objects in game, a working periscope that can be used to spy on surface ships, and a torpedo launcher. There is also an abundance of animated and static sea life models and art.

I contacted Danny Ngan who I had heard was a very talented animator and sent him a demo of my horse and all the jumping obstacles. He liked it very much and agreed to join me in working on the pack. Both Danny and I are very busy people so it took us a while to get the animations done, but when I saw what he had done, I nearly teared up. His animations are beautiful.

One more problem existed. The saddle I made looked like a well painted log. So again I went off to try to work some deals. Around this time, Mat Mitman showed me a mountable monster he had been working on. I agreed to help him get it into a Torque demo and he stepped up to the plate and created a wonderful saddle for the horses. Then I contacted my friend at ExileWorks again who was in need of code, and Peter made some changes to the saddle to make it work better with the Horse, and painted it.

I have been fiddling with the AIHorses in the Horse Pack Demo, and creating a pleasant mission that I can present that includes fences and haystacks and the ability to jump over these obstacles and score points. Danny is working on the last of the animations. The Textures are complete, and the saddle looks and works beautifully. Danny and I agreed that we will be supporting both Maya and Max for the Horse Pack. Soon all of our hard work will come to fruition. Here's a few screenshots of the Horse Pack! Enjoy!

Some technical jargon:

Number of polygons is slightly less than 1000. In addition to the head and neck working with steering, the horse has three different speeds of animation that blend together based on speed. They are walk, trot, and gallop. It also has a root and rearing-up animation. The saddle is approx 400 polygons. There is a Horse and AIHorse C++ class, a horse script, an AIHorse script to get them running around in missions and seven different textures for the horses. The textures come in two formats, with or without the leather and saddle blanket. The pack may contain the obstacle script, fence and haystack models.

I want to give a special thanks to Craig and Nauris, my De-Railed teammates, for being patient with me and supporting my efforts to finish this pack! Thank you men!


Robert