create a new freedom force with a freeware game engine like ogre 3d?

[abenavides]

The intelligence stat is something I've thought about and can still easily add when a good generic implementation becomes clearer to me. Probably when I start coding the object class, it may lead to something. I do think everything that's been mentioned can actually be done in FF now, it just takes scripting- so the goal (like everything I do) is to make it simpler.

Do currently have plans for some traits (I call them "traits" instead of attributes) that deal with special skills, for example - martial artist , stealth, and escape artist. They will give some flavor/added value to ninj/batman type heroes.

Invisibility, Growing, and Shrinking powers are implemented in the current build I'm adding to (0.3.0)

[lugaru]

I was gonna say an intelligence "stat" can be faked with attributes like "Dull" (for any and all who are bellow the average) and "Clever" and "Genius" for all those who are above. All characters would default to a stat nobody ever needs to define. Dull characters will come to the table with a lower stat that nobody will ever see if they need to do or defend or whatever in a brain powered situation. Meanwhile other characters will accomplish feats in half or a small fraction of the time.

But yeah, the main trap of designing a superhero game is specificity... if you design your game wrong (no examples off the top of my head) you end up with 10,000 superpowers, one for each individual thing you can think of, such as "mutant fire control, magical fire, cosmic fire" instead of just "ranged attack, and I choose fire as the type"... and you will feel like you are missing a bunch. When done right (Freedom Force gets a lot right) you end up with maybe 10 - 30 super generic powers applicable to anyone and then a few specific ones to fill in the gaps.

Abenavides: I've always liked that "you got it or you dont" skill system... in many rpgs you see characters with a rating in 50 different skills (1 in martial arts, 10 in driving, 5 in marksmanship) but for most RPG's I design you can either do something or you cant... and then your base stats modify how good you are even further. A character who cant pick locks simply cant pick locks, but out of two who can the more "dexterity" one is best. And yeah, I let some skills be purchased twice for extra bonuses making a character a master... say +1 to hit and +1 damage instead of just +1 damage or so on. Similar to how freedom force will have "leaper" and "super leaper", the second contains the first but also provides stuf the first does not besides just being better.

BTW growing and shrinking as in the mesh changing size on the screen? DUDE!!!

[Tawodi Osdi]

It would be nice to have a split power to emulate characters like Duo Damsel and Silent Majority.

[abenavides]

Have posted my first Developer Diary, in case anyone is interested in how we got to where we are.
Assuming there's any interest, I'll post more in the future.

It's up at my home page:
http://alexff.com/

Lots of good progress in the last couple of weeks.

[Podmark]

Thanks for posting this. It's neat to see how you guys got started with this. I hope you write more.

[Figure Fan]

Very cool, Alex. I like this idea

[GoldenGladiator]

I really like the DD. Hope to read more.

[tommyboy]

Both Alex and I are in agreement about releasing a panda mesh (or two, who knows) here for people to play with.
To whet your appetites, and to illustrate why I'm always blathering on about normal mapping, I give you the following preview pic.
What is of interest, I hope, is that the image on the left is wearing the very minimalist skin on the right. All the muscle definition is actual shadows and highlights, not skinned on. And the normal map I got this effect with is not even particularly well done, I just ran my base skin through the normal map filter, it could look much better. Then, if a heightmap is added (which it hasn't been here), it would look better still.
I hope this picture is worth a thousand words, because my fingers hurt if I type that much..


I hope to have at least one mesh ready for people to download and play with inside of a week. Bear in mind that in order to view the mesh, or do anything else with it, you will need to download Panda, and probably the Panda SDK. I don't know if I'll supply any animations with it, as you don't need them to skin. I'll have to think on that.

[Symon]

Stunning stuff! Looking forward to samples.
What's performance like compared to FF btw?

[lugaru]

Also... if I decided to get back into skinning (you never know) would I have something I could pull up the mesh in for reference? You know, like a makeshift hero tool or a pre-beta of the game that is stable enough to look at a mesh in...

[abenavides]

Like Tommy mentioned, you'd need to install the Panda SDK, which comes with a utility called PVIEW to look at Panda models.

If I get a sec, maybe I can whip up a quick and dirty model viewer that would be a little easier to use.

[tommyboy]

Stunning stuff! Looking forward to samples.
What's performance like compared to FF btw?

Well the stuff Alex writes hums along at 60-70 plus fps, even with my non-optimized models, big tga skins, no LOD models and pretty much everything unoptimized. It's running on my system at 1920x1080 in opengl or directx9.
I implemented some collision detection code badly which made it chug down to 30fps or less when zoomed out, but I am reasonably sure it's because of my poor coding. Everytime I try to add anything in, Alex has to clean it up and make it work properly.
By and large, considering it's in unoptimized Python rather than optimized C++, it compares pretty well so far. Theres still a lot to be added to the code, and to the art assets, so we are still finding that out, really.
I'm thinking that we should be able to put together something that looks reasonably next-gen, and performs comparably to ff in terms of fps. Like ff, if you load it up with highpoly-particle-spray-3MB-for-every-texture-models, something will give. So I'm having to learn how to not do all that, lol..

[Symon]

Thanks. Those initial performance figures bode well I'd say.

[Figure Fan]

The shading and highlights look really cool. It's going to make skinning interesting, that's for sure.

[abenavides]

Have started throwing together a quickie character tool. Need to fix the camera on it a bit before releasing.

Developer Diary #2 up at http://alexff.com

[lugaru]

I added WASD controls to walk around, put up little portraits (can't click em, but they look cool), and you could press the number keys 1-8 to choose which squad member to control. Yes 1-8! Unlike FF, I wanted there to be the possibility of having big squads. A 7-man Justice League needed to be possible, dammit!

Both are things that I had put on a bunch of those "Freedom Force 3" wishlist threads. More than 4 members is a no brainer (X-Men is a great example of a team that does not work with just 4 on the field) and the WASD controls are really cool. After playing Dragon Age I fell in love with being able to just move around like I would in an action game instead of having to click everywhere. Point and click is the heart of any tactical game but WASD controls kind of saves you some time getting from point A to point B and feels more natural.

[abenavides]

Just finished up a big new milestone (0.3.0) which features tons of new features and is just a lot more stable. Will do a dev diary on it soon.

Work on 0.3.1 , of course, is well underway - lots of stuff in that too:

1 little glimpse - Tommy has some great ideas on redefining what animated melee should look like. That and some grappling,flying, and er... other features we've been designing should make this game pretty dang cool.

[Podmark]

Sweet. Looks like you've got a coordinated dodge thing going. It'll be excellent for all the martial arts types.

[Figure Fan]

Oooh! Now that looks pretty cool. 

[lugaru]

Cant wait to read the new dev diary, but I agree that the fight looks good!

[The_Baroness]

this is awesome...

you just blew my mind



(lurking around.... absent but not gone...)

[tommyboy]

That pic  above was an early version of the melee combat system we are developing.
At the moment we are aiming towards 7 types of melee: today I'll tell you a bit about the 3 most basic ones: left, right, low.
The idea of left/right/low is that the attacker comes from those directions, with one of a random bunch of melee animations made for those directions. So most melee-lefts use the left arm, melee-rights mostly use the right arm. The dodge anim is played if the target successfully dodges, a dodge-left anim is called from the dodge-left pool if the attack was a melee-left, a dodge-right if it was a melee-right, and a dodge-low if it was a melee-low. A hit calls a "pain" animation, and these too may end up being direction sensitive.
Here's one of my favourite matches to watch, Cap Vs Batman, (which some may remember from the classic Busiek/Perez JLA Avengers series):


I'm still tweaking the animations, and the pic is without the "low" stuff, just some of the left/right melee/dodge combinations, and only a fraction of those.
The system Alex has developed is remarkable. It's incredibly flexible but simple to use, and allows characters to access "generic" animation pools, which is what Cap and Bats are using here.
These will be broad categories like male_basic (seen above), male_agile, male_martial_artist, male_melee_weapon and so on.
Extra custom animations can also be individually assigned to any character, so when I make some custom shield-using melees for Cap, he will get those in his own anims folder, and probably some custom dodges. These custom, character specific, anims can be played in addition to the "generic" set, or they can replace any, or all of them.
You could also take animations from male_basic, male_agile, martial_artist and mix them into the custom character-specific animation folder to build the Batman you want, who is part martial-artist, part acrobat, and part street-fighter.
Or, you can give a character their own completely exclusive custom animation set made just for them.


That's the current state of play on that part of the melee-combat system.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm here to talk about an interesting thing I've discovered about animations in panda.
You know how in FF if you give a male_basic sized character male_hulking keyframes they get all stretched and distorted? Or if you try to use male keyframes with a female character the same happens?
Well, the same thing happens in panda.
But.
Because the panda egg files are editable in a text editor, I've looked into them and figured out how to change the dimensions of the biped within the animations, so you can use a male_hulking type animation on a male_basic sized character without stretching or distortion.
Basically, there is a map of the positions of all the bones marked as x,y,z co-ordinates within each animation file. One needs only to copy these x,y,z values for each bone from a male_basic animation into the male_hulking, and the animation will work.

Now, what I need from the more clever forum members is some help with the next step, which is to stop copying/pasting by hand, (which takes about 30 minutes per animation), and move on to an animation conversion tool, or batch file, or something.
This would take an animation file, and a set of the co-ordinate values of the desired character size (I can build a library of those if necessary), and overwrite the animation's own x,y,z values for each bone with those from the desired character.
And preferably be able to save the output somewhere else, and do batch conversions rather than one-at-a-time.

Please pm me if you think that you can help, as any assistance would be most welcome.

[Epimethee]

Interesting! The system is looking very much like was I would have been hoping for in an ideal world. I'll PM you about the conversion script (which shouldn't stop someone else to have a go at it).

[Podmark]

This melee system is really exciting. I really appreciate you guys sharing your progress with us.

[abenavides]

Dev Diary #3 now up at http://alexff.com

[BlueBard]

Dev Diary #3 now up at http://alexff.com

So why did 'all work on SuperSquad' stop, out of curiosity?

[Podmark]

Alex do you have or planning any kind of setting for a hero's material? Such as a hero being made of metal (like Colossus) which could be used as a flag for magnetic and other abilities like in FFX. I imagine things like that could be set as traits.

I really like reading about the process of making this. It's very interesting. I'm curious about system requirements. I realize I'm asking very early but do you think they'll be comparable to FF or significantly higher?

[Reepicheep]

I cannot believe I missed this thread.

This is... wow.

Just wow.

[lugaru]

Dev Diary #3 now up at http://alexff.com

So why did 'all work on SuperSquad' stop, out of curiosity?

He is remaking XCom and a couple more classic games over the weekend. Hahaha, joking, no clue but given how crazy all the updates have it should be something interesting.

And yeah, glad to see you guy's are kind of starting from scratch (which is inevitable of course) since you are doing all kinds of stuff most us community members never dreamed of (context melee, damage decals, etc). If you guy's eventually need some non technical "pure manpower" help let me know, such as a boring text updating chore like you mention above.

[tommyboy]

Alex do you have or planning any kind of setting for a hero's material? Such as a hero being made of metal (like Colossus) which could be used as a flag for magnetic and other abilities like in FFX. I imagine things like that could be set as traits.

I really like reading about the process of making this. It's very interesting. I'm curious about system requirements. I realize I'm asking very early but do you think they'll be comparable to FF or significantly higher?

Alex can answer the metal material question, as I don't know, offhand.

As to system requirements, I think to some extent they will be higher, if you want to see it the way I have it in these screenshots.
If only because of things like bump/parallax mapping, which weren't generally available back when ff came out.
Not necessarily massively higher though.
I can tell you that the polycount of the characters is the same as FF meshes, for the most part. Other than having fingers, my male_basic is the same polycount as irrational's.
And I am a lot more conscious of framerate than when making models for an 8-year-old game, so most, if not all of the meshes you see in screen shots are a smaller filesize, lower polycount, and use less textures than the ff equivalents I've made.
But, I am generally making larger textures than some ff meshes because of the extra detail the engine supports for things like bumpmaps. But "only" 1024 by 1024, and Panda can be set to use a maximum texture size and scale down anything larger.
We will have Level Of Detail (LOD) on as much geometry as possible, this switches in lower polycount models if something is distant from the camera. We will have mipmapping (which does a similar thing for textures at a distance) on all textures.

I can also tell you that I can still choke FF (or v3R) to a standstill, even on my 8-years-later pc with a spec way, way beyond FF's requirements and a graphics card quite happy with most of todays games at reasonable settings. So in some ways its a hard one to answer. My current rig still cant give me 60fps in ff with FFX and 30 characters on-screen.
At the moment, with a city scene, 16-20 chars on-screen and AI controlled, I still get 40-70 fps, running at 1920 x 1080. And thats without the LOD in place, with models and textures un-optimized, and the code not completely finished. Last time Alex did a code optimization I got a 20-30 FPS boost.

The game will be scalable, in terms of graphics settings. Lower end systems will of course be able to turn down resolution, turn off per-pixel lighting, shadows, lighting FX and so on.
I think that we both want to make a game that's fun to re-play, and as, or more, customizable than FF, not some graphics-monster eye-candy fest that people play once and move on to the next shiny game.

So I think that if you tried to play our game on the pc you had when FF came out, you'd have to go lo-res, no fancy fx and no levels with 50 people on-screen. but I think that it might still be just about playable (*not a legally binding statement. By reading this you acknowledge that tommyboy is entitled to half of any future earnings you may receive. Offer void in Canada an Northern Ireland)