Possible Projects Interest

[Randomdays]

1st new release after doing the Christmas requests.

I've been watching some of the old 60's Spider-Man cartoons, as well as reading the original spidey comics.

After watching the episode with the original Spider-Slayer Mk1, I went and looked and didn't see anything for any of the Spider-Slayers for FF, and decided to try to make the animated version. The comic version had a lot of tentacles that I thought would be hard to duplicate.

I took the Mindhammer mesh by Jason DaSilva (JIK), which I had with an old Arnim Zola skin by Kraven, and started working on it in Blender.

1) Removed the long neck piece and put the head back on the shoulders.

2) Resized the head and closed the open hole in the back created by from removing the neck

3) Changed the extras skin, enlarged it to 1024 x 1024, replaced the eye on the lens with a picture of the animated JJJ. Changed the rest of the skin to a basic blue.

4) Added a large cylinder to the chest with a smaller cylinder near the top. deleted some of the chest that was sticking out of the cylinder

5) Removed the feet and added various sized spheres to the head, knees and feet, plus flattened spheres to the shoulders.

6) Removed the thumbs and narrowed the hands a bit.

7) Last, replaced the main skin with just a basic blue one.

I need to check if Jason allows for skoping and kit bashing (I think so since there's the Zola skin for it) before releasing, as well as a readme and game testing.

It might need a more detailed skin if anyone is interested.

Final project below - Pic from the cartoon on the left and the mesh on the right.

Made for FF, but should work for both games.

There's some overlap with the chest cylinder, but otherwise I think he looks good for a quick throw together.

Edit - I checked the permissions list on the niskoping list and didn't see Jason for either a yes or no. Holding off on releasing for now.

Does anyone have any info on him? Are JIK and Jason the same person? If so, JIK has given permission, so we're good if so.

Edit Edit - Yay! I can confirm that Jason and JIK are the same, So I can release when ready.

[cranlox]

It occurs to me to participate with a skin version that I do not know if you will agree with what I thought.

The character and version you chose is super good.

So if you want, count on me

If you release it, tell me from which folder on your mega site you are going to upload it.
Since it is not from any Marvel game then.

[SuperPoweredYank]

That's awesome RD! I never knew I wanted a mesh of JJ's robot until I saw you'd made one, lol.

[Randomdays]

Thanks guys.

Its released on the megasite under a new folder - "Marvel DC" - for mainstream characters

IT has two nifs - one using the original uv and one with an updated version with the new primitives added in.


I'm really surprised that it looks like none of the various version ever got done. I thought that someone like Val would have done a few versions.

[cranlox]

Downloading and watching what I can do (in other skin style)

[windblown]

That's an unexpected character to see! Great job with it! 

[Randomdays]

Thanks Windblown

At the moment, I'm in the mood to try something new with map making. I've already got the Merry Go Round, and I was thinking of using the park map for a base.

I also wanted to add a few new buildings and vehicles into the mix that I don't think are available - a few real world businesses, school buses, ambulances, etc for vehicles, and the same for buildings.

Even a superhero can get hungry when out on patrol, and what better place than one that's served billions of peoples over the years?

Welcome to Mickey D's! You can now fly in, drive up in your Batmobile or Spider-mobile, or just walk thru the door. Just make sure that the Hulk's fries are hot, or "Hulk Smash!"

This is a very complex sketchup mesh from the 3d Warehouse. It was rather difficult to find a good mesh that's not too simple or complex, or that costs money. Even getting a workable mesh into Blender took some effort.

The one I picked is about medium range - about 90k vertexes, but only 5 meg in size when done - I'll see if it I can reduce it if it causes problems in game. The FF vertex limit is good since its a large number of smaller meshes making up the whole.

I've also got some meshes for some of the other fast food chains as well, that might be done  later.

I'm having to export each piece, one by one for both games as Blender is still trying to combine materials and messing up the textures on export.

Right now I'm working on re-doing 4 different nifs - the complete model for FF1 and FF2, and two versions of the same without the roofs for possible internal running around in.

If the complete models cause a problem, I'll see about removing the insides to lower the poly counts.

I'll also need to to add the outside menu boards and large logo sign to complete the setup, and possibly some internal items as well.

All the buildings that came with either game have various extra models for them, showing them partially destroyed, but that's beyond me. These are just for looking at and to have fun with, not for destruction, unless someone else wants to got there.

Work in progress pics below.

[SickAlice]

That Jameson is great.

[BentonGrey]

RD, haha, that Jameson-bot is great, and hilarious with his face on it!

The building you're importing is very interesting.  I'm really curious about whether the interior would be navigable by a character.  I'd assume not, but I'm not sure.  THe intricacies of map settings are still something of a mystery to me.  It's a shame we don't have destroyed models for that.

[Randomdays]

Thanks Benton. Doing some research, it looks like some of the spider-slayers were human-like with the operators face on a screen, while others were more spider-like. with an operator sometimes inside.

Probably beyond me, but I'd like to some more models in game.

I finished working on the first 4 versions of the restaurant from above, centered them resized them, and worked on the lighting.

I just got done on the Merry Go Round as well - resized it, lighting, and tied it to the nazi-tank kfs, specifically to the front wheels, rotated to make it into a turntable.

For some reason the walk for the kf was not cyclic, so I had to change that and rename it to idle. The Merry Go round now spins, a little fast, but looks good.

Now to look at some map-building for them. Putting the rides in the park section of the "Park" Map, and the other buildings to replace the ones already there.

If the first part works, then more rides and buildings. I've got some other buildings that would work well next to McDs - a motel, a gas station, some more fast food, etc.

Benton - is the sound for the maps locational? I'd like circus music when you're near the Merry Go Round, but fading as you move away.

Edit - SA was talking a few pages back about teleporting from the outside of a building to a separate inside area as a possible workaround for a complex building.

I saw a mention of a "teleport marker" that might do this, but not a lot of info on it.

The ezscript faq mentions that you can teleport to a character during a cutscene. So if I put the inside of the restaurant in a remote inaccesible area and put a small, invisible character(or marker) near the door, and a cutscene trigger at the outside door of the restaurant, the player SHOULD teleport to the inside map when scripted to.

Hero teleports to character x, or hero teleports to marker.

As far as I see, you can only teleport during a cutscene.

I see that sounds ARE locational, but music appears not to be. I'm not sure what the limits of sounds are - how long it can be and if you can loop

[BentonGrey]

SA, so, sounds can be anything, including music.  You just need to set them up as sound assets, put the files in the right place (mono channel, not stereo!), and then you use a marker on a map and set it in the editor to be a local version of the sound.  You'll find instructions about how to do this in the FFEdit.  Let me know if you have any trouble with it.  I'll have time after the next few days to field anything you have issues with.

As for teleporting, you can actually make teleporters on maps that allow a character to enter a spot and then teleport to a corresponding spot.  I used in some new JLA missions in the DCUG update.  You'll find documentation of that in the FFX manual.  It's actually super easy.  You just place objects on the map and then, I think, place a properly named set of markers.

Be warned, placing map portions in inaccessible parts of the map seems to cause issues.  When I experimented with combining maps and simply pasted a map piece next to an existing map, out of its bounds, I could see it in game, but I couldn't actually scroll over to it.  And I could teleport characters onto it, but they either glitched out or slowly slid back to the actual map.  In general, I couldn't actually interact with the added portions.  I'd LOVE to crack this and be able to figure out how to do this, so by all means experiment with it!  My only notion at the moment is that the extents file associated with a map might be involved, AND/OR how you attach the pieces in Nifskope might matter.

[Randomdays]

Thanks Benton.

On the Merry Go Round music, I notice that sounds in game play and then end. Can you loop a sound to continuously play?

My thought on inaccessible was placing the indoor reataurant up high on top of the skydome.

For the teleport, I thought so with the marker, but wasn't sure if you could always do it. The ezscript manual just mentioned doing it with a cutscene.

On reflection, I think I'll try breaking up the restaurant into different nifs - the parking lot split off with its own bounding box, and just deleting the included street lights and using the standard ones.

[Randomdays]

Progressing....

Split off the restaurant  parking lot into a new nif. I think that the character should be able to walk on it.

Copied the "mp_park" map and renamed the new copy "funland"

Embedded the "idle"spinning animation into the merry go round nif. Created a new folder under park objects for it and put the textures in the the generic item "_textures" folder.

Opened ffedit and created a template for it. Tried to edit the map ingame and add the merry-go-round, but it wasn't showing up on the park items list. I was able to add it manually, and then see it and reposition it with in game edit.

After saving, tested it by having El Diablo fly over to it. It looks good and animates, but 1) the animation isn't smooth, 2) with shadows on, the shadows of the horses don't move with them, and 3) collision is off - El Diablo climbed over the railing, but walked through the merry go round itself. I probably need to fine tune the bounding box.

He was able to target it with ranged attacks, but not melee ( I think)

The park area of the map is actually to small to use as a base for theme park, so after experimenting I'll probably have to move to a different map.

Still tinkering

Pic below

[GogglesPizanno]

If you wanted to do an internal navigate-able map without doing the teleport thing, I have a idea that MIGHT work (maybe). The caveat being that it would not have a roof so characters couldn't land or walk on top of it.

You could try duplicating what some of the game levels did where they had a black flat mesh that sat over certain areas of a map until you hit a marker that triggered a removal of the hidden "roof" and the door that blocked passage (the underground levels from FFvTR are the ones I'm thinking of).

So here's the basic thought:

1. So first make the entrance where the door is an empty area and create a door object/mesh and make it solid. Then place the door there. That prevents the player from crossing the threshold until the door is "opened" via a trigger.

2. Pull the roof off into a separate mesh object that is not solid and cant be interacted with, but place it above the restaurant. This works like a mask that hides the top of the interior, but since its non solid and cant be interacted with, its just a visual object that doesn't affect movement or path finding.

3. Add a marker/trigger bubble at the door area that removes the door and the roof objects when entered. The trick might be on the trigger to add the logic to put it back again -- but even if not, its like once entering its now open (just like exposing the new new tunnels in the original FFvTR levels).

IF all that works the trick is then making the restaurant interior object modeled in such a way that all the obstructions are in place in a way that the path finding works. This method might require making the restaurant part of the actual map layout object or maybe building the interior out of wall pieces rather than a single object.

[Randomdays]

Thanks Goggles....Haven't heard from you in quite awhile.

Lots of good info. I would definitely need to switch to a much bigger map for that.

For number 2), that sounds good, but I had hope to have the character land on the roof.

For the last, I had thought of taking at least some of the interior items and making them separate objects to help with pathfinding.

I'll keep that in mind and might be asking for help in a bit. First I need to get the normal restaurant and merry go round on the map working correctly with collison and pathfinding.

Still a lot to do. The parking lot is on the map and able to walked on, though its a bit larger than the block I deleted the items from. There's a small rectangular square wall out back where a dumpster would go, and the test character is walking though it at the moment.

[Randomdays]

More progress.....

Form fitting the bounding boxes around the Merry Go Round and the dumpster walls fixed the walking thu the mesh problem. For the dumpster walls, even though its an open space inside, you stand on the invisible box in the middle instead of going inside. I d have to change the bounding box to hug the four walls inside and out, but since I would probably add a dumpster in the middle it shouldn't matter.

Right now, you'll walk around it or fly over it. I wonder if I changed the base template to where you couldn't walk on it, would you go through it or just not be able to walk on that area at all.

Also, going back to what SA was talking about, what would happen with a thin "floor" of a bounding box above the dumpster box? Would you be able to walk thru it, but still land on it if flying above it?

Since the parking lot has been separated off the main mesh, its now a bit smaller in size in the number of vertexes. It was already resized , but I messed with the lighting a bit and form fitted a bounding box to it as well. You can go around it, fly over it, or land on the roof.

On the map, there's a little shimmer from the two meshes and the base map nif overlapping each other and the game trying to decide which to show.

With Goggles idea, making the roof separate and non interactive, right now you could still stand on it since you'd really be standing on the bounding box.

I'll have to experiment and see if I can make separate bounding boxes to hug the walls. Or, if once made, I can combine them into a super, complex bounding box in Blender. If I separate out the insides, each of the pieces could have its own bounding box.

With that, what would prevent the character from flying over Goggles' roof and landing though it inside the building?

I notices that the load time for the mission went way up with the restaurant added to the map.Its still at 58k vertexes total. Game speed once loaded seemed good and unchanged. Its nice to see that the game can handle such a complex high poly mesh, though it could only done in pieces instead of a single solid nif.

To get the load speed up I may have to go with the first thought with two different nifs, one outside only with no insides, and one inside only without the roof and separate items. That would bring the vertex count down on both of them.

Pics of El Diablo standing in front of the restaurant, and standing on the roof,  below. The alpha on the windows is working and you can see the items inside.

There's some overlap with some of the base park map items still on the map.

Still some experimenting to do.

[Randomdays]

More experimenting....

Double checked that a bounding box will prevent any movement under it, no matter what height its at. You can still stand on it even though its not seen.

Goggles idea should work - the roof would have the bounding box on it, and as soon as its removed, the player should be able to walk inside. the inside and its objects would still need their own bounding boxes to prevent walking thru them.

The EZscript manual says you can place a marker and have an item appear at it, which could make the roof reappear.

Possible issues with that - Each encounter will only trigger once. Would I need multiple markers to keep the roof being removed and restored? Say, 1,3 and 5 to remove the roof, and 2, 4 and 6 to restore it?  Same with the teleport back and forth?

How specific is the add object to the map? I would want to roof to be added exactly to the same spot it was before?

Benton, on the teleport, can you confirm that you can do that outside of a cutscene?

For this instance, it might be more complex than needed - do you really need to go inside? I know that SA had some specific ideas, maybe for a possible mission, but for what I'm doing its not vital. If I can get it to work, it would be more fore knowledge and info that anything else.

[Randomdays]

Still learning on map making.

I decided that the map I wanted to use for the Theme Park base was the 1st FF1 campaign map "A New Beginning" - It's got a large park area and some city with it like the original park map I was using, but the map is much bigger.

I found a FFvt3R conversion in a large map conversion pack from FF1 to FFvt3R. It has about 160 maps in it and is setup for FFx3. It looks like it was one of two I have by Ren.

I moved the files I needed from the separate FFx3 directory to the main directory - the files in the missions folder, all the FF1 textures to the main "_textures" folder., and the map nif to the multiplayer terrain folder.

In FFEdit, I added the FF3x Mappack folder as the 2ndary data path so I wouldn't have to move all the objects to the main data folder and worry about conflicts

I hadn't really done anything with custom objects yet, so instead of merging the two object.dat's, I just renamed the original one for safekeeping and copied over the one from the map pack. the pack readme mentions merging the sounds over, but its seems to work fine as is.

In FFEdit, I made a copy of the mission and renamed it to "Theme Park" so that i could experiment without messing up the base map.

In game, the map runs and looks good without the intro encounters, but has moving civilians and traffic. Running the map thru its FFx3 shortcut does have encounters setup and running.

Issues -

1) Haven't heard from Benton or any other mappers, but it still looks like any version of going in or out of the restaurant would require encounters and/or cutscenes, which I think would prevent unlimited use.

2) This version of the map comes with a skysphere, but its actually a bit too small ,and part of the park area was on the wrong side of the sphere. Enlarging the sphere nif worked, but if you stand at one of the map and look at the other end, the draw distance is too great, and you get a big black wall. As you walk towards the middle, it shrinks until it vanishes and looks normal. It was also casting a shadow on part of the map.

Because of that, I deleted the Sphere.

3) The map works fine as is, but doesn't come with a level layout file. FFEdit points to one thats not there. Copying the original from FF1 and importing it messes everything up. Is there a way to generate one? Or, if anyone has the original modded one, it looks like it was done by "Shodan"

4) Testing the map normally and in FF3X, it looked very dark. I nifskoped the map nif and made the whole thing brighter.

Now that everything's set up, I'm going to try to add the Merry Go Round and restaurant onto the new map

[Randomdays]

Short video uploaded to Youtube. It shows the Merry Go Round in the park and the restaurant right outside. The parking lot was a little too large for one block, so I lined up the first part of the drive thru lane with the street. Natural traffic looks like its turning in for some food. Of course, they just keep on going and leave.

Activated the camera hack to get a better view from the street level.

Someone who knows how to setup pathways could make it more natural looking. Needs a little more tweaking overall.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ5NnEhKqCU

[oktokels]

Looks great !!! Very nice job 

[cranlox]

are you going to upload this map for download?
I even forgot how to install them on the maps
From what I saw on youtube it looks very good
Great job

[Randomdays]

Thanks guys. I've got a ways to go before the map is finished - more Theme Park rides, a motel, a playground, etc (if they work)

Just learning how to do things as I go.

At present, I'm working on a Haunted House ride, and then we'll see from there.

To get the map to work, since its an FF1 converted map, it'll probably take some steps to get it working like I did in FFvt3R

[cranlox]

perfect, I understood that you had already finished it in a first version so I asked.
You are quite fast for everything that you add to the game and that added to the cravings make you wonder.


Take all your time brother. I have been trying to make a skin for JJ's robot and since the area resource of the textures is so repetitive, it has been difficult for me to find how to overcome that.

[Randomdays]

I didn't mention it before, but adding the parking lot and merry go round to the map didn't change the loading time much, but adding the restaurant did - on my system, which is an older win7 laptop, it added about a minute.

Here's the Haunted House ride from RCT3. You can't see him, but there's a low poly ticket taker in the booth. Comes in a random male or female when you play the game.

Still to do on it - Resize it up, round out the tracks a little, split off the 3 carts onto separate spinning turntables so that they can ride the three different tracks

Later, add some people to the carts with some random skins for variety.

Total poly count is pretty good as is - about 4000.

[Randomdays]

The Haunted House is basically finished and in game on the map. The House and two carts at different distances from their center.

Splitting the carts up to singles and putting them on a turntable worked well. They're a little off on the tracks, but I don't think its that noticeable.

There's a bounding box around the house itself, and a lower one around the fence. I tried putting one on the carts, but couldn't get it to move with the carts the way I wanted.

Moved some of the civilian's pathing out of the way where the House went, as well as some rocks, plants and trees.

A little more pausing during loading the map.

The main problem I saw with game testing is just getting a good look at the house due to its size.

Tweaking to do - some holes showing up in the carts due to facing, though that could be hidden with people on board.

I think that adding mechanical coaster sounds and rider noises would really add to the object.

[Randomdays]

The next map item is done and tweaked.

I was looking for a cheap looking, retro motel, and while there's a few out there, many are overly complicated or have a price attached.

I wound up using the Carlton Motel exterior set I had downloaded a while back from a modder for "The Movies" game, who in turn got it from a user on deviantart, who in turn ripped it from a game (though I didn't see from which one).



https://www.deviantart.com/oo-fil-oo/art/MOTEL-EXTERIOR-427960410


And now its imported again to FFvt3R.

I also started doing some blendering on a different motel from the same Movies modder, who got it from a different deviantart modder, who once again had ripped it from a Walking Dead game. But while the first mesh had to have things added to it, the second one has way too much detail around it that I'm slowly deleting. I may get back to it as time permits.

https://www.deviantart.com/akandrov/art/Motor-Inn-The-Walking-Dead-XPS-688678932

The first mesh needed a bit of tweaking. As a movie set, it had no back walls at all, l so I had to build those from scratch and put some windows on them.

The four vehicles were split off to lower polycount, and the main sign was backwards if you looked at it from the back, so I had to flip that around.
.




The total polycount for the motel is about 10k, and each of the vehicles are only about 500. The vehicles need a little tweaking as there's no undercarriage, so I'm doing quick builds on those.

The largest files in the set are the dds skins, which are 1024x1024(only 3 skins for everything) and about 4 megs each. I'm not sure if that would slow down the loading again, so they might get reduced down to 512x512

The  vehicles will available as separate map objects besides the motel. Though the vehicles look high poly, that's just the high def texture on them.

I'll probably add a few extras to the motel on the map like a soda machine, etc.

Once an area on the map is cleared and everything's in place, I'll probably load up another short video so you can see the Haunted House in action.

[Randomdays]

I went ahead and did the second motel.

It looks cheap and creepy, is about the same number of polys as the other one, but takes a while to load up in nifskope.

The problem, the single skin is a dds file 9megs in size - 4096x4096

Reducing the resolution also loses to much detail - the hotel sign part of the skin is very small.

I tried to unwrap the uv in the smaller, final mesh, but blender messed it up.

I'll load them both up on a map and see the different loading times, but I think its going to be the first one.

Pic below from the character viewer.

[cranlox]

I don't know if you know this page, I suppose you do, but it has buildings and in various formats.

https://rigmodels.com/index.php?manualsearch=1&searchkeyword=build

[windblown]

Eveything is looking great! I especially like the Merry Go Round. Looking forward to the new short video.

[Randomdays]

Thanks Windblown

Second video below. You start at the park entrance with the new Souvenir Stand from Wildlife Park 2. Turning, you see the Haunted House in the distance and fly to it. You check out the ticket taker and the 3 ride carts.

You then fly back past the Souvenir Stand again to the restaurant. The camera moves north to the motel and you fly and walk around it till the end of the video.

I found that making copies of the bounding box and placing them around a mesh, in this case the motel, is easier than making one big, complicated box. This didn't work in the 1st test with only the 1st bounding box actually working, but once I went back into Blender and joined them all together, it worked fine.

In the video you can see I shaped part of the bounding box to the stairs so you can climb them  up and down. The bounding box starts at the edge of the roof, so you cant walk up to the doors themselves, but you should be able to land on the roof.

For later, I'll probably split off the sign and set it up like a lamp post, and add some separate soda and vending machines, and an ice machine or two. The 3 sides of the building and the office might be split into separate objects as well, so the entire building won't go up at once if destroyed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8zpKoK-Wc