freeciv + blender - Page 2

Per · July 27, 2003, 04:26

Impressive. Are you adding skeletons to these models?

skyscuffler · July 27, 2003, 05:07

Yes, of course. Thats the way the animations are made. I first make a mesh model in a sort of base position (see the "Leonardo"-style image below) that is easy to edit and then i add a skeleton, which transforms the mesh dynamically. Well, of course i have some base meshes and skeletons for the humans and horses so i don't have to make everything again and again

. The skeleton has so called "actions", which describe the characters movement and can be switched easily.
This is the dragoon unit:

skyscuffler · July 27, 2003, 15:02

The Catapult, an easy but nice model:

skyscuffler · July 27, 2003, 17:00

I've modified the units.png file from the SDL client for testing purposes. First thing i realized was that the images need some postprocessing (which i didn't do yet), especially more contrast and border outlining.
Apart from that i think that a new tileset size would be good. At the moment we have standard tiles with a width of 64 pixels which leads to very small tiles at modern screen resolutions of 1024x768 and more. If you have a look at the civ3 graphics you will see that the tiles are relatively big compared to the units, which allows for example more beautiful proportions between land units and ships. In the meantime there is so much graphical detail combined on one tile (base tile, specials, irrigation, units ...) that it's often hard to get all the info that should be clearly visible at the first sight.

I suppose we introduce a new tileset size of perhaps 96 pixels in width (that's the size civ3 uses too). Whoever will do that ...

geeslaka · July 28, 2003, 00:20

Very cool.

What are the units on the bottom row? I recognize most of the others, but those are unfamiliar.

Per · July 28, 2003, 07:47

The units on the bottom row are not used.

skyscuffler: The units in the units.png look bad compared to the same units in the other screenshots. Palette problems, perhaps?

While larger tile size will allow nicer graphics, it means less viewable tiles. Almost all veteran players favour more viewable tiles over good graphics, since it gives a tactical advantage.

I guess the best would be to have an OpenGL renderer in the client, which could scale everything to whatever size the player desires.

CapTVK · July 28, 2003, 16:12

Yes, but Freeciv has a fixed tileset. You can't zoom out for a better overview unlike the multiple zoom levels in Civ2 (yes graphics got clipped/degraded/reduced to dots on higher zoom levels but it worked fine for getting a general overview).

I know there have been some attempts at introducing a zoom function in Freeciv (Teamciv used it). Wouldn't this work better if you had a high resolution tileset to start with? Or perhaps use multiple tilesets with different tilesizes (16,32,64,128x128)?

skyscuffler · July 31, 2003, 04:31

Quote:

The units in the units.png look bad compared to the same units in the other screenshots. Palette problems, perhaps?

As i said, they need some postprocessing. I have to try out different ways of rendering, scaling, etc. to get them look good.

I finished the legion and the paratrooper. Can't wait to see these in action

!

CapTVK · July 31, 2003, 11:43

That paratrooper looks great!

Per · August 4, 2003, 15:44

Yep, this looks absolutely fabulous. I am thinking of adding a frontpage story about this on www.freeciv.org. Got some more screenshots? Everybody love screenshots :-)

skyscuffler · August 11, 2003, 09:53

Great Idea

!

Should i upload those screens to the ftp server ? Do you mean in-game screen shots and/or some with the Blender stuff ? I think making some animated GIFs for demonstrating animation would be good, since you can't see this in a screeshot

. I'm experimenting with rendering- and posprocessing parameters to make them look better.

Per · August 11, 2003, 15:33

Uh, I don't know. Anything that looks good. You could upload it to ftp://upload.freeciv.org/ and post URLs to it here. Perhaps also a tarball of the most recent blender files, for other blender users.

telex4 · August 13, 2003, 06:02

These look great! Any chance of getting animated units in a future release?

Per · August 13, 2003, 10:27

Yes, we're talking about adding support for animations.

skyscuffler · August 14, 2003, 02:38

I've just uploaded some demo stuff to ftp.freeciv.org/freeciv/incoming/blender_demo.tar.bz2 .I hope that's what you need for the web page. The content of the files should be clear by their names, otherwise ask me

.

Per · August 19, 2003, 16:42

You all should go check out the newest front page news item on www.freeciv.org :-)

CapTVK · August 19, 2003, 17:27

I already have...

Now i've finally seen those units in action.

Just how long have you been working with Blender to create this sort of stuff?

skyscuffler · August 23, 2003, 04:08

Well, i don't know exactly, but i think the actual work on the units is going for about 2 or 3 months or so now. I've had some experience with Blender before, so making such a model doesn't take very long any more - a few hours or so, depending on it's complexity. (BTW, i removed some skeleton bones in the very complex models, because having to handle too much bones is a bigger disadvantage than taking care of correct movement manually.) I really don't know when i used Blender the first time, perhaps one or two years ago, anyway i'm not a professional for 3D graphics, but i think many of the freeciv developers do this in their free time.
And here's the next two meshes, the cruiser and the tank (armor):

tonic · August 30, 2003, 22:57

Mmm...the freeciv site has joined the European patents protest today!

geeslaka · August 31, 2003, 13:19

Good. I agree with them fully.

Frozzy · September 2, 2003, 04:09

CapTVK · September 2, 2003, 06:49

Ditto

Maybe we should do something like this over at Apolyton. The same sort of patent problems would apply to Clash, C-evo etc.. as well.

paulz · September 2, 2003, 20:03

I tried creating some new units in blender, but I'm way over my head. I think I'll wait until there are some more units in blender format and play with those.

This really give me an appreciation for the amount of work you've gone to to complete all the ones you've done.

Good job, keep it coming. At the least we'll have a more realistic looking tileset, and hopefully we'll get some animation in as well.

There are more coders than artists, so if you create the animations I'm sure someone will step up and code it into a client.

Frozzy · September 6, 2003, 04:17

So, skyscuffler, any more wonderful creations?

skyscuffler · September 6, 2003, 07:34

I'm currently waiting for a programmer to write a patch for unit animation, so that i can see if that stuff i've made until now is working. I've uploaded a test png file for that.

Meanwhile i'm also working on an OpenGL client, that will use real 3D graphics. If you have some good ideas about what could be implemented in such a client, please tell me ! These are some of the features i've already thought of:
- basic zoomable map view similar to isometric view, but slightly perspective and with smooth camera movement
- zoom function(s) for detailed tile info (e.g. city info screen, unit stack, terrain info)
- highly configurable 3D options for running the client on slow machines without 3D hardware acceleration (textures, geometry detail, ...)
- "classical" camera settings for orthographic overhead and isometric views
- of course: animated 3D units and symbols
- maybe a particle system for explosions, nuclear weapons, turmoil signs, ...

Well, i admit, none of the things mentioned above is implemented yet, but i'm quite confident that there will be some working code in perhaps a few weeks. I'm currently working on a good GUI system.
Oh, and i think i'll also do some further unit today

.

skyscuffler · September 6, 2003, 09:43

so that's it: the worker i had already done, and the diplomat. (that little fatty looks somehow like a well known german politician i didn't really like, but who gives a very good model for this one

)

Frozzy · September 6, 2003, 16:45

I just

the diplomat... looks absolutely wonderful!!!

Pave · September 7, 2003, 05:33

Wonderful diplomat, really...

telex4 · September 7, 2003, 08:14

Quote:

Originally posted by skyscuffler
Meanwhile i'm also working on an OpenGL client, that will use real 3D graphics. If you have some good ideas about what could be implemented in such a client, please tell me !

How will you implement the rest of the UI? I'd suggest that you could use GTK2 client and have the map area drawn with OpenGL, so you needn't reinvent the wheel on a lot of the UI that wouldn't really benefit from a GL rewrite. I've been using, testing and bugreporting on the SDL client a bit recently and aside from being a very cool new client, it definitely suffers from having to implement a huge number of features and shortcuts that are in the original Gtk1 client.

If you're going to allow the camera to zoom quite far in, it might also be fun to animate tiles. For example, have farmers working on irrigated land and farmland where cities are "using" them, have sheep and cattle wandering around agricultural specials, etc.

Oh, and one feature that would be very nifty would be replay, so you could record a game, and then fast forward through the gameplay again to watch empires expand, battles take place, etc.

Mithrandir · September 8, 2003, 20:11

One problem with using the Gtk 2 base is that OpenGL isn't really designed tobe integrated like that. I know there are widgets for it, but I'm not sure if they work, and they must be downloaded separately.
I've been trying, on and off for a time, to create an opengl client using SDL(mostly off for the past few weeks). Of course, the problem with that is that the method's used to blit all the elements to the screen are deprecated and not recommended, as they're hacks that really slow it down. I've got it displaying terrain, but I displaying the gui has been a lot of work, and getting the keyboard bindings, mouse movement, and unit/city picking to work might be very hard. I'm not even sure how to do a city view. How would one load models?
I note that I'mnot attempting to dissuade anyone else from working on this, as I doubt that I'll ever actually finish.