I hallowed out the eyes in the helmets, to add more detail.
Prydon Modelling
Armor's hard because the model would have to contour with the way ithael's body moves. I'd suggest if we're going to do that (which i was hoping to do) we make skins of the armor on ithael, and then maybe also add shoulder pads if they're used on the armor model.Urre wrote:Awesome! Now animate them too, so someone *cough* can add support for visible helmets! It'd be awesome with armors too. Boots could be a bit overboard. Helmets and armors, yes, that's cool...
Can you not make Ithaels model and the different sections of armour the children to Ithael??? For example Ithaels head would have the helmet as a child then make the overall parent for example the torso for all the parts of ithael so that everything will gradually join together. or is this not possible in QME and im just talking shite!!Chillo wrote:Armor's hard because the model would have to contour with the way ithael's body moves. I'd suggest if we're going to do that (which i was hoping to do) we make skins of the armor on ithael, and then maybe also add shoulder pads if they're used on the armor model.Urre wrote:Awesome! Now animate them too, so someone *cough* can add support for visible helmets! It'd be awesome with armors too. Boots could be a bit overboard. Helmets and armors, yes, that's cool...
That's not so difficult because the ithael model already has visible armor for the three main classes of armor + few special cases, it would only take a few more skins to extend it to all armor base items.Chillo wrote:Armor's hard because the model would have to contour with the way ithael's body moves. I'd suggest if we're going to do that (which i was hoping to do) we make skins of the armor on ithael, and then maybe also add shoulder pads if they're used on the armor model.Urre wrote:Awesome! Now animate them too, so someone *cough* can add support for visible helmets! It'd be awesome with armors too. Boots could be a bit overboard. Helmets and armors, yes, that's cool...
I'm all for anything that works! I like the idea of making it a skin, and adding shoulder pads as a separate entity following ithael around (just like the helmet, weapon and shield). Other than that you could make a separate model using the armor instead, and when you equip the armor the model gets entirely replaced. On the other hand I wouldn't recommend that if you want to save resources to some extent, but seeing as your skins seem to be so insanely large anyway I don't think it'd matter and/or be a point of interest. I'd personally be interested in seeing better use of skinmap area and smaller skins.
Why's that? Well, it works like this (someone correct me if I'm way off here): Quakes palette allows only 256 colors, meaning small files (hooray), but once an OpenGL driven engine (like prydon's official multiplayer client DarkPlaces) loads the file, it needs to convert it to full 24 bit color in memory, meaning that you can get an absolutely ridiculous memory usage if you have large skins on your models. It's just like having the same skin, but as an 24 bit TGA. Try converting one of your skins to that, and see how big it is (uncompressed TGA). Now consider the fact that you have like, what, 8 skins on Ithael alone, along with very many weapons. That could bring any computer down and crying. And now we're not even considering the map models, monsters, npc's and map textures.
Am I wrong?
Then, beyond that, OpenGL engines convert images to powers of two, meaning a skin that's for example 200x800 would be converted to 256x1024 (I think) ingame, making an even larger skin you originally designed (and the stretching can sometimes create minor artefacts in the end result), so it's all lost if you don't use powers of two. I'd personally suggest dropping the dosquake support and using skins the size of 256x256, 256x512 and 512x512 and certainly smaller too if it's a small object (like most of the weapons), but most preferrably not larger skins than that.
Why's that? Well, it works like this (someone correct me if I'm way off here): Quakes palette allows only 256 colors, meaning small files (hooray), but once an OpenGL driven engine (like prydon's official multiplayer client DarkPlaces) loads the file, it needs to convert it to full 24 bit color in memory, meaning that you can get an absolutely ridiculous memory usage if you have large skins on your models. It's just like having the same skin, but as an 24 bit TGA. Try converting one of your skins to that, and see how big it is (uncompressed TGA). Now consider the fact that you have like, what, 8 skins on Ithael alone, along with very many weapons. That could bring any computer down and crying. And now we're not even considering the map models, monsters, npc's and map textures.
Am I wrong?
Then, beyond that, OpenGL engines convert images to powers of two, meaning a skin that's for example 200x800 would be converted to 256x1024 (I think) ingame, making an even larger skin you originally designed (and the stretching can sometimes create minor artefacts in the end result), so it's all lost if you don't use powers of two. I'd personally suggest dropping the dosquake support and using skins the size of 256x256, 256x512 and 512x512 and certainly smaller too if it's a small object (like most of the weapons), but most preferrably not larger skins than that.
I was once a Quake modder
Error: maybe not, but most games don't have as many objects loaded at once as an RPG game without dynamic loading/unloading (darkplaces supports dynamic loading, but not unloading), they only have their set of say 10 weapons, 3-7 character models, and the map. Many games even have a lot fewer character models loaded at once. An RPG (ish) such as prydon has all these, plus loads of items, and due to the way Quake works, they're all loaded at once, and kept in memory.
It might be fine, I'm actually not sure, I'd like to hear other views. As it seems right now, we're dropping old-quake support, and only doing the newer engines thing, which I personally am fine with. With this, one can expect more powerful computers than what it took to run Quake, I just want to know where the line goes.
It might be fine, I'm actually not sure, I'd like to hear other views. As it seems right now, we're dropping old-quake support, and only doing the newer engines thing, which I personally am fine with. With this, one can expect more powerful computers than what it took to run Quake, I just want to know where the line goes.
I was once a Quake modder
Urre: you forgot mipmapping (although that is off by default), and colormap layers 
To see memory usage, type r_texturestats and browse through the listed skins, the sizes on the left are in kilobytes (first number is uploaded size, second number is original size, and the one highlighted in brackets is the current status) and each skin has several layers depending on which colors it uses (just in case it gets used with colormapping), the skin layers are only uploaded to the graphics card when they are first used in the game, so most of them are never uploaded (just the merged layer and the glow layer).
The upload to the graphics card is the point at which darkplaces expands the data to power of two size (if your GPU is not a GF6 or later, which support non-power of two size) and 32bit color (not 24bit), a 320x200 skin undergoes an 8x expansion (or 11x with mipmapping) in memory usage for each layer used (so a colormapped player is base pants shirt glow, 4 layers used, each 512KB, for a total of 2MB).
To see memory usage, type r_texturestats and browse through the listed skins, the sizes on the left are in kilobytes (first number is uploaded size, second number is original size, and the one highlighted in brackets is the current status) and each skin has several layers depending on which colors it uses (just in case it gets used with colormapping), the skin layers are only uploaded to the graphics card when they are first used in the game, so most of them are never uploaded (just the merged layer and the glow layer).
The upload to the graphics card is the point at which darkplaces expands the data to power of two size (if your GPU is not a GF6 or later, which support non-power of two size) and 32bit color (not 24bit), a 320x200 skin undergoes an 8x expansion (or 11x with mipmapping) in memory usage for each layer used (so a colormapped player is base pants shirt glow, 4 layers used, each 512KB, for a total of 2MB).
. It's all good Chillo, keep up the great work!Some of my free Quake models
I tried some quake models to compare with the excisting.
Had a hard job in turning the dxf files into Qmle, as the vertices were meshed.
Only the base model was right. And it is a hard job to clean them up in all animations.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/gimli08.htm
The bat model still has a wrong cheek, but I lost my patience after changing its thin wings,
when I saw they turned up transparant in Quake. Just luck they only attack from heights.
Had a hard job in turning the dxf files into Qmle, as the vertices were meshed.
Only the base model was right. And it is a hard job to clean them up in all animations.
http://members.home.nl/gimli/gimli08.htm
The bat model still has a wrong cheek, but I lost my patience after changing its thin wings,
when I saw they turned up transparant in Quake. Just luck they only attack from heights.
I haven't posted in a while, but don't worry. I'm still around and I'm still modelling for prydon. I'm on vacation and i don't have the best access of internet i had back home, but i packed my CPU with me and i'm using it where I'm currently staying. the only problem is, the CPU isn't hooked up to the internet. I'm using one of my relative's computers, because it is at least hooked up to the internet. But, once I get home, I'll have a lot of pics to show you of models in progress.