Blengband - 3D angband in development

[jplur]

Heh, I had toyed with giving naga a female Medusa-esque torso, but I think the male version is a little scarier.

Edit: yeah there are some good historical images of the female torso version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:In...m_1640_001.jpg

These sculptures from Laos look more like mine though: http://www.raingod.com/angus/Gallery...Sculpture.html


I finally go back into the code. I ported a few of the combat functions to python. Player to monster melee attacks are working, and it's great to finally be able to kill stuff.

Here are a few shots of some effects, arrows that stick in the creatures, blood splatter, and a fire bolt. I put these in for testing purposes, but ranged combat is on my short list of todos.

[Derakon]

Looking good! And yep, that's a very green naga. Are you currently just using a flat-color material for the creatures based on the color in the edit files? I suppose eventually you'll want to make the coloring more detailed, but time enough for that later.

Keep it up!

[jplur]

Thanks!

Funny, I was just working on that last night. I've tested a method that alters vertex color and shows through the alpha channel of the diffuse texture. The effect is very good (at least for red and green, blue and yellow get a bit washed out) If that all works out, i can reserve the full color channel shown in the pictures for multihued and clear flavors.

[jplur]

I've been putting a lot of time into this, and getting some good results.

Here is a progress report.

Enemy AI is in a working state, here is a youtube video.

Every turn (based on monster speed) they look up what's in the local 9 tiles, and average a vector to avoid other monsters and wall/colum tiles with the vector to the player. It's one of those things I could tweak forever, but it's emulating the angband AI quite well. Once I fix up the avoidance factor from other monsters, groups of monsters should 'push' themselves around more severe U bends, and hopefully line up in hallways. Erratic monsters are moving correctly (although once they engage the player they stay engaged)

The AI code is called infrequently, meaning it has a negligable effect on the processor. I still need to add the pack animal AI.

The FRIENDS flag is working, and it won't be long before I handle reproducing monsters like worm masses.

Melee combat is working. At first I thought it was way off, because I kept getting killed on DL 1. After starting a few characters in Angband, I now remember that this is the proper outcome

I'm about 60% finished with the features I want for the first beta release, which I hope will come out this summer.

[Zikke]

This is way cool! I'm amazed at all the progress you've made. Are you making all the models yourself with the combat animations? Have you thought about how the spells are going to work?

Detection will be interesting since the FPS perspective will limit your awareness of surroundings. I guess the mini map will provide the detection.

I look forward to helping with the Beta if you need some folks

[jplur]

@ Zikke, Thanks! Yes I'm making and animating all the models. The animations are rather poor right now, my plan is to recruit someone with a lot of talent to animate the creatures towards the end of the project, when all the models have been made.

Spells should work much like in angband. I'm also going to use the same macro system, so for non targeted spells that should work quite nicely. For targeted spells, I'll be putting in a macro option that instead of executing the commands, maps them to one of the mouse buttons.

As for detection, I have a screen that displays the full map. Detection spells will pull this up, with the relevent things displayed. Down the road, it's possible that effects like telepathy will let you see monsters through walls while in the game, but I expect players will spend a lot of time checking the map.

And lastly, the Beta will be open to anybody.

Thanks again!

[nppangband]

This looks amazing! Will we all be able to look at the source, or are you going to keep that private?

[jplur]

Yeah the source (.blend files and .py files ) will be open.

I highly doubt anyone could make heads or tails of my code, but it will be there

[Derakon]

I'm loathe to volunteer my own time, given that I have umpteen million of my own projects to work on, but I do have some experience with animation in Blender. I threw this together (model + texturing + animation) in about seven hours over the weekend, for example:




Large image, posed large image

The model's pretty crude and high-poly for what you're doing, but it's fine for my own project because it'll be pre-rendered and fairly small (certainly smaller than the above animations). I find that good animations forgive a lot in the modeling -- though of course, a mesh with bad topography will be difficult to use to make good animations. Of course, ideally you have a good mesh, good texturing, and good animations, but you pick your battles.

[jplur]

Ah nice, the attack animation is very realistic. When the time comes for animation I'll drop you a note, I'm sure we could work out a labor trade of some sort.