Mayco Posted May 26, 2013 Share Posted May 26, 2013 As you have probably noticed, this section has been silent for quite some time. But fear not, my models aren't going anywhere soon! I haven't had a lot of time to spend on modeling. School consumes pretty much all of my time nowadays, which sounds worse than it really is. Thanks to school I've become much more involved in and much better at programming. I'm quite fluent in C# right now, and I hope I can add C and C++ to that list soon (I already know these languages pretty well, just not as well as I want). Some of you may know that I spend most of the free time that I have on . Though this is a lot fun, I can still hear game development calling somewhere far off in the distance. Because of this, I have started a couple of projects (that I didn't finish and probably never will). I started programming a 2D platformer (C#, XNA), made an attempt at a SimCity-esque game (C#, XNA) and made Pong in 3D (C++, OpenGL, SDL). While I had fun working on these projects, it really took a long time to see progress since they were all made from the ground up. Still more playable than SimCity Pong3D in action This brings me to modeling. Recently (3 days ago) I started playing around with Unity. I always liked Unity as an engine, but never realized how easy to use the SDK it is. Porting my models to the Source engine is part of what made me stop modeling for it. It's a real pain in the ass to just get the plain mesh into the game, let alone the textures. Unity does this really well. Amazingly well even; there's no need to compile anything, it just accepts .3ds files! I'm certain I'll be spending a lot of my time on toying around Unity now that I realized it's potential. It's a quick way to see your models, scripts and ideas come to live. I'm planning to start working on a game (read: something playable) the coming holidays. WIP of my "demo" map Last but not least: Sorry for the blog post. I'm not sure if anyone is really interested in my work, but I thought some of you might like to know what I'm up to nowadays. Snotteh, Quad_Tube, Ywa and 1 other 4 Link to comment
Mr. Darkness Posted May 28, 2013 Share Posted May 28, 2013 I want your duck models again, Mayco. Also nice one with Unity. Doesn't it actually bring lags if there are a lot of things to load? Link to comment
Mayco Posted May 28, 2013 Author Share Posted May 28, 2013 I want your duck models again, Mayco. Also nice one with Unity. Doesn't it actually bring lags if there are a lot of things to load? I still have to get a feel for the performance Unity delivers. The screenshot you see there doesn't contain a whole lot of (complex) models, but it does have a lot of normal maps. Normally I don't expect these to make a big performance impact, but I noticed the game has some FPS drops on my (mid-range) laptop while it runs really well on my (good, but not top-of-the-line) desktop. nice to see you active on the forum's again and how can i play that WIP game? Thanks! I'll release a demo of that WIP "game" as soon as I get done with it. The cabin needs to be furnished first, then I want to add some interesting interactivity (not even sure what exactly yet) and lastly I want to make the atmosphere as immersive as I can make it. Right now you can just walk around the cabin, switch your flashlight on/off and holster/unholster it, so it's not all too exciting. Also, before I release any kind of demo I'll need to get the licensing of the textures in order... Quad_Tube 1 Link to comment
Mayco Posted May 28, 2013 Author Share Posted May 28, 2013 I have some experience with player models (I once made a very simple ragdoll I used in GMod), but I don't think I have the modeling skills to make a proper playermodel that looks good and is textured properly. I'll also have to freshen up on how to rig the Valve skeleton to a model. Like I said, porting models to Source is a pretty lengthy process. I'm sure I'll get back to Source eventually but I'm not planning to do so any time soon. Quad_Tube 1 Link to comment
Mayco Posted June 3, 2013 Author Share Posted June 3, 2013 Small update. This is some of the progress I made over the last few days: Quad_Tube 1 Link to comment
Ywa Posted June 3, 2013 Share Posted June 3, 2013 Great to see what you're trying to achieve! Keep us updated. Link to comment
Clavus Posted June 3, 2013 Share Posted June 3, 2013 Nice work. Great to see more people dabbling in game design Link to comment
Mayco Posted July 13, 2013 Author Share Posted July 13, 2013 A bit late, but thanks guys! The last few days I've been working on a more complex model for use in a potential game. A Victorian house: Inspired by: As you can see, I only have the basic geometry down. Over the past few weeks I've unfortunately also discovered the downsides of Unity. It's a nice engine, but the free version only gets you so far. There's no support for plugins and there is no "render target"/"render texture" in the free version. The Pro version costs around $1500, which is much to steep for me (and pretty much any other beginning developer). I also have some trouble with scripting. It's pretty easy to do, but I'm used to Object-Oriented Programming (C#/C++). Scripting is in many ways not object oriented in the same aspect. For example, it's pretty difficult to give a certain amount of objects the same base functionality. It's also not very easy to create objects on-the-fly since all Unity objects have a lot of dependencies. That said, it's still a good engine/SDK and I'm pretty much stuck with it for now, so switching is not a viable option. Link to comment
Ywa Posted July 15, 2013 Share Posted July 15, 2013 So how're your UV mapping skills nowadays? Link to comment
Mayco Posted July 15, 2013 Author Share Posted July 15, 2013 They're quite alright actually. I'm not all that good at texturing itself though. Link to comment
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