Thanks Kartoffel

small update:

I really like your work eXile. Amazing textures, they really fit well together. I always have the problem, that the different textures of my models don't fit pretty well.

Cheers
Dekurian

rvL_eXile, I know you quite from you start with gamestudio if I remember correctly. You always got better and better over time, but the progress you made in the last few month is awesome. I'm jealous.

And a small update of my project, since I had a little time I made quite some progress.

I reworked the texture for the cliffs. I just hand-painted it, but to be honest, I didn't take my time to fit it well, i just placed it there. like i said, it's a testmap anyway ^^.

I'm finally able to place my heroes on the battlefield and made an animated panel for showing their stats and stuff, which also shows the stats of the enemies when the cursor is placed on their position.

So here it is



I hope you'll like it.

Cheers
Roxas

That's a great map !
The hand painted textures are good alreday.

The 2D character face is great, is it ripped from some game ?
or from RPG Maker ? or did you did it ?

I hope you'll show us some 3D characters next

Thank You ratchet!

well ^^ I just started to create hand-painted textures, but I draw a lot of stuff.
The face is made by me as well.




This is the Faceart in full size. It's a couple of month old though. Don't know if i'll use it for the project ^^. added it just for for testing the interface.

Thanks for your reply ^^ and I think I'll have a lot of stuff going down the road on the programming side before I actually start to make 3D models. But I think I'll start drawing some concept arts very soon.

EDIT:
Don't be confused by the "(C) Dekurian". Dekurian is my main-nickname. But because of the fact that I love Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy I used "Roxas" here, because everywhere else that name is often already taken.

Cheers
Roxas

fewww :
Your 2D art is very pro, nevre thought you could do such well done 2D work.
The shadows on it are great.

That's perfect 2D for some narrative dialog above the tactic combat grid , or for some panel character showing stats, orbs equipment.

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I would like to know how works your levels ?
It is made freely by hand , or using assembled 3D tiles ?
Is the white grid made on top of a free made Level or made above some 3D cube tiles ?

Your grasstexture seems bigger , perhaps tilling, but not necessary aligned to cubes, but tilling along the whole level ?
Or am i wrong ? it is 3D tiles with grass tile on it ?

What editor do you use ?

Thank you .
I think I have to practice first, before I'm able to create such drawings again. Didn't make any for months now.. I was just too busy with a couple of other things.

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Well actually the Map itself is one single MED file. Since it's Tactics-Game I don't need any real physics or collision.

So I started to make up a plane in MED. Each square is 32x32 units, 2 polygons. After that I just extruded the hills and cliffs out of the plane.
Finally i made some simple touch ups by deforming some tiles so that it'll look more natural. I think maybe for the real maps I'll even add more polygons just to get more detail.

I also applied the skin in MED.

For painting the textures I use Photoshop CS2. It's a pretty old version, but I like to work with it.

The grass-texture is not tiled. It's just one big texture. It's 1024x1024. For more detailed levels I'll create tile-textures I think because such big textures need a lot of memory.
But the big texture has a benefit, what's hard to achieve with tile-textures: it's pretty detailed and looks very natural.

The cliff-texture is a handpainted 512x512 texture which can be tiled.
The gradient-texture around the level is just a gradient effect, 64x64.

the grid is just a 32x32 sprite.. and for each tile I create one sprite. Not very effective tough, uses up a lot of memory and entites. I think sooner or later I'll change this. But I don't have a good idea up until now.

aaand that's everything i suppose. ^^ nothing really tricky, no shaders involved.

Cheers
Roxas

i htink you'll gain lot of power using 3D lines drawing instead of sprites ?
One trick can be to toggle on/off the grid also to gain some power?
for example only show the cubes where the player can go.

Even your texture of 1024*1024 can fit and be good like that, specially if it was for some mobile game.

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I've played DrakenSang Online :
They use 3D Tiles , they can put two or more layers of them in height.
And for texturing it seems they have some system that paint multitexture in top of all 3D Tiles, so this is not a simple texture per tile, but like some big multi texture paint for the level made of tiles ?
But i'm not sure.

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What will matter will be your characters, their attacks and special effects and all your 2D art, customizable things (characters equipment, powers etc ...)
The level is already good.

Will you make Final Fantasy tactics combat style : zoom on the map, or Fire Emblem like : 3D cinematic fight ?

The grid itself can be toggled already, and for the moment I don't got any frame problems^^. It runs smoothly on 190 FPS, so I think there's no optimization needed at the moment.

I just think about adding more polygons, more detail like trees, blades of sprite-grass , bigger maps and as you mentioned above, special effects for magic and the likes. This map is just for testing, but also for testing my abilities and how I'll create the maps in the end. But I think some of your suggestions might be helpful for optimization.

For now I'll focus on the code. Up until now I think it's pretty dynamic and well structured. But I optimize a lot, too.

And for the battles, I think the battles will just be Tactics/Disgaea styled. so I think I'll just zoom in on the map, and the battles will take place on the battlefield. So there will be no extra battle screen or something like this. At the end, this project must be bearable by me, since I'm (almost) working alone, so I'll just focus on basic elements right now.

Don't get me wrong, your ideas and suggestions are welcome but a roleplaying game is quite a lot of work ^^ and I stopped working on several projects because it was just too much for one person. For this reason I restrain myself from adding to much features and things.

Cheers
Roxas