New Farmer Faction

[softcoder]

This is a work in progress, we are learning Blender and Glest source code all at the same time! A few basic models of our new faction can be seen here:

http://www.soft-haus.com/glest

The xml configuration is quite fair when playing against the tech faction. We are fine tuning models and xml configuration as we go. I realize this type of faction may not be for everyone but definately fun to use and great the younger crowd!

Thanks

[-Archmage-]

hmm...very interesting me and my dad will want to try this

[Sir modman]

This looks very cool...please don't be like God's Dawn and go away without uploading!

[softcoder]

No worries, the faction WILL be uploaded for everyone to enjoy. We are working on our modelling skills (my son has quickly picked up on doing more accurate models and skeletal animations in blender). Not only will we post the faction, we will post the raw blender files for anyone else to modify as they desire. We believe in free software, and I appreciate the openness of the Glest.org project, you have some excellent talent here but also a community that is open, this is not often the case in open source projects, especially good ones like glest.

[titi]

Cool, looks like some kind of glest for kids!
If you want to create a more realistic look try to use photos snippets for the textures.
Base photos can be found (and uploaded) here:
http://www.burningwell.org   ( it's all public domain! )

[softcoder]

Ok here is our first official release (the boys have been hard at work learning blender and the glest map editor etc).

Farmer Faction is packaged as its own tech tree (with our own originally designed ants_nest faction as well) and is available for immediate download at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/tech_trees/V-Pack.7z

(we used 7zip instead of regular pkzip format as the download would have been 177MB instead of the 7z which worked out to be 51MB.

The original Blender files for the models are available at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/tech_trees/blender_farm_faction.7z

And a few good maps are available at this link:
http://soft-haus.com/glest/maps/maps.7z

All feedback would be appreciated, feel free to modify further and enjoy / share.

*UPDATED: The links should be fixed now.

[-Archmage-]

uh could you make sure that first link is linked right
cause i just loaded that page and it was just all these symbols

and about the tech tree you can insert that into a post so we don't have to download it

sorry for triple post but i have gone up a directtory and found that the links are all right it's just what they link to isn't exactly a download screen

[softcoder]

The files are all good... not sure if its my hosting provider (powweb.com) but this is the first time i FTP'd 7ZIP files.. if you right click on the links and select SaveAs it will download the files and you can decompress them. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why the links don't pop-up the browser download dialog.

[-Archmage-]

thank you
i suggest that you upload to mediafire or filefront and then post the download link from that

[-Archmage-]

wow this is pretty good
it's a bit humorous

[softcoder]

I have a support ticket open with my ISP (powweb.com) as they didn't seem to have .7z files added to their servers as binary file downloads! Hopefully will be fixed soon. Till then right click and select SaveAs.

[wciow]

I tested your faction. I think the idea of ants is great!

Unfortunately most of the ant models would benefit from a remodel. The basic ant model is 14,000 polys! 
Glest models should be closer to the 1400 polys.
This won't matter if your running a high powered gaming rig, but onboard graphics chips won't handle that many polys.
A few ants on-screen turned my game into a slideshow.

[titi]

(Update: while typing this,I saw that wciow wrote something similar, so please don't wonder ... )

My sons played a first little match now, and I looked what happens.

First of all, they all liked the background music and the 4 year old one was really happy to see a tractor and a truck in glest.
There are really lots of buildings and units in the farmers faction. We will have a lot of fun to fiend out al the details .
As I said we only played one little game yet ( but we saw lots of units! )

Problems I saw:
The games stucked often when we had some more units and I tried to find out why. I looked at the farmer model and it had more than 7000 vertices!
This is much too much and I think there are other units with similar problems too. Glest was made for low poly models. look at my scarab it has only 372 vertices. Its ok to use more vertices for something wich is not used very often in a game ( buildings for example ) but definitly not more then 1500 (maybe 2000).
Probably you can try fix this with the "reduce vertices" function in blender, but this often doesn't give very good results.
The hunting for low poly models is also the reason why good textures are so important. They often give you the illusion of very detailed structures/models also the real model used only very little vertices.
 
For the number of frames of animations, you should use something like 0-20 frames for often used animations.
But also for animations not used very often I think 50 frames should be the absolute max.
And glest calculates the missing frames. So if you have something that looks shoppy in blender, it might look ok in glest.
To reduce the number of frames in blender, simply select all points in the action editor( ctrl-a ) and scale the animation.

[softcoder]

Yes there will be lots of things to learn about models and real world application. Can anyone point us to any good tutorials or links that address the kind of finesse mentioned above? We have already seen some of the glest specific tutorials for blander but what we'll need now are tricks and good practise type info to minimize vetices / polys while still getting good detail.

Thanks

[-Archmage-]

the glest guide

the noob to pro tutorial

the blender site tutorial

[titi]

I didn't ever used/found a special guide for low poly modelling. I simply looked at the original models and then I tried my best....

- The original models are really low poly, but they look amazing detailed due to fantastic textures.
- Also good animations let the things look much more real.
- I'm not a really a good texture painter, so I tried to use photo snippets to create my textures with good results. ( but beware of copyrights when using photos! www.burningwell.org has no such problems! )

[wciow]

As Titi said the most important thing is actually the texture not the model itself. A good texture can go some way to make up for poor modeling, but even the best model can be ruined by a bad texture.

As with most things in life generally there is no 'secret' to modeling, practise makes perfect 

Basic tips for low poly modeling:

- check our current poly count often and try to work out how many polies each piece (arms,legs etc) of your model will be. Try to work out which pieces need the most detail and where you can save polies.

- the overall outline of your model is the most important thing avoid trying to adding details which are too small to be noticed. This applies alot to Glest which doesn't have sophisticated lighting, shaders or normal maps to make details stand out.

- make sure that you don't have any faces which are inside your model. Any face which cannot be seen shouldn't be there. In Glest any faces which will be sunk into the floor, such as the bottoms of buildings can be deleted.

- you can often fake complex objects by using planes, such as the trees in Glest.

[Omega]

Also, change the defaults. IE: a cylinder may have a default of 32 sides. This is huge. 6 will do. This makes 12 vertices. Remember that it is all in the texture, not the model.
http://glest.110mb.com/ (glest guide) has a modelling section, texturing, and a animation section. Seeing this has given me an idea for adding a 'Making your models low poly' section in the modeling.

[ebola]

the 2 most important thing about low poly modeling is the silhouette and front facing polygons. basically, use more polygons on the silhouette because they determine the shape of your model. and the second thing is use more polygons on the angles that gets the most viewing time (front facing polygons). if you know if some polygons will never be seen, like the inside of helmet or bottom of a tunic, delete or contract the polygons.

also, dont worry about the vertices count actually. glest doesnt use per vertex lighting methods, in which case the graphics card will only worry about polygons

[Omega]

I would hardly say those are the most important things, ebola. Titi's tip is the best. Sometimes clipping out those polys that are not seen may cause animation distortion and texture troubles.

It's often best to make things simply, thinking abstractly as you model.

-Tip of the Day: Never, ever subsurf for Glest models.

[ebola]

lol, okay.