MAGE GATE

Announcing MAGE GATE! I have decided to give another go at making my own RPG. The main reason for aborted past attempts has been the lack of programmer support. Since then I have teamed up with Ryan Dean who has agreed to help out with programming and Patrick Griffiths who will lend a hand with animations. (I can do the animation part myself, it's just one LESS thing that I will have to do myself)!

The game will be created using the venerable Realm Crafter Standard engine. Although it is pretty out-dated as is, Ryan has been creating a Community Edition with many features that will serve to bring the engine closer to 2011 such as normal mapping. Many of his planned feature expansions are things that I would require in my game so this is a turn key sort of venture.

I have a license for Garage Games T3d, and I also have some experience with Unity 3d and ShiVa -All superior to Realm Crafter. RCS however, has many RPG features all ready built in and is by far the most user friendly of the afore mentioned. My biggest complaint with it in the past was that development had stopped on it some time ago and it was left broken and incomplete. Ryan has already made huge progress towards fixing and finishing it.

The above shot is an in-game screen shot of the starter zone. While Ryan has already implemented Normal mapping, this shot does not use any normals. It was taken a day or two before Ryan released the update enabling those. For those not familiar with normal maps, they are a way of creating what appears to be 3d detail without geometry, using only texture. This allows real time rendering of detail that normally, would not be possible.

The premise of the game itself is fairly simple, all player characters are a mage of some kind. Spells are the law of the land. This is a fantasy noire genre and not for 13 and under. There will be NO elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblins, or trolls! Although dragons might make an appearance.

Mage classes will be interesting and a little on the dark side. Blood mages who slice themselves to hurl flaming blood at an opponent for an example. Golemancers forging inhuman servants from rock and metal. Contract mages who bind demons to their will for power, to mention but a few of the planned character classes.

Underlaying all will be a detailed custom crafting and custom spell creation system. The best items in the game be they weapons, armor, or even spells will be player created. Players will have to brave dangerous areas and defeat mighty foes to acquire resources needed to make items of power! All in preparation for fighting their way through the MAGE GATE and doing battle with whatever dark and sinister forces lay in wait on the other side!

Justhost.com a Comedy of Errors

Well my switch to JustHost.com as a new hosting solution has turned to a comedy of errors. Only to me it's not so funny.

They dropped the ball on switching over my name server, support has answered a question I didn't ask on at least 2 occasions, there have been a number of Errors with the site. One Ajax error prevented me from accessing my account. Two sequential errors that occurred when I attempted to place an online order for a dedicated IP lead me to conclude the order had not been placed. This was later confirmed by a customer service representative, and 3-4 days after the fact, they decided to attempt to manually charge my account without telling me that they were going ahead and placing the order. Then they sent me an invoice demanding payment within 7 days under the threat of service suspension, even though no dedicated IP was ever set up!

They offer extremely low monthly hosting rates, but then charge outrageous fees for services other hosts I have had have offered for free.

The Indian customer service representative was almost understandable, But I could understand about 1 out of 5 words that the oriental (Chinese?) Support rep spoke. How can a support representative assist you if you can't understand what the heck they are saying? What's the point of even having support at that point? It's like a Saturday Night Live Routine, only instead of Samurai Deli it's Samurai Customer Support - Where the customer calls in and the only English phrase the rep knows is "no Coke! Pepsi!"

Me: "Hi, I'm getting an Ajax error when I go to access my account"

Samurai CS Rep: "No Coke! Pepsi!"

And they are still trying to bill me for setting up a dedicated IP on a hosting account I cancelled!!! I would think providing a dedicated IP for a non existent service would prove a bit challenging! But no, the fine people at Just Host want my $19! And they are making it happen!

So this has been a complete disaster. I'm waiting to see what bungling antics they come up with next, because I am sure they aren't done yet.

At any rate... In all my years of having one web site or another hosted, JustHost.com has been the absolute worse!!! If someone is considering them and reads this, it is my hope that you take heed and spare yourself the headache!

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM!!!!

The upcoming virtual currency site virtapay, is sponsoring a cash promotion right now. If you click this link http://www.virtapay.com/r/indiecreative and sign up, I get $10 added to my account and you get $25 added to your account. The money can be used for downloadable purchases such as game assets and more.

The guys the referred me claim to have accrued $400 and $800 respectively, but they have been with the promotion for some time. Anyways, what have you got to lose but 3 minutes for the effort?

Give it a go!

-End Spam-

Spring Projects 2011

-Click to Enlarge-

Waiting for the domain transfer over to the new host so I can start rebuilding my website there. It shouldn't be too much longer.

Been putting in about 14 hours a day working on Tarl's World, Mage Gate, the upcoming Realm Crafter Standard Community Edition, and my online store assets.

Got some hax in place for RCS (realm Crafter Standard), I managed to create a work around for RCS's lack of alternate font support. That will be going in to the community edition as well as Mage Gate. I'll post a WIP shot showing the new font from Mage Gate above... (it doesn't want to go here without a fight).

What you are looking at here is a test zone with a stock RCS character and moon. As you can see from the text bubble, I managed to get a slightly modified Gemelii font working. it replaces the rather unattractive stock RCS font. I chose the Gemelii font because it has some personality, lends an organic feel to the character speaking, and it is not Comic Sans!

I've been donating an assortment of miscellaneous Mage Gate graphic and audio assets to the Realm Crafter Standard Community Edition being created by Ryan Dean, as I probably wouldn't attempt to produce Mage Gate at all without all the cool improvements that Ryan has been adding to the game engine.

I'm going to try to head outside today and do some audio recording to see if I can't improve some of the default sounds for RCS. Those will most likely get included in the Community Edition Release.

Regarding the RCSCE... I have no idea when Solstar intends to make RCS public or release the source code as promised. An official release of the community edition may hinge on that. The RCSCE developer Ryan, has told me that he is targeting next weekend to start Alpha testing. Yours truly has been selected as part of the limited alpha test team. I'm looking forward to seeing normal mapping in RCS, this is very exciting!

I hope to have indie graphics AKA www.indiegraphics.net back up and in full swing sometime next week. I am contemplating a name change to something more inclusive of game graphics AND audio assets that can currently be found int he indie graphics online asset store. But I don't want to let that cat out of the bag until I have it all set up.

That's news for another week!

Changing Host

indie graphics ( www.indiegraphics.net ) has up until now been hosted on GoDaddy. I have been wary of their marketing practices in the past because they try to up sell me or just plain sell me services I don't want or need, and they do that in such a way as to make you think they are required. Recently they lost my business permanently when they attempted to auto bill me $50 for a service I originally paid $12 for! I'm sure they have some clever terms of service or legal mumbo-jumbo somewhere that says they can annually auto bill your account for 5 times what a service is worth, but in my book that is basically attempted theft! No two ways about it! And who wants to do business with a company that indulges in those kind of underhanded marketing practices anyway? Not I!

Needless to say that I will be changing hosts, so folks visiting Indie Graphics for 3d game art assets, music, and game content might experience some warnings, errors, or interrupts in service. I apologize for this in advance and will get Indie Graphics back up and running smoothly on a new host as soon as possible!

Indiegraphics EPIC Game Tracks Promo

The Chronicles of Riddick

Yes, I'm, going to review it >:]

I rather enjoyed the movie, I found the art direction rather fresh. So when I saw The game on sale in Steam for $5, I figured what have I got to lose!

Well I now have an answer to that question... my 5 bucks! lol

What were Ken Finney's 4 "F"'s of good game design? Feasibility, Feedback, Fun, and Fair! And that's pretty much a list of what the game lacks. :o

I died about 6 times at the very start of the game because it took me a while to figure out you had to go back and talk to an NPC a second time, at which point he opens a secret hatch for you in the floor. Without that your character has 2 possible options, get blowed up in the mine field or charge the mini guns in the wall at either side of the main door. That was neither fun nor fair.

Missions in general are vague, and you have to hunt around for newly opened zones or subtle flashes that indicate a particular object is now interactable. In one instance, you must climb down a ladder to progress. The ladder is not visible unless you are practically on top of it.

Melee combat is OK. Workable blocks and attacks. What I don't like about it is that the actions your character takes seem to be based on timing and response to what your opponent is doing rather than on what you want to do.

Ranged combat is nerfed down to the point where you may as well be trying to kill each other with paint guns. And that is a good thing too because you are often facing several opponents. Unfortunately, your movement becomes impaired for some reason once you start taking hits, so doing a Mass Effect tactic of retreating behind cover usually doesn't work. Instead you stand there like an ass and get shot until you die, doing your best to take everything out before that happens.

So far about the most satisfying aspect of the game that I found is sneaking up behind an opponent and snapping their neck, and that fact in of itself is a little unsettling. Sometimes it is about all there is to do while you try and figure out what you are supposed to do next. "OK... I killed everything, now what"?

I don't care for the approach to the game art either. Normal mapping is relied upon WAY too much and used at such small resolutions that it looks like aluminum foil pressed over pixel blocks. (See below)

This appears to be yet another example of Deep Media crap - A hastily thrown together game using only mechanics that have been thoroughly vetted. It lacks imagination and creativity which runs contrary to the actual movie it is supposed to be supporting.

Oh.. and did I mention the 10 gig of disk space needed?

I want my $5 back!

Content Submitted to Unity

I decided to upload my 3d Dagger Pack to Unity's new online store today. After all, It should be simple right?

No such luck! I ended up loading each dagger in the pack twice into Light wave to take various required screen shots. I had to compose 4 additional composite images, and all of the above had to have RGB + an alpha layer. I was also having a bit of trouble using OBJ, so I ended up re-exporting the entire pack in FBX.

Once all that was done, I had to manually import each 3d object into Unity, assign textures, and configure it. I didn't like the way one looked, so I had to load that back into ZBrush and create normal maps for it.

Then there was also the time required to learn unity enough to get all this done and figure out how to use their asset tool.

All of which took 8 uninterrupted hours!

I hope it sells well ^ ^