Topics

1

General / New web Page

« on: July 06, 2014, 06:40:21 PM »

Hello boy here you can see how the new version of our land page is looking: http://ngr.sumwars.org/wordpress/
It's a work in progress

2

Graphics / Website Redesign

« on: March 23, 2014, 08:09:30 PM »

Hello, i wanted to share the progress in our website.


I want to showcase the game as good as if we were selling it
What i'm in need is writting


What are the best things our game has?, features, cool stuff about the game or the story, etc.s
So please, let's brainstorm about this.


And better if you post your thoughts here in our redmine: http://85.25.66.224/issues/32


Click to enlarge:

3

Graphics / [UI] New mocks + sources

« on: May 19, 2012, 10:32:27 PM »

What the title says. Easy piece.

http://imgur.com/a/bkWRU#irNRH

This delivery comes with new buttons and concept.
Not very originals but easy to reproduce, extend and customize.

It's a simple inkscape svg file, so it can be customized by just editing the gradients, in the gradients palette.

The first image is the result when you press the exit button.
It has a title, a description of what's going to happen, and options.
Just that. the new element is the focus status, which is a nice to have feature.
in that screenshot the button 'no' is focused, (so when enter key is pressed that option will be activated)

The second one is a humble tooltip showing the name of the npc and the remaining life. A good addition would be a 'friendly target' indicator.
So the idea is to be simpler as hell but clear.

4

Graphics / [UI] Halt the system.

« on: May 19, 2012, 10:01:14 PM »

I've been thinking about our UI development, i've noticed that in the time that i've paused my contributions to the project, it received some nice and important contributions.
And they all work just fine. But somehow they don't fit quite right, call it "streched windows", "bigger buttons", "missuse of checkboxes", "odd questions", "unanswered doubts".

I was wondering, why does that happened, i've seen that even i've made stuffs that don't really fit with my previous designs (aka BELT, in relationship with inventory/character sheet).

So, if even I have made mistakes why some non-designer wouldn't? How can we fix that?
And i've realized the obvious, we need rules, a guide, instructions of how to do it, and how we shouldn't.

Our current gui development needs some construction & design rules / goals.
While i'm not assuming a mandatory possition, i'm proposing, to the acceptance and discussion of every member, a way to develop our UI system.

What does it means?
It means that from now we will adopt a way to write, dispose elements,  and design new ones.
From new widgets(eg: buttons), to new dialogs(eg: Enchanting system).

Why does it worth the try?
Because, if we stick to it, it will make the process distributable, and non dependant on one person to achieve a consistent / coherent system ('unified').
Or at least will reduce the possibility of error.

Let's go physical (mmm yeah)
The warehouse will be the wiki, of course.
The idea is to write some text holding the rules, with examples in images, if possible.
An important thing is that i don't propose a guide for every possible situation, that would be nonsense.
Its more like, "we got this, so next thing with similar stuff should be like this, or like this other".

What do you think, does it worth the try?
If something is not clear, please let me know.

Since i'm the first one to roll the dishes i'll start making some basics rules like, sizes and colors.

5

Graphics / Crafting the UI (WIP)

« on: December 07, 2011, 11:40:15 PM »

I'm going to take this place to post the progress I made over our current UI, I will avoid stuff related to look & feel and focus on the behaviour of it.
As always your comments are appreciated and required, just take your time to write.


First of all:
Remove the screen that appears after the game is loaded
Is already displayed in the loading screen, and there is no need to display it again.

The main menu



The actual main menu is pretty consistent with what I am proposing here, just a few differences to improve it.

The changes:

The mesh is displayed at the centre of the screen, and closer.

Host and Join grouped into one menu (multiplayer)

To delete a hero you must select him first, to avoid accidental clicks errors.

Also, if you delete him, the alert message should be:


Create a hero



The main difference is the new panel to show a resume of the hero story (*Bio*), talking about his past, his abilities, his reason to fight, etc. This panel could be mixed with the *creation* panel.

Also i switched the list selector by this *kind of slider* which force the user to pass trough all the options. The reason to switch is to "encourage" the user to discover all the possible options before to chose a hero.

Also as a nice feature would be awesome if these heroes have animations and are placed into the nice scene that Stefan has madden.

The multi-player screen:



It consist intwo dialogues grouped in a screen. You can switch between them by selecting any area of them (the title, the frame, the inputs, etc).

As you may notice, I focus on keep the user informed about where he is, that's why the highlights.

This concept is temporary, I'm looking forward to know further the version that trapdoor is planning.

what happened with the credits dude?
I don't know, i'm figuring a way to display them nicely, they could be displayed while the game is loaded, or in short part like while loading a map you can display at the cookie of fortunes way: "hey do  you know that Kalimgard has written the story of this game? Go to sumwars.org/credits and discover who made this game".

Something like that, ideas are appreciated.

That's all for today (December 07, 2011)


The mini-map

Hi folks, here I'm uploading another design.
In this case the mini-map.

The idea behind it that points of interest will be marked in the map, and it will act like a compass (more like a gps) guiding the player to where he needs to go, it could be gradually implemented.

The idea is that those bubbles orbit around the mini-map pointing to the direction the player must go to find them.
When he is near the target the bubble disappear and the icon is showed in the mini-map.

I think it's pretty much explained in the sketch, but if you have any question feel free to ask.



New features? good points? bad points?
I think  I don't have to remind you that your criticizes are very welcome.
And I've uploaded the svg source, so, if anyone wants to contribute with a modification just go ahead.
That's all for today! (December 20, 2011)

6

Graphics / Animations of the warrior

« on: October 05, 2011, 01:05:25 AM »

Haha, i called him Jared.
Well, here are the firsts animations that looks near to decent.
A picture with all his polys (around 1200-1300 quads)


I liked this picture.


Here, some videos:
Die side view
Die top view
Run side view
Run front view
Breathing

Also i'm uploading the blend at current state. Under CC-By-SA license.
Link to rar file
---

Here is a improved version of the run cycle:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/19383651/jared0001-0220.avi
It have weight on the arms (because of the weapons and shield)
I hope you like.

7

General / The wiki

« on: July 13, 2011, 10:59:55 PM »

Hi friends, i would like to have a wiki like this one: http://wiki.spiralknights.com/Main_Page

I like how they handle the Equipment Encyclopedia section and Clockworks Handbook.

Very intuitive, organized. =) This kind of organization and content is okey?

8

Off-Topic / Engines and other stuff

« on: July 11, 2011, 10:50:59 PM »

Hi guys.. I will post here some things that looks good at first impression related to engines and game development

The first one is Maratis: A game development tool kit... which claims to be supported by windows, mac, iphone and "virtually executed in other systems"(I don't know that it means).

http://www.maratis3d.org/

Ardor: in their words is "a professionally oriented, open source, Java based 3D engine".

http://ardor3d.com/

9

General Discussion / Random thoughts, feature request

« on: July 11, 2011, 10:37:00 PM »

Hi my friends, I'm writing this to share what i would like to see here, in our game and our community.

I would like to see:
Concept art for characters and scenarios, before we move on on new adventures. Complicated, yes, but necessaries if we want to have a polished  final art.

Maps madded by hand, in this way we could have maps more organized, stylized and we can control how the gaming  will be. I suggest it not to replace the random generated maps, instead of that they will get complemented. And could polish the gameplay in relationship with the story. Maybe we could have random generated dungeon.

I would like to have a new front page more accessible, without iframes, and bug on the forum like some users cannot login sometimes.

And a place... where we enlist what we need. In that way people can contribute. Would be better if we have detailed tasks, in that way is more easy to know what to do, at least for graphic contributions...

Well that's all for now, share your thoughts too guys.

10

Graphics / Doub about features

« on: May 25, 2011, 04:05:45 PM »

our engine supports normal and diffuse map textures for the 3d characters?

11

Graphics / the belt

« on: April 23, 2011, 09:08:43 PM »

hi guys, i started the sketch of the belt.
Basic arrangement of the elements.
The colors and "style" will be decided later.

I purpose to change some shorcuts.
I want the swap spell by pressing "tab key " function.
In this way you can have 3 spells working at the same time.
And that the "chat" function could be activated pressing "Intro" instead of M...

And the M could be the Map

And i want a counter to know how many potions remains.

12

Programming / Addon for ogre

« on: April 02, 2011, 02:16:17 PM »

Hi folks, googling i found this, maybe useful, i don't know,

What is PagedGeometry?
The PagedGeometry engine is an add-on to Ogre which provides highly optimized methods for rendering massive amounts of small meshes, covering a possibly infinite area. This is especially well suited for dense forests and outdoor scenes, with millions of trees, bushes, grass, rocks, etc., etc.

Paged geometry gives you many advantages over plain entities, the main one being speed: With proper usage of detail levels, outdoor scenes managed by PagedGeometry can be >100x faster than plain entities. Another advantage is that the geometry is paged; in other words, only entities which are immediately needed (to be displayed) are loaded. This allows you to expand the boundaries of your virtual world almost infinitely (only limited by floating point precision), providing the player with a more realistically scaled game area.

13

Bug Reports / Gui issue with widescreen

« on: March 28, 2011, 04:25:33 PM »

Hi guys, i was testing the behavior of the ui in different screen sizes.
This is what i found, the game looks good, but the ui get streched.

14

Graphics / Inventory

« on: March 27, 2011, 05:08:26 AM »

some bigger changes in the color, more brown and red, calid colors, related to blood, earth, dirt. Some golden details.
Still needing some phantom images, but with the organization i like this arrangement. The character will be the 3d rendered, not this flat 2d.
But i think that the 3d render should have a good fighting pose.

15

Graphics / free ccby 3d texture stuff

« on: March 23, 2011, 04:47:08 PM »

Hi guys, i'v seen the gallery of this guy, all his shared content is ccby
Take a look =)
http://nobiax.deviantart.com/gallery/24853853