Use of 0AD plants, scrubs, animals and buildings?

[poVoq]

Looks higher poly than it is... keep in mind this was made for a RTS originally. And yes, this is pretty much how it will look. Sadly it doesn't come with a bump-map or such, then it would look even better. But we could make ones in the long run and feed them back to the 0AD team also.

About the automation... I think if it is done civ set by set it is something that doesn't take all that long (unless the SumWars integration takes long)... so no need to try to automate it. Afterall it has to be done only once more or less.

[poVoq]

Ok, I have transferred about 90% of the relevant celtic buildings into .blend files ready for ORGE3D export.
It's quite amazing how all these different buildings basically only use one single texture (which comes in two versions, one with snow and one without).

Next I need to figure out how to get them into SumWars (which seems to be the hard part?).

Btw: There are actually some coastal buildings and a lot of nice looking ships that could be used as props... does SumWars have the ability to add water to the levels? Probably not, right (as it is all flat currently)?

I will probably also convert all the "nordic" vegetation from 0 A.D. so that together with the celtic civ set we have a nice "viking" themed set for SumWars.
However we really need some sort of terrain implementation, since without the nice blended ground textures from 0 A.D. everything will look really out of place on the green flat ground

[fusion44]

Hi poVoq!

I've made two videos showing how to export from Blender to Ogre and into sumwars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jcjz9iNHjI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fddNclbNkts

Look at the description of the first video for links to the exporter.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask

[poVoq]

Ahh, thanks! I had seen these a while ago I think, but couldn't remember where.

But in general I assume that the second part will no be necessary once we have a proper world editor?

[fusion44]

It will still be necessary since the world editor will not include it, least initially. I'm not sure at the moment how to go about this.
Ogitor is a pretty heavy dependency and someone who wants to contribute a model will be forced to use it then, which is not good.
On the other hand I want to avoid code duplication. Well, will see the editor is still a long way off.

[poVoq]

Hmm, but what good is a OGRE mesh without a way to integrate it in the game? I mean it's nice to be able to preview it in the game... but most likely anyone contributing a model will also open a world map and integrate it via a editor, right? Either that, or he/she will be happy to just hand an exported .mesh file over to someone who can integrate it.

But maybe I am getting this totally wrong

P.S.: Argg those overly complicated material settings from Blender... if you just want to add a alpha transparency diffuse texture as for most games it makes everything a pain to set up

[Trilby]

Hello poVoq

Would you be able to provide a repo or otherwise upload these converted meshes? I wouldn't mind trying my hand at integrating these for local build and see how they look. I've done a small amount of work with the xml files on the data side before. In lieu of an editor I have been motivated to look into integrating meshes manually.

[poVoq]

They have recently updated the walls... I will get those too, fix a few last things and then try to get them uploaded somewhere. Watch this spot, I will probably find the time to do it this sunday or the day after.

Edit: maybe by the end of the week... was busy with other stuff this weekend :-/