[Nils]

A Christian 3d adventure in development

The plan was to start in March with the further development of this project after a long pause. When finally all was ready to go, the Covid-thing started here in China (February) While taking care of the family and chronic illness was there barely any time to do work, sometimes here and there a little. Now almost everything is getting back to normal (a new normal that is) I'm looking forward to spend some full-time months on this. After a year it's still in the starting phase, but not to worry; there are no strict deadlines... The engine is already much outdated, a few more months really doesn't matter.

The aim is to target old hardware; it's being developed on a 6 year old low-end game PC and will be satisfied if it keeps running with a 30+ fps at 1080p. Realism is not a goal, but just looking decent enough is something try to spend some time with.

Hopefully, when I'm managing to get some help on the coding side, some upgrades can be made in the near future. The current engine branched of from 3.6 and many changes have been made. Porting to 3.10 or 4.0 is a big step, but will see how it goes; in the meantime you can enjoy the D3D9 renders below

Please remember that everything is in a early stage of development, and all may be subject to changes; nothing is fixed yet !

























Previous blogs:
June 2019 viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1654
November 2019 viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1678
and viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1704

Work in progress, unfinished work, not final yet, will change in the near future, not everything is done yet !

[Nils]

In this video you see the quality settings function being implemented, though the actual settings are far from done.

Watch it on YouTube (FullHD1080p): https://youtu.be/f2f2upfmvHg

[Nils]

Sounds are also a work in progress

Watch it on YouTube (FullHD1080p): https://youtu.be/Yl1kqdjByv0

[Duion]

Looks very realistic and finished to me, hard to tell if there is something you still can improve, definitely one of the best graphics ever made with Torque.

The only thing I wonder is, if you made all the models yourself, since there are quite a lot of different scene objects, even buildings with interiors.

[Nils]

Thanks @ Duion. It's nothing comparable with the current standards though. But I'm really not aiming towards that. I'm happy with balanced scenes where it all matches together.

I hardly buy assets. There are some I bought a while back like the vehicle (Lada) and the rowing boat for example; but the conversion to a decent working and T3D asset (texturing, LOD's etc.) takes so much time that the consideration to buy something often leads to not doing it or not using it. The latest 3d model I bought is a blue whale on TurboSquid. To model something like that animated and all would take me ages. All buildings and structures are done in-house, as about 90% of the props.

This is the latest building I'm working on, need to finish the tower and texturing.



The switch from Max to Blender takes so much time (sigh)

[Duion]

In art there is no such thing as "current" standards, either something looks aesthetic or not.

Sure today things have more polygons, higher resolution textures etc, but this all does not help you much, when you don't have the skills to assemble them in a realistic way.

I see it in a lot of "popular" games where the "artists" basically do almost everything wrong you can do wrong in their level design. Sure they have a lot of high quality standard assets, since they buy them, but then they just take them and randomly place them on the terrain, making no distinction between biomes or context. They have a meadow, then place some trees on it, some houses, some rocks, some roads and call it done, never considering that trees grow in forests and houses are in the city and rocks are in the mountains.

Regarding assets, I also found that I had to make almost everything myself, since the mere process of converting and fixing them for my purpose is almost as much work as doing them myself from the beginning. But some assets like the car for example I would never bother to make just to have one of it as a scene prop.