Duion

Imagine someone wants to grow his football club, but all he does is advertise to the target group of golf players, it is kind of obvious that this does not work well. But it gets worse after 8 years of appealing to golf players to become football players this person did not manage to recruit a single person, but still insists that some time in the future the golf players will convert to football players and continues to appeal to golf players, more than to his own target group, so much that he manages to make his already existing football members leave, since they are so pissed off, because all the club does is appeal to golf players, even though they have no business being in the football club. And of course I started out as a Torque3D user when I came to this community and if you are a user, you are automatically also a contributor in most cases, but if you are not a user to begin with, you hardly can be a contributor. The fact is, practices like that had zero success in the past 8 years or however long this community existed, so I have definitive proof that such behavior is completely useless in attracting new users and is even harmful. So you have no basis for negotiation, none at all, you are just insane and insist on being insane in the future. All I'm trying is to show you this reality.

How many more times do I have to explain that I did not do that? I also did not insult anyone, but in fact was victim of being insulted. I discussed the downsides of using Discord in a thread that I created for exactly that purpose. The only thing I said regarding other communities, is that I don't want to join a game development community, where nobody uses Torque and where probably also nobody develops any games, can't you see the logic in that? Why you try to appeal to people that never used Torque and never contributed to it? If the target group you try to appeal to does not exist here, there is nothing you can gain. PS: I applied as a mod multiple times now, because I was the only one finding the spam, but I was denied that every single time. PPS: You should rather setup an existing steering committee, so that you don't have to do everything on your own all the time, you are behind schedule for that task for like 4 years now.

I probably have to remind you once again that this CoC was created, because Jeff accused me of saying something negative, which I did not say. So the main reason we are in this situation is, because I was falsely accused of something and nobody cares to be nice to me, even though I did not behave bad in that situation, which makes everything already very hypocritical, since the main reason we have this CoC did not even exist. It all becomes even more hypocritical as those rules are basically never applied in cases of real bad behavior like insulting people, but are almost always used as a reason to censor people, which it is all about.

Well the lazy method is to press auto unwrap and bake the textures, done, may not look so nice, but it will be efficient and have good performance and will not teach people to do bad practices. The reason to have LOD textures is to have less textures and texture size on LOD levels, but you also increase the number of total textures in the game, which probably makes performance worse again, so it is a tradeoff. The default tree in Torque has that, it has 2x 1k textures for highest LOD and 1x 512x1024 I think for lower LOD, so it reduces draw calls by one. Additionally you can remove things like normal and specular maps for LOD levels. But I hardly ever have seen anyone doing that method, so maybe it is not so useful at all.

That is not an argument, some people probably are dirt and deserve to be treated like that, who are you to judge that and how is blackmailing people to "be nice" to others going to help anything, if there is any effect of that it will be to create more hate. PS: You did not even understand my argument, yes he only left the project temporarily, but my main point was not that, but the possible chain reaction of others leaving.

NEVER a problem? Did nobody notice the huge scandal when a CoC for Linux was introduced which resulted in Linus Torvalds leaving the project and several other Linux contributors threatening to revoke the licenses for their contributions, which could have resulted in the destruction of the Linux project in total and in the destruction of 90% or whatever of computing infrastructure, since most computers run some kind of Linux. So just recently a useless CoC almost destroyed most of the computing world, but you don't see a problem in that, if everyone just pretends to be nice to each other.

The textures are not broken, but you should not have 10x 2k or even 4k textures for one character, especially not duplicated. Makehuman is not made to export game ready characters, you eventually have to merge meshes, textures etc. I already put something together and therefore show how to make it right, but I did not release my character yet, since I was not fully done, I'm kind of a perfectionist there. Even the default assets roughly show you how it is done.

Do whatever you want, I'm just commenting what I think is wrong. I also don't think there is such thing as an inherent skillset, you can learn anything if you want to, given a certain amount of base intelligence, which I assume exists in most people here. The biggest time waster is probably, if you don't have a professional to tell you how things are done correctly, since then you spend much time doing the wrong things until you find the right way, while it would be much easier to do things right from the start. @Jason Campbell For example I used your shotgun model in Uebergame, since I wanted to save me time: https://opengameart.org/content/semi-auto-shotgun-with-magazine Later I figured out that the textures were all broken so I removed them and use plain colors and the mesh was not the best as well, that was in 2016 and now I see that you still do textures wrong. I could give you people countless other examples, where I thought I was clever to use some stuff someone already made, but in the end it turned out that it was broken in some way and I had to fix it leaving me with a not so optimal solution and not having saved me much time. It is not that your tutorial here in general is bad, indeed it is pretty good and helpful, but it really annoys me if I see bad practices and things that are not thought through over and over again.

I'm pretty certain making animations is easier than all what you are doing here, since I as a good artist was able to learn how to animate and fully animating my character in a few days, with no prior experience, but I was not able to transfer any animations to anything. Sure you can just rename all your bones and retarget and transfer anything so it will match some other already animated character, but as soon as you need even one custom animation, you have to do it your own and learn how to do it, which will almost certainly happen at some point, just saying.

@ Jason Campbell Yes, looks genius at first, but when you want to replace the weapons as well, you can throw away the animations or you need to build your weapons the same way the default Torque weapons are build. The best way may be to edit the animations and not edit everything else to match the animations. It is often so that if you try shortcuts and save yourself work, life invents ways to punish you. I had this happen to me many times now, where I thought "oh just reuse this or that, it will save you work" and in the end it turned out worse than if I had done all by myself the hard way. It depends what your end goal is, for prototypes it may be okay, but in the long run you may want to have better quality.

The main use of what you did will most likely be to port over animations to your character in the future, I tried that as well, but could not figure it out or was too lazy to rename and re-target all the bones and read all those tutorials, so for me it was less time consuming to just make my own animations instead of porting others over. Especially since the only ones compatible were those that came with the Torque3D demos anyway, all other animations may require adjustments. For example if you port over a motion capture walk animation, you have to make it seamless, meaning it has to be made symmetrical and looping and it has to fit exactly frame by frame, everything else will likely look wonky. Basically most FPS animations only consist of a few frames, that get interpolated between. Even my run animation is 22 frames, which roughly half are actual keyframes. Well it is not all a waste of time, to learn how to do those things is fine, the problem is you did it the wrong way, you made your character compatible with the demo character from Torque and its animations, but you should have rather made the demo animations compatible with your character, but this may be problematic, since of import issues that may occur, so I understand why you did it the other way around. I still would vote for removing the demo characters and force people to learn things from scratch, it will help people more in the long run. The demo characters are too complex to start learning with and missing source files and/or are only compatible with 3dsmax which only few people have.

I know people will call me negative again, but I would not bother recycling any of the default Soldier assets and rather start making new animations etc. While at first things look good, in detail you can see that everything looks a bit weird still and some weights are wrong. You should not adapt your workflow to someone elses assets, just to be able to recycle some animations. You are not that far away from making a fully functioning character all by yourself, all you need to do now is to spend a few days learning to animate. I could also send you my paintball player, he is compatible with makehuman default rig, you only have to figure out how to re-use and/or export animations only.

You are worrying too much, you should design the game first with placeholder assets, so you can test it out before you build it finally. Put some objects in that have the polycount and texture sizes that you aim for and see how it does.

You all think pretty complicated, I think in most of those Diablo style games, characters just run into each other. They are probably grid based so the player will just occupy the square right next to the NPC. If it is FPS movement, you only need a raycast to check if the NPC is in interaction distance, which already exists as a function. So player moves towards the NPC and when he is in range he can press a button to interact, there is no need to calculate anything else then.

If your "players" are mechs, you can just make them up to the maximum limit of ~65 000 vertices per model, mechs are bigger and more complex and make up a lot of your game visuals, so go as good as you can, for the distance you still have LOD levels anyway. At least I would make it that way and to optimize performance I would rather reduce the world around and remove some trees or so. Modern games sometimes use that high polycount models for closeup or cut-scenes, it depends how many of them will be in the scene at the same time and how much else will be going on in the game at that time.

I'm very bad at math as well, but I always try to find an out of the box solution or a workaround. In may game players just run into each other, which is not a problem, since they usually kill each other before and if they hit each other they get pushed away through the physics engine. I think the engine can already do what you need with the navMesh functionality, you only need to re-build the navmesh where the NPC is standing and the area the NPC is on will be cut out from the accessible area and therefore anyone trying to move onto the NPC position will stop before him, depending on the buffer radius you set to use in the navMesh. I have no idea how to re generate the navMesh at runtime, but I saw @Azaezel doing it in his game, so AI players do not run into each other. So maybe that solution will work, you can try it out manually first before implementing it fully, if the NPCs are static and do not move it is even simpler, then you can regularly exclude the area they are standing on out of the navMesh, so the player will always stop at an exact distance before it.

Yes vertex count is more relevant, polygons are just the traditional measurement, you could go really into nitpicking mode and argue how slanting edges are harder to compute than straight ones, but it becomes very relevant in collision. However I use the visible mesh for most static scene shapes, because there is hardly anything you can LOD there on the collisionmesh, a low detail collisionmesh is something for organic objects like player characters, like the default player in Torque is just a box. More helpful maybe would be a showcase thread where you post your models or scenes and others can say what could be optimized. To argue blindly without knowing what it is about is a bit complicated, but I can identify crappy art pretty much instantly, when I see it.

Yes drawcalls is more important, think of it as in painting, polygons is like complexity of the painting, but a drawcall is where you need to change the color of the brush. I heard of the myth, that 400 polygons are "free" due to the cost of one drawcall, so each model can have at least 400 polygons theoretically before it costs more. However my tests showed that less is always better, it is just not that relevant probably. What I do when developing is I only start to worry about optimizing my scene, when my fps count gets below 60 fps on max settings, I have a mid range gaming PC and this is what I target for, so that anyone with a halfway up to date PC can play it flawlessly on max settings, I also have options for really low settings that can make it run on almost any PC. A typical scene has around 3000 drawcalls and maybe 3 million polygons including shadows.

Well first it depends on the game, second with modern hardware it does not matter that much if your game is not that large scale, you can get away with lots of very poor optimization nowadays. To make it short: 10k is good for an FPS model, 15k is high quality, above is high end, 5k is kind of low end now probably and below it is more for stylistic intentional minimal stuff. To make it shorter I aim for 10k. The Torque soldier has 15k, but he also has lots of stuff on him like armor plats, holsters, grenades, pistol etc which adds a lot, so "naked" he would be around 10k. But a good artist often makes always high quality and reduces later depending on the need, upscaling on the other hand is not recommended in most cases, since it does not add much "real" additional detail.

To explain it really really short, you just dublicate the model and for one you just unwrap it onto one UV map, then you bake the textures of the original to your newly created one, pretty simple, once you found the right buttons. Regarding the LOD textures, I don't even know how you managed to get them in the first place, they are pointless and I consider LOD textures pointless in general for the most part. Yes sure as a tutorial how to re-use old animation this is great. I could not figure that out so far, but once you animated a character you will realize there are not that many animations you have to do, the most complex animation is the run and maybe reload cycle, most other animations just consist of a few poses and frames. If you are perfectionist I would not really recommend to re-use anything, since if you transfer animations from on character to another, you don't get exactly the same result, the only exception is, when they are designed to be compatible from the start. My point is, you may teach people bad design behavior, that is why I did not make tutorials so far, since I always think I may have done something totally wrong and I don't want to teach people wrong things.

@Jason Campbell You should get rid of all the individual textures, simplest method would be to bake them onto one UV map. Btw the textures are all doubled, one normal and one that is the same named _LOD at the end, it is completely pointless to have those. If you get that right as well the character is close to being gameready, so it is not that bad, my initial response was just, that this all looks very amateurish at first for an experienced artist. You use like 10-40 times more texture space than you would need to and you don't even have other layers than diffuse yet.

It is still in beta, I'm just following it, did not use it myself yet, otherwise I can only recommend you to stick with Blender, it is the best tool, sure it is complex and hard to learn, but in the long run you will get the best results, I use it even for level design. Regarding paid software I have no experience, I don't even think they are better, but they often come with libraries of pre-build stuff, that may help you speed up development. From experience I can say it took me 2 weeks to learn how to model a human character, unwrap it, texture it, rig it, animate it, create LOD, collision, set it up for the engine, create scripts and make it work flawlessly in the final game, I had prior experience in Blender, but not in character modeling, rigging, animating etc. Just to give you a rough time frame you can be expected to get the things done you want, it is a rough learning curve at first, but once you are done everything is much easier, so I can recommend just deal with it, use Blender and do it the old fashion way. You can use a model from Makehuman, Dust3D, a pre-made one or whatever as a base, so you don't have to create everything from scratch.

Try his: https://dust3d.org/

@XIXWYRMEXIX We had an IRC channel before and you can create a new IRC channel within minutes, for example Freenode offers free hosting for open source projects since like forever, which almost all open source projects also used since almost forever. An IRC channel was deliberately not created and even before deliberately not advertised anywhere, so it was not well known. It is also not about open source or political statements it is about complete ignorance, one person just decides "We do everything on discord now, screw everything that was before" without asking anyone and if you complain you are just told "fuck off". There is actually a long list of reasons why not to use discord and "open source" and "political statements" are at the very bottom of those lists for the most part. The whole business model is abusing it's customers and scamming them and the popularity was created through dubious methods like bribing youtubers etc to advertise it. But I already made many of the arguments, I'm tried of repeating them over and over, it would be much easier if you could read the arguments to begin with and make counter arguments based on that, but attacking me personally all the time does not get us anywhere. Here are some more reasons not do use Discord: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html I also updated the main post to include that link as well, since it is much more detailed than the first link I posted.

@XIXWYRMEXIX The tutorial about how to transfer weights and animations may indeed be helpful, but the rest is very suboptimal. I indeed have something so much better, I once made a full character from modeling, texturing, rigging, animating and integrating it in the game and making it work flawlessly in a released game. But I'm not decided yet how to handle player characters, there might be a way to handle everything easier. Telling everyone on everything how great it is, does not help anyone, only actual criticism will help people improve and real men can deal with that. The reason I posted was, that I remember that I still have a fully made character laying around that I did not pack for release yet, it is on my long to do list still and I regret not releasing it before so it can help people getting characters right.