> sure the textures are little mspaint like...
Guitly as charged. I've got some nice art tools, but I keep falling back to MSPaint.
> but it's really something to see this project i started 3
> years ago get a new look
What can I say? You make cool sig banners.
> Lighting is a factor, it needs to be dark but not too dark,
> I like the idea of glowing neon lifhts,
Aye, and its a resource that needs to be carefully managed since there is a limit to the number of lights a single scene can have. One idea for the level editor might be proximity lights. Imagine placing dozens of lights on a level, but only those closest to the player controlled camera get activated. Move beyond radius X and the lights get swapped out for invisible entities. You just then need to budget your lights so they're not too close together. Of course, we have to reserve a few for explosions and such.
> something syndicate wars didn't really have as it was all
> one colour lighting. i like the dark future theme, but with
> more of a fluro cyberpunk look. The film I'm doing will suit
> the cyberpunk look better.
Full bright textures/colors are cheap and do the trick most of the time. How garish did you mean? Tron-like bright or more like Blade Runner with everyone wearing rave lights? [Note to self need to think about animating textures or cycling them for low budget animation effects.]
> how much slowdown would a particleesque system work for fog
> control?
It would be brutal since you're talking about filling the 'back' of the camera frustum with particles. A zoomd out shot would probably drag the machine way down.
> And yes the kickback after being shot is good, dunno how
> good ragdoll will be on such small models,
Um, damned funny comes to mind. Ragdolls would only come into effect when something is killed so it would not be a constant load thing.
> unless they are fully detailed like the one supremacy made.
> But that is something else we need to look at, are we going
> for toned down models like in OIE, or full fledged models just
> smaller, and whom is going to model them
That's were we cross our fingers and hope EZ Actor will do the trick. I can actually, build character geometry with programs like Creature Creator Pro and DoGA, texturing and animating them is another story.
Depending on the level of detail that you want, the NPCs can be very simplistic. Torso, upper/lower arms, upper/lower legs will do quite nicely for the civilians, think marionettes for the level of detail I have in mind. Of course, I'd like to hear what Van B is thinking. One of the loose design ideas is the ability to be a first or third person shooter. If we keep that, we'll probably need higher detail characters with some LOD modelling. We might be able to take advantage of that proximity idea as well for character models.
--
TAZ
"Do you think it is wise to provoke him?" "It's what I do." -- Stargate SG-1
