New Siege University 2 Article: Tuning Grids
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| Submitted by Sharkull on Wed, 2006-03-08 23:09 | ||
GPG's own heroTop has posted the new Siege University article that was hinted at previously. Here's a quick snippet of the Overview: Quote: During the development of DS2, the "tuning grid" system was created to allow monster to be dynamically generated as nodes streamed into the frustum. This tuning system is composed of a series of weighted blocks created in Siege Editor on a region by region basis. The system takes a list of templates generated by the developer and assigns properties to each creature and their blocks. By doing this a developer is able to create a dynamic combat experience that changes each time a party runs through the region but appears random and is correctly balanced. Read the full "210: Tuning Grids" article here: http://garage.gaspowered.com/?q=node/3389 forums: |
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:yahoo:
:dance2:
I expect that I'm not alone in thinking that this will help the map development process of many would-be story tellers / adventure creators. ^_^
Very nifty, that.
You are not sharkull, but I'm afraid we lost the mod base and the new modders quit so fast. The tuning info helps me out a ton, but I doubt it will help much. A strong download place would help. We still need to get FX info from gpg. I helped fight for the tuning stuff. It takes more than one as we got results when I linked them to our thread. I have asked for more and got ignored such as shader info. I cannot even get it confirmed that it is HLSL /sigh . I asked for an optimized ds2mod but was told their internal engineers were too busy. I was told they have top priorities atm. The only way we can fight for this stuff is together. Ecc fought and got us dlls and not sure what else. He was on the right track. There were demands for it at the time as well (others helping this fight)
Some things we will have to fight for are(we shouldn't have to fight for this but we do):
Missing textures (this is annoying me very much atm lol as green_grass01 has many missing textures)
FX info
artpacks
Patch
Edit: This will not be easy since, gpg is busy and our community is dorment
Edit: Nm that texture set it doesn't even support any ruins. Gonna have to use another one.
If I has three requests for GPG they'd be:
1. A stable and easy distribution model for mods (meaning easy from the player perspective...).
2. Another patch (mainly bug fixes, but hopefully including a solution for #1 too).
3. Artpacks (not for me, but for modellers...).
...that being said, I think we should always show gratitude when GPG does give us stuff (like the new SU2 document)... otherwise a door will close.
oi, sharkull and the 3 you mentioned are not possible atm. Only thing I think we could win atm is FX info.
Make that artpacks -or- an importer.
I'd actually prefer the latter, as the artpacks didn't cover the whole range of characters, as I always wanted to re-use a piece of one that was not in an artpack. The old Lance Importers that were done for DS1 still have some use for bringing in the meshes (I made a number of updates that let them handle the newer file formats - such as DS2 ), but they tend to fail on the bones and skin weighting. I still use them for a lot of work n DS2, as I'm usually building a new mesh out of body parts :twisted: , and need to re-bone and re-skin anyway.
Where a complete, working importer would really help is for ceration of new animations. You need an accurate, boned and weighted model to create a new .PRS file, so I can't currently add new animations for existing characters. I'm avoiding the problem by using my own meshes, but it would be nice to be able to do both.
Gpg wouldn't give us an importer. That requires them to reverse engineer
. I think after the xpack is released we should demand artpacks. Somewhat soon I am going to post about info on siegeFX .
you'll be lucky to get that info - GPG or 2K aren't likely to hand you their franchise on a plate..
I have discovered by playing with the Animation Viewer, that the skeletons for the old playable characters were carried over, so the DS1 artpacks can be used as a basis for updates to the DS2 playables.
You can build a new mesh on the DS1 skeletons and use the DS2 animations, or vice versa, build new animations for the DS2 playables (and probably NPC's, where they use the same bones).
The tricky stuff will be new boots and gauntlets, as there's no details of the stitching for those. Apparently "Ornaments" work like helmets/boots/gloves, except that there is nothing to remove from the mesh.
The old ds1 character models use skin mesh, but the ds2 models ones use physique. I don't think we can animate the old fgs rig for the new characters
.
New animations just need to establish bone rotations and don't adjust the bone/skin interaction, so an "old-style" PRS file should work OK with the new ASP. I've done new animations for the farmgirl and they seem to work OK for the Dryad/elf/human females in DS2.
Cool, I thought they needed the skin mesh or physique to animate properly. That is some good news.