Train Platform

Not much explaining needed here, I'm now making a platform for passengers to get on the trains. This is just the basic layout, not the final model. The steps are too big and are floating in mid air atm. The inside is also empty!

 

 

Always improving!

Today I've spent a lot of time working on my railway. I'm still yet to do a corner piece, but I have the bridges and the tracks created and the work together seamlessly. Texturing is going to be a bit of a pain and instead of relying on normal maps as much I worked a bit of the detail into it at the polygon level. The poly count is 300 for the tracks and 2100 for the bridge which is more then I wanted. I was hoping to keep the overall thing to about 1000-1500 polygons, but I risked adding detail in at the expensive of speed.

For texturing I think I might just add a dirty metal texture to the track and bridge and for the concrete structures holding it up, I'll probably add some detail in there. I might split the bridge up into 3 sets of UV's, one for the bridge, one for the concrete and one for the shadow map in UT3. The tracks I'll use 2.

Railways, Railways, Everywhere!

To fit in with the victorian steampunk feel, I'm going to add a LOT of railways throughout my city. I want these on multiple levels going from ground level all the way to the top of buildings. If I can get the lighting working correctly I think it'll add a nice shadow effect on the player below (even at night time there's lights from fires etc)

This is what I've got so far, I still need to make corners and tracks for ground levels.

Artus!

I tend to find that once a project has a name you can start to give it more personality. With this is mind, I decided to call my game 'Artus', which in Latin means Limbo (or so the translator said). I wanted a one word title which would sound catchy like google and other big companies do. I'll get out the url http://www.project-artus.com when I get my next loan through so I can have a portal for my work.

Anyway, I made a title page as well:

Are you speaking Latin or something, because I can't understand a word your saying

I've been going back to the drawing board on my game with a few aspects including how the levels set out, how it starts etc. After watching Dogma and Angels and Demons, I thought about having a few tie-ins with religion in my game. I thought that the mineral could become a sort of Idol which people worship, not physically but mentally, and that's one of the big sins in Christianity.
I decided to call the game, and the city, Artus, which in Latin means Limbo.

In Roman Catholic theology, Limbo (Latin limbus, edge or boundary, referring to the "edge" of Hell) is an idea about the afterlife condition of those who die in original sin without being assigned to the Hell of the damned. Limbo is not an official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church or any other. Medieval theologians described the underworld ("hell", "hades", "infernum") as divided into four distinct parts: hell of the damned (which some call gehenna), purgatory, limbo of the fathers, and limbo of infants.

I thought this idea fits in pretty well with my game, people have come to rely on this mineral to keep them alive and keep them healthy, and god has now decided to purge the planet, like when he got Noah to build an Ark so he could purge the world then.

I'll write the players back story I've got a bit later on when I've refined it, but basically you are part of the most elite and dangerous team in the world. You were tasked with guarding the company (now called Eve Industries) when they discovered the mineral. You were given large amounts of uncut mineral giving you a lot of strength and amazing healing powers as well as the usual excess amount of energy and longevity.
As all hell broke out, you we're tasked with protecting the Capital city, which is more of a industrial city more then anything, tasked with cutting and mining minerals. Everyone who lives here has something to do with mineral production. After a few years, once the majority of people on the Earth had died, your task was to venture out and kill any remaining stragglers who could pose a threat. As well as this you were ordered to bring back any minerals you could find and and important information that 'Eve Industries' would find useful.
In your last mission, you were tasked with going to the neighbouring city to do a task (rescue someone, kill some people, gather some mineral, not sure yet), on the way back you were ambushed and knocked unconscious. When you come back around you have amnesia and you can't remember who you are.
While you are gone, the city went into Revolt, the doors where opened and mutants had got into the city, civilians were fighting against the company, everyone was fighting for their own life. The first thing you see is the capital city and you have the choice of going against the company or going against the civilians.

3 point turn

I wasn't happy with the look again, the wall texture just wasn't what I was looking for, so I went back and found a new texture after looking at some more Victorian houses. The result I've got now fits what I want pretty much perfectly, although I would of liked some more shine on the windows and on the metal parts.

I had a bit of a problem with the textures not meeting up in the middle, although in the diffuse map they did perfectly. I had 2 UV's so I could add a shadow map, but I hadn't un-checked bOverrideLightMapResolution, so it wasn't giving me the right results. Once I had fixed that, the textures met up in the middle how I wanted (pretty much). All in all, I'm happy with the end result. My next problem is trying to get the rest of the walls unwrapped and making the textures meet etc. This may take longer then I had originally anticipated.

95% complete!!!!!

Wouldn't mind re-doing the normal map, and changing the specular so it looks less like plastic...oh and I need to realign the diffuse map so they don't have a seam in the middle, but apart from that, the first part is done!





oh, and the bottom of the arch/pillar looks a bit shiny/unfinished. Might add a bit of grime to it

Textuing finished

OK, Pretty much completed my first modular wall, texturing isn't 100% as good as I would have liked, but it'll do. For some reason, my evaluation license on Crazybump has been extended for 17,000 days...I'm not gonna ask questions, saved me 30 odd quid!

Anyway, I need to complete a specular map, redo my normal map without the overlaying textures and then create another uv map so I can have shadow maps in UT3 as currently some of the UV's are overlapping.

On to Texturing....

I really don't like texturing....Unwrapping and then finding the right images/textures, then editing them to fit in with what you want is slow and tedious, and I'm not brilliant at it. I find it's a bottleneck in my work, but some of the results are good.

This is how far I've got so far, I don't like the top half and will change it, the lower half I'm not sure with just yet. I'm not sure it seems steampunky enough, I always envisioned more shiny metal with glowing bits, so I might go back to the drawing board, or drawing pad in my case, and have a little think.

Onto the fun UV unwrapping....not

Finished my building which is made out of modular pieces so it can easily be interchangeable. Thinking of making a few that look ruined as well so I can add a bit of destruction/variety into the scene. I had a look in game to see what the size and impact of it looked like, and although it had no UV unwrapping, so it looked like a retarded mess, the overall size of the structure seems fine....except the door, the handles just above Marcus's head.

I reckon it'll take me a couple of days to unwrap and texture everything here (4 walls and 1 corner piece), but once I've done that I can start filling out my level.

Update

Modelling nearly done now, which is the fun part, just need to add a roof section and finish off smoothing. Then I need to texture it, the long and tedious part, before sticking it in the GoW engine to see what it ends up like.

Modular Design

I've started building walls that I can use all over the city in a modular fashion. One of the main reasons for creating my walls this way, apart from the reuse-ability is the because of the way the Unreal engine renders. If I make a whole house, and let the player walk about around inside, if the player is in the basement and only looking at say, the floor, the whole house is still rendered. Instead, building the walls, floors, roofs and other accessories inside separate allows me to improve FPS while also giving me more flexibility.

Anyway, this is what I'm working on at the moment.



After doing a lot of research into the way buildings look in steampunk images, which is really a mix between modern day technology and Victorian architecture, I've come up with this kind of design.

Deus ex machina

I was doing some more research today, trying to extend my story even further and I remembered the phrase "Deus ex machina". I had a quick google and found that Deus ex machina meant the following:

A deus ex machina (pronounced /ˈdeɪ.əs ɛks ˈmɑːkinə/ or /ˈdiː.əs ɛks ˈmækɨnə/,[1] literally "god from the machine") is a plot device in which a person or thing appears "out of the blue" to help a character to overcome a seemingly insolvable difficul

I thought this would be an interesting aspect to introduce to my game, with the players character taking the role of A deus ex machina. I don't want to go down the lazy path with can sometimes follow suit with a plot of this statue and just have the end of the story go, " It was just a dream....".