Looking back at the year and plans for next year

[HaterAids]

For those of us who do more than leech stuff it might be cool to see what other people are up to / how their year went. Also there isn't a proper show boat thread so this could be the chance show off what you made / done. Since I made the thread I'll go first

My experience from last year:

• Live chats with freelance artists make a HUGE difference, without live chats results were really ugly/wrong for RF things, to the point that it didn't make sense to even use them in game. With live chats items were much better, so good I later added in a batch file feature where my program converts all files in a folder at the same time.
• There is something called too much detail on armor it became obvious once I spent more time than realistically it should take to make it look good even during animation.

My plans for next year:

• Updating my program to do more stuff in order to ease the pipeline of Blender to game. Mainly 3D animation related stuff like my own way for animation to be both imported and exported.
• Looking into why only some maps have discrepancies between what my program writes and what loads in Max while others don't.
• More improvements, mostly is just rewriting existing stuff which in turn could give my program more flexibility and adaptability.

[MentaL]

[lifestream]

Even tho i made this awful decision of opening my old server again (players are a headache to deal with) - i have tried to avoid any real development - it eats too much time.
Besides messing around with a few models and replacing some bad ones/adjusting angles i had before the 3dsmax plugin era and adjusting some ingame balance - nothing major.

I'm not a 3d artist so i didn't spend much time with that part - existing "free" stuff mostly wont work for rf or is designed for rendering artwork - and i don't have the patience and time to learn and start making my own complex models.

Besides that there isn't much to do with RF. Models/maps are one thing but new functionality/mechanics are too deep in debugging and even then they are half assed features that barely work.

And rF lacks a lot - maps and models are one thing but after initial "wow" wears off, people get bored again and only look at stats/fastest farm spots.


Also proper lack of support for decent shaders. Everything is just basic baked textures - and no support for even simple normal maps.

[HaterAids]

Even tho i made this awful decision of opening my old server again (players are a headache to deal with) - i have tried to avoid any real development - it eats too much time.
Besides messing around with a few models and replacing some bad ones/adjusting angles i had before the 3dsmax plugin era and adjusting some ingame balance - nothing major.

I'm not a 3d artist so i didn't spend much time with that part - existing "free" stuff mostly wont work for rf or is designed for rendering artwork - and i don't have the patience and time to learn and start making my own complex models.

Besides that there isn't much to do with RF. Models/maps are one thing but new functionality/mechanics are too deep in debugging and even then they are half assed features that barely work.

And rF lacks a lot - maps and models are one thing but after initial "wow" wears off, people get bored again and only look at stats/fastest farm spots.


Also proper lack of support for decent shaders. Everything is just basic baked textures - and no support for even simple normal maps.

From what I noticed existing "free" stuff is honestly horrible for RF, at most you might get some weapons that kinda sorta fit without looking too bad and with some effort a mob. At one point i checked out other game art like Dekaron and other older games for stuff. Even then you still get poor results because of different rendering settings and what texture size the files are. Trying to port non-custom made armor into RF just isn't practical unless your okay with joints being off, armor parts digging into other parts, not looking good with mis-matched pieces and a chance texture quality being worse than original game. That's under the assumption the person doing it understands animation enough to give the pieces proper values so they don't deform weird while walking/ doing any other animation.
Imo better of having other game armor as Reference Art, not actually used.

Designed for rendering artwork I can honestly at least work with, that's one of the things I ended up doing, just was really interesting seeing how optimized I could make it while still looking good. Result was okay would really change some stuff if I were to do it again though. Like planes aligned vertically was a poor choice, solid objects would of been much better but planes aligned horizontally did work nice. Plus If I had the time changing glows to a different effect would of made it better.

Custom Maps without radar working would at least liven it for awhile, as new players would have to explore it. Most "new" features/ mechanics are not really new just a new flavor of the old thing, getting chocolate instead of vanilla... For anything major would need to pay to have it special done then I'm guessing everybody else using the same protect could use it too for a cost.

For good shaders and stuff could really look into features/changes to the bin instead of that program you used for anti-aliasing, in theory you could have client side rendering system completely redone without needing to change other stuff. Its not very practical but I see no reason why it wouldn't be possible if time was not a factor.

[lifestream]

Yeah - not interested of spending all the time trying to use and make sense of the pseudo code to try and add some new sharers etc.
Minimaps should not be a huge problem - but i can't recall what i did when i added a map from 1.5 to 223. Something about specifying proper dimensions somewhere.


All we need is one leak for newer source code - like 216 instead of early alpha G3 something.

[HaterAids]

There's already opensource projects done for other games to update the rendering to something more modern, send me a pm if you want more details as that could be used as a starting point then just modified for RF. Just would need to do hooks in the bin to point to the file and maybe expand the code a bit to cover things that only RF has.

What good would a newer source code do? I already know the majority of all the graphic stuff, it really hasn't changed much. There are already programs to capture packets so people could guess and test what the structure of packets are. Am I forgetting about something?