| General Notes | |
| Known Issues | |
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Although the RTS kit does not ship with enabled collision, all of the assets have collision volumes included, when appropriate. There is a known bug in the RTS kit with the relationship between the water block and the terrain geometry which results in holes and alignment issues between the two. To solve this the "square size" found under the "Misc" tab within the "Terrain - TerrainBlock" data has been set to "8". This has the effect of proportionally increasing the scale of the environment and as a result the objects I developed (rocks, trees, etc are designed around this scale. If you need the objects to be a different size, they can be scaled up or down within the environment. There is a known C++ bug in the RTS kit that prevents particles from rendering until the user has toggled back and forth between the two camera modes (press Alt+C to switch modes). The fix is a single line of code and can be done by anybody with a working compiler. Follow the link for a detailed explanation. www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=26068 The "fxFoliageReplicator" does not function properly in the RTS kit which is why I have used the ""fxShapeReplicator" in its place, within the demo levels. You can see several examples of this in the South West Desert Demo mission. I have provided textures optimized for use with the fxFoliageReplicator for anyone who has corrected the problem within their local build, or anyone who wishes to use them in an FPS TGE project. "fxShapeReplicator has issues with collision meshes and object transforms. When setting rotation and transform extents, the collision mesh remains unaffected by these changes, giving the appearance of getting “hung” up. This can be countered by turning off “Interactions” in fxShapeReplicator, but you lose collision unfortunately." Timothy Aste Regarding the included source art. I have provided the original LightWave scene and object files. I have also included Maya conversions and .3ds format for Max users. The .3ds files lost their respective surface smoothing values in the conversion. All smoothing angles were originally set to 89 degrees, with the exception of the tree trunks, which were set to between 120 and 125 degrees. |
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| General Design Notes | |
My original intent was to develop environments found within the United States, because those are the environments I am most familiar with. And because it seemed as good a place to start as any. This plan changed. Best laid plans of mice and men, as the saying goes. What I did develop has a consistent art style, even if the maps depart a bit from the original theme. Most content for the environments can be used in any of the other environments, and fit quite well. There are however a few exceptions, which will be noted below in the detailed break down for each environment. The
demo maps included are intended as a basic demonstration of how to combine
the asset in each environment to create a particular look. This is by
no means the only look that can be achieved, and I strongly encourage
you to experiment with all the contents and their My primary design goals were as follows. To deliver assets that provided a high level of visual quality. To attempt to create art for use within the Torque Game Engine on par with contemporary RTS games like Age of Empires III and the up coming Rise of Legends. They have both raised the visual standard for what can be expected in a modern RTS game. They had many many months of development time, and millions of dollars. I've had my outdated PC and about three months of learning TGE while developing the content pack. I am pretty happy with the end result, but being my own worst critic, I can see areas for vast improvement ...but that can wait for the next content pack. A specific mini goal was to deliver nice looking trees with minimal poly count. I am seeing lots of tree models out there that are in the 600 to a 1,000+ poly range, which for a general use three is simply unnecessary, in my opinion. In the case of the trees in this pack, all of them are around 200 polys (not including the collision volumes). I designed them specifically for RTS game development, but have done a little tuning for typical RPG and FPS camera views as well, and while not as good as they could be if specifically designed for those camera views, they hold up pretty well and offer a relatively low poly alternative. Generally speaking, all of the trees in all environments were designed to help sculpt the space within the level while creating as little occlusion of the environment as possible, with the hope of reducing the issues that are inherent with this in most games that have a pulled out 3rd person camera, common to RTS and most RPG games. In short, maximize the look pretty part, but minimize the getting in the way part. I would strongly suggest looking at Dungeon Siege by Gas Powered Games. They came up with a very elegant solution to creating a dense forest, without the problems which would normally result from a densely decorated environment. Each environment comes with extra textures not used in the demo levels. Some of these are better sooted for RTS use, some for FPS use. Garage Games has provided the inde community with a wonderfully versatile and affordable development environment. I hope that the content I have provided help you to achieve your design and development goals. |
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| Web Links | |
| Garage
Games www.garagegames.com DTS
Exporters
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