Loladins of Legend - The Making Of Part 2

So, I had this post about halfway written out before but apparently sometimes when I restore Firefox it doesn't restore information on TL posts and I lost quite a lot of stuff I had written out. T.T

I am rewriting it from scratch and changing subjects.

The Making of Loladins of Legend - Part 2

Part 1 - http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=130797

In the first post I told you a little of the project's history and what it seeks to do, the challenges it faces, and my goals for the future. Today I'm going to introduce you to the universe the mod takes place in, some parts of my GEC Primary, and some of my development pipelines.

Gameplay Elements Concept - The GEC Primary

It is my goal to eventually create an exhaustive video documentary talking about my game design ethics down to the letter. Until then I'll just summarize some of the GEC Primary and what it stands for.

A GEC is basically my approach to gaming and media as a whole. The GEC Primary is an overarching foundation from which I then extend genre and then mod-specific designs from. A GEC is basically a methodology of approaching design and is not to be treated as a railroad or a guideline, but rather a perspective.

The GEC revolves the concept of four Elements, each of which are just as important as the other. The goal is to achieve all you can achieve in all four elements to complete the circle of experience.

Graphics
Gameplay
Sound
Computer AI

Graphics drive your world's experience and it is through graphics that players first experience elements of your world. Graphics are envisioned as the chassis of the vehicle.

Gameplay is the mechanics behind how you're telling your story, how you're bringing your world to life, how you're presenting your characters, so on so forth. Gameplay is the engine of your vehicle.

Sounds accompany both graphics and gameplay by providing an extra level of immersion that cannot be accomplished by either. Sound is my most powerful form of language. I think and talk in sound, the motion of music in particular. I talked a bit about this in my Zen of Modding, and I'll go into deeper detail in the documentary.

Computer AI is far more important than you first realize and the reasons for this remain no matter your genre.

In an RPG, even a RTS turned into an RPG like the Orc campaign in TFT, the AI presents the personality of characters, opponents, and plays a huge role in how your world is experienced by the player. AI is employed heavily in my Active Map Concept for my RPG GEC where I seek to create a living world where cities actively harvest resources, build units, and engage each other like an RTS, but in an RPG world.

In a traditional RTS mod, AI is exceedingly important to facilitate gameplay, especially for a young mod who likely doesn't have a big playerbase. Investing in AI early and actively helps prolong your mod's life and extend enjoyment for both the player and the developer. AI can be used to help test balancing concepts in many different manners, as well.

Only by achieving harmony and unification in these elements can a form of media succeed. It is also by these elements that I judge games as a whole (and why I am extremely critical of commercial developers).

The LoL: 2042 project is no exception to my demanding rules. Unfortunately, as the game's AI is totally hardcoded, all I can do is try to meld the units and such in a way that makes the AI function better. As I spoke in the last topic, I have had reasonable degrees of success in doing this.

Pushing Forward in Graphics

In Part 1 I spoke about how graphics are my major concern for this project, as they are the only thing I cannot immediately solve on the spot. I have been pushing to convert graphics from other games, and have had moderate success.

Today I'm going to go through the paces of converting a graphic from Requiem: Bloodymare, a violent and amusing Korean FTP MMO, to the ILB format, the sprite container Age of Wonders 2 uses.

Requiem uses a format called NIF of which there is a significant amount of support for. Those familiar with Oblivion have probably dealt with this format before. As a result I got extremely lucky and there's very functional tools available for these formats.

The unit I'll be making is the Hammerdin, a Tier 3 burst DPS unit for the Loladins. As I work on this unit I'll introduce you to the Loladins, the primary Protagonists of this universe, thus the name Loladins of Legend.

Loladins are best described as popes with really big hammers. Take your common concept of a Paladin - a righteous goody two-shoes with a hardon for justice - and multiply by ten fold. Now you have a Loladin. Loladins strive for perfection in all walks of life and exist for the sole purpose of protecting humanity from the grimy, icky evilness that lurks in the darkness of closets and under beds everywhere.

In the tier 3 bracket, around the 300 gold cost range, Loladins are to have access to three units that serve as their bread and butter until late-game - Paladins, a generic melee combat unit with rounded attributes that gains the ability to heal on Gold veterancy, Battlemages, which have Death and Cold magic ranged abilities and are more agile than Paladins but less durable, and the Hammerdin, who is less durable than the Paladin and has no utility, but hits really hard.

The Battlemage is a character I already converted from this MMO as a testbed for the pipeline, along with the dragon Ruinhorn.

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Something I have been a little uncertain about is the usage of AA in renders. As a rule, you NEVER render with edge AA in a sprite-based game; it makes black edges (or worse, it really fucks the blending and causes a lot of headaches that you need to fix manually). She was rendered with AA excluding edges, but Ruinhorn and the others have no AA at all. The differences aren't easy to spot for someone not versed in graphics, but ultimately AA is responsible for the smoothness. With the Hammerdin I'm going to see how he looks without any AA at all.

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This guy has no AA at all. On a small unit the lack of AA can pixilate their armor and look weird in still frames but otherwise look ok when animated. It depends on the unit and details in question.

I have no particular concept in mind for the Hammerdin other than that he's going to be a dude. I've selected a few pieces of armor out of Requiem I want to use for him; he's not supposed to be heavily armored, but look the part of tier 3. His hammer, however, must be satisfyingly large.

Loladins are split into two sects - Paladins and Priors. Paladins are your average hammer-swinging preachers, and Priors delve more into magic and psionics. They are most easily told apart by their armor color - Prior armor ranges from gray to blue, and Paladins wear yellow and gold.

As Requiem's colors are fairly subdued and I want the Hammerdin's armor to be more golden, I'll need to edit his skin textures, something I am not very comfortable doing as graphics are my weaker skillset. Nonetheless, if I want to one day mod say Starcraft 2 I must become familiar with these tools.

The Source Data

Requiem's data are contained in VDK archives that I already have decompiled. In WoW and Wc3 the models are divided into Geosets, multiple meshes within the same model, that the game can hide and such. In WoW, a single character model contains all armor, hair, and cape variants. You can actually change through these in the WoW Model Viewer at will and create some neat looking hair by combining two of them. You can also do this in 3ds max, too.

Requiem's models are separated into geosets the same way, but each piece is a separate model, except for the base character mesh which contains no armor and the basic face and hair models. To get different hair and model textures we'll need to import them one by one. Animations are also separate files.

Without the NIF tools supplied by third parties I would have no hope in hell of getting these into max correctly.

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The base model of our Turan Male. He's not quite ready to bash the skull of some poor demon quite yet.

Looks a bit like Tidus, if you ask me.

There's another quirk to these NIF files - they have embedded textures. For each geoset. This is a nuisence, especially since once you export a texture the file listing changes and it's very difficult to find the other textures and have to re-load the model. For a Character, though, you're exporting the texture out of each individual model for each piece of armor, so it's not quite as aggravating.

I've seen some cool looking faces and hair on the wiki so I'm going to have a look for those once I get the base model into max. Since I'll be totally covering this bad boy in armor and getting new textures for his face and hair I don't need to worry about exporting anything from his base model.

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The Hammerdin's to-be Chest armor. I have to somehow make it a bit more golden and vibrant without effecting the skin. I have no clue how I'm going to do that or if I even can.

I just realized I have no glove model. Guess we'll need a texture from the base model, after all!

Oh wait, those are green gloves.

BALLS

Don't worry about it kiddo, I'll just do that at the last minute. Where as I? Ah yes, hair and face.

Previously my concept was that all Loladins had blonde or golden hair, but I randomly decided to go against that and just whatever the fuck I wanted. Because that's kind of what ends up happening anyways. I've got an idea of what I want this guy to look like... a bit like Goemon.

Speaking of Goemon, that soundtrack is amazing.

I have a scene pre-prepared that I use for all models in max now. This contains a lighting setup HKS made that is the best we've been able to come up with for this game. The goal is to avoid a fullbright no-shadow render but also avoid extensive shadowing, instead focusing on creating highlights.

Our dude is a little small. We can't rescale him because he'll revert back down again when we import animations. All we have to do is rescale the gray geometry to rescale the cameras and lights down to him instead.

Loladins are a bit of s misnomer. They can wear as much or as little armor as they want, as they are gifted with HOLY BLOOD from the HOLY PIE. Because pie tastes damn good. They are also immortal, immune to diseases, and more resistant to mental attacks. To become a Loladin, a human must first undergo a grueling chess championship to determine his fortitude and conviction. Then he must wrestle a gigantic man-eating cucumber alone and naked, in the Ghost Range, to return with its essence. Once imbued with the essence of this beast he must then attune to the Holy Pie, a ritual most sacred and mysterious.

As the Earth is flat and the sun is a freezing wasteland, the Ghost Range is most inhospitable. It is the mountainous set of terrain that lines the rim of the Earth, separating Modern Earth from The Cold Place, where evil sleeps in cities of ice. It is perfectly possible to fall off the planet or, worse yet, fall off and then get sucked in by gravity again, by wandering around the Ghost Range. As a result it has been impossible for either side to move armies through it.

Our Hammerdin has been through a few scuffles in his time, so he's grown confident enough to just run around with the biggest chunk of metal he can carry. Modern Earth is home to many different kinds of metal, including Adamantine and Mithril. However, even Loladins must prove themselves before they can be gifted with magical weaponry, as there are so many Loladins and so little time and resources. Our Hammerdin will have a mid-range weapon, so it should look the part; not overly flashy, but still impressive.

Under the directory Item -> Drop -> Facial -> Do we find the facial and hair textures. Yes, their structure is weird like that.

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A bit of poking around and I find something fairly similar to what I had in mind. However, the ends of the hair are all weird! They need their alpha. However, the Alpha has blending intensities, which means that parts of the hair will be blended and not totally tansparent or totally visible. This is VERY bad for us - it means the hair will have pink spots in it that don't get converted into transparency!

To deal with this, I normally have HKS manually edit the hair because he doesn't tell me his trade secrets. I do, however, have a fast method to correct the alpha. First, I need to open it up in photoshop, then I max out brightness in variations until it's all pure white or pure black.

Normally that is a terrible idea but minor details won't matter to us, so long as we get no pink spots! Thus, all filtering must be off on the materials as well.

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Much better.

Everything in LoL has a sound or piece of music associated with it. Every character, event, race, and piece of technology. It's the same way with my novel. By using sound I can visualize the world much better than with words and even in some cases better than images themselves. That's just how I am.

Loladins are best portrayed with tracks like this;

Though ridiculous in their own ways, Loladins fight a very real battle whose consequences are ever present in their minds. Not every battle is won, and they pay dearly for every defeat.

We are now ready (relatively speaking) to try to make his armor more golden.

This what we're starting with;

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Remember, we want to make his armor more golden and a bit brighter, without effecting his skin. How the fuck am I going to do that? I have no clue! I can just make it more yellow in photoshop with hue but that also changes the skin! Hmm, maybe if I magic wand...

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There's probably way better ways to do this but, again, I've used Photoshop for close to 10 years now and still scarcely have any idea how it works.

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We are totally in business~

Well, the boots still need to be done and I still need gloves. I did the same thing to the leg alpha that I did to the hair alpha so I can fix the boarder around his leather doohickies. Also need to make sure the material is set to two-sided. It won't be very obvious with this guy but on some units like the chick with the cape you're not seeing the cape from the backfaces where you should. A minor detail with a sprite, but I'm a perfectionist.

Because this armor set does not have a glove model that means I need to find one that fits reasonably well with the rest of the armor. I like my armor to look fairly consistent with each other, and even though I can use hue to change the color a bit I'd prefer to not have to put a huge amount of effort just to get golden fondlers.

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Excellent.

Alright boys and ladies, we're ready to find the device that makes a boy a man - his kit, if you will. I have two hammers selected and now I can tell you a little bit how I select weapons.

The Holy Justice And How To Swing It

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So, we have two hammers here that represent two different styles. I'll call the left one the Sledgehammer and the right one the Americansticker. The Sledgehammer is definitely more fitting of a traditional Loladin weapon, but the right one is more mean looking. How do we determine which one best fits our Hammerdin?

The prose of the Hammerdin is that he just wildly runs swinging his hammer in wide arcs while laughing and screaming as loudly as he can. While the Americansticker would definitely hurt, it doesn't look like it fits that role quite as well as the Sledgehammer. The Sledgehammer seems more befitting of a weapon used more often simply because it has less parts that could somehow break. Paladins are typically not very sophisticated anyway; fancy weapons fit more with Priors.

Also, the Sledgehammer looks like it could be made really big and still fit his hands quite well. I decide to use the Sledgehammer for this guy and the Americansticker for either a higher-level unit or a hero. I'll need plenty of unique weapons for heroes. I'll just grayscale the Sledgehammer's skin so it's not brown.

Now enters one of the portions of doing this that can get really irritating really fast.

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Upon importing this massive hulk of steel I am met with the realization that it's already enormous. This is how it's scaled in-game - this thing is HUGE!

You probably guessed what we need to do next - we need to fuse it with his hand. Logic dictates this means rotating the weapon around and fitting it in his right hand, then linking it to the proper bone so it moves with it. However, when I did the Battlemage I came across the odd discovery that when in neutral the bone is oriented in a weird way, and on the female model the left hand bone actually changed orientation throughout several different animations and forced me to constantly re-orient her offhand claw.

Presuming we need to do the same for this guy, I save a backup of the model - I don't think I can get him back to the neutral pose after I import an animation and this can get silly trying to fix the orientation otherwise.

I make the discovery that his prop bone is in the proper location in the neutral stance - on the female model it's inside the wrist. This might entail it also has the correct rotation as well. I just don't know yet. Out of curiousity I check the pivot;

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Looks like it might be oriented correctly. I decide to risk it and orient the weapon properly and see if it stays that way.

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I get two vertex errors from two squares that somehow got into the scene with the hammer and delete them. Otherwise it looks good, the hammer just needs a 45 degree rotation. On second thought, I like the hammer's texture as it is. I'll leave it alone. His armor could stand to be a bit more golden and less pale... hmm...

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Fun Fact - The glove texture is as large as the upper/lower textures, and all of them are really really tiny resolution-wise. Sc2's textures are literally 5-6x as big. For doodads.

That's better. A bit more vibrant. Now to scale him...

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Looks good. The armor is still a little pale, though. It looks ok in photoshop but on the model it's not as vibrant. Hmm.

I decide to see the differences between No AA and AA without edges.

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It's a tough call to make, but imo the non-AA version looks better because it's more defined, you can see the face and the chest armor better, and appears less "flat". Also the hammer looks much sharper. With something this small it will never look perfect, though.

The time has come to pick out the animations and begin rendering at long last. I am not too fond of many of the two-handed animations available for this character, the animations are fairly rigid and don't seem to bring out the feeling of power very well. The ones I've shown thus far are the ones I'll probably use.

What follows now is importing the animations one-by-one and then batch rendering them to the default max renderpresets folder, then cutting and pasting them to my resource folder.

After a while I end up with this;

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Now, normally I'd be in for a lot of pain and grunt labor, but after I posted a video detailing the renaming process some random dude PM'd me on youtube. A day later and I have a working renaming script! Horray!

+ Show Spoiler [Youtube video part 1] +

Eventually I need to figure out a PSP script to bring these down to 256-color but keeping the pink in the same index. Otherwise the ilb files end up being around ~50MB. Not a problem for me, but means a lot of avoidable transfer time when it comes to sending the mod data to my private players. Until then I can just compile as 24-bit.

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In-game Configuration

We're ready to put pretty boy into the game! Woot! Then we'll need to figure out sounds. But, for the moment...

Oh, I should put the Proto dragons in the directory so I can config them too.

The Large-scale Proto Drake is 200megs in size when converted to ilb. Rarring that makes it significantly smaller... but still. That's huge.

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These still frames sure make him look like a garbled mess. When animated he's fine, though.

Now to cross-reference with ILED and the generator and get his frames.

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Perfect. Should have set his hit to 0 because I couldn't find a suitable animation for it, but that's easy to do manually.

Now for sounds. I'll talk about sounds another day, perhaps. I'll probably use some sounds from NWN, and may make my own custom hammer impact sound.

The Hammerdin is now ready to join the Loladins and be configured as a unit. A multi-hour journey (in part due to documenting it as I go along). This is just one out of hundreds of graphics I must make before I can call this project complete. 15 races with 10 tiers of units, plus heroes, plus wizards. This shall be a most grand journey, one I shall document for your scrutiny. A journey of ups and downs, a most perilous adventure.

Conclusion

I wish I didn't have to do this. I wish I didn't have to take graphics out of other games just to make ends meet. But nothing changes in my world - ten years have passed since I began doing this and I have been able to learn only a miniscule amount of what it takes to be a real modder and custom asset creator. I wish I could create my own characters and do things the right way. But my disabilities have scourged me for all these long days, weeks, and months of endless hours spent trying to learn and evolve. It's not that I have other obligations, only that my mind is shattered.

Don't envy me. Pity me. It's only because I cannot move forward that I have to do things this way.

Loladins of Legend - The Making Of Part 2

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