Silver Tree 0.1

Post by **Dave** » August 29th, 2007, 5:13 am

After some amount of work, Silver Tree has released version 0.1. It's a little more impressive than Wesnoth 0.1, I think, though there is of course, still a long way to go!

There is source, as well as binaries for Mac and Windows.

See all the details at the Silver Tree website

Blueblaze · Post by **Blueblaze** » August 29th, 2007, 5:15 am

Yay for Silver Tree!

DDR · Post by **DDR** » August 29th, 2007, 5:47 am

Oooh... cool graphics.

konsnos · Post by **konsnos** » August 29th, 2007, 6:25 pm

And I supposed it would be Wesnoth 2

that have been 3D and is under development.
Pitty.

playtom · Post by **playtom** » August 30th, 2007, 4:40 am

And I supposed it would be Wesnoth 2 that have been 3D and is under development. Pitty.

not likely, it would be just named wesnoth 3D or wesnoth RPG, version 2 is probably the future 2.0 release for wesnoth.

like the graphics, all the terrains are 3d, except the units, still using 2d sprites lol

hope the fully 3d version come out soon. i'll be the first one to play

(if i'm still interested in wesnoth after a long wait)

Post by **Jetrel** » August 30th, 2007, 6:33 am

It looks really cool, but I worry that its potential to get decent art assets is going to be quite limited.

There are no good, free programs* for creating 3d art, like there are for creating wesnoth's 2d art - I think that's a lot of what facilitated wesnoth's creation; the fact that there are a lot of good, free pixel art editors for all platforms. Not to mention that creating 3d art, at least "of creatures", is very hard in most 3d modelling programs. You have to be good at 2d art as a prerequisite, and that's a tall order in itself.

I do honestly hope that I'm proven wrong on this; it'd be great to see this game take off.

* I said good, and no, Blender doesn't count. If you think I'm wrong, prove it by making professional quality game art in blender; I'll let the struggle you go through serve as all further argument to support my point, since if you're going to be a freetard and root for it in spite of its obscene shortcomings, I'm certainly not going to convince you with my words. These are the fruits of a lack of competition; some might call it complacency, or stagnation, but there are other, more interesting terms for it...

_____________________
Speed is of the essence.
The W'rkncacnter groans under his slab.

Post by **vonHalenbach** » August 30th, 2007, 9:34 am

I know a very good 3d artist. His work is totally awesome. Maybe i can connect him to silvertree? I will ask him.

Post by **Blarumyrran** » August 30th, 2007, 9:45 am

are the units aimed to get 3d models too at some point? because 2d sprites in 3d world is far too retro for any complete game, imo. (Syndicate Wars, Populous 3d, all were in nineties)

Post by **vonHalenbach** » August 30th, 2007, 10:02 am

Syntax_Error wrote:are the units aimed to get 3d models too at some point? because 2d sprites in 3d world is far too retro for any complete game, imo. (Syndicate Wars, Populous 3d, all were in nineties)

It is completly normal to use placeholder graphics in a very first usable version of a new game. No need to nitpicking.

Silver tree is Version 0.1 if you hadn't noticed.

Post by **zookeeper** » August 30th, 2007, 10:20 am

vonHalenbach wrote:
Syntax_Error wrote:are the units aimed to get 3d models too at some point? because 2d sprites in 3d world is far too retro for any complete game, imo. (Syndicate Wars, Populous 3d, all were in nineties)
It is completly normal to use placeholder graphics in a very first usable version of a new game. No need to nitpicking.

Silver tree is Version 0.1 if you hadn't noticed.

Read again. It was a question, not "nitpicking".

Post by **allefant** » August 30th, 2007, 10:44 am

are the units aimed to get 3d models too at some point?

It's going to get animated 3D characters, I think all that has prevented it so far is the artist(s) aren't done yet with a first animated 3D placeholder

I said good, and no, Blender doesn't count. If you think I'm wrong, prove it by making professional quality game art in blender; I'll let the struggle you go through serve as all further argument to support my point, since if you're going to be a freetard and root for it in spite of its obscene shortcomings, I'm certainly not going to convince you with my words.

Myself, I'd agree, it's a pain doing anything with it - but for me, the same is true with e.g. Photoshop. I've seen artists being introduced to Blender for the first time, and they learned to use it amazingly fast - like in half an hour they could do more with it than myself after playing with it from time to time for years

Also, according to google, some rather good looking games are using Blender.

Dave is more aiming for using google sketchup though, at least for buildings - from what I have seen.

Tux2B · Post by **Tux2B** » August 30th, 2007, 11:48 am

Maybe you can get some Glest artists to work for Silver Tree? Their 3D graphics are pretty good.

Here is a screenshot, found on the Internet, for those who don't know that free game yet :

Post by **vonHalenbach** » August 30th, 2007, 2:26 pm

Jetryl wrote:It looks really cool, but I worry that its potential to get decent art assets is going to be quite limited.

There are no good, free programs* for creating 3d art, like there are for creating wesnoth's 2d art - I think that's a lot of what facilitated wesnoth's creation; the fact that there are a lot of good, free pixel art editors for all platforms. Not to mention that creating 3d art, at least "of creatures", is very hard in most 3d modelling programs. You have to be good at 2d art as a prerequisite, and that's a tall order in itself.

I do honestly hope that I'm proven wrong on this; it'd be great to see this game take off.

* I said good, and no, Blender doesn't count. If you think I'm wrong, prove it by making professional quality game art in blender; I'll let the struggle you go through serve as all further argument to support my point, since if you're going to be a freetard and root for it in spite of its obscene shortcomings, I'm certainly not going to convince you with my words. These are the fruits of a lack of competition; some might call it complacency, or stagnation, but there are other, more interesting terms for it...
_____________________
Speed is of the essence.
The W'rkncacnter groans under his slab.

I must agree, after talking with a very good 3d artist, how he does modeling, and which tools he use. It is a very complicated process to get good results.

[15:49] <vonhalenbach> which tool do you use to make the models,again?
[15:49] <rconstruct> more than 1
[15:49] <vonhalenbach> free tools?
[15:49] <rconstruct> models in http://www.wings3d.com
[15:50] <rconstruct> exported to obj
[15:50] <rconstruct> converted to 3ds, feed into viewmodel, which dumps a ddxml
[15:50] <rconstruct> emacs to edit the ddxml for textures, inkscape for vector work
[15:50] <rconstruct> gimp for painting/aging the vector work
[15:50] <rconstruct> i export the UV layout out of wings
[15:57] <rconstruct> i dump the uvlayout into inkscape
[15:57] <rconstruct> an inkscape layer, lock it
[15:57] <rconstruct> start adding the elements, camouflage, text, details ,etc..
[15:57] <rconstruct> export into png, for gimp
[15:57] <rconstruct> then start painting in gimp, adding corrosion, etc... aging the texture
[15:57] <rconstruct> i use a lot the bilateral filter plugin
[15:57] <rconstruct> and the normalmap plugin sometimes
[15:58] <rconstruct> converts greyscale to tangent space normal map, via a choice of filters
[15:58] <rconstruct> edge detection filters
[15:58] <rconstruct> sometimes i use obj2rib to get an renderman rib
[15:58] <rconstruct> vim to write some RSL shaders, such as depth map based ambient occlusion
[15:58] <rconstruct> and aqsis to bake this
[15:59] <rconstruct> i tried pixie's raytraced ambient occlusion, on one side it's faster to setup than the depth map based approach

Post by **Dave** » August 30th, 2007, 3:37 pm

Jetryl wrote: There are no good, free programs* for creating 3d art, like there are for creating wesnoth's 2d art

There is Google Sketchup. (http://sketchup.google.com/) which we already have support for.

Sketchup isn't really appropriate for creating characters, but most game objects -- buildings, weapons, items, etc, it is perfect for. It is very easy to use -- I think it'd be easier to create a decent looking 3D model of a house or a sword in Sketchup then it would be to make a sprite of one for Wesnoth.

And this will give us most of what we need.

Then all we need are 3D characters. Mostly humans. For that, we just need to build a generic framework for constructing humans of different sizes and physical characteristics from a set of parameters, all based on a single model (or, more likely, two models, one male, one female). This won't be easy, but it is doable, and the difficulty is more programmatic than anything.

Once we have this framework in place, even a marginally skilled artist will be able to create an interesting character by putting in some attributes, making a texture for their clothing, and making some models for their equipment.

It will be nice to have 3D models of creatures other than humans to use, but if necessary a decent RPG can be done with all human characters.

David

Myr · Post by **Myr** » August 30th, 2007, 4:30 pm

Blender can be used to create some nice graphics, KDE made a promo video using it

http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart/konqi- ... 6-divx.avi

Blender sources: http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart/konqi- ... es.tar.bz2

Just .02 from someone who doesn't really know what they are talking about, but that video is pretty good quality, you wouldn't need better in a game like this?