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In the development of the nebula-engine 2, the first thing I have to do next is drawing the game-sprites. Every character will exist of around 40 pictures that will have a 64x64 resolution.
In fact I'm a bit lazy when it concerns this drawing part. So, does anyone knows an easy way to gather these sprites? (sprites, suitable for a first person-shooter)

I know there are a lot of Wolfenstein 3-d websites that offers useful sprites, but these sprites always (as far as I know) have one direction, so a character can't move away from you.

When I developed the first nebula-engine I used a 3d modeler to rendered all gamesprites. But it was a hell of a work, and the results were a bit poor.

Why were the results poor?

Quote:Why were the results poor?

When you draw a gamesprite pixelwise, you can "control" every detail of the image. The disadvantage of rendered sprites is that small details (especially the face) look sloppy.

However, to draw every sprite pixelwise takes more time than rendering.

I just think it depends on which program you use.
Here's a 64x64 animation I did with Lightwave 7...


How many characters do you need anyway?

Quote:I just think it depends on which program you use.
Here's a 64x64 animation I did with Lightwave 7...


How many characters do you need anyway?

I that a model Doc? Send it to me!!!!

BTW, can you redo those bosses to orient themselves pointing left as with the Darius demo?

BTW, I may have ways to directly texture models off XMS and gradient based textured+gouraud triangle routine. :*)

Quote:I that a model Doc? Send it to me!!!!

BTW, can you redo those bosses to orient themselves pointing left as with the Darius demo?

BTW, I may have ways to directly texture models off XMS and gradient based textured+gouraud triangle routine. :*)

Sure, but are you gonna use it for something in QB? If you are, I would need to run it through a polygon reduction plugin first. It has almost 32,000 poly's right now! :lol:

Yeah, sorry that's been taking so long. I got side-tracked making this Spam Guy character... hifty:

:rotfl:



Oh yeah? That's awesome!!! Can you define the location of the light sources & stuff? Got any demos of it yet? :bounce:

Quote:How many characters do you need anyway?

I expect the game will have around 10 different characters.
Has lightwave the possibility to render an animated model to different frames?

Yeah, you have the option to save the animation as seperate still frame images. You give it a name such as "Troll" and it tacks the frame number on the end... so frame 1 is "Troll001.bmp" or whatever file format you want to save it as.

So you need about 400 character sprites? What resolution is your engine using? What's the theme for the game? I mean are you gonna have like D&D type characters, or something more modern like Half Life? ...or am I just way off? :lol:

I have to admit that it's alot of work to make 10 models with hi-detail. One thing you can do to cut down the workload is to use a common setup for all character's bones. That way you can make the animations for one character and then tweak 'em for the others...

Quote:So you need about 400 character sprites? What resolution is your engine using? What's the theme for the game? I mean are you gonna have like D&D type characters, or something more modern like Half Life? ...or am I just way off?

The engine uses the good old screen mode 13 (320x200x8bits). During the development of the engine I focus on making a futuristic arena-game, something like deathmatch. So the characters have to be arena fighters.

I mentioned before the disadvantage of rendering 3d models into a small (64x64 resolution) picture. A comparison...

This sprite I drawes pixelwise:


This sprite I rendered from a 3d model: (I used this one in Resistance)


As you can see the hand-drawed one is far more detailed, and I'm thinking about drawing all sprites by hand... :roll:
However, maybe using a common setup for all character's bones can also be used in case of hand-drawed sprites.

Yeah...the faces are alot smaller than I thought. Here's an idea though. You could use the animation program to render realistic animations and then add more details (such as the face) to the images in whatever image editing program you use. It would basically give you a template to work with. You could even make models without any facial features at all... just a blank canvas to draw on.