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Entry 7 - The Train Wreck Cleanup and Q&A Session
Deep Red posted a blog entry in Call of the Wild - Dev Blog
Been a while since the last update on CotW's status, so here's a few nuggets of info to break the silence. The majority of you probably know by now of the setbacks the team has had due to RL issues and whatnot. After a long two weeks of working my ass off, I'm slowly easing into it and getting back to work on the art assets. However, I'm going to be shifting gears a bit and start work on the new tattoos, which I haven't really been working on a whole lot since I shelved the Tribal Tattoos overlays plugin a while back. Here's a quick run-down of the new game plan. The Sculpt Works Over the past few months, I have learned quite a bit over creating meshes and textures from scratch while working on original content for Call of the Wild. If any of you know what is involved in creating a mesh from scratch, you'll know what a BITCH it is to optimize hi-poly models for use in the actual game. Baking the normals is a painstakingly long process; it's deceptively difficult, as there are a multitude of things that can go wrong within the process itself and cause the final normal map to become wonky or distorted later down the line. There are quite a few design concepts for things like piercings, jewelry, and some of the "clothing" which will be added by our little mod here. Most of them are very much a WIP, so I don't have a whole lot to show for yet. Creating new textures, by far, is the most time-consuming aspect of the entire process. Unfortunately, I'm a little burned out with model-making because of these things. Overall, I think I've learned more about 3DS Max in the past few weeks than in the past few months. To avoid completely killing my creative drive, I've decided to take a brief break with the 3D art assets. The Ink Works Tattoos are something I've been putting off for a while now. Since I've been "entertained" figuring out how to properly UV Map a mesh, there hasn't been a whole lot done in this particular area. Every now and then I see a potential tattoo design somewhere on the intarwebz and I quickly draw a crude sketch or jot down the details for use later, but that's probably as far as the work has gone up to now. As mentioned before, creating textures is a very delicate process (if you want to get it down right, that is) and tattoos are not so different in that aspect. Given the incredible amount of detail and the sheer complexity of some designs I have thought up, tattoos are going to be significantly slower to produce than say sculpting a mesh or adapting it for the bodies we plan on supporting. However, the total time spent making a set of tattoos is expected to be less than that of a full-blown texture for a new mesh. As of now, there are plans to create two sets of tattoos per subschool of Primal Magic (8 sets in total). Ideally, each set will be an original design in order to distinguish it from the other within the same school. There is a very gameplay-driven reason for this, but more on another entry as we're still fleshing this out. The Framework With the first iteration of the framework essentially completed, Frostbrand has taken to giving it a thorough revision and enhancement of its various core functions such as the way it handles and controls Primal Energy modifiers during spell casting. There's more to it than that, but I don't really know the specifics, or better yet, understand the more complex functions Phoenix & Frostbrand have integrated into it. While this may cause the first alpha version to be delayed a bit more, in the long run it will save the scripting team a lot of time and headaches trying to figure out how to build upon it later down the line. It's best to do this sort of housekeeping now than wait until the crap is spewing out the framework's ass and mouth. Currently, the second iteration framework is in the works. There is no ETA on it, but it is expected to be completed somewhere within the month. Q&A Session Q: "Johnny, Johnny! You said there would be a playable version by the end of the summer! Summer is almost over, bro!" A: That's true, and I apologize for the inaccurate statement. Unfortunately, we've been running into issues which are out of our control such as RL crises. Also, please understand that like any other hobby, we tend to work on CotW on our spare time and when the mood strikes is to. Both which we have been lacking in for the past few days, sadly. Q: "Okay, fine. But when will the first alpha be available then?" A: Again, this depends on whether we run into more hurdles in RL. At this point, we can't really say much other than perhaps by the end of the year, or early Q1 of 2015. This is all just speculation based on the progress we've made so far and is bound to change if we run into a progress streak or another cockblock down the road. Q: "So wait.. I see Frostbrand is on the team roster again. Didn't he drop out a while back?" A: Yes, and no. He did drop the team briefly while he sorted out a pressing issue in his daily life. Initially, we didn't know if he was going to be back or not, but here he is today! However, he's working on the code part-time when he has time. Q: "Yo, Johnny wtf man? Do you even mesh bro? Where r teh shiniez?!!?" A: The one-million-dollar question, eh? Although I've been pretty busy in the past two weeks, I have found a little bit of downtime to work on some new stuff for Call of the Wild. See below for a few more gold nuggets from Johnny's Vault. Q: "Johnny, Johnny! What are the new tattoos going to look like?" A: Ah, another prudent question! In accordance with a previous post I made somewhere, they will likely all be tribal in design. Meaning they will remain almost exclusively abstract, but may contain slight hints from what they were inspired by. In all likeliness, expect to see things like fauna and/or flora incorporated into the design. It's a little hard to explain right, but I think you'll see once the first few sets are rolled out. Q: "Dafuq? I didn't ask dis chit! Stop putting words in my mouth, yo!" A: Don't like it? Too bad! All jokes aside, most of these questions are based off of what I get PM'd over. I strongly encourage everyone to leave their questions as a comment in each update from now on. If there are enough questions, I will try to answer them as best I can in the following update. Got shit to lay on me? Give it to me. I have an open-door policy on this kind of feedback as well. Questions don't have to necessarily be about CotW, although I'd prefer that they are. Johnny's Vault of Goodies And the part of the update that most of you have probably been waiting for! The usual rules apply, as always. Stuff shown is all WIP and assume it to be NSFW. Exhibit A Here is the bracelet design base for the Allure school's first set of jewelry. Pictured in its various stages of progress. I'm still a bit in the air on where I want to take the concept, but I have a few ideas I want to play around with. The plan was to make these into an entire set of armlets, bracelets, and anklets. Perhaps there's more I could do with them.. It still needs to be UV mapped and the normals need to be baked, sadly. Hopefully I can get to that soon. Exhibit B These claws aren't mine. I forgot where I found them exactly, but figured they could be useful for the Ferocity school somehow. Not entirely sure what bonuses or abilities they will grant yet. I've also tailored them to fit the feet to add an extra touch of viciousness the Ferocity school needs. The claw mesh itself isn't the best. At one point or another, I will have to retouch it or begin anew from scratch. In these pics they're seen in red because.. well, why the fuck not? With a simple retexture, they could potentially find a place within CotW. Exhibit C This picture is a bit old (as you can tell by the smaller resolution), but I felt it would be appropriate to share. One of my earlier design concepts I had thought of for the Ferocity or Elemental schools. If I remember correctly, this particular set had a lot of warping issues around the breast areas. Even UNP's UV Map isn't flawless, unfortunately, but still a whole world better than CBBE's. It is probable that I might scrap this design entirely in favor of a new one I've thought of recently.- 2 comments
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Entry 3 - Burning Questions, Feedback Review, & Talking Chipmunks
Deep Red posted a blog entry in Call of the Wild - Dev Blog
Sorry to keep anyone who may be interested in Call of the Wild waiting anxiously for another entry. It's been a really hectic past 2 weeks and the team, including me, haven't had a whole lot of time to do as much as we would like to unfortunately. Hopefully, this long ass entry will make up for the lack of updates in the past month. On the flip side, Frostbrand and I did manage to iron out a great deal of details regarding the quest progression, piercings & equipment, Frostfall compatibility, shapeshifting abilities, reworked some spells, and touched up on the capstone abilities. After carefully reviewing all the good feedback you guys have been leaving and taking into consideration the possible benefits & drawbacks of our choice, we have come to a decision in regards to quest progression. As with any major decision, it didn't come without heavy debate and a comprehensive plan. Naturally, there's bad news but also good news to go with it. The Bad News Foreword To start off, we're going to dive head first into the bad news. (because I know you like good news so much ) If you have kept up with Call of the Wild's development from the very beginning, you'll know that we originally planned for the new sexual spells to be based off "subschools" of magicka. Each subschool was to be derived from a vanilla school (destruction, alteration, illusion, etc), keeping its "flavor" but adding a twist to it. A twist like... oh, I don't know... SEX. Without stating what is already obvious, we'll cut to the chase. Perks, Magick Subschools & Perk Trees The Allure, Decay, Ferocity, and Growth subschools of magic will likely be scrapped in favor of a more centralized MCM perk tree. The reasoning behind this was that modifying or even overhauling perk trees would cause an assload of incompatibility issues for players who use mods like SkyRe or similar mods. It would be unfair to force players to uninstall such a popular mod for the sake of being able to use CotW. The drawback to this is that we will likely have to cut down on the number of perks we had originally thought there would be. Reworking perks and perk trees isn't very fun at all, at least not for us. Forcing the player to spend those hard-earned (assuming you don't cheat!) perk points on what might probably be overpowered/underpowered perks doesn't seem like a very appealing idea for anyone either. What this means is that we'll have to rethink our approach and go the MCM menu route instead. We're aware that some of you might not like nor use SkyUI, but we feel the functionality this menu grants is too valuable to pass up. Quest Progression Now comes the part you've all been dreading. After a great deal of consideration and discussion with Frostbrand, we've come to the conclusion that there will be a need for interaction with other sentient beings in order for quests to move forward. Even though a great deal of you preferred to keep human contact to a minimum, if at all, there will be plenty of opportunity to play as the reclusive druid. Visiting the Thornwood Covenant tribe village will most likely be kept optional to an extent. The vast majority of quest progression will be done outside of the village, on your own, and well within mother nature's domain. You will seldom be required to interact with someone outside of the tribe, but you will frequently be interacting with nature's beasts and possibly doing radiant quests such as protecting the Skyrim's forests from encroachment by people. The Good News Foreword We're aware that to some of you, this may not necessarily be good news at all. Please keep in mind that almost every decision we make is based off or influenced through your feedback and we don't take each lightly. Unfortunately, there are some aspects of Call of the Wild which you might not have a say over because this is the way we as a team envision the end product. Anywho, on to the good news! Subschools of Magick, Perk Trees, and You As mentioned before, the new perks and abilities unique to CotW will come in the form of a MCM menu skill tree. Unlike the default skills system already in-game, these new perks and abilities will not cost you a single hard-earned perk point. Instead, you'll be earning some form of "XP", leveling these unique skills, and spending special points on the new perks. For now, we'll unofficially call these new "points" Primal Points, for a lack of better term. The new skill system will imitate the way S3 handles it's Slaver skill, but with a menu to facilitate Primal Point distribution, progress tracking, perk planning, and even to unperk from any given branch of the Primal Magic perk tree. The upside to the centralized perk tree is that it will keep the confusion of having several new skill sets to a minimum and will ultimately make the new perk system a whole lot cleaner and user friendly while remaining complex enough to keep the player engaged. As Frostbrand and I continue to discuss perks and abilities, we'll make a final decision on whether we should keep or completely do away with the originally planned subschools of magic in CotW. Remember, nothing at this point is written in stone and is prone to constant change. Quest Progression When touching on the quest progression topic, this was a lengthy and difficult debate. Personally, I favored a progression system where the player can keep human (or elven) contact to an absolute minimum and the quests themselves would focus on the player interacting with their environment, creatures, deities, and the likes. Ideally, the player would only ever need to come in contact with other sentient beings is to either have sex with them or to pry something from their dead fingers. Unfortunately, that will not be possible for several reasons. The first being that creatures in Skyrim are generally very dull and lack animations aside from the basic movement and attack animations. While there are bestiality animations, there is only a handful of them compared to the relatively large collection of animations for humanoids. The second reason is that it limits what we can do with the plot of quests. While CotW is primarily a sex mod, we also have great plans for creating an expansive arc of content-rich quests, which will ultimately form a story for players to enjoy. The way we see it, there is only so much you can do with creatures in the way of plot devices to keep the quests interesting and engaging enough to want to actually do them. This is where the Thornwood Covenant will step in and save the day. However, this isn't to say that you will be forced to follow around and serve a bunch of loonies living out in a garden of weeds. There will still be plenty of opportunity to lean away from your tribe and its people to do some of your own discovering and progression. Interacting with your tribe will be largely optional, with the exception of a few critical features of CotW such as learning your first Primal Magic spells, getting your first tattoos inked on, tribal orgies, and for "orientation" on your new abilities as a member of the Thornwood Covenant. After the initial stages of CotW's questing, you'll be set free and allowed to do your own thing. A good portion of the quests will progress on the periodic interactions with four wise and powerful sages, which will be hidden and scattered across Skyrim living in solitude (not the city! @_@). The plan originally was to have each of these sages be a master of a single subschool of Primal Magic (Allure, Ferocity, etc). The higher level spells and capstone abilities will all be learned from these sages once you have progressed enough through the quest arc where you will need to reach out and find them in order to advance your training. The quests from the sages would be a variety of things such as acquiring an ancient forbidden tome, collecting rare ingredients (ingredients unique to CotW) from dangerous locations, performing sexual favors for them, slaying Forsworn trying to expand into your forest, amongst many other things. Doing these smaller, meaningless tasks will eventually earn you their respect and begin to trust you with more important things. At each stage, they will offer to teach you a new spell or capstone ability, ink you with another tattoo, or teach you a new ritual which you can perform on your own later. We may or may not include interaction with creatures like spriggans or wisp mothers at this point, but there will be ample opportunity of bestiality. Man Overboard! As many of you have probably noticed, RangedPhoenix is now on a hiatus, which means he'll probably not be involved with CotW's development. He has stated in his own blog that he'll also be shelving the mod he was working on independent of CotW. Hopefully he will return in the future. You can read the details about it on his blog here on LL. Moar Shinies from Johnny's Vault! And the part of the entry that you've all been waiting for is here! Here are some more screenies and pics of stuff I've been doing for Call of the Wild. Some of these are actually pretty old, but decided to show you guys anyway for hell of it. Again, none of these pics represent what will be in the game or how they will appear in-game once CotW is released. As always, everything beyond this point is NSFW! A set of older pics of labia piercing concepts. Largely intact still, but without the Ankh. New bone piercings for the nipples! A revised version of the older labia piercings. Got rid of the dangling bits, thought they were too much.. still not satisfied though. This is an alpha version of an early perks concept I put together a while ago. Needless to say, after deciding to scrap perk tree overhauls, this is largely irrelevant now. It's still a nice concept though. The perks would automatically turn into penalties upon equipping a piece of armor or clothing, and revert back into a boost when taken off. Fully functional, but somewhat inconvenient to the player since you had to spend perk points. It was also unbalanced and could become extremely crippling, or stupidly overpowered at times. Bonus Pics! While on the subject of mother nature, here's what the spriggans thought about being made less important within CotW. Fair word of warning, these have nothing to do with CotW nor its development!- 2 comments