Need some help or brainstorming...

[Verdite]

Meh. Been stuck with this for a while now, but tonight i saw something that inspired me and gave me confidence.

When i first started on my project i entertained the idea of keeping the player almost "trapped" amongst the confines of caves, high walls and the like... But since then i have become fond of open areas in other games... Maybe i'm forgetting kings fields' design and potential.

Just wondering, what do you guys think is the best way to restrict the players view from beyond a set area? Basically i'm finishing off my town construction and i dont want the player to see beyond a certain level.

I'm really tempted to go back to the cliff scene scenario...

[dmpdesign]

I can think of several 'natural' ways to restrict movement..

Using cliffs is fine (meaning walls which I think youre referring to) but you can also use them as drop offs. ‎  When you play through KF3 you will notice they did several things to 'wall' in relatively large areas. ‎  The snowy plains area had a huge cliffside where the ocean could be seen about 30 feet below the drop off. ‎  If you recall...eternal ring used this tactic alot as well to create barriers between areas without putting up a physical wall to obstruct your view, it was effective because you could see far away but just couldnt reach it and it intrigued your explorative senses. ‎  So cliff drop-offs (not walls) are a good tactic.

Similar to the cliff drop off you can utilize rivers/lava flows or shallow ridges like canyons.

Clusters of impassable trees can often times offer the equivalent of walls that don't necessarily feel out of place or as obstructive as a pure rock wall. ‎  I have contemplated in my new game having a very large forest where its going to be hard to see because of the intense smoke in the area and having burning trees scattered about to provide some walls. ‎  I think this could potentially be a really cool map to build with a forest fire or battle aftermath situation.

You mentioned you are finishing your town...and I have seen a screenshot. ‎  Perhaps there is a madmade fence area stretching up about 10 feet to provide protection for the village that may also act as an obstruction to the player.

I know at one point Madison was going to make a field of corn to act as a wall.

Quicksand/swamplands may offer a unique way to keep the player from moving forward.

[Verdite]

Thanks for the ideas. I was actually planning on using trees to encircle the whole town... But as you'l probably know trees arent the most resource friendly tactic especially in SoM, so i had to change tactic there, i mean a good tree is what 500+ vertices? I was thinking to add distant trees though... And i could get away with 8 vertices for each. Though because of no alpha channels, the best way to create a transparent texture is to use black as the background, but then again the mipmaps pick up the black speckles.

Most games from the som age (hehe ) have high walls to keep the player from seeing too far ahead. The idea with the cliffs is good... Hmm...

[HwitVlf]

I played around with how to make the lowest polygon tree that still looks good and attached are some pictures of what I figured out. Basically, individual leaves and a round trunk aren't needed. Most of the 'quality' and smoothness comes from the texture. Make a whole branch a one piece bowl-shaped polygon. That way it looks full (3D) from any angle on the ground. Also, with a single bowl-per-branch, it's much easier to set the UV and swap out branch textures to make new trees.

You could put low-polygon trees here and there along the wall-edge with some kind of flat tree-wall texture between the 3D trees (like the attached bmp). It would work especially well if you used a river to keep the player at a distance from the tree wall.

[Verdite]

Didnt see this post until now, thanks for the pictures!

Where do you find such good leaf textures (that have the black background present) i have found many great textures with an alpha background, but alot of the alpha background when filled with black leave alot of holes, often ones that cling too close to the texture.

[HwitVlf]

Sometimes I just manually crop out (using freehand selection tool) a few leaf clusters, and piece copies of the clusters (rotated mirrored etc) together to make a branch.

For textures made from a single photo, (like the pine branch above) I have the same problems you mention. But I start with a high resolution photo so the pixels will be small enough to get a clean edge. Then I decrease the image to 256 colors and change the blue-sky or white background colors to black using (edit pallete) . There is often a bluish/whitish border around the leaves still, so I finish by darkening the whole image. That usually gets rid of the light colored ring. Finally I resize to 256x256 which further blurs out any lingering color problems.

[Verdite]

Thanks for the tip, this will help me with my grass problems and trees. I've already made a nice tree but it has mesh branches.

[Verdite]

I've got this under control now. Will post a video at some point.

[Verdite]

Got my acorn tree in game. Total vertices came up to... 195 per tree.

Heres a screenshot of an acorn tree grove. Thought you might wanna see it, as you did show me the technique... I made the leaves and branch from scratch, starting with an acorn leaf.

I really much prefer making my own models / textures and putting them into my game.

[dmpdesign]

Wow this stuff is shaping up really nicely, I love those trees, you guys are really inspiring me to want to make another game!