2010-07-05, 05:02 AM
(2010-07-04, 04:44 PM)Verdite link Wrote: Its great that players will be able to use both Joe's pieces and the original SoM pieces, and in time possibly my own, though i dont think that the way forward for the community is holding onto old map pieces that are in a way crying out to be redeveloped and ... In some cases replaced entirely.
I'm actually really surprised anyone would not want to use the original assets. They are really great. I'd be floored if someone amongst us was able to reproduce that quality in terms of brand new assets, much less a catalogue broad enough to comprise an entire game. There are 100~200 monsters let alone everything else. I think you two are just odd blips on the radar. Personally I'd prefer that you spend all your custom work time doing stuff like expanding the outdoor set and adding pieces to the existing square dungeon shapes to make the dungeons more variable. I think you'd get a lot more bang for your buck doing that. And you'd be contributing more to everyone and history. Tom's games are fine the way they are. DD is great even though some of Todd's custom pieces do stand out.
When I add all of Shadow Tower's stuff to Som that will double the builtin asset pool. I just think you're going down the wrong path trying to compete with that. The only thing wrong with some of the models is the texture mapping could be corrected so those seams don't show up. The texture work in general is really sophisticated and I think you'd have a hard time one upping it without a significant budget. I worry your reskins won't be as good. Like Todd once said, reproducing the Som style textures is fairly challenging, especially from scratch... too challenging even. If the artistic direction was to go one way or another I'd prefer it regress to something that looks more like KF2 or KF1 even, because I think more people are better able to contribute work in those simpler terms. And frankly Som is unique visually, somewhere between ST and KF4, but I actually prefer to look at KF2.
Anyway we're going to be looking at nearly 300 monsters and more objects/items/map pieces than you can shake a stick at. So yeah I'd definitely prefer you add to the pot than try to do your own thing too much. I don't actually think of Som as a tool for doing your own thing. I don't think it was ever conceived that way.
EDITED: I realize we don't actually have tools available to correct the texture mapping. I certainly know enough about the files to develop something, but now is probably not the best time for that.