Karagiozis 2 - Hunter of the Dead (3D platformer)

[Veleran]

Im taking ideas from old platformers like Karnov and ultimate ghosts and goblins.
Enemy pawn Scripts will be simple like- patrol left and right or up and down between the platforms.
Dont expect much,as im no scripter and i dont plan to learn much on that subject.


Maybe i could some day finish some levels using the first world brushes.There is no need to try make more than that because i dont know how many would like to try play it-even for free.

When i first tried rf i did tests on karagiozis,however the content of the pics is all new.
I have to paint the barks of the trees to complete a basic brushes set for the first world,then i can make some animations for the player and start improvising.
Next i can add some ghosts ,zombies and skeletons.This is still far,as i got to hand paint the trees canopies too.

Of course,-there is no Karagiozis 1 previously published,..




earlier shot of some brushes-untextured in max



rf older test screenshot




Karagiozis is a folk comedy character in greece from the shadow theatre if the early 1900's late 1800's that is still being played on its mini stage with modern plays.

[Veleran]

Close view of the player's home at the start of the stage.No shadows,as it is staticmeshes-some are no collision double sided with transparency,others are solid with collision.
I ll make invisible clip brushes for the walls these days.

Some planks of the roof backfaces are nt visible,but this is an older pic i was experimenting in which parts to make two sided etc.

Tell me if you like it,i hand painted the heater ,bed and pot.
To the plant texture tga, i adjusted lightness and saturation etc and masked the transparency by hand too.

[zany_001]

Looks OK, if oldschool.

[Nighthawk_0973]

the original player model looks rediculous next to the rest of the game though. He doesn't fit with the visual style very well.

[Veleran]

I know.here s the original player-the hunchback karagiozis - faced here because its in mudbox now and smoothing groups dont work on my version,
i dont have time to run max now and take another screen but you can also see the player somewhere in the first pic ,although tiny.

[Veleran]

Quick test with a staticmesh without transparency.

[anc]

Hi,
I'm new over here. And i got interested in the Reality Factory because of this project.
Was it hard to work with this kind of environment?
have you imported the environment from another software or was it made in the RF editor?

Best regards.

[Veleran]

All that is smoothed and that is mesh,the bsp brushes you can create in the editor are sharp shaded.

Its is hard to me because rfeditpro used to crash when displaying actor meshes so i disabled it and had only the enities origin "X" to place.
I made all in max and exported them in max from 0 0 0 and looked in max where that piece was to copy coordinates in rf editor so it ll be put to its right place.

Many times staticmesh collision is faulty -you push static entities on a terrain hill they might move through the ground along the player or some times might even get stuck on the boundng box of staicmesh.
If the static mesh is flat you can add a clip flagged bsp plane under it and

Read the manual,it ll take months to know what works better and what does not.
There are many bugs and you got to do many tests to find and avoid them.
Have the manual and forum open to search it and you may do something.
Rf i think is better for puzzle games and like.

The transparent actors must not intersect each other leaves or the transparency is lost there.
If you want to intersect thing ad them as different actors.
Now if you have thin objects over another one many times its better to add them as one actor,Rf mixes things like thin bricks over a wall,a shirt over a body etc and flickers the thin one.

If you can export .map file for the bsp to use as invisible collision mesh you ll get some better frame rate at levels
where there s detail on an actor and dont want all that detail to have collision,otherwise you ll have to use bounding boxes and add as static entities to avoid sticky bounding box collision.

Anyway lately the staticmesh cant be placed over other than static meshes,so,you ll have to avoid these sometimes.

[Veleran]

Correction: Staticmesh can also be placed on top of bsp like clip brushes and render fast.
The staticmesh was messed up when i placed solid -transparent faces flagged- bsp,at the same place with the staticmesh ,
to block the monsters view to the player.

These days when i worked on that level i was too busy with many other things which did not leave enough endurance and i was kind of hurrying for no reason and did not have the patience to design the levels.
I had started working on it with my brother for only few months as 2D at 1993 with a possible concept titled like-Karagiozis in the Underworld.
Then i went back to it at 1998 and started modelling various level brushes and drawing concept art.
Most of the level was done in the season 2009-10,but i abandon it again for a year more when i posted the pics.

I will note that it was fast because i had not used too small details,the actor textures were small and not too many,and i had attached objects to minimum static meshes,and used far clip plane and fog.
I used only one staticmesh for the geometry and one for leaf like transparent objects like tree canopies and grasses.
This way the leaves could be flagged two sided or might use zsort-if needed,and not the whole stage,which would slow it down.

[Veleran]

Hi,
I'm new over here. And i got interested in the Reality Factory because of this project.
Was it hard to work with this kind of environment?
have you imported the environment from another software or was it made in the RF editor?

Best regards.

I will correct few things and i should have done so when you asked.

All objects placed in 3ds max and attached them before export.All foliage that used staticmesh zsort = true were exported as separate actor.
The terrain you step on was also made in 3ds max by attaching all platforms together before exporting.

If a building had average detail and was nt too triangulated,i had to add it as separate staticmesh with no collision and put in rfeditpro a clip brush box bsp to optimize the collision.

I did nt place every plant and tree and platform as separate staticmesh to free the cpu from further calculations.

About the display actors crash:
That project was in directory C:\Program Files\RealityFactory and the engine should be in C:\RealityFactory
plus there must be other configurations or just my little messed system that helped the editor to crash more often when it displayed the actor meshes.

[steven8]

Veleran, these screens are pretty sweet. Do you have anything playable, yet?

[Veleran]

Just what you see in the pics,no monsters.I considered it left aside for the moment.It started as 2d in 1993 and the original idea dates to 1984.No wonder it has nt got far yet.

[steven8]

Shame it got shelved, although I certainly understand why these things happen. You sure creative some sweet level geometry there, my friend. Beautiful texture work.

[Veleran]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karagiozis

http://www.karagiozismuseum.gr/en/figoures/index.htm


Spatharis was a great player of this theater and did all character voices by himself and i remember it was quite fun between 1975-1985 ,specially the sounds when someone got beaten up.

I did the models at season 2009-2010 and i was planing to use mostly the main character and occasionally throw some of the main characters walking around displaying some line above their head and that would be all.

Now that i think of it it would not be much of a Karagiozis without the social satyric comedy and strong plot which is in that theater.
So,it should be arcade with adventure and basic dialog (and i was always lazy to learn how to script pawn conversation).

Plus, the characters are numerous and would take some months to make and animate,excluding the enemy monsters.

I know i can do it but not now that i am looking for quick level creation.

[steven8]

Oh man. That is really cool. The character model you created is spot on. I will have more time at work tonight, as it's Friday, so I'll do some thorough reading of those sites.