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Siege Max
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005 - 17:55
Getting StartedQ: Why does Siege Max say it can't find Gmax when I have Gmax installed? To find this, right click on My Computer -> Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables. Look for gmaxloc. There is a work around for this issue. After installing Gmax, open and close Gmax, then restart your computer and environment variables will be ok. Install DS Toolkit after restart. Here is some more info on setting environment variables: Q: How can I start learning Siege Max?
Q: What is the average poly count for Dungeon Siege assets? The trees are a good example. By keeping the poly counts on our characters down in the 1000 range, instead of the 2000 range, that frees up 8000 polys for trees, allowing us to flood our terrain with them! A simple choice, but based on being responsible with poly economy throughout.. We hope that the mod community will appreciate this concept, and continue the strategy into their creations. Weapons... Weapons are something you should keep as low as absolutely possible. Not only does every character in the party equip themselves with a variety of them, stacking up the poly count per character, but you can have literally dozens of them littering the ground at any time. A few people have mentioned 500 poly weapons being "okay, since they're strong and we'll only have one" or whatever.. What this doesn't account for is that anything that's really exciting and impressive will be used and used and used again, and it won't be long before you see 8 character parties each carrying around these 500 or 1000 poly weapons, doubling the overall poly count for that party (which, of course, is always on screen and is the most critical poly count to manage..). Keep the weapons under 100 polys, or even half that, and you should be great. Consider it a challenge to make something look good with that many polys, instead of being tempted to use more. That's what we had to do.. Also, textures for weapons are a big BIG issue, for many of the same reasons. Since weapons litter themselves all over the game by the dozens, we went with a plan of just using one texture for all the weapons, and filling it with pieces of generic materials that could be used repeatedly. Q: How do you get nodes lined up properly in Siege Max? For smaller, custom areas like Fort Kroth, the Droog Village, and Castle Ehb the nodes fit together like a jigsaw puzzle where every node has its place. We also made a bunch of node systems that could be connected together many different ways, kinda like a Lego set. Most of the landscapes, dungeons and the multiplayer castle work under this principle. By the end of the project, we definately favored the second way of producing nodes. It took a lot more pre-planning and required a bit more sophistication with UVW mapping, but it was well worth the effort in the end. The pieces could be reused in many many different ways and whole layouts could be changed without needing to go back and remodel and retexture anything. We also designed the pieces so that the textures could be switched in the editor and because of this their usefulness became exponential. Big wins. As far as precision goes, the game engine is extremely unforgiving when it comes to aligning nodes. Lighting and pathfinding calculations are based on the node's vertex posistions and there's no room for error. But have no fear. There are two foolproof ways to ensure all your vertices are lined-up exactly. The first way is to use gmax's Transform Type-In tool located at the bottom-middle of the screen. Here you can get absolute XYZ positions of any selected vertex and type-in any value you want. The second tool is a little script that our MAX programmer Biddle made for us called Reset and Round. This little goodie rounds off the XYZ position all vertices of a given node to the nearest .01m (it also cleans up all internal values that we don't see). With this coarse of a grid, it became easy to spot vertices that didn't align. The Round tool is part of the Siege Max node exporter. On top of this we would recommend keeping all your connecting edge vertices on nice rounded-off XYZ posistions that are easy to manage on a coarse grid. Q: Are two-sided textures supported in Dungeon Siege? Q: How do change the default bits path for Siege Max? The contents of the Registry (.REG) file should be: REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareGas Powered GamesDSTK1.0Paths] "Out"="C:mybitsdirectory"
Q: How do I get my new art into the game? In addition, you can go over the Siege Max and the tutorial included with the DSTK Art Packs. Creating ArmorQ: How do armor meshes work? ARMORThere are four player characters in the game; Farmboy, Farmgirl, Dwarf and Skeleton. These characters are the only meshes in the game that support complete armor sets. A complete armor set for a character includes the following meshes: Body armor
Gauntlets
Boots
Helmets
Each of these armor components requires a separate mesh, weighted to the bone structure for a particular character. That's a total of 62 meshes per character. We begin by constructing the base body armor mesh for a character, which we call a "pose" file. For example, the Farmboy character you see in the character selection menu in Dungeon Siege uses the base pose file "pos_a1". This mesh represents the character wearing simple clothing. In gmax, this pose file contains the complete character mesh, UV mapping information, bone structure, and vertex weight information. It also contains "hidden poly" information for the head, hands and feet. Polygons flagged as "hidden" will not be drawn when helmets, gloves, or boot meshes are swapped onto the model in the game. Hiding these polygons eliminates clipping errors from overlapping meshes. All body armor pos files (a1 through a7) contain head, hand, and feet polygons that are defined as hidden. This permits the player to swap body armor while retaining any helmet, gloves and/or boots the character might be wearing. We then build the extremity armor, like helmets, boots, and gauntlets. Each of these components requires a separate mesh file containing UV mapping information, bone structure, and vertex weight information. The entire bone structure must reside in each of these files, but only the component geometry will be present. For example, a helmet file will contain the mesh and UV information for the Viking helmet, or "type5". The entire bone structure for the character will be in this file, but only the geometry for the helmet will be present. The bone structure is needed to store weight information for the helmet vertices. The armor swapping technology is also used in the character selection menu. When you select a hairdo, you're actually selecting a "helmet" that replaces the default head polys (flagged as hidden in the gmax file) on the pos_a1 mesh. Textures for body armor, helmets, boots, and gauntlets are shared between characters. To maintain UV consistency between characters, we typically modeled the base body armor pose files for Farmboy, and simply duplicated and reshaped this geometry to create versions of the armor for Farmgirl, Dwarf, and Skeleton. This dramatically simplified the UV mapping process and permitted us to leverage a single body armor texture for all player characters. Textures for helmets are a bit more complex. Because some helmets expose part of the character's face, multi-sub materials are used to define what portion of the geometry belongs to the helmet, and what portion belongs to the character's skin. WEAPONS AND SHIELDSEach weapon and shield has a "grip" mesh. This grip is attached as a parent to the weapon or shield mesh in a gmax file, and defines where it will be positioned and how it will be oriented. The character meshes also have weapon and shield grips. These grips are children of the hand bones, and correspond to the orientation of the grips for weapons and shields. When a weapon or shield is attached to a character in the game, the grips simply snap together. Position and orientation information for the attached component is now controlled by the character's hand. Q: How do you make shields?
For more help relating to this, take a look at Siege U 215 regarding pivot points. Q: How do you make custom guantlets for Dungeon Siege? Now you'll need to make the template for your new gauntlets. You can add a new entry to worldcontentdbtemplatesregularinteractivearm_glove.gas, or if you prefer not to modify the original game file, you can create your entry in a new and separate GAS file in that same directory. If you want to see how your gauntlet would look, you could import a gauntlet mesh into Siege Max and apply your texture to it. You'll notice that there are type1_a gauntlets, and type1_b gauntlets. These correspond to the two different gauntlets meshes. Type1_a are gloves (and gauntlets that are tucked beneath body armor). Type1_b are regular, bulky gauntlets. A texture made for one, should/will look correct when applied to the other mesh. Q: How do I make a new Gauntlet Type for Dungeon Siege? To go about making a new gauntlet type, first you'll need to create a model of the gauntlets lying on the floor. That is placed as /art/meshes/armor/gauntlets/m_a_gntl_typeX.asp. Then, for each PC/NPC capable of wearing your new gauntlet type, you'll need to create a model of them being worn, and place those in the gauntlet subdirectory of each PC/NPC model. My suggestion on how to best accomplish all of this modelling is to import existing gauntlets, and merely move the vertices around. This preserves the uv-mapping. It also allows you to preserve the correct skeleton for each PC/NPC. Import a farmboy gauntlet and you'll see what I mean by this. Remember that your new gauntlet type should have texture mapping coordinates which are compatible with all existing textures. Any texture that looks correct on type1_a and type1_b should look correct on your new type, and vice-versa. To see your in the game, you'd have to either: alter the armor subtype lookup table to reference gauntlet type_1c for certain types of body armor, or write some skrit to use type_1c whenever you have your unique gauntlet item equipped, regardless of the body armor. TroubleshootingQ: Why do my animations look fine in Siege Max but do not animate properly in Dungeon Siege?
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