I'm currently writing out the text dialog of the ship interaction part of the game now, that's the easy part to do so I just made simple little batch file to navigate my way around all the text diaglog parts pressing keys to move around with each of the shjip's crew members that I interact with.. Along with writing the text, I also set up all the Values like the number of Credits, any credits in the ship areas to be found, Moods and attitudes of crew members, or goodie items you find ect.
so on.
The batch format is just temporary. It alows me to see the diaglog of the game and move through it through all areas of the ship and change anything But Once all the tweaking to the text is done then I can cut 'n' paste the text I need into the Unreal game engine, and then try to hook the dialog up to the 3d models. The hard part will be finding the audio files to match the dialog.of each character. Then the other tricky part, how to animate their mouths so it looks like they're really talking when the text shows up on the screen..
I bult the text diaglog all outside the Unreal engine so I didn't have build and rebuild the level all the time just to build and test and tweak all the text when all the adding and changing and tweaking of diaglog can be all done instead outside the engine, saves time...
If I can figure out how to do text dialog announcements on Unreal 4 then I can start intalling the text diaglog announcements in the level.
Yes I just noticed that when any soundfonts are loaded, these soundfonts change the sound of the tune and some soundfonts make SOME midi instruments sound better, while other soundfonts make my tunes sound awful, so soundfonts might work better for Mp3 than with midi. because it don't always sound good in midi when soundfonts are being used.
It a good catchy tune, has got a good piece in it with the sawtooth but needs a couple more octaves up the scales higher in the transition at the end of this techno tune. vocals are really good, o is the bass. BUt that is the type of music I'm looking for my game to put into the entertainment center part of the ship where you can play different music as well put as putting dark creaking ambiant sounds in the game so I need to find alot of this type of music ...... If you make any more of these techno tunes or ambient bgm let me know, I will also be making a city area as well in my game, I'm trying to make a sci fi roleplay action combat type of game. one that has got all kinds of different crew personalities in it that you can interact with and talk to. So I'm working on the text dialog of it. I need to find someone to help me to rig the models in Unreal 4 so they can have animation so I can do their text dialog.
Not sure if this is going the way I want... Dosen't quite look like i'm on a ship. walls dosen't have enough curves so it looks very plain and boxed.....and not got the right textures either, but i don't know how to do that with Unreal 4 like what I could do easily in a just few seconds with Red to bend segments of verticles to create curves. With Unreal it looks like you have to mess all around with resetting all the properties for the stairs segments to create all the flat bends and curves. The BSP system is not that good in Unreal.... Are there Unreal 4 mappers in here who know how to get a game to commercial quality?
Now I need to know how to animate my models, Unreal uses a maya toolit for the animation and rigging, but I don't have that program. But I don't know how to animate models in blender...........to get my models walking all around in the Unreal 4 editor. I also used Make Human to put the models into my level so I can at least populate it with more stiff t bones.... That was the most easiest modeling program I ever come across. although it should've had advanced options and a few more human models. And its compatble with Unreal 4.
At the moment this level needs a big overhaul to get it to commercial quality because at the moment its miles off that...... I might have better luck when doing outdoor terrain (haven't started that yet).
I also stuffed up the Main player's animation running sequence somehow, all he does is just move about in the stoff T pose now, looks hliarious. Might have to reinstall Unreal again to fix it of start a new level don't correct it.
The thing about Unreal is that when you stuff up or or other people stuff up with their stuff because they have different ways of doing things which Unreal don't always like,, you're the very first person to know about i. Unreal Is just like hawkeye, nothing gets by it. Nobody gets away with anything. Unreal is watching your every move behind its many shaders, the building takes a long time and in the meantime, and you know the engine is a beast, a workhorse because it makes your computer cooling fan go into turbo speed. It also tells you that your 16 gig ram computer is good enough only for its lowest settings. So I wonder how much ram it takes for it to tell you that your system is epic. and all the heavy caching it does continually, well that can't be too good for your hdd....
Unreal was pretty hard to try to understand because its advanced, the hardest part about it is all this animation and rigging concepts and Player Behavior node scripting with the models which is like Chinese to me, I can't get my head around it at the moment........ Unreal just does things in a difficult way that I dont particularly like. I like things to be advanced but made simple. Shephard and the other models in mass effect were pretty highly detailed so they must've been done in Maya. but I don't have maya...
The Puppy Dog came from Blender Swap. The guy who rigged it had rigged it wrong and that's why Unreal had trouble importing the whole thing..
Learning how to do things in Unreal was more harder than learning how to play professional tennis. But more harder is trying to learn how to wire the whole thing up with all the scripting.. But at the moment I need help getting my spaceship level looking more like a spaceship.
I also broke the lights. (tons of light UV overlapping errors.)
Not a bad Program.... Sketcher did allow me to get the wall done but not the window part. For Sketcher can't pull things through any curved surfaces.... So I can't get my window done. But the good thing is that I can paint textures onto the faces. But Sketcher does have an issue with Brush Rotation, causing the brush to cartwheel all out of control sometimes...Sletcher also has a 30 day period to use it.
So Sketcher can't import Meshes in from Blender, . but it will let me export stuff in that I make inside sketcher to Unreal. There was a corrupt FBX plugin in Blender that was preventing impot of models. So I fixed it. And was able to import the 1st low poly model of the game,
So I imported in the Captain Scar model, (hes just there for the testing). And there's also the Menus of the game to make, but Unreal uses the Flash Editor, but that editor only gives you 30 days to make all your menus in. Talk about putting on the pressure !!!. I need to find out how to make unreal Display JPG pics on the screen when I go to a computer terminal (oh I need to find a computer terminal static mesh, one with a hologram screen.
Two other things, I Need someone to help me shape the spaceship. but the curved walls need splits to make them bend more inward because everything at the moment is too square and blocky looking.... (that I don't know how to do because I'm not a 3d modeller...).... I made a start on the spaceship, but I don't know if I can shape the collision box that's on the mesh, this will stop the player from going into the main part of the spaceship. I also need the lighting floors trim textue.
I decided to have a little puppy dog, one that runs around causing havock on the spaceship. The dog is rigged with bones and animations but I had trouble importing him into Unreal 4, and its a whole lot involved in making models do things in Unreal, its an advanced engine. Unreal says the dog has had too many bones in the root whatever that means, Unreal will only accept 1 root bone, and now the dogs eyes are gone, Unreal didn't just take the dog's bones away but also took his eyes.... And I don't know how to fix the root bone problem either.
So I put in the curved walls, done the basic shape. now it needs all the splits in the wall curves to bend the sides of the ship inward to give it shape. I don't know how to do that.
Ureal is also Incredabily fussy. If people haven't set up their models right in blender then Unreal won't import them and tells you to fix all the errors it finds..........
I dont know how to make loop music in midi, but I thought most game engines have an option to allow music to just loop or just play once or is specificed by the number of times of the trigger counter.. I made the tune in midi so that other music artists can alter the music as they see fit for their needs because its hard to try to edit Mp3 or Ogg files once the music has been recorded but you can always edit and change midi... I'm giving away my music so that someone might beable to help me with my game like with models and stuff. or make some cool insignia's. But it would be nice if some other music artists do take my tunes and change them and make them sound alot more better with all the high quality instruments and sound as it would be interesting to see what people come up with.... I'm now looking at Sketchup and it says that the program can be used for game design.
I know Unreal has been messing up with me when trying to do certain geometry with those curved brush shapes I was hoping to do a spaceship with about 100 crew on it, but i have to try to find the models. then you have to try to find sutiable ship uniforms of various rank with the ship's insignia, that aint gonna be easy because I think the clothes has to be modeled unto the model itself, unless its just a bunch of textures. So how do they make the models animate and Talk in the cutscenes? I know how they do the audio and text diaglog, but not the animation of the models or the making of the clothes..
Another Question I have for you guys. Should I also try making video game music also.
I will upload two of my tunes now.
A word of warning, There's a problem with using any loaded midi soundfonts...
But If I'm good enough to make a tune in music even though the timing is a bit out because I used the pc keyboard to make it with then I should beable to make this 3rd personal video game....
But if my tunes are not good enough then I will just leave to it the pros to do all the timing. Because I don't have the equipment.
BUt I had to have a go at it anyway, but maybe some one out there can make much more better looking Insignia's than these ones that I tried to attempt to do.....If anyone wants to make some cool looking ones, or know where I can find good ones do let me know
Teh_Bucket, It looks like I need to build the interior of my spaceship with a 3d modeling program and the outdoor levels of the game can be made with a mix of both static mesh and brushes, but for inside the spaceship to do curves and the pipe and walls, , looks like it has to be done in a 3d program, because Unreal's brush system is limited on what you can do with the brushes. If i try to bulid cylinder brushes in each other to crate the walls of the ship it causes holes in the faces.
Its a hassell trying to do curved walls and other stuf in unreal becaus eyou have to split brushes in order to get the brush to curve, but in Red, all you do is just add number of segments you want then the number of splits and then hit the BEND button and the degree you want it to bend the brush to. done in literally done in seconds, whereas in unreal it will take half an hour to add in all the splits, then position each segment individually and so on.
So the interior of the ship has to be assembled together using Static Meshes to create the shapes I want. I don't see any other option. The Red Editor will allow me to lay down air and solid brush cylinders inside each other to create half moon wall curves without causing any face hole problems.
Here's some Insigna's Symbols.I came up with (they are just rough prototypes), I've still to come up with the ship's insignia. These symbols are just for the planet's Marketplace of various stores..
It would be good if some of these symbols can be turned into 3d glowing holograms.
I'm currently writing out the text dialog of the ship interaction part of the game now, that's the easy part to do so I just made simple little batch file to navigate my way around all the text diaglog parts pressing keys to move around with each of the shjip's crew members that I interact with.. Along with writing the text, I also set up all the Values like the number of Credits, any credits in the ship areas to be found, Moods and attitudes of crew members, or goodie items you find ect.
so on.
The batch format is just temporary. It alows me to see the diaglog of the game and move through it through all areas of the ship and change anything But Once all the tweaking to the text is done then I can cut 'n' paste the text I need into the Unreal game engine, and then try to hook the dialog up to the 3d models. The hard part will be finding the audio files to match the dialog.of each character. Then the other tricky part, how to animate their mouths so it looks like they're really talking when the text shows up on the screen..
I bult the text diaglog all outside the Unreal engine so I didn't have build and rebuild the level all the time just to build and test and tweak all the text when all the adding and changing and tweaking of diaglog can be all done instead outside the engine, saves time...
If I can figure out how to do text dialog announcements on Unreal 4 then I can start intalling the text diaglog announcements in the level.
Yes I just noticed that when any soundfonts are loaded, these soundfonts change the sound of the tune and some soundfonts make SOME midi instruments sound better, while other soundfonts make my tunes sound awful, so soundfonts might work better for Mp3 than with midi. because it don't always sound good in midi when soundfonts are being used.
It a good catchy tune, has got a good piece in it with the sawtooth but needs a couple more octaves up the scales higher in the transition at the end of this techno tune. vocals are really good, o is the bass. BUt that is the type of music I'm looking for my game to put into the entertainment center part of the ship where you can play different music as well put as putting dark creaking ambiant sounds in the game so I need to find alot of this type of music ...... If you make any more of these techno tunes or ambient bgm let me know, I will also be making a city area as well in my game, I'm trying to make a sci fi roleplay action combat type of game. one that has got all kinds of different crew personalities in it that you can interact with and talk to. So I'm working on the text dialog of it. I need to find someone to help me to rig the models in Unreal 4 so they can have animation so I can do their text dialog.
More updates
Not sure if this is going the way I want... Dosen't quite look like i'm on a ship. walls dosen't have enough curves so it looks very plain and boxed.....and not got the right textures either, but i don't know how to do that with Unreal 4 like what I could do easily in a just few seconds with Red to bend segments of verticles to create curves. With Unreal it looks like you have to mess all around with resetting all the properties for the stairs segments to create all the flat bends and curves. The BSP system is not that good in Unreal.... Are there Unreal 4 mappers in here who know how to get a game to commercial quality?
Now I need to know how to animate my models, Unreal uses a maya toolit for the animation and rigging, but I don't have that program. But I don't know how to animate models in blender...........to get my models walking all around in the Unreal 4 editor. I also used Make Human to put the models into my level so I can at least populate it with more stiff t bones.... That was the most easiest modeling program I ever come across. although it should've had advanced options and a few more human models. And its compatble with Unreal 4.
At the moment this level needs a big overhaul to get it to commercial quality because at the moment its miles off that...... I might have better luck when doing outdoor terrain (haven't started that yet).
I also stuffed up the Main player's animation running sequence somehow, all he does is just move about in the stoff T pose now, looks hliarious. Might have to reinstall Unreal again to fix it of start a new level don't correct it.
I like this tune, good for video game bgm music.
The thing about Unreal is that when you stuff up or or other people stuff up with their stuff because they have different ways of doing things which Unreal don't always like,, you're the very first person to know about i. Unreal Is just like hawkeye, nothing gets by it. Nobody gets away with anything. Unreal is watching your every move behind its many shaders, the building takes a long time and in the meantime, and you know the engine is a beast, a workhorse because it makes your computer cooling fan go into turbo speed. It also tells you that your 16 gig ram computer is good enough only for its lowest settings. So I wonder how much ram it takes for it to tell you that your system is epic. and all the heavy caching it does continually, well that can't be too good for your hdd....
Unreal was pretty hard to try to understand because its advanced, the hardest part about it is all this animation and rigging concepts and Player Behavior node scripting with the models which is like Chinese to me, I can't get my head around it at the moment........ Unreal just does things in a difficult way that I dont particularly like. I like things to be advanced but made simple. Shephard and the other models in mass effect were pretty highly detailed so they must've been done in Maya. but I don't have maya...
The Puppy Dog came from Blender Swap. The guy who rigged it had rigged it wrong and that's why Unreal had trouble importing the whole thing..
Learning how to do things in Unreal was more harder than learning how to play professional tennis. But more harder is trying to learn how to wire the whole thing up with all the scripting.. But at the moment I need help getting my spaceship level looking more like a spaceship.
I also broke the lights. (tons of light UV overlapping errors.)
Not a bad Program.... Sketcher did allow me to get the wall done but not the window part. For Sketcher can't pull things through any curved surfaces.... So I can't get my window done. But the good thing is that I can paint textures onto the faces. But Sketcher does have an issue with Brush Rotation, causing the brush to cartwheel all out of control sometimes...Sletcher also has a 30 day period to use it.
So Sketcher can't import Meshes in from Blender, . but it will let me export stuff in that I make inside sketcher to Unreal. There was a corrupt FBX plugin in Blender that was preventing impot of models. So I fixed it. And was able to import the 1st low poly model of the game,
So I imported in the Captain Scar model, (hes just there for the testing). And there's also the Menus of the game to make, but Unreal uses the Flash Editor, but that editor only gives you 30 days to make all your menus in. Talk about putting on the pressure !!!. I need to find out how to make unreal Display JPG pics on the screen when I go to a computer terminal (oh I need to find a computer terminal static mesh, one with a hologram screen.
Two other things, I Need someone to help me shape the spaceship. but the curved walls need splits to make them bend more inward because everything at the moment is too square and blocky looking.... (that I don't know how to do because I'm not a 3d modeller...).... I made a start on the spaceship, but I don't know if I can shape the collision box that's on the mesh, this will stop the player from going into the main part of the spaceship. I also need the lighting floors trim textue.
I decided to have a little puppy dog, one that runs around causing havock on the spaceship. The dog is rigged with bones and animations but I had trouble importing him into Unreal 4, and its a whole lot involved in making models do things in Unreal, its an advanced engine. Unreal says the dog has had too many bones in the root whatever that means, Unreal will only accept 1 root bone, and now the dogs eyes are gone, Unreal didn't just take the dog's bones away but also took his eyes.... And I don't know how to fix the root bone problem either.
So I put in the curved walls, done the basic shape. now it needs all the splits in the wall curves to bend the sides of the ship inward to give it shape. I don't know how to do that.
Ureal is also Incredabily fussy. If people haven't set up their models right in blender then Unreal won't import them and tells you to fix all the errors it finds..........
These are the 1st screenshots of my ship level.
I dont know how to make loop music in midi, but I thought most game engines have an option to allow music to just loop or just play once or is specificed by the number of times of the trigger counter.. I made the tune in midi so that other music artists can alter the music as they see fit for their needs because its hard to try to edit Mp3 or Ogg files once the music has been recorded but you can always edit and change midi... I'm giving away my music so that someone might beable to help me with my game like with models and stuff. or make some cool insignia's. But it would be nice if some other music artists do take my tunes and change them and make them sound alot more better with all the high quality instruments and sound as it would be interesting to see what people come up with.... I'm now looking at Sketchup and it says that the program can be used for game design.
I know Unreal has been messing up with me when trying to do certain geometry with those curved brush shapes I was hoping to do a spaceship with about 100 crew on it, but i have to try to find the models. then you have to try to find sutiable ship uniforms of various rank with the ship's insignia, that aint gonna be easy because I think the clothes has to be modeled unto the model itself, unless its just a bunch of textures. So how do they make the models animate and Talk in the cutscenes? I know how they do the audio and text diaglog, but not the animation of the models or the making of the clothes..
Another Question I have for you guys. Should I also try making video game music also.
I will upload two of my tunes now.
A word of warning, There's a problem with using any loaded midi soundfonts...
But If I'm good enough to make a tune in music even though the timing is a bit out because I used the pc keyboard to make it with then I should beable to make this 3rd personal video game....
But if my tunes are not good enough then I will just leave to it the pros to do all the timing. Because I don't have the equipment.
BUt I had to have a go at it anyway, but maybe some one out there can make much more better looking Insignia's than these ones that I tried to attempt to do.....If anyone wants to make some cool looking ones, or know where I can find good ones do let me know
Teh_Bucket, It looks like I need to build the interior of my spaceship with a 3d modeling program and the outdoor levels of the game can be made with a mix of both static mesh and brushes, but for inside the spaceship to do curves and the pipe and walls, , looks like it has to be done in a 3d program, because Unreal's brush system is limited on what you can do with the brushes. If i try to bulid cylinder brushes in each other to crate the walls of the ship it causes holes in the faces.
Its a hassell trying to do curved walls and other stuf in unreal becaus eyou have to split brushes in order to get the brush to curve, but in Red, all you do is just add number of segments you want then the number of splits and then hit the BEND button and the degree you want it to bend the brush to. done in literally done in seconds, whereas in unreal it will take half an hour to add in all the splits, then position each segment individually and so on.
So the interior of the ship has to be assembled together using Static Meshes to create the shapes I want. I don't see any other option. The Red Editor will allow me to lay down air and solid brush cylinders inside each other to create half moon wall curves without causing any face hole problems.
Here's some Insigna's Symbols.I came up with (they are just rough prototypes), I've still to come up with the ship's insignia. These symbols are just for the planet's Marketplace of various stores..
It would be good if some of these symbols can be turned into 3d glowing holograms.
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