I limit myself here to the four "classical" elements, fire, water, earth and air. Additional elements have to be integrated in a fitting manner then. Also, I assume we have a special, complementary relation between fire and water and between air and earth.
___
Lets analyse the elements a little bit:
Fire (representation of energy): is basically heat, what moves in a spherical falloff, heating up everything in its range, the bigger the distance gets the lower the heat gets. So, you can either initiate a "point of heat" somewhere, or have the point of heat in your hand and give it an initial speed vector (aka fireball), who will follow the law of heating up his surrounding during his travel.
Water (representation of fluids): What water does, is cooling things down and when it comes with speed, it will have a physical impact. Also, water often appears in big volumes, so a water spell might be able to summon big volumes as well, what brings his own sideeffects. Also, water can be a heat carrier.
Air (representation of gas): Air behaves similar to water, it also has a physical effect when it is in movement, the amount of it is even more volumonous, but also less clear defined. It is also a temperature carrier. A big difference is, that it is immune to gravitation effects.
Earth (representation of solid matter): Is solid, shapeable, when accelerated, it has a good physical impact.
___
Examples of spells:
Fireball: 1) it is moving, usually the faster, the better 2) it is hot, it incites what it touches That is a very basic fireball, we have seen steerable ones, or ones that travel through water as well as through air, or even are able to explode at some point, but I concentrate on the basic fireball here. So, we need to give it a medium, what it can interact with, lets choose air here, we want it most likely travel through air, not through water or earth. Also it needs velocity, velocity is another form of energy, so we need to convert some heat energy to movement energy. And we need plenty of heat energy to make it hot. To break this down into a pseudo-rule-system: Carrier medium: Air (1) Convert heat to velocity: Fire (2) (I assume a convertion loss here, 2 points of fire result in 1 point of velocity, what can be looked up in some table to get an actual speed) Just be hot: Fire (4) (or 10, 20, depends if you wanna incite a barn or create a new volcano)
Fireshield: - creates a sphere of flames around the caster for a certain time Carrier media: Air (1) and water (2) ("2" because of fire-water relation) Sperical, static appearance: Fire (1), to define the spherical shape via the falloff of heat, and Earth (1) for the static wall-like appearance Lifetime: Fire (x), feeding the shield with Fire as kind of fuel.
Raining rocks: - casts rocks in the air and let them fall to ground Carrier media: Air (1) kind of casting target Creating Rocks: Earth (4) as we want much of them, covering some area The rest is done by the natural influence of gravity, so no further magic manipulations needed.
___
Okay, its quite trivial to invent spells and break them down into that kind of pseudo-system.
Following questions are a bit more interesting:
1) Can there a kind of a "questionnaire" created, that gets filled out by the caster, and whatever he fills in, an algorithm behind the questionnaire will create a spell from that? The answers should be one or more elements, each combined with a value. Examples: Carrier medium? Element1/(desired value), (maybe) Element2/value, etc. Heat energy? Fire (desired value) - here Fire is a fix answer, as it is the representation of energy Movement energy? Fire (2:1 value) - means, you say 4 but will get just 2 ... As I see now, the examples are maybe not so trivial, as they work as a good base to refine questions out of.
2) If the questionnaire wont work, can there be refined some "patterns" at least, that can be freely combined to a spell? Like, we have a few transmission patterns, like "beam", "radial growing", "spherical wall", "cast and then follow law of nature", etc.) Then we have the base elements the spell itself consists of, where every element is kind of a pattern, as much as dual-combinations of patterns (like fire+water give a steam styled spell, earth+water makes much dirt, air+fire gives the fire a pseudo-material appearance, etc.) Then we have influence patterns (the caster itself, a certain victim, every being in sightrange, or law-of-nature influence, like with a fireball, that simply heats and incites everything in his way, until he is eaten up) Now lets imagine more categories here and more patterns for every category and lets assume that we have a spell for every possible combination in the sleeve, or -even better- get it created (by combining some graphical effects, like let the "acting" element define the texture, the other patterns define some shapes and animations) plus, calculating the amount of damage (does it always have to make damage? what about a simple fly-spell?) and the cost.
Not sure what this leads me to now, just my 2 cents to the topic of elemental stuff ;)
due to high poly count not usable as 3D model without doing retopology, so with some nice texture usable for 2D shots, maybe for board games; generate maps of any kind; show as symbol in descriptions of mobs/npc's to tell about their preferred living space etc.
make a break from it for now, any ideas what to do else before committing tomorrow?
Just found that article, maybe it is of interest:
http://www.harkyman.com/2010/11/26/recording-ik-movement-into-fk-bones/
I limit myself here to the four "classical" elements, fire, water, earth and air. Additional elements have to be integrated in a fitting manner then. Also, I assume we have a special, complementary relation between fire and water and between air and earth.
___
Lets analyse the elements a little bit:
Fire (representation of energy):
is basically heat, what moves in a spherical falloff, heating up everything in its range, the bigger the distance gets the lower the heat gets. So, you can either initiate a "point of heat" somewhere, or have the point of heat in your hand and give it an initial speed vector (aka fireball), who will follow the law of heating up his surrounding during his travel.
Water (representation of fluids):
What water does, is cooling things down and when it comes with speed, it will have a physical impact. Also, water often appears in big volumes, so a water spell might be able to summon big volumes as well, what brings his own sideeffects. Also, water can be a heat carrier.
Air (representation of gas):
Air behaves similar to water, it also has a physical effect when it is in movement, the amount of it is even more volumonous, but also less clear defined. It is also a temperature carrier. A big difference is, that it is immune to gravitation effects.
Earth (representation of solid matter):
Is solid, shapeable, when accelerated, it has a good physical impact.
___
Examples of spells:
Fireball:
1) it is moving, usually the faster, the better
2) it is hot, it incites what it touches
That is a very basic fireball, we have seen steerable ones, or ones that travel through water as well as through air, or even are able to explode at some point, but I concentrate on the basic fireball here.
So, we need to give it a medium, what it can interact with, lets choose air here, we want it most likely travel through air, not through water or earth. Also it needs velocity, velocity is another form of energy, so we need to convert some heat energy to movement energy. And we need plenty of heat energy to make it hot.
To break this down into a pseudo-rule-system:
Carrier medium: Air (1)
Convert heat to velocity: Fire (2) (I assume a convertion loss here, 2 points of fire result in 1 point of velocity, what can be looked up in some table to get an actual speed)
Just be hot: Fire (4) (or 10, 20, depends if you wanna incite a barn or create a new volcano)
Fireshield:
- creates a sphere of flames around the caster for a certain time
Carrier media: Air (1) and water (2) ("2" because of fire-water relation)
Sperical, static appearance: Fire (1), to define the spherical shape via the falloff of heat, and Earth (1) for the static wall-like appearance
Lifetime: Fire (x), feeding the shield with Fire as kind of fuel.
Raining rocks:
- casts rocks in the air and let them fall to ground
Carrier media: Air (1) kind of casting target
Creating Rocks: Earth (4) as we want much of them, covering some area
The rest is done by the natural influence of gravity, so no further magic manipulations needed.
___
Okay, its quite trivial to invent spells and break them down into that kind of pseudo-system.
Following questions are a bit more interesting:
1)
Can there a kind of a "questionnaire" created, that gets filled out by the caster, and whatever he fills in, an algorithm behind the questionnaire will create a spell from that? The answers should be one or more elements, each combined with a value.
Examples:
Carrier medium? Element1/(desired value), (maybe) Element2/value, etc.
Heat energy? Fire (desired value) - here Fire is a fix answer, as it is the representation of energy
Movement energy? Fire (2:1 value) - means, you say 4 but will get just 2
...
As I see now, the examples are maybe not so trivial, as they work as a good base to refine questions out of.
2)
If the questionnaire wont work, can there be refined some "patterns" at least, that can be freely combined to a spell?
Like, we have a few transmission patterns, like "beam", "radial growing", "spherical wall", "cast and then follow law of nature", etc.)
Then we have the base elements the spell itself consists of, where every element is kind of a pattern, as much as dual-combinations of patterns (like fire+water give a steam styled spell, earth+water makes much dirt, air+fire gives the fire a pseudo-material appearance, etc.)
Then we have influence patterns (the caster itself, a certain victim, every being in sightrange, or law-of-nature influence, like with a fireball, that simply heats and incites everything in his way, until he is eaten up)
Now lets imagine more categories here and more patterns for every category and lets assume that we have a spell for every possible combination in the sleeve, or -even better- get it created (by combining some graphical effects, like let the "acting" element define the texture, the other patterns define some shapes and animations) plus, calculating the amount of damage (does it always have to make damage? what about a simple fly-spell?) and the cost.
Not sure what this leads me to now, just my 2 cents to the topic of elemental stuff ;)
very nice! *downloaded*
Great occasion to give alchemy another try, after watching this great video from the sintel-guy. Thanks to whoever posted it in the forums here!
I planned to do 5-10 nice sketches of various things....
The variety is the only goal I was able to achieve ;-)
http://opengameart.org/content/3-random-alchemy-concepts
just took a quick look at the ryzom stuff, the 3D assets have the extension ".max", Blender can import ".3ds" .. not sure how to convert that.
2D art is definitely no branch where I feel at home, but I tried my luck with these. Due to error messages during upload you can get the images here:
http://www.2shared.com/file/Defg0xX8/rad_icons.html
Preview here:
http://picpaste.de/icons_prev.png
You have the .xcf's in the Zipfile, in case you want to redesign parts of it (what is not unlikely, hehe)
edit: the hand and the rampdoor are from imageafter.com
edit2: its all CC-0 licensed
Apophysis, the fractal flame generator: http://www.apophysis.org/
City generator for Blender 2.49: http://arnaud.ile.nc/sce/
http://www.mmofront.com/ not about opensource, but mmo's of all kind
and I check http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=&sort=latest_file_date&sortdir=desc... from time to time
and http://www.devmaster.net/ is interesting as well.
highpoly landscape items (mountain, forest, grass): http://www.pasteall.org/pic/6452
due to high poly count not usable as 3D model without doing retopology, so with some nice texture usable for 2D shots, maybe for board games; generate maps of any kind; show as symbol in descriptions of mobs/npc's to tell about their preferred living space etc.
make a break from it for now, any ideas what to do else before committing tomorrow?
Again a last-minute-entry: http://opengameart.org/content/miniboss-infested-knight
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