Monkey Island mod!

[G0blin]

about 7 years ago some friends and I worked on a mod for quake 3. And yes it was a Blood Island mod. I created the menugraphics, weapons and the Goodsoup hotel. the sad thing was that my computer died, and we lost the level,models and the textures:( I tried to save the hard disc, but no -it is all gone. I wish that I had at least some screens to show you:(

 

anyway, I want to give it a new try -not right now, but in a year or something...

 

1. what game is a god game for a Monkey mod?

2. a god level editor? I remember I used q3 radiant, it sucked!

3. witch location, charecters, weapons, blabla?

[Gabez]

Half-life 2 Source maybe? It looks fantastic and I hear it's fairly mod-friendly.

 

Though I'd love to see the Blood Island crypt done with the Doom 3 engine.

[Alien426]

Umm, someone is requesting an engine for a game that plays on an island??

 

How about fricken Far Cry! It would look good in the evening/night setting of Blood Island, too. Also take a look at the decaying body and skeleton.

 

It's not using a stupid registration policy, either.

[Gabez]

Haha yeah, I was thinking about FarCry too but I didn't know what the mod tools were like. That said, I hear there's a lot of projects based on the engine so it can't be that hard to use.

 

I also used the Farcray engine as an example in my to 3D or not to 3D article on TSB, except I can't get to that image now since Remi broke it. ;

[Fealiks]

counter strike source.

[Thrik]

Far Cry is by far the best engine for creating an island map. Source (which encompasses Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source) is probably one of the worst you could use, with Doom 3 being pretty much the only one that could be worse. To save myself from explaining, I'll put them into a basic order:

 

Crytek Engine (Far Cry)

Designed specifically for creating lush, beautiful outdoor scenes. Also designed specifically for creating islands, although you can import 3D architecture in from other editors (including 3D Studio Max and Maya as far as I'm aware). The editor itself is a "sandbox" editor, in that you modify it in real time and can immediately test it. Terrain height adjustment is almost like painting.

 

Unreal Technology Engine (Unreal Tournament, Tribes Vengeance, many more)

A large focus on outdoor areas, but also has strong support for detailed indoor areas. Is a good compromise between indoor and outdoors, but has the huge disadvantage of having the hardest to use editor of any engine ever pretty much.

 

Source Engine (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source)

Is focused more towards strictly geometric designs, making it ideal for cities and indoor areas. Making believable terrain with this engine, especially an island, is not impossible. However, it will not look anywhere near as good as the Far Cry engine because its lighting is simply more optimized for indoor areas and it will look fairly flat. Creating smooth terrain and such is also a huge chore with this editor, which is essentially still Half-Life 1's worldcraft (which is in turn derived from Quake) with a few extra additions. You are, however, guaranteed more exposure from the community and Valve themselves if you mod for Source. Huge downside is long compile times (think of it as rendering, except without real-time previewing as it does so).

 

Doom Engine (Doom 3, Quake 4)

Tailored specifically towards creating highly detailed and realistic lighting indoors. This is probably the worst engine you could hope to use when creating a believable outdoor area, and also has an incredibly weak multiplayer community which means that your mod is unlikely to receive much exposure.

 

Hopefully that sums up the pros and cons of using each engine.

 

In my personal opinion, I thoroughly agree with Alien in saying that Far Cry is the best engine for this project if you really want to go ahead with it. However.. Half-Life 2 is a newer game and has a more active community, so you may wish to compromise engine suitability for that. Up to you!

[Gabez]

Hee, well, that shows what I know.

 

Maybe you could wait until Black & White 2 comes out and make an island with that! It would be mega-awesome.

[Thrik]

Now, that is a good idea!

[Aptiva]

I gotta say Doom 3 or Unreal tournament. What's the point of all this if we mac users can't participate!

[Gabez]

Ah Mac users, ay? What about... World of Warcraft! Or maybe just Warcraft III.

 

Or not.

[Aptiva]

I've actually been wanting to make a 2d scumm-style engine for quite some time now. Just been busy on another project, if anyone here is interested in working on that I'm all ears

 

p.s. No I'm not an artist, I'd just program

[Gabez]

A Mac user who isn't an artist but a programmer?

 

My God! Or, as you Mac users say, Sacre Bleu!

[Aptiva]

A Mac user who isn't an artist but a programmer?

 

My God! Or, as you Mac users say, Sacre Bleu!

 

hehe, that's right

[Scummbuddy]

Aptiva, that is what Adventure Game Studio is for. Why rewrite what is already there?

[Aptiva]

Aptiva, that is what Adventure Game Studio is for. Why rewrite what is already there?

 

I had no idea that existed

But after checking the site out, I found these problems with it:

No mac support (though porting the freebsd version shouldn't be too hard)

800x600 max resolution, that sucks on lcd's (and is just unacceptable in 2005)

It's a game creation kit, with emphasis on easy game creation, What I was talking about would just be a scriptable engine

it's closed source.. (at least I couldn't find the source)

 

It just seems to me that ags is obsolete

[Legshot]

First of all I'd like to get one thing straight: Your 3D work is pretty awesome

 

With that said, here's my thoughts on this:

In my opinion you have only two choices for this project: Doom3 or Source... I'd choose doom3 over source anytime...

 

Why? Because Source and similar engines are the last of it's generation. The old "build in editor, pre-render for hours" is a thing of the past. Future engines will use real time lightning just like the doom3 engine does today. The perfect thing with the doom3 engine is, that you can, just like with farcry, create stuff within the engine itself. No pre-rendering time. If you move a light, for example, you have instant feedback. One big drawback of the farcry engine is (and maybe that has changed, but I doubt it) it can only handle one real light on the screen at any time. There is a doom3 style level which demonstrates this pretty well (http://www.forum-3dcenter.de/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=140068&page=1&pp=20 it's german btw...).

 

It's also not true that the doom3 engine is only good for indoor stuff. Granted, it's been used only for that but future games will use it differently as the hardware starts to become even more powerful. Quake4 is also said to have large outdoor areas.

 

Which brings me to the next thing: multiplayer. It's true that doom3 suffers from a small modding and multiplayer comunity. But I think that's going to change when quake4 hits the market. Quake had and still has a strong community arround...

 

So if you like to bring your very good work to a game, without sacrificing too much eye candy, you have only one choice: Doom3 I'd personally start with just bringing your levels to the engine, so you can walk arround blood island in awesome 3d When Quake4 hits the shelves, you can bring in multiplayer as well... Although let's face it: Such a mod would probably only have a small community of monkey geeks anyway

 

I hope this thing goes anywhere and doesn't die beeing only a good idea

[Thrik]

Epic's engine can be used for creating outdoor areas, but as I said, the engine is tailored more towards indoor design above all else. Creating outdoor areas which look as nice as FarCry's, regardless of what other pros the engine has going for it, will be difficult.

 

Of course, Doom 3 could become more viable depending on how exactly you plan to go around this mod. If you plan to have the entirety of Blood Island as one huge map, then FarCry is without a doubt what you want simply because it has brilliant handling of LoDs, draw distances, and managing a lot of stuff being rendered on screen at once. The Doom 3 and Source engines, put simply, don't.

 

This is primarily down to the way that the two engine render things. They do a lot more calculations to ensure that lighting and such is pixel perfect, whilst FarCry sacrifices that to an extent and instead "cheaply" renders huge stretches of terrain without much slowdown. Source can also do this, although you have to use a special type of floor mesh which is called a displacement map. Source does not really use LoDing on anything other than models though, which makes huge areas of visible detail (stand on top of Blood Island volcano, look down) really difficult to do at a satisfactory frame rate. Doom 3 also has this issue, amplified x1000.

 

If however you'd prefer to design the mod to be cut into maps, with each map depicting a certain part of Blood Island, you could probably do this project a lot more nicely. It'd be slightly less immersive, but you would be able to devote a lot more detail to each area of the island (no nasty LoD issues to worry about!) and also use engines which were previously unfeasible because you'll be rendering smaller areas at once. Source could be a really nice engine if doing this, since that's what it's designed for. Doom 3 less so, but since it's a night map you'd benefit from its advanced lighting capabilities.

 

Edit: Another benefit of splitting it into maps is that you could release the mod as beta after getting a couple done, which could in turn provoke people to help you out and work on other maps. The Source community in particular is great for this, with many talented people willing to do work for free if they see a mod has potential (ie: completed work ... trying to recruit really good mappers with no existing material is near impossible). Source probably does have one of the better editing/mod communities around, which would seriously help the mod get both exposed and played.

 

Edit x2: If this mod gets cancelled after my writing of these long posts, people shall die!

[Scummbuddy]

Aptiva

 

It just seems that the front page may be a bit out of date. The forums is where all the latest news occurs, really.

 

we have people that create games with macs, plus we have the ability to play the games on linux and macs as well.

CMI was made in 800*600 and looks fantastic, but yes, we had larger res support before, took it out, and it looks like its coming back really soon.

it is not emphasis on easy game creation... trust me, you can make all kinds of really complicated games with this. we have RTS games being made, and we are currently testing its 3d possiblities

just take my word for it, if you want to script it, its either possible, or you ask the creator to add something, and he will, or it will in the future.

 

yes its closed source, but again, if you need something, just ask CJ and he'll most likely get to it soon. he's always coming out with new betas for us.

[Remi]

(CMI was 640*480)

[Jake]

Jake agrees with FarCry.

[G0blin]

hmmm...FarCry would be a good game for a monkey mod. But I found out that on school this year there will be leveldesign, and we are going to use the Unreal ED (Unreal tournament 2004). So I thought it would be a nice opportunity to work with the monkey mod. I cant say that i like the level editor for unreal that much though, it is a bit old school... but I will learn fast I think..

 

The mod will not take place on blood island....but...but...hehe...Plunder! Yes I remember that I just loved the old Plunder 3d project for HL (rip)...The first level would be Puerto pollo, and got damn it could be a great multiplayer map!

 

The good thing is that it wont be that long time before it is on!!

[metz]

The good thing is that it wont be that long time before it is on!!

Aye, thats for sure.

[G0blin]

by the way, my pal Metz is one of the brains behind the Plunder Island project!

[Legshot]

please check your personal messages G0blin

[th00mas]

it´s cool to see that there is an interest for this

we´re working on puttin up a website now, where you will be able to watch the progression of the project and ultimatly dowload the mod. Altough i guess that will be a bit down the road from now

i´ll post the URL in this thread when it´s up! so keep on checking for updates ;>