Godfrey of Bouillon Posted March 13, 2023 Report Posted March 13, 2023 (edited) I hope there was a better Vintage Story model creator. As of now it only supports the basic small creatures and singular animations that cannot be used extensively by modders. I believe that assets are a HUGE part of game development. It consumes time, effort, and the subject of a game's quality. This game has the loveliest textures out there. There are things in the current model maker that are inadequate to the demands and imaginations of a visionary mod maker. Blockbench - Blockbench is a Minecraft third-party development software that supports many plugins and APIs including geckolib. Blockbench allows Modders in Minecraft to model and animate their entities with ease compared to other libraries. Geckolib also allows modders to simply call animation depending on a situation sent to the clientside. Players can also play multiple animation predicates in a hierarchy that can move and transition in sync i.e (Legs animate to move in a separate animation predicate called "movement", while the mouth bites a target in a separate animation predicate called "attacks"). This enables the player to create creatures with flexibility in its different sets of movements that are imported from Blockbench's animation script.https://www.blockbench.net/https://geckolib.com/ Player animations implementations - So I met a guy in the Vintage Story discord server who wants to overhaul the Vintage story's combat, in his opinion- it is the only thing missing in the game, so he tried to make a mod for it. He made extensive models of different types of metals from swords to pikes, halberds, and polearms, the only problem is he has to manually animate each of them with unique attacks. I have to wonder if Vintage Story Code even accepts foreign modifications in their core engine, such as new animations for the player. The last time I played that mod we can create the weapons in the anvil and craft it however their pole arms still play the vanilla animation of the default spear. Polearms are long, heavy, two-handed weapons, and the spear swings in one hand. Despite the different stats and properties of each weapon, it is still underwhelming due to the lack of unique memorable animations. Easier to create Animations - Textures can be made with third-party software such as GIMP and Photoshop that allows more flexibility. It is easier to make your game with nice graphics and textures but many games and even modern CGI movies forget about another fundamental aspect, "movement". Some old Japansese film director Akira Kurosawa proved that movement is a great and underrated aspect in film making. His old black-and-white films are still interesting to watch today. A simple dialogue scene in his movies for example will have interesting movement in the background in the form of rain, wind, or fire. Its intention is to keep the viewer's attention in an albeit uneventful scene. If we apply this to game development. The movement would capture the player's attention. The only problem is the Visual Story Model Creator are difficult to mass produce animations, we have to manually rotate each limp for a single frame and then do the same for each frame. Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movementhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doaQC-S8de8 Bones - Vintage Story could use animation types, simple and advanced. the separation is to prevent current animations in the game from being phased out. The advanced animation allows for the introduction of bones. Bones can simplify animation with elaborate forward and inverse kinematics. To oversimplify, instead of rotating model part to model part. The user can grab the i.e “right hand” of a model to point it to the “left hip”, this will cause the elbow to penetrate the chest. The user can then simply grab the elbow and pull it off the chest. Cutting what would be 1-minute animation to 3 seconds. The UI – when I first made the model I thought that the square around the model is the “Limit” of how big models can be. I never thought of it as the size of a single block. So I made a giant golem model the scale of a block smaller than a rabbit. I quit immediately, Imagine how I have to rework everything. A good UI is quickly seeig at hand and understanding it, if we need the details we have to read the manual Support for blocky yet none triangular models - Vintage Story has a blocky aesthetic but they don't have to be made up of quadrilaterals all the time. An example is a knight helmet called "armet". It has a triangular-shaped design that won't be possible in vintage story with a quadrilateral layout. The fact that it extrudes to the neck and has visible aligns on the head. The design will only be possible in Vintage Story if a new overhauled model maker can support edgy designs with more polygons than a quadrilateral. Something like this I hope the devs see the priority of this issue and hopefully we see better Vintage Story Asset software in the future. Edited March 26, 2023 by Godfrey of Bouillon added new things 6 1
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