Dragon Warrior 1 3D Remake using irrWizard...

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 3:54 am

Well, I just wanted to post an update. I have decided to go with irrLua as the scripting choice for DW. The problem is I've never used/dealt with scripting before in a game environment. So, basically, I'm severely lost and confused (it's not the first time that happened since I started this project).

I picked up "Game Scripting Mastery" book by Alex Varanese to help me understand scripting. This 1200+ pages tome covers just about everything one would want to know about scripting. But why is it so darn huge? Whatever you do don't drop it on your foot.

At any rate, I've looked (more like skimmed) through the first 2 chapters of the book and the chapter covering lua. I do have a better understanding of scripting afterwards. But I'm still quite dumbfounded at how to get irrLua to work with irrWizard. Ugh.

Basically, I plan to use irrLua at first to do the conversation text between the npc and the pc. Then once I get that to work, I plan to use irrLua for things like items, weapons, battle system, and npc behavior/ai. I'm sure one could take over the whole game using irrLua (as demonstrated in the irrLua irrlicht examples). I'll probably do that in the distance future.

To show how much a scripting noob I am, here's what I've written so far:

Code: Select all


	// opens lua
	l = lua_open();

	// opens the basic library
	luaopen_base(l);

	// opens the string lib
	luaopen_string(l);

	// opens irrLua
	IrrLua_open(l);

Pathetic isnt' it?

area51 · Post by **area51** » Sun Feb 12, 2006 1:46 pm

Im guessing that IrrLua binds to Irrlicht, ie enables you to write games/programs in LUA instead of C++.

I think what you need to do is bind LUA to your game interface/types etc directly.

Implementing a scripting language is next on my list of things to do, however this might be a while as I've had no time recently (Dungeons & Dragons Online) and very shortly a new edition to the family.

I think I narrowed it down to either LUA or Game Monkey script in the end. LUA is the path most travelled, and therefore has more documentation, examples etc. although GameMonkey script looks similar to NeverWinter Nights script.

Good luck
________
Vaaapp vaporizer

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Mon Feb 13, 2006 5:26 am

area51 -- thanks, bud. I'm still reading/researching scripting. I've never heard of game monkey until you mentioned it here. Since then, I've downloaded version 1.24c of GameMonkey and played around with it a bit. Until I read about this by By Oli Wilkinson from:

http://www.evolutional.co.uk/gamemonkey ... e.asp?id=4

GameMonkey canot bind C++ class members unless they are declared as being static.

Bummer, dude.

Anyway, the scripting integration using lua is going pretty slow. I've switched gears a bit and did some modeling. The plan is to drop in the main hero, Erdrick into the game world then work out the sizes and dimensions with him for everything else. This will then allow me to add in the other npc models. Then hack out the functions to do dialog and movement and buying items/weapons. The last time you saw Erdrick, he's 3d but one dimensional with no texture. Well, I took some time and added a bit more dimension to the model. Here's a couple of shots:

Erdrick model looking up view:
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... upview.jpg

Erdrick model looking down view:
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... wnview.jpg

Erdrick model back view:
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... ckview.jpg

Erdrick model perspective:
http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... del_v2.jpg

He's not animated yet (honestly, I haven't figured out how to yet since in the NES game -- it uses only 2 frames of animation; basically alternating mirror views). Also, this allows me to mess around with a 3rd person camera like xterminhate's interesting 1st/3rd person cam.

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Sun Feb 19, 2006 6:30 am

Hi All!

I've been playing around with different cams. xterminhate's cam (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=10807) is the best of the bunch for what I'm needing to do. It works quite well. I dropped in the brecconary town and our hero erdrick to try out the cam. It's pretty sweet. Check out the video I made of the test run (4,383,604 bytes compressed from original 361,001,296 bytes):

http://rapidshare.de/files/13602769/DW1 ... m.wmv.html

It took me awhile to get Erdrick to orient correctly. I ended up having to scale/rotate Erdrick's model in Milkshape then exporting it into directx's .x file from .3ds format. Unfortunately, I still don't know how to animate poor Erdrick yet in the game.

Also, when using xterminhate's cam inside irrWizard, I can't get the collision detection to work nor the mouse wheel.

Things never seem to work for me the first time.

UPDATE 03/21/06:

Hi All! I'm not dead nor is the project.

I like to "raise my head above water" to go refresh/update my knowledge. So, I've been reading up on scripting, modeling, programming designs, and trying out all the wonderful community releases!

I've been tweaking the Lion 3D project (updating it to use one of the two irr game framework), adding in the grass node, adding in the day/night node, new camera system, and cloud node. I'm also applying some of the new knowledge to animate/model the various animals that make up the kingdom. Hopefully, I'll have something to announce/release soon!

Das Gurke · Post by **Das Gurke** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 11:37 pm

Just wanted to tune in that this looks really interesting. I must admit I havent even heared of the original, but I get reminded of Zelda everytime i see the video

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Mon Apr 24, 2006 1:28 am

Das Gurke wrote:Just wanted to tune in that this looks really interesting. I must admit I havent even heared of the original, but I get reminded of Zelda everytime i see the video

Thanks! I also like the Zelda series. Heck, I'm a nintendo fanatic. I love the castlevania and metroid series. I once started a 2D project for a re-make of castlevania and metroid. But I didn't have the tech know how back then to put one together. So, it went down the way side -- unfinished.

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 2:13 am

This is a quick update on DW1 progress. I think I've absorbed enough 3D modeling skills to show off something. It's not much to show but takes an insanely-long time (8+ hours) and effort to do (if anyone knows a better way please chime in). This is solely working on one model -- Erdrick.

I realized that building the 3D model via square blocks is accurate to the original pixel-per-pixel, it doesn't work too well when trying to animate the model. Also, it's not very efficient. This approach eats up a ton of polygons. Erdrick alone takes up 5,772 ploygons! Just imagine a village full of NPCs and you start to get the picture (12 characters x 5,772 polygons = 69,264 polygons).

So, I took it upon myself to reduce the number of polygons. I started by trying to pull vertices. But that proved beyond my current skill level as an amatuer modeler. So, I then tried cutting out the sides of the square that cannot be seen by the player. After an hour of that, I threw up my hands in frustration. It's way too tedious.

Then it donned on me that I could reduce the squares by making a larger, contiguous square. This large square piece would replace a ton of the small "perfect" 1x1x1 squares. This also allows me to "cheat" at texturing (i.e. I don't need to do UV wrap/unwrap; also trying to "paint" the model to look like the original). Texturing a square is far easier than the other skinning/texturing method (at least for me at this skill level).

So, that's pretty much everything I wanted to say in this post. I did try animating Erdrick (I'll post a fuller rundown later once I manage to get something post-worthy). The following are some pictures of the Erdrick model.

wireframe picture of the 5,772 polygon model:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... 2_poly.jpg

wireframe picture of the 756 polygon model:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... 6_poly.jpg

an edge face picture of the 756 polygon model:

http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a175/ ... 6_poly.jpg

Next up is deleting the sides of the polygon that players can't see and maybe attempt to wield then to other vertex to make a seamless model instead of a bunch of blocks grouped together (this is probably a contributing source of my animation woes).

UPDATE:

Wahoo! I've managed to reduce the polygon count of Erdrick down to 588 from 756 (down by 168!) just by deleting the non-visible sides of selected polygons.

ErUs · Post by **ErUs** » Mon Jul 03, 2006 10:32 am

looks good

keep up the good work

Spintz · Post by **Spintz** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 12:43 am

I'm still waiting for this, I LOVED dragon warrior, wasted many a months playing that series in my life, willing to waste some more....

shurijo · Post by **shurijo** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 5:02 am

Agreed. I loved DW 1. I can't wait to test this out

jclins · Post by **jclins** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 4:48 am

ErUs, Spintz, & shurijo -- Thank you all for the show of interest!

I have something special to show everyone. It took me what seems like two life spans to get the animation for Erdrick to work like I wanted it to. The currently exported .x format doesn't seem to be correct. I don't have another .x exporter to compare to other than panda 3d so I can't tell what is correct .x format or not. I just know that the animation looks correct in the modeller but when exported it doesn't look right. Anybody know of another good .x exporter that I can try?

Anyway, the following animation doesn't look much compared to the time I've invested into getting it to look as faithful to the original as possible. I've tried bone animation but it causes issue with the base model. If I do that, then the animation won't look like the original (which alternates between two mirror version of the same sprite).

Be sure to turn on video loop for whatever media player you guys use to playback the videos or else you'll miss the animation (there are only 4 frames of animation).

Erdrick animation test (back view -- 67 KB):

http://rapidshare.de/files/25421021/Erd ... w.wmv.html

Erdrick animation test (front view -- 67 KB):

http://rapidshare.de/files/25421049/Erd ... w.wmv.html

Enjoy until next time!

lostclimategames · Post by **lostclimategames** » Tue Sep 05, 2006 5:37 am

hows the project comiing, do you use lod at all, that would help greatly with the poly count issue.

Darkchrono · Post by **Darkchrono** » Thu Sep 07, 2006 4:22 am

jclins

Next relase of irrwizard will have a scripting engine you can register Variables , Methods and Clases and many more stuff

3ddev · Post by **3ddev** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 8:03 am

I would suggest using Niko's new 3d sound system: irrKlang ( http://irrklang.irrlicht3d.org/index.html ) which is tightly integrated with Irrlicht. IrrKlank has many cool features and is super simple to use!

Anteater · Post by **Anteater** » Mon Sep 25, 2006 8:36 pm

I'm really looking foward to this. The only Dragon Warrior/Quest game I've played all the way through is DQ8, and I didn't like the story much (at the beginning: Hero! Destroy the bad guy! 100 hours later: Hero! We need to destroy the Bad guy!), but this looks really fun. When do you think it'll be released?

Irrlicht Engine

Dragon Warrior 1 3D Remake using irrWizard...

Fun with modeling...the hard way!

A New 3d Sound System!