Kai finally got around to place jayr’s fantastic castle on the mason map.
Now people can start exploring the castle, and we can get started adding some gameplay.
Castle defence anyone?

Further screenshots of the castle, which should be included in the next cyphesis release, can be found at:
Approaching Castlegard
Closer look at Castlegard’s entrace
Bird’s eye
Bird’s eye 2
Morning bird’s eye

There are still some client bugs to be fixed before this works reliably, and lots of work to get the rest of the castle components loading okay. With any luck it can be ready in time for LinuxTag. We need to think carefully about a setting too. I am thinking about creating a land mass to the west of the area used for the current demo, and make this area the city port from which settlers leave in order to sail to Moraf, which is currently unsettled. Let me know if you have any ideas.

As far as interiors of buildings are concerned, we still have a long way to go with the technology before its possible to navigate around inside buildings. We’ll get working on this as soon as the current work on tasks and combat systems. Please be patient with us for now.

Keep model is located here. I have uploaded Ogre xml files as well as a md3 file.

The keep textures are located here. This directory will be restructure a little bit in the near future.

Now moving on to the Inn.

On a side note, I do not have a good 3ds exporter from Blender and I also have a really flakey obj exporter. Thus WorldForge hacks will need to figure out how to get this in to their game engines. Ogre exporter works fine.

The textures are located here

The next phase of the project is to proceed with applying the templated textures to the royal quarters, the house, inn, barracks, stable and the keep. Other todo items are to create additional templated texture for the inside portions of the castle, particularly for the don jon and the bailies. Futhermore there are several items that are needed to create a smithy section

All the files can be found here

Here is a little clip was generated using the content that was uploaded to svn repository. Sorry some of the compression is a bit messed up, its getting late and I don’t want to figure out whats up withit. File is 3MB

The plan is to reduce the polygon count and clean up the typography. This inturn will fix the weight maps. The file can be found here The viewer used was found on the OGRE site, its simple and really easy to use. Just place your mesh and skeleton files into the media directory, tweak the material file to find the image. Fire up the viewer open the mesh in a drop down box. Select the animation and press play.

The plan is to proceed in creating a total of half dozen animations for LinuxTag as well as well desinged NPC type of character.

A little animation clip can be found here.
Compressed with DViX5.1/1.1Megs

So here’s a suggestion for a very simple to edit, tile based ASCII format for special sites in the world, such as towns, castles, dungeons, etc.

A site entity could be associated with a specific SiteMap, and then placed into some position in the world.
The server and/or client then reads the maps either on startup or on demand, and create entities based on the characters in the ascii map.

Special rules are used to select exactly which entity is created from a given character, other adjacent occurences of the same or some other types of characters can affect which entity is picked. For example when defining a wall, the SiteMap loader would look at characters
to the right, left, below, and above, and based on that select a straight wall segment, an L segment, a T junction, or a wall crossing,
and rotate it as needed. Stairs need to check if there are other stairs above or below or both, and pick the correct stair entity type based on that.

Or when adding things such as trees, a tree could be picked randomly from a pre-defined set, based on a location dependent random seed.

This is just an initial idea, and is open to further modification, redesign, or rejection.

Here’s an example SiteMap file:

# SmallCastleOfEvil.sitemap

# The basic requirements of the format used for the SiteMap file is a key-value pair configuration file,
# with the extension of support for named subspaces, lists, and multiline values.
# Text form Atlas seems like a suitable format to use.
# In that case = should probably be replaced by :, and an implicit { } pair is assumed around the whole SiteMap file.

# Perhaps some kind of pre-processor like include statements could be supported, or perhaps the files are parsed in some order,
# contextual and entities defined in earlier ones are available in later ones.

# Define ContextualEntities, whose exact entity type may depend on adjacent ContextualEntities:

OuterWall =
{
# Which kinds of entities that this contextual entity type can connect to.
AdjacentTypes = [ Wall, Door ]

# A parent entity type for this contextual entity type. Any settings defined for the parent type is inherited by this type.
ParentType = Wall

# The models to use for the different cases of adjacent walls
ContextAlone = 3d_objects/buildings/models/pillar/
ContextEnd = 3d_objects/buildings/models/wall_end/
ContextLine = 3d_objects/buildings/models/wall/
ContextBending = 3d_objects/buildings/models/wall_bend/
ContextTJunction = 3d_objects/buildings/models/wall_T_junction/
ContextCrossing = 3d_objects/buildings/models/wall_crossing/

# The texture template used for this kind of wall
TextureSet = 3d_objects/buildings/textures/granite_blocks/

}

Stairs =
{
# Which kinds of entities that this contextual entity type can connect to.
AdjacentTypes = [ Stairs ]

# Stairs are interested in if there are other Stairs above or below them.
ContextMiddle = 3d_objects/buildings/models/stairs_continuous/
ContextTop = 3d_objects/buildings/models/stairs_top/
ContextBottom = 3d_objects/buildings/models/stairs_bottom/
ContextDefault = none # Used if none of the other contexts match.
# In this case, we won’t create any entity at all for stairs that don’t lead anywhere.

# The texture template used for the stairs
TextureSet = 3d_objects/buildings/textures/wood_weathered/
}

Tree =
{
# We don’t care about adjacent trees, but we may pick from several different kinds of trees.
# We may also include nulls here, indicating that in some percent of the cases the contextual Tree entity may not produce any entity.
ContextDefault = [ "3d_objects/plants/trees/models/oak/", "3d_objects/plants/trees/models/rowan/", none, none ]

# The texture template used for the tree.
TextureSet = 3d_objects/plants/trees/textures/gnarly/

# NOTE: To match specific textures to specific tree types it seems like we would have to be
# able to not just specify the model type above, but be able to specify the entity type.
# The entity type then contains the mapping to the correct texture. The ContextDefault line above could then look like
# ContextDefault = [ Oak, Rowan, none, none ]

# Some entities should be positioned at the local ground level,
# others on the same level as the site entity that specified the location for the SiteMap
SetAtLocalGroundLevel = true
}

Door =
{
# …. Etc. Rest of the definition left out from this example
}

# Define character shortcuts for the entities used.
# On the right hand we have some identifiers for some ContextualEntities defined above or in some common included files.
# Common character definitions may also be put in a standard include file so that they don’t need to be repeated for all maps.

O = OuterWall
o = OuterWallTop
I = InnerWall
S = Staircase
F = Fountain
T = Tower
R = Tree
D = Door
. = GroundTile

# Define the map. Each level is defined separately. [ starts a block of ascii characters and ] closes it.
# If Atlas is used, the map could be expressed as a nested list of strings perhaps.

Level1 = [
OOOOOTOOTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
O...................R.....O
D...R...R...R...IIIII..R..O
D.....F.........D..SI.....O
D...R...R...R...IIIII...R.O
O.....................R...O
OOOOTOOOTOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
]

Level2 = [
oooooTooToooooooooooooooooo
o                         o
o               IIIII     o
o               I..SI     o
o               IIIII     o
o                         o
ooooToooToooooooooooooooooo
]

Level3 = [

     T   T
                IIIII
                I..SI
                IIIII     

     T   T
]

The plan is to use as much of the current texture media as possible with a few modifications for visual appeal. For visual appeal when textures are generated or modified a normal map, specular map, diffuse map and a bump map are also generated. That is if such maps are needed. This will help create visually stunning in game shaders as well as cinematic renderings.

If anyone wishes to contribute to the project please email me at jayr[at]hourglass3d.com and I will assign a task. In addition, I will provide you with content and all the pertaining textures packed within a blender file. Unless otherwise specified.

Some screenshots and renderings of the project can be found.
here