I always respect what you have to say Rob, but you've made some oversights i'd like to correct.
Quote: "the models animation IS NOT interpol synced to the FPS, it should be"
This is not the game, this is a piece of model viewing software that we're using to distribute a preview animation of one of the games model. As you are no doubt aware i'm a big advocate of making DB software run at the same speed on all machines and have given source code away to achieve this dozens of times.
Quote: "i'm not going to be using over 400,000 polygons perscene"
This would require hardware well above what this game is running sucessfully on, the characters are all circa 10,000 polygon, the scenery never takes up more than 5,000 polygon at the moment. We have two characters onscreen for most scenes and are therefor hitting 25,000 polygons. If we had 30characters onscreen that would be another matter, but we don't.
Quote: "low-polygon modelling is becomming a lost art i think"
It is an art not lost at Banshee, just check our model downloads for evidence! Nick is rapidly becomming an excellent low polygon modeller. Sure he's not at your standard, but like most of us here this is a hobby - not a £400,000 a year job. I bet you my left leg you cannot cook aswell as Nick does, and i'm confident that you've not had rock stars and royalty compliment your audervs.
Quote: "with a good pixel shading routine you can make 4,000 polygons look like 40,000 "
Quote: "learning the balance you have to mark between what you texture for detail and what you polygon for shading"
You may notice that the model is still untextured (your own advice to me was to animate first then texture), and it's not even running in the game engine yet therefor there is no pixel shading. Now as it happens i've not looked at pixel shaders yet as i'm still learning but if I work them out before releasing this game it'll have them, if not the models will still look pretty good - especially for a freeware game - infact I think they knock the socks off everything i've seen so far in other DB games.
Now let's get down to business: This is the best that the Banshee team are able to do at the moment, remember for a second that Banshee are amateurs. We feel that this model, and the game that is evolving (see our work in progress section for more info) is of high quality for a freeware game.
We're not trying to get this published by EA, we'll probably give it away for free or possibly shareware. I think the evidence of what we've released so far demonstrates that this game will be significantly better than most of the so-called commercial projects i've seen on these boards but does that meen we should be judged as professionals? Take a look at our webpage, what does the second line say? "Non-Commercial Software House".
I had the vacancy for a model rigger and animator open for about two months before Brendon stepped forwards, and I know you where aware of the trouble I was having in finding someone with the skills to do it because I spoke to you about it, perhaps if you spent as long typing your replies up doing some of the models and animations for us then we wouldn't be walking around with sticks up our arses.
We will get there Raven, but please, let us take one step at a time rather than try to write the all-in-one super game with everything and fail like every other FF-MMORG around here.
Pneumatic Dryll
