Hey hey.
Just splurged my hard earned cash on the latest offering from Jon Fletcher's talented lasermouse, and thought I'd do a review (as the product page says relatively little.
In the interests of organisation, I'll keep this in sections:
Meshes / Textures.
Ok, you get a total of 7 characters, although there are variations of weapons and some ar RIDING BEASTS! The model quality is exactly what you will have come to expect of mister fletcher. The texturing and model quality is very high, while the poly counts are tight, and there are no visible stretches or anything that would give the models away as being amateur.
you may have some issue in putting these in together with the Bond1 fantasy pack , as Jon's work tends to have a slightly more anime flavour to it, unlike Bonds more photorealistic work. This isn't so much a criticism, Jon's hand painted textures are totally beautiful, just bear in mind, they might not fit neatly with other current fantasy packs out there.
It's probably worth noting that if you've been checking out Jon's work on his site, the characters are rendered with a Normal (and sometimes specular) map, which makes these characters look delicious, unfortunately these aren't included with the FPSC pack, so some of the characters look slightly more flat and washed out than they do on the renders on Jons site.
Scripting and AI
Again, the AI on these guys is good. It follows a similar model to the melee enemies from bonds packs with the characters varying between walking and runnin depending on their distance from the player, and striking "I've seen you and I'm angry" poses when they first spot the player.
I had some trouble with activation distances, with enemies not reacting to me until I was pretty close. Not a problem with hand to hand, but made them easy arrow fodder with the crossbow. Anyone with the brain of a spoon will be able to adjust this themselves so it's not really an issue. Just worth noting.
Animation
Credit to the fletch, he's only gone and done totally custom animations for these guys. They have a custom set of strafe, walk, attack, spot player, idle, run animations. And the standard FPSC fall backwards death animation.
To be honest this was the most disappointing aspect of the pack for me. I realise that Jon is a modeller, and not so much an animator, so I wasn't expecting anything amazing, but some of the enemy attacks are a bit of a letdown.
The wicked orc with the 2 swords has a kind of punch/slash attack, and a right hook attack that it randomises between, but it just doesn't feel right for the character. He doesn't really go at you with swords like you want him to! It's passable, but I just wanted him to go frenzied with the 2 swords, where as he kind of pokes at you like you would poke a dead cat with a stick.
This lunge attack is replicated on most of the characters, which is dissapointing on the Ogre and Taurus characters, because they have club-type weapons, but instead of bashing, they poke.
Expandability
As expected, the UV maps are clear and well presented, so retextures should be an absolute synch, no problems there. I think some of the vertex weights or animation techniques used in 3DS are incompatible with Fragmos .x importer so you can forget about making new animations in milkshape or fragmo, because they simply corrupt on import. A shame really, because as I said with the animations, you may want to do your own attacks.
Overall.
A good pack. Certainly worth your dosh. The character designs are innovative, especially the ogre and taurus, they're slightly less upright in their pose, so give you a change from the standard FPSC character look.
For me, the animations really let it down, for evil melee characters they just don't feel aggressive or threatening enough.
I'd like to see a non-FPSC/x10 version with the shader maps in there too, I was expecting them, having seen Jon's site.
I guess that's it, the characters themselves are top notch, and you will definately find a use for many of them.
I want robotic legs.
