ZEQ2 Lite

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Making little predictions I assume that when ZEQ2 lite becomes polished enough it will attract many new players. Players have their enquiries to create new characters. The only reason they won't do it themselves is because they don't know how to (no need to thank the captain obvious).

Why not teach them ? I can see that the staff is great at modelling, texturing and animating. I believe that several tutorials might bring a pretty decent amount of characters. And I am not really concerned about quality - they would learn from the pros .

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Yeah, but I can see custom models looking poorly from fans. Not everyone is up to the level of the modeling crew on ZEQ II Lite team. If any of the modellers made a tutorial on what their usual routine is, that would be pretty awesome.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

If the team members have the time to make a tutorial, sure it would be nice. But it's not of utmost necessity.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

Even with a tutorial it will take fans a buttload of time to get anywhere near enough to produce anything of quality, no point in the team wasting their time teaching people something they can learn themselves anyways.

Monday, September 21, 2009

There's plenty of tutorials on modelling, texturing and animating both in general and for Quake 3 based games available on the internet, a quick google search by anyone with an interest will find plenty.

However, a tutorial about ZEQ2lite specific character set up is not a bad idea at all. Setting up a character in ZEQ2 is a bit more complicated than in normal quake 3.

In normal quake 3, characters are split into head, body and legs models. Each model has a "skin" file which is just a text file which defines which part of the model to assign which material. Then there's the animation.cfg file which again is a simple text file, it lists the first frame, number of frames, number of looping frames and the frames per second of each animation. The animation.cfg has to be set up perfectly otherwise the animations will look all messed up in the game, or it just won't work. That's about it for setting up a normal Quake 3 character in game.

For ZEQ2, though, there's a lot more animations so the animation.cfg is a tad longer. You also need to set up "phys" and "grfx" scripts, which define how the character's attacks act and look respectively. You could just use the attacks already in the game, but that would be boring I expect many people would find it very useful to have a tutorial guiding them through how to set up these attack scripts as there's a lot of attributes that can be set. of course, creating your own attacks means you'll have to make the relevant models, skins, sounds, sprites, materials, etc. for the attacks.

Finally, you also have "tiers" in ZEQ2Lite, so you could create a character which changes form completely with each tier change (ala Cell or Freeza). As well as the models, textures and skin, there is also a tier.cfg file defining all the various stats and settings you for the tier. This is a lot simpler than the phys and grfx scripts and the tierDefault.cfg file lists all the settings you can change in your tier.cfg

So yes, a tutorial regarding setting up a character in ZEQ2Lite would be very good but at the moment it shouldn't be a priority as there's a high potential things will be changed or added in to the character set up in later releases.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Alex wrote : So yes, a tutorial regarding setting up a character in ZEQ2Lite would be very good but at the moment it shouldn't be a priority as there's a high potential things will be changed or added in to the character set up in later releases.

Actually I was planning to work on such a tutorial this week

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Even better then

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

As a lot of content are yet to be revealed, and as you may know, it requires a lot of time to implement/fix bugs for it, we, the team, can not suggest anything else, as just to try looking for tutorials out there by yourselves. There are thousands of tutorial websites (text and video based) regarded to game development. Those cover pretty much all areas of development.

As the main pretense for fans is "That we don't know any good resources which cover the certain areas" -- I have a tendency to think that it's due to people reactions when they try developing something, and at the first attempt, they find it hard, so the results may be very disappointing. However, we all have tasted that "disappointment". You pretty much see us as robots which give you top notch quality constantly. Unfortunately, unfortunately... -- we are just a group of common (and yes - we are mortals) people and most of us see the game development as a hobby. We reached the skills we posses right now, because we didn't give up at the start and we kept on doing what we want to.

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However, I can recommend you some great tutorials.
www.poopinmymouth.com (Artist's Ben Mathis website. There are plenty of video and text tutorials out there. Tutorials are free there.)

Also, I highly recommend to get Gnomon's or Digital Tutors DVD tutorial sets, as they are for beginners or intermediates and are very step-by-step tutorials, covering pretty much all game ART developing areas. However, these tutorials are not for free and you can buy them online.