(TC mean Total Conversion)

I'm starting to work on this. Basically it's a replacer mod that changes Fate to have more a more futuristic look and feel. The town will be retextured to give it a sort of "medieval metal" look. Names, dialogue and other text entries will be changed, NPCs and creatures retextured. Armor and clothing retextured. Only weapons that have a more futuristic look will be used. Lots of new dungeon templates too.

(Most mods should work, as long as they don't try to change things that were removed from the original items dat. So if someone wants to release some energy blades or some new cool armor, they can be installed with the Mod Manager.)

Here's pics of two of the buildings I retextured today, and also a pic of the fence:




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The textures are from the files of a game that was cancelled, Chronos V. I got the OK from a representative of the game company to use the textures and models in mods. (I do have to be involved in any mods using them.) There are so many great models, some of which could be used if anyone was ambitious/crazy enough to want to modify the town model to look really futuristic.

There are also incredible creatures, with animations, that would be most awesome in the game if any of you wonderful creature animators felt like doing them.

Here's some pics of some of those:

[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v84/redwoodtreesprite/ChronosVTeam/Creatures/th_sckman.jpg[/img]
[img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v84/redwoodtreesprite/ChronosVTeam/Creatures/th_tank.jpg[/img][img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v84/redwoodtreesprite/ChronosVTeam/Creatures/th_Tmed.jpg[/img][img]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v84/redwoodtreesprite/ChronosVTeam/Creatures/th_Sorceror.jpg[/img]
(Note that some of these would work as excellent NPCs rather than monsters to battle. One thing I feel strongly about is that I don't want to introduce people as monsters to battle in the dungeons. I want this to be totally safe to play by kids.)

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Anyway, I have a lot of modding experience, and have planned this to be a very possible TC to finish. It will be a lot of fun to make too.

If anyone else want to join up to work on this, that would be very cool.
But one thing I want to make clear from the start. Everything in this will be completely legal to use. No rips from games, no music or textures that don't have full OKs to use. It's very possible to make incredible mods that give the feel of playing other games without using assets from those games.

Im in..this looks amazing, ill look for some wep models an upload em here, then convert em to useable stuff after I switch comps. Ill also see if I cant find any music that will fit..

Hot dang, another town! Maestro's created a monster lol.

If anyone else had said they were going to do a total conversion, my advice would have been "try something a bit easier." But since it's you, I know it's going to get done.

What I can contribute at this point is minimal as I'm heavily involved with Ancient Egypt and learning how to animate monsters. However, I can offer one bit of easy modeling help - I could move the buildings around just slightly: a small rotation here, a tiny resize, a movement along the x or y axes. Just enough to make it look different from the original layout without having to make drastic revisions to the collision file.

All you would have to do is swap out the town.scn and town.col files in the TOWN folder. Let me know if you're interested.

That looks pretty cool; the buildings look kind of like a ghost town. I'm not really experienced with mods but if there's anyway I can help, please let me know.

Can 3ds import .obj files? If not ill have to skip over alot of cool models I found..
-Edit- Heres a bunch of wepons and a hat I found on turbosquid, sorry for the sloppy package...Im about to wipe this comp clean and switch to a different one so I had to be fast.

It should be able to.

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Here's what I retextured today:




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That would be great!

Yeah, max will import .obj files, but have you checked the poly counts on some of that stuff magmon? I didn't get a chance to go through it all. Anyway, I'm not sure what rts wants is a bunch of high-tech machine guns.

I'll send you some new files this weekend rts and you can let me know what to tweak.

True. Though it's true there are a lot of guns in science fiction movies and games, I don't want to have this be a third person shooter.

Though....
I was thinking today of this situation. I want this to be a kid-friendly mod, yet there are so many guns, blasters, laser rifles and such in science fiction movies and games. So I think it's a good idea to have several versions:

A version with no guns that resemble anything in real life, only very futuristic looking guns included in the weapons

A version with everything in it

A version with no guns at all

Well I'll post pics of those weapons in magmon's link. - just can't do it at the moment. Hopefully there will be some futuristic ones.

As to polly count, I only got ones with around 800 and below. Some pollys are unknown tho, so those are to be tested.

wow what excellent work with the buildings so far, I love the bridge at the fishing spot, turned out really good! The models are cool too, I wish I had free time but I have my hands tied

Wow, That's coming out really good, I love the new monsters.

Thanks! It's really fun doing a town retexture, as with Viewer it feels like I'm walking though the town to check out the textures.

I'm almost finished another building (just have the chimney to do), and I did the tombstones today. As the tombstone texture works nicely in a basic Fate town, I released the texture for those who might like it in their game.

ahh whos town do i use? yours or maestros or zeemans(when it comes out)?!?!?!?!

Hi RTS. I’ve gone through all the files you sent me. Some are good, some have issues.

For starters, the mesh files Barrack.max, Graving-dock.max, and Landing-dock.max are all empty. No items in them. It’s possible that they were created in versions of 3ds max later than version 7, and that whatever data they contain is not backwards-compatible to 7. I have to use version 7 in order to use Travis Baldree’s exporters. Can you find those files in importable formats such as .3ds or .obj?

The fusion plant is good, faces at 511 - came in .3ds format which is importable to max 7.



The landing pad that replaces the fountain is good.



The Chronos V grocery store replace is also workable.



Eaglepod had the same issues as other max files - this time it made max 7 crash, but the .3ds file imported just fine, so we're in business on this one as well...



I'll go through the rest of your files as soon as I can, but I want to work on Egypt tonight. In the meantime, I'll put a few of those buildings into a town.scn file and PM it to you and we can begin the process of figuring out where you want them.

In general, if you're looking for free models, look for them in max formats less than or equal to version 7, or 3ds, or anything else for that matter (I haven't figured out every format that will import to max 7, but they're all worth a try.)

Looks like there are only two buildings I need to find so far then. As the other files are definitely in .3ds format, or are from ChronosV like the landing platform.

I'll do some more digging and see what I can find.

I'm not sure I get cloud city. There are two structures in the file. (Nevermind the lights and cameras - I haven't edited those yet.)



Do you want to use just the main one? ...



The mouse droid is cute, but at over 67,000 faces it's a total no go. It would totally lock up the game.



This kind of monster could easily be made from scratch - a model of 30 to 40 faces with a nice texture, and the animation would be simple enough to make from scratch (even for me). Then just add droid sounds from Star Wars.

Travelpod has the same problem - over 27,000 faces.

On the Cloud City one, just the main part is fine.

I wish that more sites would list the faces/polys on models. I guess the travel pod's count is so high because of the rounded parts on it. I have noticed that most vessel models seem to be extremely high-poly. And yeah, that mouse droid may be cute, but not cute enough for so many polys.

Darn! I love that mouse droid. Glad to see this is going great. To tell you the truth, this is the only town mod that I will download.

Well the landing pad worked out OK. Some wierd stuff with that model - a bunch of the faces were flipped, but you never know what you're going to get with free models. Retextured it with a file converted to png and added an opacity map for the glass. That will need some adjustment. (Making glass look natural is tough because you really need both an opacity and a reflection map at the same time and Fate will only compress two files into a merged dds.)

The size is probably too big, but that would be up to you. I'm going to add all the models that work in their general location then you can tell me how you want things adjusted.

The trojan building also looks good...



But it has some strange mapping issues. More to come in this post.

I'm just going to ignore salt&peppers comment, lol. this is looking great! I should tell you that if you want people to be able to walk up on the landing pad you need to make if very low and the slope very easy as fate is very obstinate about slopes and at a certain point just won't let you go any higher.

Also this is what Travis said in the exporter documentation:


Therefore you should map it with a multi sub/object map (which is what you use for all buildings) and make the glass texture have only a reflection map according to him.

I already did that. :wink:


Maestro - I'm not sure I understand that comment from TB. If I don't need a base texture for the glass, do I JUST texture it with reflection and/or opacity? Will Fate merge ref and op files into a merged dds?

I guess there's no way to find out but to try...

EDIT.

OK, you answered my question in your edit.

The landing pad probably should be sized smaller, especially if it will make it easier for the player character to walk up on it. It's hard to tell the size a model will look on the town mesh. But I figured that the dimensions were so close to the town fountain that it might work very well there.

I've gone through just about every free model site I could find, and have found one more possibility for the armorer's building:

I know from my Morrowind experience that a part of a mesh that isn't seen still affects the framerate. And that ramp and platform part wouldn't be needed I think. Would it be hard to remove that part from the mesh?

Oh, and if the mesh works there, would it be possible to put a glow where that recessed area is? It would suggest a futuristic forge quite well then I think.

I also have this gorgeous mesh from ChronosV, most could never work with the town mesh. But there is that nice tower at the back that might look very nice:

Could that part be cut off the mesh and used?

Just PM me those files rts and I'll use whatever I can.

I'll figure out the glass thing tomorrow - I've been experimenting with attaching both opacity and reflection files to a model with a base texture. The sneaky thing I tried is to use the same png for opacity and reflection, so that when Fate creates a merged dds, it only has to use two files, but the model recognizes the op/ref file to create both effects. I've discovered that it CAN be done, but it's going to take some tweaking to perfect.

A good way to get rid of hidden inner faces is to use the boolean join. If you google 3ds max boolean there are a couple good videos I watched to get the hang of it. basically it will join 2 objects and eliminate the inner parts (most of the time) and you can use it to easily subract from an object as well. This is really good for reducing your poly count, because really in the end you want something more like a shell/moulding than an actual structure. also when you pick the operand b and join them hit esc and then click boolean again before tring to join another object or will just switch the operand b.

I'm definitely going to do the tutorials on boolean join. Thank you for that tip, maestro.

The issue with the landing platform is that it had some flipped faces - perhaps it was made to enter somehow so that you could see the textures from the inside (???). At any rate, unifying the normals didn't have any effect, but then I noticed that the texture wasn't being applied 2-sided. Once I reapplied the texture 2-sided, it didn't matter which faces were flipped.

But as far as boolean join is concerned, don't you think (as in the case of the mouse droid with over 67,000 faces) that it would be easier to to make that model from scratch?

well sure, but good luck, lol. anyway you would have to do it that way in the end anyway. When I was making my houses I made them the way that was logical to me with lots of geometric shapes all put together like a real house. And of course I had an insane poly count. So in the end I used a lot of booleaning and welding so that I ended up with a shell. My point is even if you made it from scratch you'd be doing this in your last step to eliminate inner faces anyway, so you might as well try it on this premade model.

I've found that a good number of models that you import in 3ds format have completely or partially flipped faces. That is genius using 2sided textures though, i never thought of that. I can't see it having any repercussions, that is an amazing workaround.

The nebulos building is way cool. A little steep at almost 10,000 faces, but's it's worth getting rid of some other stuff in order to keep it. Lots of elaborate and intricate textures...



The little transport is super. Low ply count, should look great...

Oops, I sent the interior rather than the exterior mesh of the Nebulos Building. As I can't view the models myself, it's sometimes a guess on which mesh is the right one. :blush:

That is an incredible mesh though. It's too bad the game didn't get finished. Though it was really nice of the company to share it with game modders.

(Some of the other ChronosV meshes will be wonderful as dungeon props I suspect.)

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Hmm. That interior mesh is quite large and round. Do you think it could work as the edges of the town mesh?

Factory is great. No problems there.



And yeah, using the edges of nebulos to surround the town would look fantastic! Great idea, especially since it comes with so many cool high-tech textures. I'll start tearing down the fence. I've had some practice with this kind of demolition on Ancient Egypt. If you get rid of the tree wall, you eliminate a HUGE number of polys from the town which then frees you up to use some more sophisticated models.

Cool.

I just did a "walk" through the inside of the model in the Morrowind editor. (A really neat modder named mightyjoeyoung converted quite a few of the ChronosV meshes to nifs for me and also included them in a futuristic mod for Morrowind.) Looks removing like these and also the pipes along the bottom would cut down a lot on the polys.

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(mightyjoeyoung does have a tendency to name his nifs things like mjy-t01 though, so I couldn't tell the name of the original ChronosV models by looking at the converted nifs.)

Super car looks great too. 5000 faces, but I can work that down with maestros idea of Boolean join. We don't need all the interior detail for one thing as it's basically a prop.



You might also want to search for some general town props - something more high-tech looking than wheel barrows and wooden crates. And at some point you'll have to decide what you want the overall landscaping to look like: how much greenery (if any), the color of the ground, etc.

Great!

I'm uploading all of the ChronosV goodies right now. (Except the flora, as those are simplistic palm trees and such.) There are quite a few really neat models in there. And as they did seem to design a lot of their models to be lower poly too.

I think you may have some fun checking out the models.

rts here are some models you may like
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-transport-ship/297587 (poly count may be a little high)
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/255332- bender from futurama would be awesome in fate!

Sorry Maestro and Z, It's just that I don't like the look of Egyptian and Japanese buildings. But to add to what I said earlier, I would actually get the StarWars town instead, if it comes out. I'm a big StarWars geek. But I might use the items in this mod.

Well, enough criticizing my mutual friends, I'm off for breakfast at Dairy Queen with some friends.

Seeing this makes me cry with the loss of my futureistic work.
This looks great peoples!

you know saltandpepper this isnt star wars town they were just putting in a mouse droid from it

I like doing tributes in my mods. So far we have references to Space 1999, SuperCar and Star Wars. There are a lot of beautiful models on the net from other shows and films, but most are so high-poly that they would likely make the game crash.

A lot is being used from ChronosV, especially since the models seem very workable for games needing lower-poly meshes. The textures from it are really nice too.

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zeeman - From looking at the meshes that will work, I'm thinking this to be a spaceport type town. I like the idea of it being the only town on a huge seemingly barren planet that's being mined. Of course there was a civilization long, long ago. Whose ruins are come across sometimes during the mining. So there will be a variety of levels, including tech ones, mining ones, ruins and mysterious caverns.

I wish there was a way for random NPCs other than the Penguin and the Traveler to sell things or heal you. Is there a way to have healer NPCs turn up in the dungeons I wonder? I suspect it's completely hard-coded though...

Anyway, grass is still good in some places, though those little garden patches wouldn't fit in well. It would be neat to have a sort of "hydroponic garden in greenhouse" somewhere in town, but that would depend on how many polys would be free for it. Lots of more tech ground texture, especially for the paths. "TerrainMap" is the texture that needs to be changed, right? But since that has the shadows painted on it, it needs to wait until all the modeling is finished.

ohh but still it sounded like he thought thid was going to be a complete star wars town
ps salt&pepper try the star wars mod from the mod archive you may like it

I already have the SW mod. And I wasn't talking about this, I was talking about Myconid's SW mod.

Sorry it took so long to get back to this. After enjoying some biscuts and gravy with a side of a hashbrown, my GF and her brother suprised the rest of the group with an insane snow-tubing trip. We tied a gaint tube to her dad's fourwheeler and we all got into the tube and her dad floored it. Then we all went to her house and we drank her homade hot chocolate and watch her brother's 1st season of That's 70's Show in thier basement, which is where both of thier rooms are. There was 5 of us: me, my girlfriend, her brother, my best friend (a guy), and her brothers friend (a girl).

OK, I'm dissecting these models bit by bit. I won't bore you with the details, but a lot of stuff in max doesn't work on Travis Baldree's screwdriver platform.

For the grocery store replace, I chose the orange-metallic texture (there were four textures in the file). That's the one that looked the best to me. I also added a reflection file to the glass over the cockpit(?) This has an unusual effect, and I haven't seen it in Fate before. Reflection maps usually go on weapons and armor which moves around during gameplay. This reflection map is stationary, which means that it reflects the sky and/or objects close to it and changes as you walk around it. I haven't seen anything like that in Fate before. Of course, it can't be captured in a screen shot, so I'll PM you the TOWN file and you can look at it yourself.

In the meantime, I'm going to try making glass by using a combination of reflection and opacity without a base texture in a multi/sub mapping of the landing platform.

Cool!

I figured that not everything would work in Fate, but there are probably quite a few files that may work. And it made sense to make the whole ChronosV game content available for you to play with. (Except the plants, as those really didn't look great. I think they were only meant to be seen from a distance.)

I did also find some "Greeble" and "Nurnie" packs on the net, that have some interesting assorted model parts. Bits and pieces that would look nice to add finishing touches to the town I think. Some look a bit high poly, and some don't.

you I missed some important details in that exporter documentation. It says that reflections are totally different for scenes than for everything else:

" Several kinds of reflections are supported. Note that reflections are DIFFERENT for Scenes as opposed to everything else.

Scene reflections are intended to be Mirrors. Other objects are intended to use dynamic or static cubemaps as reflections...

Note for Scene Reflections (mirrors) To let the mirror know where to reflect from, it is important that you detach the mirror geometry so that it is an object unto itself. It is also important that you center the pivot point of the geometry on the plane you want to reflect from, so that it knows where to start rendering."


So I think that in the scene it made it into a mirror not glass, sorry bout that.

I guess it would have helped if I had read that documentation. :blush:

Me who keeps telling everyone to read...

EDIT - Ok, at this point, I'm going to go with just an opacity map for the glass. I'll seperate the glass later on and fool with the reflection. I just like to do the big things first- get all the models in the game. the really tedious fussing can wait for later.

At this point, it just looks like tinted glass...

Geeze Luise!!! Let me just say that this cloud city building was a horror. Both the max4 and 3ds versions had pieces of it sprinkled all over the files. Trying to find what fit with what was a major pain in the a.s.s. Then there was the mapping - all kinds of stuff that kept making Fate crash - specular color, specular level, bump, reflection, opacity and all kinds of tint - all textrues in jpeg that had to be converted to png. I think I crashed my game 10 times trying to make this thing work.

In the end, I just stripped it of everything but one map in png and did some vertex painting. That should probably do for Fate if it's surrounded by some nice props and maybe some blinking light particles.

What I don't understand about some of these imported files is how they get different textures to apply to different parts of the model without a multi/sub object mapping. And I'm not talking about seperate unattached pieces of the model - I'm talking about one mesh that takes 3 or 4 different standard mappings.

Scratching head...

I installed Fate on my husband's computer and walked through the town. Kinda spooky.

I couldn't see the reflection, but I wasn't getting sounds either, so perhaps something went awry with the Vista install.

About half of the townspeople were still there, including some shopkeepers.
Looks like once the town model is all set, I can have that in my main Fate install and play with settings tweaks. Though I think I may start work on some of the setting tweaks now...

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On the Cloud City building, it looked like a simpler mesh. Guess appearances can be deceiving...

RTS, I deleted many of the point helpers that add the sound and light effects. Those will have to be redone.

Also, I'm working from maestro's revision of the the town template in Travis Baldree's mod kit. It's the only town scene we have to use as the town.scn in the vanilla game can't be opened, ie. reverse imported to 3ds max.

I'll PM you a new town file with these new buildings in a few minutes.

Also, would you like me to explain the process of altering the terrain textures in the TOWN file and how they relate to the baked texture terrainmap.png, or do you already know how that works?

We could accelerate the process if I were tweaking the structures and you were retexturing the ground cover.

Yeah, it doesn't bother me, the town feeling empty. It's kind of cool, like walking through a construction zone.

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I have some idea of how the terrain map works related to the town textures. As I quickly discovered that the under-texture remains unchanged, and it seems like the town textures are there to add detail.

How is the texture baked? I understand about baked meshes. Those are meshes where the texture is contained within the mesh. Is the actual terrainmap.png in the town mesh? And if so, then what is the tiny one in the town folder for?

And yes, I am very interested with doing more of the texturing. Can I simply enlarge the terrainmap.png and draw on that? And then do the individual ground textures to work with the modified terrain map?

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I was wondering. Since the teleport portal's location can't be changed, should the landing pad mesh be moved so the teleporter is in the middle of it? Or would it be better to have a merchant or healer standing on the landing pad instead? Seems like it would be good to have a reason for the player character to be walking on and off it. If it's an NPC to put there, I like the idea of a healer I guess.

Hmm. Or perhaps that would be a good place to have a "Stash" creature? One that had a good look for a storage and retrieval system?

(Doing a new post as there's a lot in the previous post already. )

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I walked around the latest town. I can see the reflections now on the grocery store replace. Neat! The mesh is a good size I think.

The Sky City mesh looks good. Great job on it.
It's a bit small, could it be twice the size and still work well?
Also, I was thinking of it being where the petshop is, rather than for the blacksmith.

The landing platform looks great! It seems a good size too. I couldn't walk all the way up on it, but I suspect that's just the fountain collision box still there.