Making our own creatures with OpenZone: call for modelers

[Windcatcher]

What you're proposing sounds just fine. I'm leaning toward the .X format since it's text-based and should be easier to parse. The animations you listed should be fine, and the .WLD format works the same way, with a hierarchical skeleton.

I definitely intend to keep expanding the .XWF format so that it can support weapon and mob models. It was intended from day one to be a better format for our own client, and I want OpenZone to fully support the format. As it stands, if people want to work on a client, the .XWF format supports zones, and it's expandable such that we can add support for new information without breaking anything. There is already code in OpenZone to import .XWF files, so for a client all that would be required would be to port the code to the language of one's choice (and it's surprisingly little code).

[Windcatcher]

Just a little update...I've been working on my elf model in Anim8or and I have a set of animations for it that cover the basics (standing, walking, dying, casting, ducking, swimming, attacking, etc.). It doesn't have all of the possible variations (e.g. only one casting animation), but for a mob it should be enough. If anyone has a humanoid mob model that's rigged to a skeleton I might be able to use my animations with it and create something exportable.

[RangerDown]

Wow, great to hear that Windcatcher is still alive and active

Can't wait to see what kind of mob creatures people come up with. Hope somebody can make a dragon or demon that's so scary that for a week after I see it I sleep with the light on

WC, one big reason I stay around here is to see what your going to do next. I cant wait to see this, and all the other stuff you do.

[Windcatcher]

I'm still alive and around (sick as a dog, though). I'm sort of in a hurry to get something working because I'll be starting a new job soon and I'll be pretty busy. If someone can supply me with a decent humanoid mob model that's skinned and has a skeleton, I'm pretty confident that I can get something going. I already wrote an importer for Anim8or .an8 files so I know that I can get my animations into OpenZone with just a little bit of work. I think that most of the work in getting mobs working through OpenZone will more involve the GUI code to manage them than the small bit of glue code that it will need.