Comments from a jaded 3D animation student

Mincemeat

Doomsday's Neighbour
Brace yourselves ;)

I love the colour palette - it's so retro WC2 and very consistently applied. I guess it helps that you are not trying to re-use some major assets from SO (unlike the case with UE).

The B&W scene in the intro was a nice touch too.

The sounds and music are a real trip down memory lane - well done.

My first impression of the main character's voice is that he is almost bored in places - especially in some of the inflight comms, in contrast to everybody else - was that a deliberate decision?

I think it would be a lot more effective if the expressions on the talking heads in the cut-scenes are much more exaggerated, because with the video compression, there is scant detail with wrinkle lines and other facial subtleties - the original WC2 can do them pixel by pixel. It's better to over-animate than to have raised voices but too little visual emotion.

There is some UV mapping problems with the models - eg. the Gilgamesh's side profile where the textures stretch. Personally I don't really care - I hated poly modelling and am no good at it myself - but it can detract from the overall experience.

To sum it up, WELL DONE and everybody can clearly see the colossial amount of hours and effort in producing this free mod, especially working with/against a dated and restrictive game engine.

Thank you, and keep up the great work :)
 
Mincemeat said:
The B&W scene in the intro was a nice touch too.
Yep, especially in an engine which does not support any palette-switching or stuff like that. If you knew how we did it, you'd laugh.

My first impression of the main character's voice is that he is almost bored in places - especially in some of the inflight comms, in contrast to everybody else - was that a deliberate decision?
To a certain degree, yes - Bradshaw was supposed to be a little bit like WC3's Blair (who also sounded pretty bored). Of course, to a certain degree, it's also a case of the voice recording coming out the way it did. This time round, we were more concerned with getting all the voiceovers in there, not necessarily getting them absolutely right. Anyway, Pedro (who did Bradshaw) says he'd like to re-record some of the in-flight lines, so you may see some improvement in this area in Episode 2.

especially working with/against a dated and restrictive game engine.
Heh, working against the engine - that's actually a very good way of putting it.

(for the record, Standoff is the absolutely last time I ever touch the Vision engine. I don't care if we end up doing UE2 or not - there's simply no way I'm working on anything Vision-based after Standoff. The engine was designed for 1997's WCP, and it's a lot of trouble getting it to handle 2004's Standoff.)
 
Mincemeat said:
I think it would be a lot more effective if the expressions on the talking heads in the cut-scenes are much more exaggerated, because with the video compression, there is scant detail with wrinkle lines and other facial subtleties - the original WC2 can do them pixel by pixel. It's better to over-animate than to have raised voices but too little visual emotion.
I'll definitely keep that in mind for the next episodes, thanks for sharing your thoughts on the subject. :)
 
Quarto said:
Yep, especially in an engine which does not support any palette-switching or stuff like that. If you knew how we did it, you'd laugh.

My guess would be that half of the background image is color and half is BW. And you also did a B&W texture for all ships in that very cutscene?
 
cff said:
My guess would be that half of the background image is color and half is BW. And you also did a B&W texture for all ships in that very cutscene?
Yep, you got it. The world is a strange place, half of it is colour and the other half is b&w.
 
Quarto said:
Yep, you got it. The world is a strange place, half of it is colour and the other half is b&w.

And it worked so well! :)

I would bet it was quite a job to ramp the coloured background to B&W while matching it perfectly with the speed of the background scrolling.
 
Mincemeat said:
I would bet it was quite a job to ramp the coloured background to B&W while matching it perfectly with the speed of the background scrolling.
Actually, no - I made the background before I started working on the coding, so it wasn't that much work to make sure the camera rotation matched the colour change :p.
 
NuclearPenguins said:
Blair sounded bored because Mark Hamill can't act. ;)

I did liked his acting in wc4.

I agree with the animating emotions on this thread, i noticed something i seen is most games that use 3d animated characters, is that when one character shows some emotion, quickly afterwards, it quickly resets to a plain, "emotionless" face, wich looks weird after a smile or something.
The only game i dont remmember seeing something like that is bloodlines (got to love those facial animations :D )
 
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