Shatteredragon: Looking forward to seeing the corvette. As for the comparison basis, the itchy thing is you're right. That battlesuit has 40 parts, and if I'd known back then half the stuff I know now, I'd have slapped myself silly for making such a tiny and complicated model.

These days, however, I've been attempting to offload more detail into the textures and simplifying the smaller pieces of geometry a bit more. The dragon's original geometry was pretty much the top of my game when it came to combining 2D and 3D elements into a model that was as simple as possible, while still presenting the illusion of a more complex form. To get there, I had to practice by doing things like 2.5D alien bugs and dinosaurs, and for those I had to force myself to put as much depth information into the texture as possible. After the first few bugs and xenosaurs, things clicked and I was finally able to just do the 2.5D geometry and mentally envision how the texture would look on it.

When Denny asked me if I thought I could do a dragon, at first I wasn't sure I could pull it off. The results surprised me, and Denny took it even further with some great changes. Don't listen to him when he says he just made minor tweaks. He's just being modest-the changes he made were really nice and gave it a lot more character. The open jaws, the frills and horns, and the tail spikes are all original Denny work, and he also gave the wings a more organic flow to them. Basically, I handed him a somewhat generic and plain-Jane cardstock specimen of Eatemuposaurus draconii, and he turned it into something with much more personality.

You folks have seen how well he textured the dragon, and I think that little project really improved the process of working together. Hoverforce Zeropoint is probably going to be even better as a result, since every model that we work on together leads to improvements in the collaborative process.

Lord Abbadon: Heh, I figured you had me confused with another designer.

-Mel

Denny PM about the Aussie Designer I might be able to help.


Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

And DungeonLinX is ahead by a nose! (No, seriously, check the front page again)

Need I say more? These are very cool, the more I see of this set the more I want it . Keep up the awsome job Denny.

Sweet!!!

OMG! Those are the best 2D tiles I've ever seen, and I've seen hundreds (hell, I OWN hundreds).

Denny . . . You Da Man!!!

The spiked pitfall looks like it is greased with the blood of those cardstock creators' that fell before.


I can see the use of laminating the tiles then bonding them to the foamcore LinX. Then doing some extra tiles laminated but not mounted, to slide over the traps!



Lord Abaddon of Wormwood

Those are sweet. This is exactly the dungeon tile set I've been waiting for.

Lookin' good!


[nitpick]
One issue I'm somewhat concerned with (hey, I have to pick on something, right?) is how these tiles fit (or don't) to the underlying grid. Sure, there's a square grid of paving tiles, but it seems like the 2.5D features on the tile hardly ever pay attention to the grid.

Take that lava "pitfall" above, for example. Looks to be a 4x4" tile, based on comparison with similar elements in the earlier preview. Now, which of those 16 squares are considered to be open to the lava below? On which of the tiles would you require a Balance check to avoid falling in, and which would be considered "safe" (apart from the obvious heat effects)?

Ditto with the earlier "lava river" preview. See those ledges right next to the lava? Near the bridge they seem to be about one square wide, but further out they might only be 1/2 a square wide. Are those ledges accessible? And if so, in what square would you count a miniature to be, if it were on that ledge?

Of course, I can uderstand the sentiment to not want to straightjacket the art into a perfect square grid. But I have to wonder if some of these problems couldn't have been avoided with just a *little* more attention to the grid in the layout phase.
[/nitpick]

Conaill, that's up to your DM!

A balance check for the ledges, or 1d4 heat damage for standing on a superheated metal grate? Make it up as you go!

Conaill - it's only a nitpick if you play D&D. Heck, even when we do occasionally pull out D&D we aren't terribly particular about a "perfect grid" and I'm sure a lot of GMs are the same way.

[Disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is in good part a rant against map makers in general, not just Denny's work here. In fact, I don't really have enough information to judge whether this is a significant problem in DungeonLinx. That being said...]

It's not just D&D, I just used that as an example. And deciding the in-game effect of a terrain piece is indeed something that any DM worth his salt should be able to adjudicate.

It's mainly the partial and ambiguous squares I have an issue with. For any rpg or miniature game that uses squares, being able to see at a glance which squares fall in which category of effect is important for the smooth flow of the game. You don't want to get into "well if I had know that I'd need an XYZ roll to cross that square, I wouldn't have approached the dragon from that angle to begin with" discussions.

Mainly, what it boils down to is that you want to avoid 1/2 squares as much as possible. That's not always possible with organic shapes, but you can often arrange the layout such that you almost never get tiles which are less than 75% of one particular type of terrain.

For example, when drawing a 45 degree boundary (e.g. between solid ground and lava tiles), one could draw the boundary along the corners of the tiles, creating a whole bunch of ambiguous 1/2 tiles. Or, one could draw the boundary to cross the center of the edges of the tiles (avoiding the tile corners). This approach creates very unambiguous small 1/8 tile triangles and 7/8 square tiles (square with one corner cut off).

Similar things happen when drawing circles on a square grid. At some diameters and offsets with respect to the grid you get much less ambiguous results than at others.

I can't really tell from the previews how bad a case of this DungeonLinx has. Denny's post above seems to indicate this has been taken into account in the design at least to some extent. Yet I do see several tiles that do seem rather ambiguous to me.

Hmmm, I like standardized one inch squares, but this is more for consistency's sake. I want to be sure that the bits from one set can be used with the bits of another.

While I do run D&D games I do not use the squares for combat - they are only for convenience when drawing the battlefield out. I use rulers instead when I am moving the mice around the tabletop.

I do use squares for Spycraft - it is much easier with the automatic fire rules to have a grid.

The Auld Grump

Conaill, ther ewas a time I would have agreed with you, but that time has passed. Back then, I wanted games to have covered all the bases, explained every rules with examples, and left nothing to doubt. I rarely, if ever, found these games. I ended up having to make a choice, play with gamers who weren't so anal about having the "perfect" plan with no mistakes, or give up gaming. I chose the former, but only after a gaming friend tried to get me to play Advanced Squad Leader. Now THAT is a ruleset!

We're talking RPG's here, and least we forget, that means role play.

Let me put it a different way. Have you ever walked past a chair on your way to another room and stubbed your toe? Hurts, don't it. Now, if you had "known" you were going to pass too close to the chair, or that it was actually sticking out a little further than you expected, naturally you would have stayed just a bit further away. Your toes would thank you. But this is real life, and you didn't have your esp in alert mode, and now your toe is throbbing.

Same for role playing. You wanna run your character close to the edge to get past something, go right ahead. As the GM it's my call if you need to pass a balance check. So half-squares, 2/3rd squars, 78th squares, makes no difference.

So I say, let the artists do their best work, and I'll handle the situations that come up. This isn't Advanced Squad Leader, it's role playing. You will never, ever have a rulebook that can cover exactly when every test will be necessary.

If this were real life, and you were to turn to me and say "Hey Steve, how close do you think I can get to that lava river before I run the chance of slipping and falling in to my death, and I'd tell you if you can see the lava, you are already too close.

Like I said, I can see where you're coming from, but if your players are constantly trying to figure out how to move their characters like chess pieces with perfect precision, they have too much time on their hands.

My advice, while they're debating how close they can come, and if they step intoi this or that square will they possibly need to take a test, have a stalactite drop on their ass. Always an attention getter. They won't worry about where there feet are going now, they'll be checking out that shadow you mentioned over in the corner. Keep 'em guessing, keep 'em moving, that seat of your pants danger around every corner thrill is why they took up role playing.

Steve