A new project to last a lifetime...

[Nishi_Acolyte]

Well, just to prove how crazy I really am I finally started work on a project that i’ve been planning for a long time. Right now i’m a freshman in college and i’ve been planning this project out for the past three years or so. That said, work at the beginning has been a little slow to say the least. It has taken me six months to get the first two minutes of an animation finished and rendered. Sadly, the file size is huge, and I don’t think i’ll be able to post it, however I will try and post some screenshots in a little while, but first let me explain the premise of this project.

First of all, i’m a huge fan of Star Wars, as i’m sure a lot of you are. In response to my child-like obsession for lightsabers, spaceships, and the force, I have begun a project that will take me the course of my natural life to finish, if it can be finished at all. I have spent the last three years of my life planning out a new Star Wars game that I would like to create. Although i’ve only been using blender for about three years or so, I would consider myself to be an advanced user (humbly :-)), but I have spent the last ten years studying different programming languages and what aspects go into game programming specifically. Just to prove that i’m not going into this project half-heartedly I will tell you that I have spent many hours storyboarding, modeling, animating, rendering, studying c++ and different code structures, and everything else all the way down to scoring this game. hehe. I don’t need to tell you that it’s almost driven me insane, but i’ve managed to get somewhere recently and i’ve decided to continue my pursuit of this dream. Here I will post some information about the project that might come in useful for others who are thinking along doing something of this magnitude, and then I will try to post some screenshots of parts of the project i’ve been working on.

Modeling - Blender 2.36 - Current; Terragen (landscapes)
Animation - Blender 2.36 - Current; Terranim
Rendering - Blender 2.36 - Current; Terragen
2d Raster Images - Photoshop, the Gimp
Compositing - Adobe After Effects 6.5
Sounds - Some free software tools available on the net (just search!)
Music - Free midi programs, and of course the original Star Wars mp3s.
Game Engine - Dark Basic Professional

Here is some of the work i’ve done so far:

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[Nishi_Acolyte]

Here are some more screen shots:

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[vliegtuig]

Sadly, the file size is huge, and I don’t think i’ll be able to post it,

Don’t put everything in one file.
Spread whatever you can on as many files as possible.
If one crashes beyond repair you’ll thank me.
P

[thelonesoldier]

Probably not a good idea to spend the rest of your life making a game based entirely on material that is copyrighted to someone else… though Lucasarts is usually supportive of mods and such.

That said, I love Star Wars.

Er, did you make up those ships? I don’t recognize them.

[Nishi_Acolyte]

Here are the final three shots i have. These are from the first render of the full movie. There will be more updates soon as I get more done with the game intro movie. I will then begin to post some of the game models and possibly questions about certain topics. I look forward to the day when blender will be able to integrate hair smoothly so I will not have to write custom scripts. oh well, maybe soon i’ll keep my fingers crossed.

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[Nishi_Acolyte]

ok, let me be clear this game is for personal enjoyment only, i’m not planning on getting any profit from it, or even posting it due to copyright infringement. as for the comment about splitting the material up because it’s too large, i was actually speaking about a rendered quicktime file that averages about 300mb compressed with sorenson 3 codec, so i don’t really see how to additionally reduce the size without reducing the quality as well. Thanks for the comments though, they are greatly appreciated. Just a hobby!

[Nishi_Acolyte]

yeah i designed the ships from scratch using conceptual sketches and then scanning them in. I have some books on star wars ships and such, so I spent many hours researching what goes into making a convincing ship design. Thanks!

[nonaestet]

what if some one wanted to play the game?

[Nishi_Acolyte]

then i would have to check on some things to make sure that i didn’t cross any boundaries when it came to the legal matters of releasing a game that wasn’t endorsed by Lucas Arts, but contains a lot of their copyrighted material. I don’t think anything would happen because i’m not making any money, but you never know, we’ll see. That day is a long ways off anyway, gotta finish the intro first. hehe

[hampus]

I hope you will finish this project some day.

[Nishi_Acolyte]

Here is my latest update of the head model shown above. I used some of the new features in the blender 2.40a release to do the hair with some control curves. Let me know what you think.

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