Determinance screenshot

Determinance moddability

A common question is how modable DT is; and it’s a strong aspect of ours so I’ll address it briefly here.

Determinance, being based on the Torque engine, is already highly modable. It ships with all of the standard Torque tools, including an extremely easy to use in-built mission editor and gui editor. New characters are very easy to add through Milkshape or Max (or any other software with a dts exporter), and level buildings or objects can be made in Quark, Hammer, or anything with a dif exporter (huge amounts of info on GarageGames.com).

On to the Determinance-specific stuff. Putting cloth on exported player models is simply a matter of tying verts to a special node in your modelling program of choice. New weapons are also just a case of using a dts-exporting program and then fiddling with a collision box for a couple of minutes.

Animation is where it gets a bit more exciting. Determinance’s in-built animation tool looks like this:

You can grab any part of the body and drag it using the mouse (IK under the hood here)

Or you can select any joint in the skeleton and rotate it for fine tuning:

We also have the face editor for coming up with expressions:

And here’s something which took twelve seconds:


The point of all the imagery being that anyone can make new attacking, flying, showing off, feinting, whatever poses for DT characters in very little time. And you can import a model with a completely different skeleton (like a creature with 5 legs) and completely modifiy the entire freeform fighting engine to be all based around him flipping his tail (or something). Now that does require some work, but it’s all there.

Finally is the game mode system. We have a very easy to get into, very flexible system which allows you to play around with making your own game modes.

Ian

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “Determinance moddability”

  1. Wedge:

    § April 27th, 2006 at 6:48 am

    Can cloth only be placed on players, or any shapebase derived class? Does it have interactions with collision and wind?

  2. Ian:

    § April 27th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Cloth interacts with collision and wind, yes. Right now cloth only works on players, but it’s extremely easy for us to add it to the standard shapebase class instead (like moving 10 lines of code) so we’ll make that available.

    Ian

  3. Paul:

    § April 27th, 2006 at 4:06 pm

    Man, I don’t know if we have time to move 10 lines of code.

  4. Ian:

    § April 27th, 2006 at 4:39 pm

    I just changed the title because someone told me that Moddability has two d’s.

  5. Tom:

    § May 1st, 2006 at 7:44 pm

    You might want to change the first sentence of the post as well, then. Unless that’s a deliberate mistake aimed at keeping the blog “charming”.

  6. Paul:

    § May 2nd, 2006 at 12:07 am

    LOL CHARMING

  7. Tom:

    § May 2nd, 2006 at 1:58 pm

    I ROTFLMAOed.

  8. Archanis1:

    § May 11th, 2006 at 9:08 am

    dude! this will be the game of the year! a modders paradise!

  9. Paul:

    § May 12th, 2006 at 2:26 pm

    Yay! Seriously, we hope modders will get excited about this – there’s loads of scope to make your own fighting styles and game modes at one level, and then take it much further and use the game as a basis for something else if you like.

  10. Archanis1:

    § May 13th, 2006 at 8:53 am

    I am a modder and i am really excited about this. Seriously i cant wait when ill can test my swords in game :)

Leave a Reply