Moving Along

I've been working on the Sentinel Armor here and there when I get free time. The big details are all done. I'm making metal look like metal and leather look like leather now (or at least what I think metal/leather look like). After this, it's normal and specular maps followed by skinning to Skyrim's skeleton.

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I'm almost ready to call it quits in Warframe. It's a fun game to play sometimes, but I'm finding that anytime I want to talk about it, I have nothing good to say. If I can't state a positive other than "the art is cool", why am I playing it? Oh right, time invested. Should I stop playing, I've effectively admitted I wasted my time. Therefore, I should keep playing to justify my investment.

Like I said on my first post about it, the grind gets worse with every update (except hotfixes!). It took until trading was introduced before I could acquire the last part I needed for Ember Prime. And now, it's just this huge RNG grindwall for pretty much everything.

I went through 35 Void keys and only got 1 Rhino Prime part. 10 more keys yielded 2 other parts, but getting the last key type is a 15 minute commitment for a 2% chance of it being rewarded with diluted void drop tables further reducing the chance of obtaining that last part. They had to stash all the parts for the 2-4 piece prime gear recipes in something's drop table, so they pretty much doubled the number of items for a majority of Void Missions.

The solution for this further dilution? DE finally removed resources and credits from the Void drop tables. There have been dozens upon dozens of screenshots showing credits/resources making up 70-90% of the rewards for all Void Missions. The claim was they still had to do internal "testing" to make sure the drop tables worked properly without them. And now, when they worsen the issue, they pull this out and go "See! We addressed this problem!"

With Update 13, the grind is truly ridiculous. Instead of making Vay Hek a standard "Go here to kill him" boss, you have to farm his randomly spawned lieutenants for rare drops, make a one-use key that takes an hour to build, use the key to confront him in a 4 stage fight where you mainly have to wait for a flashing dot to appear (if it ever does) in order to damage him, and hope he drops what you are looking for. Rinse and repeat. And, should you get all the parts you need, you have to farm the Void for a resource that expires at 0:00 GMT, not 24 hours after you get it.

I really want to try the Stances mechanic DE added to the game, but weapons don't have a default stance mod and the Stances themselves are rated Uncommon or Rare. They are also mod drops that were not "included in the proper drop tables" and subsequently "fixed" in a patch. I haven't seen a single person use the Stance mechanic aside from the developers on a livestream.I have now.


I tolerated waiting a week to get my hands on all the new gear/systems/etc when I started playing the game, but now I'm waiting months to even touch aspects of it. I...think I'm done.

Time. Flown.

Work has been keeping me busy lately. Losing some of my day to travel time, but I guess that's how it goes.

I haven't touched the Sentinel Armor for a while. I was working on an entry for the Warframe Melee Weapon contest since it started and submitted my entry hours before the deadline. Despite reading dozens of pages of entries to make sure there wasn't anything similar (even searching for "hammer"), I got smacked in the face with an entry from the day the contest started (naturally, it was posted after I thought I cleared the page).

I've since deleted my entry and am left with a hammer that can't go anywhere but here. So, here it is:

Gouge: The jet-assisted war hammer.
Faction: Grineer
Description: Rocket on a stick. Two-handed heavy weapon. Rubberized grip with one hand on the lowest grip section to control the throttle/keep from letting go. Jet is active for every swing. Intake will bore into any target caught in the claws. Charred bits may or may not spew out the exhaust. Charged attack could be a 270 degree spin (starting at the wielder's right) ending with a 270 degree vertical smash (back to front). Flames encouraged.

I'm not that good with capturing aesthetics it seems (both my models and levels have been criticized specifically about that) and this time I'm inclined to agree. I had no idea how to make this weapon Grineer-ish and instead went with the idea that the race prefers things simple and a rocket on a stick is about as simple as it gets.

I wanted Gouge to look like it was put together with whatever was lying around. So, I pulled references from the Grineer tilesets with some peeks at their weapons (rockets have to come from somewhere and levels are the best places to look). The white text says "Greet".

But, with the effort for mostly naught, at least I had fun making it. I'll be getting back to the armor now.

Yay. 111th post.

Sentinel Armor Progress

As always, female body first because it's my character's gender (eliminates save swapping and summoning the character generation menu for the early stages). Sentinel Armor doesn't conform to the bosom, so I should be able to scale the armor to the male body instead of remaking it like I did for Blood Dragon Armor.

The gloves are almost identical to the Blood Dragon gloves. I took the base mesh, fiddled with exporting/importing their skin envelopes, and removed all but the hands. From there, I removed the knuckle guards and used the trace-spline-rotate method for creating the wrist guards. Massive Armors in Dragon Age: Origins are asymmetrical for the hands and pauldrons, so no quick mirroring for me. This is going to be interesting to unwrap later on.

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Since I haven't heard from the artist in a month and he isn't responding to me, I'm going to go ahead and post an image of the helmet I mentioned in my last post. Just note: Full credit to him for the initial sketch. I made the base model shown below.

The back of the head isn't complete yet. I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with it. There's this ongoing theme of protrusions that look like receptacles for tubes, but not all frames have them. Given how this particular one is close to Excalibur's, I think I'll draw from that. Then there's the organic wisps, swirls, bumps, and such that comprise Warframe's art style. I have no idea how I'm going to do that, but it should be informative in either case (I might actually try to use Mudbox for more than painting UV seams away!).

I have no idea how I'm going to unwrap this. Everything is currently using Max's default color selection. It is also MeshSmoothed a couple times.

The Long Silence

I've been busy and distracted for a while. I put more time into playing Warframe, getting A+ Certified, and working on side projects.

As I said in my previous post, Warframe is getting really grindy for new players now. Since I've been playing for a while, I've already completed a majority of the game before scaling difficulty, lower drop rates, and additional "BUY PLATINUM" neon signs. I'm a bit upset at how I'm not nearly as efficient at leveling gear as I was before the scaling difficulty change and how this also messed up item farming (lower drop rates+ harder to solo areas = more risk, less reward). Then again, I have more "but this was how it used to be" comparisons now.

In other news, I am now A+ Certified and have 3 years to either take a newer version of the test, completed a higher level cert, or enroll in Continuing Education to keep my status from expiring. All those options cost money and I'm still unemployed. Bah. And yet, I still have access to a computer with a decent net connection through which I can play games. What? Needless to say, I'd be screwed on my own in my current state.

On the Warframe forums, there was a fan sketch of a Prime Warframe's helmet, so I did the sensible thing and made it in 3ds Max. I've since submitted it to the sketch's author and am waiting to see what kind of organic details he places on it. I should probably inquire as to its progress...

Some friends and I are planning a game about a year out and our artist drew a couple sketches of armor. As above, I've been making it in 3ds Max and trying to fill in the details where the sketches are just gradients or solid color. It's also front view only, so I'm improvising on the back. No images to show here until the game gets further along.

EDIT:
This is apparently my 100th post. I guess I'll have to make some media (read: Continue Sentinel Armor) for the next one.

Sentinel Helmet - Model Progress

I've finished the helmet's shape for now. I was considering chamfering all the edges on the wings to produce the smooth shapes from the normal map, but no one's going to be that close unless they've blown the model up several times or imported into a 3d package. So, I made some really close polygons resembling the shapes and assigned all the hard edges to the same smoothing group.

There is a sun shape on the forehead where the red glow dot is supposed to be, but I'm not sure if I want to make that geometry or not.

This is really the only unique thing about the Sentinel Armor, besides the texture. It seems like everything else is exactly the same for all massive armors in Origins/Awakening.



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I came across a thread on the Warframe forums with a sketch for a certain frames's helmet redesign and, well, decided to give it a go. The sketch is front view only, so I'm using a side view from the wiki to get a head size.

Warframe

I've been playing quite a bit of Warframe lately. I picked it up during the Global Game Jam earlier this year and, well, I've been having quite a bit of fun. I have a couple more missions on Pluto and have never been to the Orokin Void, but the grind is starting to set in. I've endured long grinds before (RF Online Shield Miller @ level 48), but every update seems to tack on more and more grinding.

Understand though, as of this writing, the game is in open beta so anything can change. I'm just not a fan of having to grind for items with a low drop chance against enemies that are simply bullet sponges. Well, it wouldn't be better if the enemies weren't bullet sponges, but still. Then you have the Dojo from Update 8 which added 20 weapons, a decent chunk of which take an obscene amount of time and resources to make.

Take Ignis, the flamethrower, for example (stats taken 5-30-13). To get the opportunity to make the weapon you need a chem lab:

Detonite Ampule     500
Plastids     10,000
Ferrite     20,000
Polymer Bundle     25,000
Credits   500,000
Research Time     3 days

Once you can craft it, then you need

Detonite Injector     2
Nano Spores     5,000
Ferrite     5,000
Forma     1
Credits     30,000
Build Time     24h

Now, this wouldn't be that much of an issue except for the following (no hard numbers here):
Detonite Ampule - 1 per drop. Uncommon
Plastids - 10-30 per drop. Uncommon
Ferrite - 50-100 per drop. Common
Polymer Bundle - 100-400 per drop. Common.
Nano Spores - 100-200 per drop. Common.
Detonite Injector - Crafted via purchasable blueprints. 12 hour build time after Chem Lab is built.
Forma - Randomly awarded from Void missions, Tier 3 login rewards, purchased with real money, or awarded as a blueprint for an Alert mission. 24 hour build time.

So, to get all the resources, you need to invest a huge amount of time. Now, the Chem Lab costs could be offset if you join a clan, but since I made my own clan, I can't leave (didn't know that beforehand) and there's no one I really play with to invite. This leaves me footing the entire bill if I decide to go for it. Since you have to build hallways, reactors, and other support rooms just to be allowed to build a Chem Lab, it effectively raises the difficulty of gaining those resources by what feels like an order of magnitude.

But I digress, since I have a whole arsenal of weapons to build, let alone use, I can at least keep the grinding interesting. And, before anyone goes off, Warframe is a Free-To-Play game, meaning they have to make money somehow. I understand it (well, not like an Economics professor level of understanding). The usual money crunch is when new gear is released in an update. Those new items are not available to non-paying folk for a few weeks; after which they'll start appearing as drops or Alert missions if the RNG gods smile on you.

One more thing, I have a strong...dislike towards Lech Kril. Stupid, camera flipping, drop hoarding, bullet sponge of a boss.