There are no treasure items. Building in a score thing (1million treasure points == frags++) would be fun/cool ofcourse, but it is kind of weird. Also - which items would turn into treasures? The ammo? The weapons? Powerups? I don't think players would want to give those up, just to collect some gold (and inevitably die doing so).

I'm working on items in 3 tiers.
1 - ammo + small armor + health items
2 - armors + megahealth replacement
3 - (real) powerups

DooM and Earth have all their tier1 items done. Strogg's stuff is really getting there.

Games, the cross was the least valuable of the whole bunch. Wouldn't you rather pick up a crown? Since there's really no way to put that stuff in there it doesn't make much difference. The funny thing is, except for the gold, Wolfenstein lacked a lot of stuff that showed up in later games. There was only one kind of ammo, 4 weapons total, dog food, dinner plates, and first aid boxes. Doom had a lot more stuff. Quake had an 8th weapon. Quake2 had a big bunch of stuff. Because this is an Arena mod we're stuck with the limit of things Arena allows. What will the Earth powerups look like? Since their was no haste, quad damage, invisibility, or regeneration that leaves a lot of freedom to make models for them.

Because Wolfenstein had no items for armor, we used treasure items instead in SOG. So picking up treasures would give you more armor. I think it would be cool for GenArena if you replace the armor shards with those golden crosses. It would look very authentic.

BTW - I do have the grenade crate modelled now, but haven't skinned it.. in favor of this puppy:

its better than the q2e attempts ive seen, ohh the niceness

must have more, greed overwhelming...

*Daedalus merges with Icarus, transforms into Helios and attempts to take over the world

We hope for all the items that are done to be in 99c

And we've been talking about converting all our .tga's to jpgs anyway. There's just a LOT of TGA files to convert, and some of them have fancy stuff like alpha channels and the like

awesome work tab! and im sure im not the only one eagerly awaiting the strogg stuff =). also, this question might have been answered, so dont kill me! i was wondering..are the slipgater's weps/stuff gonna get an overhaul like earth's? i hope  

Tab, you really can do very nice skins. But what I'm wondering is that how do you even skin those things? Like, do you start everything totally new from a new piece of white blank in a paint program?

This is how I work, lunatic:

1. I model boxes, cylinders, spheres or planes, depending on the item to be made, using 3d Studio Max.
2. I convert them to editable poly, and use a wide variety of meshtools to edit the above shapes, until I like what I see
3. I unwrap the sucker - for an example, see this. This means I decide what the skinmap looks like, how it stretches and where seams are.
4. I build an MD3 and two Textporter TGA's (one that outlines everything in white on black, and one that shows the face normals using colours (- this helps me remember what was what, and where)). An example (of the strogg grenade) can be found here
5. I load the TGA's in Photoshop, overlaying the white-on-black mesh (always stays on top (but not always visible), so I can still see the mesh when I paint over the background, if I want to).
6. I pick an area on the map that I feel like doing first, and fill it with the most appropriate colour (for, say, the strogg bulletbox that would be brown).
I accentuate the edges and generally paint in details like scratches, highlights etc.
7. I use texture overlays to get the desired gritty effect (this usually involves a lot of browsing in my self-composed texture library).
8. I make logo's, text and other extras, overlaying them on the right parts.
This includes the ocasional adjustment layer (brightness/contrast or a masked desaturation layer for that paint-chip effect).
9. Continually checking what the skin looks like in Npherno's MD3-viewer, I keep painting until I'm happy with the result.

This is, globally, how I work(ed) on the items. Especially steps 6 to 9 happen in a strange chaotic blur of actions that just seem right. Hard to explain what my exact strategy is in this. Some days it just all falls in place, and other days things fall apart.
Also, I start out with a black canvas, always - It's easier on the eyes for me :]


For skinner/modelers like me, there are other strategies, like painting a full skinmap in Photoshop first, and unwrapping the model to fit that design. I've never even tried to do that (other than small adjustments in rare cases) - It's too restrictive on the model and quality of the unwrap IMO.

Here's some links to stuff:
The way I used to paint, before I had a tablet, and YEARS ago - I totally revised my painting style, and work directly in colour now, but you may still get an idea of general fleshing out.
A zipped slideshow movie that shows how I made a 2d art piece - This was not too long ago (about a year, I think) and shows you more of the way I work nowadays. I think you need the TSCC codec but I'm not sure

There. Enough typing for this morning - time for breakfast :]

what he's saying is, he paints and uses the filters well. Texture filters are very nice if you know how to use them, I'm personally fairly clueless, so it takes awhile for me to do something like that. But the big idea is to start with a base, and add layers for different effects.