A newbie with a cool idea

[ggstarfoxxie]

Hello everyone. I've played alot of custom stories & have been inspired to make my very own. It's going to be based in Starcraft universe about the terran's (humans) evil Confederacy & its experiments on the living.

However, I have absolutely no experience with map making, modeling, or scripting. I have a bunch of questions though so bear with me.

1. I have plans to make new monsters, but I don't have Maya. Is there a free 3d modeling software that's compatible with the editors used for Amnesia?
2. How can I tell how big the monster will be in the game? Is there a standard scaling used across all 3d programs? I don't want to have an epic monster be like 2 foot tall.
3. How big can a map be without seeing lag because of all the stuff in it?

I realize this maybe too much to learn at once, but just want to be one of the cool kids that make epic stories of epic proportions.

[MrBigzy]

1. Pretty much just Blender.

2. It's generally done by trial and error, though you could use the grunt as a comparison by loading his model in a CG program and seeing how tall he is in system units (can be cm or m).

3. There's no "limitation" to how big a map can be, but to how many polys are being rendered at once, how many recources are loaded (textures, particles, etc) and how big the render distance is (culling and such). Basically, do whatever you want and test to make sure it doesn't lag on a medium to low graphics pc (if you want everyone to play it). And make sure to add preloads in your scripts for particles and sounds to reduce lag.

[MegaScience]

I don't believe enemy AI is open source in Amnesia, so you'd have to settle for whatever you make doing what the three available enemies do by default.

[ggstarfoxxie]

Ok just to be clear, I can't make the enemy open up closets & do other advanced searches in rooms or make him tear down our box/barrel forts, correct? What about random search paths? Like do I have to put down path nodes everywhere to make it look random?

[Your Computer]

Ok just to be clear, I can't make the enemy open up closets & do other advanced searches in rooms or make him tear down our box/barrel forts, correct? What about random search paths? Like do I have to put down path nodes everywhere to make it look random?

You can suggest for the monster to break down closet doors by having it attempt to walk into a closed closet (though i'm not 100% certain if closet doors are breakable). You could have an area in front of the closet and when the monster collides with it, automatically open the closet door. If an object is breakable and the AI realizes that it is in the way of the monster with no where else to go, the AI may attempt to break the object on its own. Random search paths are possible, but you have to make sure each node is connected to each other in order for the monster to navigate to its destination. There's a function you can use to generate a random number which you can then prefix with a predefined pathnode name (if you understand what i mean).

[MrBigzy]

When the monster is in chase or alert mode, he doesn't exactly follow nodes; at that point they act more as a guide.

There are, however, some things you can tweak for those types of circumstances. They're all in the model editor; you can tweak whatever is tweakable for an enemy in there. It includes things like enemy FOV, enemy sight distance, amount of time in alert mode, search FOV, enemy speed, enemy damage, etc. Those are the only things you can change in regards to enemy AI though.

[ggstarfoxxie]

Cool beans! Thank you guys for the helpful comments.