Implemented Procedural Books Generation

Experimented a bit with the procedural book generation. All books are completely randomized, together with their stats and prerequisites. The results are surprisingly good, and sometimes outright hilarious. Some of the best ones:

Epic books, lav! Really like the looks of this!

Really cool.

It seems the amount of available books in the community leaves a lot to be desired.

There are several Native books, but their textures are stuck in a corner with the appropriate reduction in quality. There are also two excellent tomes in spak's items which can be retextured - but for some reason this didn't provide good results for me (spak uses a lot of tricks to make his items look nice and shiny, so when I start messing with his textures all hell comes loose immediately). And I failed to find any more books - there are probably some in other mods, but downloading a bunch of huge mods just to see if they have a couple of books that the devs could be asked about is a pain in the... erm... neck.

So I went and experimented with Wings a bit. This was not my first attempt with Wings, but the first which was more or less successful. So after a couple of hours I got the following:



It's 36 poly with a 256x256 texture, overall weight ~46K. Yes, it took me 2 hours to design a mesh with 36 poly, that's what a prodigy of a 3D artist I am. I wouldn't recommend putting it anywhere on a scene where it could be examined in detail, but it looks nice in inventory window (which is actually all I care about at this stage ). And the most important (at least for me) feature is that it's incredibly easy to retexture with the following layout:



MB Repository is currently down, so uploading the archive to MediaFire if anyone's interested.

Nice work again, Lav.  Thanks for the chuckle

If you want to wait for a couple of days, we can make a joint release since I was just in the middle of an improved book osp.

Here's an unfinished sample:

Erm... Thanks, but I want to clarify - what exactly do you want to have in joint release from my side?

Because what I have is an amateurish book model which I don't consider worthy to be called "OSP pack", and about 1000 lines of code which is not compatible with Native and needs some (probably an understatement) work to adapt it.

Oh, I'm just offering some book models, that's all. I figured that you might want to release your work at some point and you had bemoaned the lack of more interesting books. I just thought it was interesting that I found your thread on procedural books on the same day I was making a new book model. Take it or leave it.

Mandible said:

Oh, I'm just offering some book models, that's all. I figured that you might want to release your work at some point and you had bemoaned the lack of more interesting books. I just thought it was interesting that I found your thread on procedural books on the same day I was making a new book model. Take it or leave it.

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I will be grateful for any models you drop on me. But what I was saying is that I currently cannot contribute anything (with the exception of this book model) to your release, so calling it joint would be giving me undeserved credit.

I can send you the code for books if you are interested, but making it compatible with Native is going to be one hell of a work.

Don't worry about it. I wasn't aware that you had a whole mod-worth of features that you were working on. I see now that this is only a small part of what you have in store. Forget the joint-release thing, just have some books.

Textured a few more books today, if anyone's interested. Also made a metal buckle, or at least pretense of one.

Download URL #1: http://mountandblade.nexusmods.com/mods/3515
Download URL #2: http://www.mbrepository.com/file.php?id=3515

Apparently modeling is quite fun in it's own way.

I added some books on my mod and I was run out native book model to use. Thanks for sharing it.

dunde said:

I added some books on my mod and I was run out native book model to use. Thanks for sharing it.

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No problem. Anyway, you might want to wait a bit for Mandible's release. Seems like I have good karma with modeling - whenever I post some model or re-texture, someone else immediately appears with an even better project. Maybe I should post my extra models for trade goods once they are ready - who knows what other models pack I might summon with those.

Pretty good idea to generate different books for each game, and fun stuff as well.
I am toying with some other ideas of generating random, unique-looking stuff per game, to make for replayability, including complex quests put together from simpler, semi-random tasks.