cgrahamseven

Save yourself from the insanity ;)

To be fair, he did note several times he was not completely remaking the game. It was just to showcase what is possible using Unity. He basically showed every potential dev enough details to fully recreate the world, which is step 1. Most people would fail figuring out how to script the placing of all the static meshes due to confusion on converting unreal units for pitch/yaw/roll to Unity. He also explained in enough detail how to apply all the original terrain textures to a Unity terrain splat map. That saves TONS of time once you automate it. Then you can just swap out textures if you don’t like the originals as he did in his second video. As far as networking, that is something he chose not to do. You don’t have to do it from scratch, there are already existing solutions to this. I have a working client and server that I can log in to that is backed by a db and allows creation of everything you need to add skills, items, quests, instances, etc. You are right that there is so much more to do. That’s been discussed previously in this thread. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible but it would require some people getting together to do it. I don’t think he’s aiming for that though as it seems this was more geared to starting a YouTube channel. I would actually be disappointed if someone who was engaging in this effort tried to make it compatible with the existing server. Those game mechanics are so tired and overplayed. L2 could have been so much more of a skill-based game with more focus on combat skills and counter skills and engaging mobs. Instead it can be summed up in two ways: 1. Make sure you get sword singer and blade dancer buffs and then hope you crit harder and faster than your opponent while spamming CP pots. 2. Kill a seemingly endless amount of (helpless) mobs to reach max level after wasting a year of your life and then subclass and do it all over again. You’d think NCSoft would have learned after all these years of getting their asses kicked by Blizzard, but nope. Instead what do they do with Lineage 2M? The same damn thing. That’s why it’s rated 2.9 stars and no one plays it anymore.

Love it. Especially nice job with the lighting in the church. The emission map for the windows really gives a much better feel to that room. I saw some comment on the vid saying they didn’t like the glossiness of the floor. I think it looked more realistic how you did it. I think I looked at using KWS water solution a while ago but he has some limitations that don’t let you properly mask out certain areas effectively. The problem you will run into with a single water prefab set to infinite water is that there are many spots on the world map that dip below sea level where you would want to just entirely mask out the water. I think I settled on Crest and it was much more configurable and allowed for the creative use of masking and setting water plane heights. Definitely love the combat changes. The movement and combat really have to be changed. I reworked some animations to include jumping and 8-directional WASD with strafing and it just feels a lot better. Of course it still remains to be seen how well the original skills would look with that kind of free movement where it doesn’t move you to the target and stop you to attack. I think it can be done with avatar masks with upper and lower body masks to do something like still allow you to use skill and attack animations while moving. Really excellent work overall. Impressed.

Your last talking island update pic looks gorgeous. Are you working in gamma or linear color space? It almost looks dream-like as if it was gamma. The textures look really good at least from that pic. I've found that alot of the older areas of the game (talking island, de village, gludio, etc) have textures that are in serious need of improvement. It would definitely be good to have an artist to do it, but you can also tweak them a bit with the right AI models and get some decent enhancements that still hold to the original feel. Definitely takes some experimenting and can be quite time consuming because of the number of textures used. I wish they had used texture atlases instead of having like 10-15 textures per model. I was recently messing around with Lineage 2M and they really made good use of atlases there because it was for mobile but it was so nice to just apply one texture to a material that is used for like 15 different models. At one point I considered trying to bake the lineage 2 textures for certain buildings or towns into one single texture but you run into problems because their existing uv maps are fairly atrocious and they frequently scale the uvs outside of the bounds of some of the textures. With regards to some of the older art, you can kinda see what I did here in the DE village. They're subtle changes, but much more visible and clean up close. It's not 100% done (carpet and some other pieces/minor uv map updates), but you can see that once I add lighting and normal/metallic maps, you can kind of visualize in your head how it's going to pop with all that metal and rock. Throw in some post processing with bloom effect and it should be really dramatic.

Not render-ready, but re-working all the textures to clean them up and smooth out the ugly pixelation in the originals. Currently reworking Aden and TOI. Image quality stays pretty good even at max compression. Should leave enough room for normal, metallic, and occlusion maps.

I love it! You must fondly remember the WoW escort quests where you end up screaming at your NPC to "stop moving so slow!!!!" while they just get beat on by mobs before you can kill them all. Yea, see those types of quests are engaging and fun for players. I agree too with keeping sieges and other retail mechanics intact to encourage world pvp for sure. I always thought one of the best features of L2 was castle sieges. That really was something different back in the day.

It's the nostalgia of Lineage 2. I can't speak for Carow, but for myself, L2 was my first MMO and I always dreamed of what Lineage 2 could have been if a few things had been done differently. Things like getting rid of click-to-move and having true WASD movement requiring players to manage distance to themselves rather than the server moving them to the target to attack. Re-working mob and boss mechanics so that there are more challenges for players. Lineage 2 always seemed to be about just putting players in a box somewhere and having them kill zergs of mobs. What about real dungeon experiences where you need multiple players using class-specific skills to help clear rooms and CC so your tank/healers don't get overwhelmed? What if you gave mobs more skills and the intelligence to use them? Why was progression in L2 all about just grinding XP? Why couldn't it have been quest-based which provided more experience than grinding mobs? That way everyone could reach max level within an acceptable time frame (not years) and start on dungeon content to obtain/craft the best gear. There are plenty of things you can do once someone reaches max level to keep them engaged. Those are just a few of the things that come to mind. Of course there is always the update to a modern engine that would be so refreshing. I have no idea why NCSoft never switched to a later version of UE. They could have really changed the game aesthetically, but they never did. I guess after they realized they had lost to Blizzard and World of Warcraft, they just gave up on development expenses and decided to milk whatever was left of the L2 population. It's interesting, I played Lineage 2M when it released and after all these years, NCSoft learned nothing from the mistakes of the past. Instead they just repeat the same model of L2 in L2M. Yes, there are more quests, but it's still just "kill x number of mobs", rinse, repeat. Then grind grind grind where it takes you months to reach a new level. That's just plain shit gameplay. I guess that's how Korea likes it, but for a western market, that's not how we like to play games. But you know, the one thing I will give L2 credit for was the music. Musically, L2 beat any other game hands down. How is it that even 20 years later, people can still get chills from Dion Village's theme song? Bill Brown really created some incredibly timeless masterpieces for them. Totally worth watching btw: Shepard's Flute (Dion Town Theme)

Oh cool yea that's super useful.

I did everything just like he did for the most part. Started with L2SMR or whatever the Java app was that read static mesh coords. I exported them per map and then wrote a blender script in python to instantiate the meshes at the correct coordinates for Unity and then just exported the whole tile as an FBX and placed it at its world coordinates on top of the terrain. I agree that scripting is the best approach for sure to save time, but there are inevitably things you will run into that you can’t script your way out of. One of the things I meant to go back to was looking at how L2SMR parsed the .unr map files so I could extract the audio and BSP pieces. I don’t think L2SMR pulls the audio source coordinates but I’m sure you could figure out by looking at unreal engine docs.

It gives me anxiety just thinking about it When I was working on this more full time, it would just drain me mentally. Get one little thing done and then realize the mountain of other things that still needed to be done. There just isn’t enough time in the day for one person to do it alone unless they have no day job lol. But it’s still super fun to try! I’d probably go back to working on this project more if more people like Carow were interested in doing it as a team. Need several people with programming backgrounds and a knack for reverse engineering. I remember back in the day I used to live on PostPacific forums and all that got me obsessed with RE. Ahh the glory days. I miss that.

I replied on your video on YT. I didn't think anyone else out there would have ever wanted to do this. I figured L2 had died. Like you, I had that nostalgic feeling one day and decided to see if it would be doable in Unity. I built the whole world based on how it was for H5. There's a ridiculous amount of learning required if you want to actually take this all the way. Blender skills are a must. As someone else mentioned in this thread, you can get a long way with just the static meshes, but the devs used BSP brushes for most of the interiors and large parts of the map. A lot of the shapes are not just simple cubes but are stamped out using the BSP brushes they had at the the time, which makes replicating them somewhat difficult.. But, it can be done. I was impressed you figured out the pitch, yaw, and roll conversions needed to orient the static meshes properly on the map. I would think that would be a big hurdle for anyone else trying to do this without knowing where to look to understand what unreal units are. Some of my thoughts on proceeding with this were: Texture enhancement (this will only get you so far and can cause problems because instead of using single textures, the original devs used multiple textures per model which can cause artifacts when introducing normal maps). Talk about super inefficient too. I'm amazed the game ran relatively smoothly when it came out with all those draw calls. Re-paint textures entirely by hand so that you can take advantage of PBR and get true metallic maps for a more modern look. The current painted-on lighting/shading looks terrible. Apparently they added some specular maps at some point but it's still pretty awful. Custom animation controller to allow for 8-direction movement (true WASD) Potential animation re-work to include jumping animations and other modifications necessary to be able to blend animations to get a more WoW-like combat play style. Let's be honest, the animations were designed for click-to-move and that was a horrible design decision. If you don't already have experience with animation, this is going to be a real pain point. Implementation of world streaming. Script to re-label all static meshes to support scene splitting and streaming. You can't build any sort of a prototype client without streaming. At some point, someone is going to have to manually create all the spell effects which is going to be a HUGE pain in the ass. I've redone some like certain buffs and healing spells but it's going to take a lot of time to go through the spell static meshes and figure out what was used for what. Some are obvious, others are not. Above applies for skill effects as well. Have to settle on an MMO engine. There are some in the unity asset store worth checking out, but likely it's not going to take you all the way and will require LOTS of tweaking to get things how you want them. Even once you settle on one you are going to have to spend time learning it as well and modifying it as necessary. Long story short, building the map is the easy part. Converting all the static meshes you need to import into unity is EXTREMELY time consuming. Same goes for creating the textures. It's possible if you got a team together I suppose. I guess I just love this game that much that I want to see it remade in a modern engine with some slight changes to the playstyle and with better mechanics for mobs and bosses. You've done a really great job from what I saw in your video. As I mentioned, I was going down this road too but it sure would be better to work on it as a team. If you might be interested in that, let me know. I can only handle working on it myself in bursts here and there. I'd be happy to share more of what I've done and the challenges/experiences I had as well. Here's a screenshot of my work scene with a few areas populated with their static meshes. I have all the textures imported, but I haven't taken the time to remap all the materials as it wasn't important to me at the time since so many other things needed to be done. I didn't texture the terrains with the original splat maps cause I wanted to use different textures with normal maps.