January 21, 2015

Marketplace Content Release

News

Marketplace

By Jon Jones

Greetings, everyone! Time for another weekly content release. This week, everything's advanced and hard-hitting! MORE! FASTER! EXPLODIER! Without further ado, here's the breakdown.

I think that Blueprints are an absolutely killer feature, and I can't wait to show more of the incredibly useful and creative Blueprints we have coming in from content creators on the Marketplace. The first one today is Advanced Laser & Bullet Decals, which is as awesome as it sounds. It's an advanced decal placing system done entirely in Blueprints that opens up a wide range of possibilities for beautiful burning, glowing laser effects and believable bullet holes. If your game has energy or projectile weapons, definitely check out the video!

Next up is Realistic Blueprint Weapons by Black Works, a clever Blueprint that lets you quickly and easily create realistic projectile weapons of all kinds for your games. Sniper rifles, bows, mortars, catapults -- this handles it all! The Blueprints track projectile flight using the same algorithms as professional ballistic calculators, and it even offers functionality for reloading and fixing a jammed weapon. If your game has ballistic weapons of any type, this pack looks like it'd be a massive time saver in setting them up flexibly and realistically.

Today's third Blueprint release is the Spell Cast System by Adam Wolf, which is a handy framework for creating spells and abilities, spell/ability books, manage cooldowns and casting. This is another great example of how much a good Blueprint can help you kick-start and develop an entire gameplay system in a modular, easy-to-use way. Incredibly helpful and time-saving!

Rapid gear shift! Here's a highly-anticipated pack of characters from 3dFoin. Behold the 3dFoin Creature Pack 1! This is a set of five fully-animated fantasy characters including a wyvern, a dragon turtle, a basilisk, a watcher, and a carnivorous plant. Each comes with all the animations you need for a fully-fledged character, plus multiple color options and MAX and FBX source files so you can make any modifications you need to customize it for your game. I'm thinking this pack would also pair well with the Spell Cast System.

Speaking of dragons, how about FIRE? Thomas Harle brings us the Environmental Fires Pack, a set of four fire animations for a Candle, an Oil Drum, a Campfire and a Torch. These look great and fit right into any game needing swanky fire effects. Look, a video!

It looks like Thomas Harle's on a roll this week, because his second submission is the Impacts Effects Pack. This features 18 surface impact effects on a variety of surfaces including Metal, Concrete, Wood, Water, Glass, Brick, Cloth, Dirt, Electrical, Grass, Ice, Leaves, Paper, Sand, Snow, Stone, Blood, and Armour. This is a terrific variety of effects that would be at home in any game involving guns. Here's a video of the impact effects in action. I feel like this would pair nicely with the Realistic Blueprint Weapons pack above.

On the textures and materials front, C-Media is back again with Advanced Materials Ed. 2! There are nine advanced materials in this pack that feature tesselated displacement and 3-way material blending, which look simply awesome. If you deal with ice, water, snow, or skin, do yourself a favor and check out the video to see these beautiful materials in action.

Finally, we have Fantasy Music Pack 2 by Michael La Manna, who's been producing a great deal of excellent music lately. This pack features 25 minutes of seamless looping music split into six tracks and 10 epic stingers. Each track has a full loop version, a full fade version and ambient loops. If you're working on a fantasy game and need great-sounding music to fit any mood, have a listen here.