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Great to see this on Steam. I enjoyed it a great deal when I first played it :)

It'd be really useful if groups had a "Looking for Work" page! Is there a good place to find concept artists who might be interested in some collaborative work?

The hand-beaten texture is very believable. Nicely done :)

Hi AlexTLe,

I've sent you a PM about your thread offering your services as a concept artist. Let me know if you got it :)

I replied to MaceMadunusus, just to note that Japanese dates go Year, Month, Day and I get negative karma? I guess it was ambiguous, but seriously?

Hm... Troll, racist or ignoramus?

The scene looks great - very atmospheric. It might be a good idea to increase the poly-count on those columns, though.

ダープ。

This is fantastically good =D - very nice work!

The contrast seems a little low on these images, but the assets are very good :)

There's a bit of imperfect tiling on the dry-stone wall texture, but it's hardly noticeable.

Nice work on the overall scene :)

Impressive work! It's interesting, though: I feel like texture resolution is less than half of what makes a game look "realistic" and it can even make scenes look cluttered - there's a certain amount of "noise" in high-resolution images viewed at less than 100% of their original size. It can also make a lack of advanced lighting and depth effects more noticeable.

Still, this is certainly an improvement over the original :)

These models look really good, but the render environment is very distracting - the contrast is too high, for one thing, and the green is extremely artificial-looking (not appropriate to the setting, in my opinion).

Secondpicture.com - this is a simple render of a simple model (simpler than some of yours by far), but it's much easier on the eye. Another option would be to set up a small "diorama" (a background scene in which you can place your models for the render.

Good luck! The mod looks promising :)

Yeah, disappointing to see such a lack of original concepts; but always good to see success for mod teams :)

No, it was just land. Or, if you believe the bible, it was the home of the Amalekites, et al, before the Israelites committed genocide. Fortunately there's no evidence that ever took place.

And yes, it is racist to say "Arab = terrorist". What if I was to say "Jew = greedy financier" or "Australian = drunk". Racism is simply a derogatory generalisation made on the basis of perceived ethnic difference.

No territory is without a history of petty, cruel and barbaric violence. Humanity will not survive if we continue to categorise one another along ethnic, ideological or nationalistic lines.

History?

Is the price one that the community will pay, that's the only question. Whether the community would pay $100 or $10, that's what the price should be.

This is where marketing really counts. If the community sees that the game is worth the asking price, then they'll pay it.

StanZcrigs? The logo is very cool, though.

Creativity? Perhaps in the sense that they have to "create" (model, texture, rig, animate) a lot of stuff; just don't forget that most (not all) of the content is based on Tolkien's "creativity" (imagination and inventiveness) or on that of Peter Jackson et al.

I support this project, but we should be clear-eyed in our praise.

Excellent quote - much better than the platitude from the film version of TTT that's at the end of the main article.

Tolkien himself tried to stamp out the sale of bootlegged copies of LotR in America from which he and his publisher received no money. Sadly I think most people would feel very differently about fan-made content if it was based on their intellectual property and might present competition on the open market.

I agree that this shouldn't be happening, but the fact that this is a FREE game means that huge numbers of people would rather download this than pay full price for WB's sub-standard products. If, on the other hand, MERP didn't exist (which is what WB wants), then WB would have what they paid for: a monopoly on LotR-themed video-games.

He would have had to agree to WB purchasing the adaptation rights in the first place, and I doubt he would have. I also kind of doubt that he would have wanted video games made about his works at all, but all such thoughts are idle speculation.

Thank you! I torrented the game a few days ago - very quick, no hiccups. With something so popular, torrent is hard to beat. I was getting ETA estimates into the five day range with a standard download; took maybe half an hour to torrent.

Why should it be as colourful as Episode 2? A more colourful palette might not suit the story, setting and atmosphere.

Great atmosphere. Not so sure about the super-spiky peak in the background, though, it looks a bit unrealistic.

I think they (or someone) do own the rights to adapt the books. The right to publish Tolkien's works belongs to his publisher, the right to adaptations belongs, as far as I know, to Warner Bros. War in the North, for example, is partly based on material that's in the books but doesn't appear in the films.

All that said, the current crop of "official" LotR games is shockingly bad. MERP has a chance of changing that. I wonder if The Third Age (for Medieval II: Total War) is getting the same kind of legal pressure?

Please read the latest news :)

Also, we are planning for this release to be a stepping stone towards a series of games based on this system; this project is not open source.

Thank you for the feedback! It's always appreciated and we will bear it in mind :) - and I can definitely see what you mean about the balance, I think it's mainly because his hips are tilted too far forward.

I did have one crash, near the end when I tried to laser-cut through three or four large objects.

What a great art style!