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4th Dimension

Let’s do the Time Warp again! My latest mod is a British chess variant brought to American shores by TSR in 1979: 4th Dimension!

Included in this TTS mod are:

• Five custom models, created from scans and photos of the originals (I was able to buy a copy of the game with some pieces missing, but with at least one of each of the five types, for $8). The colors of the pieces were scanned with a Nix Mini sensor for maximum accuracy. The models have been duplicated and placed into their starting positions.

• A high-resolution scanned copy of the game board, cleaned up and de-noised.

• A completely remastered, print-quality PDF of the four-page instruction booklet.

• PDFs of the original review in Dragon #22, some strategy notes from the game’s creator from Dragon #38, and an excerpt from Variant Chess #50, rediscovering the game in 2005.

• And, of course, the game box (a custom Bag object)… cleaned up, de-noised, and color-matched with the Nix. The extra PDFs are inside the box.

• As a bonus, the background is a spherical panorama of the Milky Way, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory at eso.org.


THE WHAT-I-LEARNED SECTION

First, this is the first of my mods where I really paid attention to scale. For example, I still have no idea how tall the Dark Tower is in TTS space, much less how it compares to the real thing. But now that TTS’s line tool has become a much more accurate measuring stick, I wanted to make sure the game board, box, and pieces reflected that gizmo’s increased utility. Therefore, the Time Lord is 2” in real life, and is 2” tall in TTS.

Next, and perhaps most importantly: Blender. My 3D workflow had until recently consisted of creating bezier shapes in Adobe Illustrator, and then working with the .ai files in 3D space using DAZ Hexagon. I have since completely de-Adobified myself, and my vector package of choice is now Affinity Designer. Hexagon doesn’t import any formats that Designer can export (maybe .eps?), so I’ve saved my curves in .svg format and imported them with Blender. The learning curve isn’t gentle, so I’m happy to say that I’ve reached a certain level of comfort with Blender. Boolean functions—which were kind of essential to making these pieces—are much easier, once you wrap your mind around the concept of non-destructive modifiers. It helps to shade the faces of the Boolean object flat or smooth before applying the modifier, to prevent those weird shading quirks in TTS. It’s also important to remember to triangulate your .obj exports; nothing makes a face go invisible in TTS like having an n-gon with more than four points… unless it’s flipped normals, and I had a couple of those. I’m still using Ultimate Unwrap to unweld edges and get a nice clean look on the sharper corners. If anyone’s tried to bring an object into TTS with flat faces and found that there’s a weird diagonal shading, it’s probably because it’s being shaded smoothly. I’m finding that Blender’s “shade smooth” and “shade flat” functions work pretty well, but unwelding an edge will absolutely kill any attempt to shade that face smoothly against the neighbor.

Also learned about: rotating snap points. It became clear after bringing in all of the assets that the game is pretty unworkable if the minimum rotation of the pieces is only 15°; the outer circle is segmented into increments of 11.25°, and it’s a pretty tight fit out there. Problem is, the rotation on the snap points isn’t that precise, either. That meant going into the saved game’s .json file and manually changing all of the Y-rotation values for the snap points for all 60 of the board spaces and the six time warp spaces. Once I’d done that, I realized that all the pieces rotated towards the center, even when a piece was in “enemy territory.” So I went back, created duplicate meshes for the White pieces, and rotated them 180°. Then I took every snap point with a negative Y value and rotated those 180° as well. The result is that the pieces should always be facing away from the player but along an axis connecting the space it’s occupying to the center.

I was going to originally take all of the meshes and pack them together into an AssetBundle (with each frame of animation containing a different mesh, therefore making each piece a unique Trigger), but it occurred to me that some equally mad person might want to 3D-print these pieces and make their own 4D board. Interested parties should feel free to use the Steam Cloud link in the Custom Model dialogue box to download the .obj files, and then use Blender to convert them to .stl files for 3D printing.