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Topic Starter	Topic: Re: AEdm7r - AEon's DM7 Reflex - (Alpha)
Fjoggs Old Skool' Joined: 02 May 2002 Posts: 5230	Posted: 12-04-2014 04:08 AM                  Looks good AEon!
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-04-2014 06:02 AM                  Fjoggs, thanks. I never was much for detail brushwork... but this excessively low poly approach does map the maps look drab, especially since you cannot fake detail with texturing. Oh well. BTW, you are the moderator over at the official Reflex Mapping forum, right? And the one who created Reflex\base\internal\maps\FjoRXtourney1.map? Now that map has an insane amount of brushwork done... even in GTKradiant it would have been a pain to pull off, but in Reflex... respect!
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Fjoggs Old Skool' Joined: 02 May 2002 Posts: 5230	Posted: 12-04-2014 07:50 AM                  Yeah that's me. Gotta push those boundaries!
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-04-2014 09:02 AM                  Luckily the folks at the Reflex forum are on the ball... the trick to make clip brushes work in Reflex is to avoid them having direct contact with any brush. I.e. have them float slightly off the walls, floor, ceiling. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-04 17-42-02-53.jpg [ 162.62 KB | Viewed 413 times ] This is the corridor I showed yesterday, all the clip brushes now are 8u away from any wall. The usual distance the folks use seems to be 2u... but since this is not creating a bot file, and the player certainly cannot tell the difference, I am using a larger distance, that also lets you get at the wall brushes more easily. Remember, the editor does not have a "hide" key... so clipping actually really gets in the way. And there is no view filter either... but hopefully there will be. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-04 17-42-07-02.jpg [ 81.99 KB | Viewed 365 times ] So this is how the corridor now looks with "proper" lighting. I am presently not going to add light entities, because IMO they are not needed. On the upper floor a few areas were a tad dark, so I opened up the ceiling by 32u and that fixed that pretty much. Attachment: reflex-2014-12-04-light-com.jpg [ 193.17 KB | Viewed 388 times ] Well... only slightly brighter... but should be enough.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-05-2014 10:18 AM                  Did some brush clean up today, trying to reduce the size of the lightmap... i.e. removed the mitering from all the orange floor trims, because brushes cut off at an angle are "longer" and since the lightmap uses rectangular images to save those, and this is slightly wasting space in the large lightmap page. Well, I could improve things, but only so slightly it was pretty much a waste of time. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-05 18-58-24-12.jpg [ 100 KB | Viewed 438 times ] Notice the glowing cube in front? I experimented with the idea of the map actually being placed inside the superstructure of a gigantic cube (3584³ units³), so that you can see the framework when running the corridors inside of the map, and of course from all the arenas. Well it looks relatively cool... but there is a downside... the lightmap file does not actually go up, it had two pages, and now it still has two. But the compile time went up from 700 seconds to 1100 seconds... so that is a slight pain. The maximum volume of the map seems to have an influence on the compile time. The frame rate is fine... an extra 36 lit triangles to draw is not really much of an issue I would imagine. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-05 18-59-11-23.jpg [ 108.84 KB | Viewed 387 times ] Something one would do by using a "real skybox" in Q3A, I would imagine. For now keeping it... since deleting it would only take a few moments. Anyway a bit of fun possible in such a low-poly situation.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-06-2014 05:00 PM                  Mostly did clean-up work on the map. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-07 01-06-42-35.jpg [ 110.16 KB | Viewed 412 times ] Added more stripes to the walls to make them have some form of decoration. I created some form of "leaf" in all of the pools, bumpy as they look. Sure not as pretty as Sock's, but then again they are built from one cube per leaf. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-07 01-09-01-86.jpg [ 69.73 KB | Viewed 388 times ] I experimented a bit with the "light shaders"... adding the triangular brushes on the floor with the glow light shader (static light). Alas the quality of the light on the wall is a bit "blocky"... I'd love to add them all over the place... but they simply do not look that great. Hmmm... I could use nice real-time light entities... but they mess with the frame rate badly.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-07-2014 12:53 PM                  More clean-up... it turns out, "falling out of the map" will not be an option, since the ugly darkcaulk would become visible... alas... so will probably add some surreal clipping. I.e. you think you can jump out of the arenas, but you will actually not be able to do that. And I prefer not to add walls as used in the original AEdm7. Oh well. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-07 17-49-33-42.jpg [ 94.3 KB | Viewed 432 times ] I experimented using a light texture on simple brushes... to add more lighting interest to the map without having to add real-time lights that lower FPS. Looks a bit nicer IMO... so will be adding it all over the place. Alas, just noted that the .probe file (no idea what that does) went up from 1.8 MB to over 10MB due to my "cube" superstructure... seems the structure needs to go as well... sigh.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-10-2014 06:13 PM                  There is a Q3 .map Reflex .map converter over at the Reflex forum. Been helping with the conversion a bit. Here is a test run of the q3dm7sample.map as seen in Reflex: Attachment: reflex 2014-12-11 02-26-56-62.jpg [ 232.5 KB | Viewed 403 times ] I edited out hint brushes, portals, player clip and the skybox before converting, but the very latest version now does that for you automatically. It might become an option to convert Reflex maps to Radiant... we might want to create a "game pack" to let us edit geometry with the proper textures from Reflex in Radiant... no idea how difficult that would be, but I know we have the experts here. Just some wishful thinking on my part, but it might become reality. Oh, and BTW... using GTKradiant camera view with W,A,S,D now... and remapped the keys requiring those keys... it is so nice to have that kind of functionality. Whee .
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-11-2014 02:47 AM                  There is a Christmas Tree Group Building over at Reflex. The idea, 8 mappers join and build their own Christmas tree, demonstrating the multiplayer mapping of Reflex. Date will be the 20th December apparently. Well, I had to meddle... pointing out that there has so be some structure in place to let folks work in peace, not having to do everything from scratch. So I created this small-town suburb or something. Every one of the "players" has their own yard, same size and small house (neo-Gothic or so)... and can build and decorate his yard and house, and add a tree in the yard. Attachment: reflex 2014-12-11 11-26-52-20.jpg [ 201.6 KB | Viewed 428 times ] Created in about 2 hours. You may wonder how I did it in Reflex without any multi-select, rotate or mirror... well I did not... I used GTKradiant 1.6.4... and then converted the map file to Reflex. I textured it in Radiant, so can now search/replace (programming editor) the textures with existing ones in Reflex. Boy is it nice to have rotate, mirror, multi-select via brush frame, vertex and edge editing in 2D views back again while editing in Radiant. Oh and the clipping tool too. Ironically, my first try at those pyramidal corner "mountains" actually created invalid brushes, that never showed up in Reflex... I was always so in envy of those skilled in using modelling tools to add models/meshes that were just that extra bit more special for Radiant. Now with Reflex... I almost feel like those modellers creating "detail" in Radiant for Reflex.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-11-2014 05:53 AM                  And now, AExtree, in eye-poking colour (in Reflex): Attachment: reflex 2014-12-11 14-22-47-18.jpg [ 216.09 KB | Viewed 375 times ] You have to imagine the "pink" to be some less garish colour, its the darkcaulk texture. And here I compiled the light (483s), skylight only, using the original nolight texture... making the houses look slightly more subtle: Attachment: reflex 2014-12-11 14-51-18-45.jpg [ 131.79 KB | Viewed 460 times ]
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-15-2014 08:57 AM                  Been playing around a bit... converted all the Reflex textures to TGA 32bit, kept the file structure and renamed the images to fit what Reflex wants (i.e. remove "_c" in textures' names), put all that into a "textures" folder and turned it into reflex_textures.pk3. And bingo they show up in GTKradiant. The Q3ToReflex map converter I wanted to try out on my favourite fun map, AEpyra... especially as instagib map with q3dm17 bounce pad. Well, using GTKradiant's (1.6.4) own texture replace tool I started to convert a few trims and one main texture to the Reflex textures... when converted the map should immediately be properly Reflex textured. Why deal with not so great Q3A brushwork in Reflex, if you can see the issues in Radiant and already fix them there. Attachment: radiant164 2014-12-15 17-42-04-86.jpg [ 185.4 KB | Viewed 385 times ] I will need to do some experimentation with the texture size though. In Reflex textures are 1024x1024... and in GKTradiant they used to be 256x256 IIRC... so to adapt the "fit" of the texture, I'll need to experiment at bit. But it sure is neat to have a "Reflex" texture environment in Radiant. If the offset, rotation and scale of textures actually works, when converted (more testing), I could in theory "fit" textures properly in Radiant, and have them show up in Reflex.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-20-2014 10:15 AM                  I am still working on AEdm7R. With AEpyraR I relearned to use GTKradiant, and it helped me understand how to better use clipping in Reflex (if you use it like in Q3A, intersecting geometry, you are in all sorts of lighting problems). Even though AEdm7R is pretty much done... I will continue to tweak a few more things, add a bit of more geometry and then release it on the 24th ...
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-21-2014 03:14 AM                  The resulting damage of... Christmas Tree Multiplayer Mapping Event on Reflex - 20th Dec. 20014 The event was kinda fun. My contribution seems to have been the "most normal"... in a way.
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AEon Boink! Joined: 19 Apr 2003 Posts: 4493	Posted: 12-23-2014 01:27 PM                  Finally getting the map released. I put another few hours into the map to really polish it, and test/clean-up any issues I had seen up to then. So here it is AEdm7R (r163): And the appropriate thread at the official Reflex forum: AEdm7R - AEon's DM7 for Reflex And a link to the download: http://reflexfiles.com/file/87 So after releasing AEdm7 in 2012, the Reflex version sees the light of day... seems almost like yesterday... Obviously... the map could use a *lot* more detail... and I will probably continue to update it. So any suggestions welcome. The map has 3 new paths, so even if you know AEdm7... there is a little something different in there to explore. If I get on it, I might be able to get AEtime for Reflex done before the year closes... a new record of three maps... all be it... recycled as of sorts.
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