Screenshots

[MackXX]

^ Sorry man You're the shader master however so it's still a great compliment.

Indeed, there does need to be some transition between the rockwall, fort and other stuff. That'll be in my 'finishing up' phase of the map, right now I'm working on layout and getting an art style down pat.

In the first versions of my map I had a sliding door at the front and blocks at the top for the nest for cover. I found that it was interupting the flow of things so I took them out to increase the smoothness of traffic in and out of the base. I'll probably still put some defenses up in the nest, although I haven't decided what yet.

Right now I'm heavily basing the inners of the fort off of the forts in 'Ephidrina Wargrounds', one of my more favorite maps in Team Fortress Quakeworld. The more I run through it however the more I think I'm going to change things around (notably the extremly cramped flag room). It'll have a similar relation to it I think but not be exactly the same. I recieved Liamse permission to base the fort off of his designs in that map before I proceeded obviously.

The community (for the most part) will end up helping me with feedback on my maps to make them more fun so I want to return the favour.

[o'dium]

Well, this was interesting. I finished the hands... At last, eh? Shown here is the white hands in jungle, temperate and desert camo. We also have a darker skin tone for players to select if they wish (Seen in the previous screenshot of the hands):



Next update... Animation movies. Stay tuned guys, because the chicken is about to eat the shoe.

[obsidian]

That's pretty darned detailed! I suppose you have a pretty good LoD system in the game?

[o'dium]

We dont use LOD, we have per pixel shadow maps, so LOD tends to look like shit with it. There are so many factors are to why you shouldn't really use LOD

[rgoer]

lol way to parrot shit you don't understand

"per pixel shadow maps" = a meaningless phrase

"there are so many factors are to why you shouldn't really use LOD" explain one

[o'dium]

Per pixel shadowing, ala Doom 3, but with shadow maps, not shadow volumes (ala soft filtered shadows). What don't you understand?

LOD with per pixel lighting presents a problem. Not only is the visible "pop" between LODS even more obvious, but you have factors such as what if your light source is far away, as is your object, and the shadow it casts isnt correct because the LOD changes? Hence why there is no LOD in Doom 3, Quake 4, Prey, ET:QW etc etc... Sure in ET:QW there is alpha fading on LOD for certain things, however the lighting in ET:QW cant exactly be called amazing, its pretty boring, and usually consists of what looks like a single light per map.

So yeah, keep flaming me if you want, but whatever...

[o'dium]

Don't get me wrong you CAN do LOD's, but it just looks so bad that its pointless. Its not like Quake 3 where the model changes and thats it. When the world is lit this way, any change in the geometric detail provides a change in the shadowing, and thus if your geo is large and changes, it provides a problem. What if the game has a shadowing system that requires a player to be in the shadow to be in stealth? How would that work when its perfectly possible on one LOD to be in shadow and on another, not in shadow?

Like I said, there are many factors here as to why LOD's are not used in OUR engine. Not yours.

[o'dium]

oh, also, the way the instancing system works for MD5 is that, for speed reasons, the model is instantiated only when it changes in some form (ie: it animates) but using a LOD system for it means you have to instantiate once per frame, or more if you have subviews (ie: twice if you have mirror)

Not to mention a LOD system is hard to get right with sub views, and it's extra work for the CPU... which kinda defeats its purpose...

[rgoer]

you're a moron you should quit posting this kind of shit

you do decent art I like your screenshots but when you talk tech its nonstop horseshit so please think of the children and just think twice before posting

shadow maps (or any shadowing algorithm) and LOD are completely orthogonal, the only reason there would be any visual artifact is on account of laziness--there is no technical limitation

do you understand how a shadow map is generated at runtime? "per pixel shadow map" is a retarded turn of phrase--a shadow map is generated by drawing (to the shadow map texture) any shadow-casting geometry from the light's perspective... there is zero chance that per-pixel (aside from alpha masked texkill) information is used in this process, shadow maps are 100% geometry (per vertex)

shadows and shading are not the same thing

the illumination model--most likely phong-ish, as in the dot product between the normal (from, say, a normal map texture) and the light vector--is a seperate operation from shadowing and is where 99% of any per pixel lighting information comes from in game engines

per pixel shadowing probably won't happen unless intel's larrabee takes off like wildfire and real-time raytracing becomes hot shit

[o'dium]

I like the way you went off on one about a term (Which is there just for kicks, same as all technical terms are these days, i.e. half the shit Crysis does isn't even real, just faked, but called that anyway), but 100% ignored my actual factual point about LOD being pretty much pointless in this kind of engine. The biggest issues we have here is the drawing of light volumes (Which take 6 passes compared to Doom 3's method), NOT polycount.

But hey whatever floats your boat and makes you feel all powerful. You worked on Quake 4, and we all know how much of a tripple A seller that was.

[rgoer]

lol yeah q4 did end up a bit of a joke didn't it

alas...

[o'dium]

I guess the actual term we use is Per Pixel Lighting with shadow mapped shadow volumes" or some shite. But that doesn't exactly sound fancy. Just like all those games that did (and some still do) "HDR" when it all it was... was bloom.

R-EA-EAAALY.

[o'dium]

lol yeah q4 did end up a bit of a joke didn't it

alas...

Actually I think every person I've ever spoken to said Quake 4 was poor not because of the story (which was odd) or the pace (Which was fine), but for the fact it was nothing like Quake 2 and more like Halo. Its obvious that they decided to do a quick Sci Fi game and cash in on the Quake branding in the hopes they could pull in some of the Halo crowd.

For christs sake... The game had green in it. GREEN. Thats not Quake 2. Quake 4 should of been made with 2 colours. Brown, and Red.

[gregs2k2]

I actually liked Quake 4.....

[wviperw]

13 posts since an actual screenshot. Stop bickering kids...

[MackXX]

New rockwall, I'm editing the sharp points so they're not as noticable:


Here it is in the map, this wall is all messed up so I'm going to have to tear it down and redo it:


What's bothering me here is that the ground is so dark but the rock face itself is very bright in compairson. Any recommendations on how to equalize this? Also, I'm finding the fort has some T-Juncs that I need to take care off, only a handful. I'm unsure why I didn't notice them before.


I like this new rockwall much better, I'd love to hear comments and suggestions.

[BJA]

Thanks @MackXX, that's what I was looking for

[o'dium]

Is that a mesh, or a patch? Might be best to throw in a mesh on that whole area, give it a more terrain like feel.

[MackXX]

Is that a mesh, or a patch? Might be best to throw in a mesh on that whole area, give it a more terrain like feel.

The ground is just one large single brush at the moment. I plan on making it a bit more bumpy (but not too much) then adding various rock structures to offer cover from the nest for attackers. I'll probably do the ground the same as the walls; via terrian generator using a height map.

[Shallow]

I think generally, I notice that when a lot of people are doing rocky stuff there's a tendency to just make stuff up, rather than actually studying reference and then trying to make stuff that looks proper. I know I've certainly tended to do that on a bunch of stuff that ended up in my junk folder.

I guess it's partly because of the mapper mentality a lot of us have - you can just make stuff up in base and gothic maps and it looks fine. Those are structures so they've been built, and just about anything is believable as long as it looks reasonable from a structural point of view. It's harder to get away with this in things that are more organic.

If you look back to Kat's awesome terrain a little way back in the thread, you can see good use has been made of reference to form the shapes of the rocks and how they relate to the terrain. I suspect quite a lot of time has been spent studying reference, and probably walking around up actual hills before starting that sculpt.

So think of a good search term for the type of terrain you want and search - usually a specific place works well, like "monument valley" for orangey sandstone stuff or "lake district" for big chunks of grey rock sticking out of rough green hills. And remember to look on flickr for people's holiday photos as well as good old GIS!

[o'dium]

Dude thats Quake 3. Its lucky hes even doing something like that at all, its not the easiest engine to get great looking rock in. Not unless you use advanced terrain brush work. Its the wrong era for it.

[MackXX]

Refrence material is key, I completely agree with you on that Shallow. For this version of the rock wall I've made it much more smoother and large flowing waves.

Here's some of the refrences I've been using:


A better rockwall texture will make a large difference.

There's a wall of rocks at the base or something to split up the smoothness that I'll be using. I'm either considering another rock wall or doing a smooth, rounded concret wall to wrap around the red base area and connect with the defense 'bunkers'. I haven't decided yet.

Indeed o'dium, it is quake 3, I hope that by the time I'm done people will be surprised to hear that. Also, I tried making the ground terrian and while it looked nicer it didn't do all the shadowing that I was looking for (it was an improvement however). I understand your view of making the rock walls and ground all one solid piece and I'll keep that in mind while deciding what I'm going to do for the transition from wall to ground.

[o'dium]

ITS ALIVE!!!

But what IS alive....? Nobody knows...

[Shallow]

I should make it clear that I'm not mentioning anyone's rocks in particular - it's a general thing that I'm seeing and commenting on. Stuff in this thread, terrains I'm seeing in the ETQW forums, even terrain people are doing in TF2 maps I've seen.

ETQW seems particularly prone to people just editing heightmaps, which is a bit of a waste of the tech's potential.

[o'dium]

Well with ET:QW a lot of its automatic, but you can fine tune and paint as much as you want, where you want. Its pretty damn sweet.

I'm really disapointed that nobody has taken something crazy like ACTUAL terrain height data and used it. Imagine making an island that way? Would own.