Quake3World

pjw wrote:This has it, and is looking great (although, yeah, the lighting is a bit vague--is it dusk? The sky looks it, but the lack of shadows looks more like night, in which case it needs to be darker, etc. blah blah

it's night, and i upped the brightness a little since all my night-time shots come out way too dark. probably overdid it

As a player, I would be sad if I couldn't somehow get up into the top of that little four-story dealie right on the water.

there are actually two beach areas like this (the other is to the left of the high octagonal building with the green roof in the second shot): the second beach will have similar buildings the player will progress through (it's a loop - the players gets to the far end of the 2nd beach, finds a raised bridge, has to loop back along the beach through the shacks on the 2nd beach to reach the hut just below the octagonal building, where they switch power from the thumpers to the bridge. just one problem - antlions spawn on the beach, and the player can't return to the bridge without going back down to the beach...)

Nice seremtan! I really dig some of the roofs, especially the red roof on the big white house there! Keep it up, you might wanna break up the sand with some more rocks or stranded boats or debris or whatever, it looks a bit repetitive atm.

washed up seaweed and lobster traps. Look up some photos of fishing towns from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to get a really good idea of what a fishing town should look like, eh.

(That rock arch in the distance reminds me of Bay of Fundy).

there's going to be reasonable amount of physics prop stuff lying around the beach, so players can use it to stand on if they don't feel like dealing with antlions

no seaweed or lobster traps i'm afraid (valve didn't make any, and i'm not going to), just rowboats, plastic barrels and assorted flotsam

Working on a CoD 4 map, early wip

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Hey UniKorn. Looks good, how similar is CoD4 editing to Quake 3? As I understand it, CoD4 is somewhat based off of the Quake 3 engine back when they licensed it for the first CoD.

obsidian wrote:Hey UniKorn. Looks good, how similar is CoD4 editing to Quake 3? As I understand it, CoD4 is somewhat based off of the Quake 3 engine back when they licensed it for the first CoD.

It's still very similar to Q3 editing, and uses a modified version of Radiant. There are quite a lot of game specifics to get used to, but Infinity Ward have documentation that covers a lot of it: http://www.infinityward.com/wiki/index. ... =Main_Page. Otherwise you have a few sample maps that help, but it shouldn't be too hard to jump into from Q3 editing anyway.

I've been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator for creating resolution independent scalable vector textures. There's something nice about not having to worry about textures being either too large or too small:

obsidian wrote:Hey UniKorn. Looks good, how similar is CoD4 editing to Quake 3? As I understand it, CoD4 is somewhat based off of the Quake 3 engine back when they licensed it for the first CoD.

It's pretty much the same. Think you can compare it mostly to ET mapping as far as entities is concerned. They got a few nice things like the terrain tool (already there in Cod1 as well btw ) and in editor lighting (pretty heavy, so I put it mostly off) and they block out area's by using portals, so that if you are not looking "inside" a house it will not render the inside of the house. For the rest its pretty much the same.

obsidian wrote:I've been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator for creating resolution independent scalable vector textures. There's something nice about not having to worry about textures being either too large or too small

That looks cool.

Say more? How does that work? What are the pros/cons?

I have a cold and I'm a little queasy so this may sound more like rambling rather than a thought out explanation...


There are a few games that currently uses vector textures as an addition to normal bitmap textures, notably for Valve's Source engine for Team Fortress 2, but as far as I know no one has implemented anything on a large scale (Valve used vectors on some decals).

Normal textures that we use for gaming are compressed into a bitmap "raster" image of the surface comprised of pixels, each pixel representing a colour dot. Vectors are mathematical equations that represents the points, lines, curves, polygons of the surface and also includes colour information for each point rather than each pixel.

With bitmap images, once you scale something up, the pixels become relatively large and you lose detail and definition. Scaling down, you start to run into mipmap issues where details become averaged out until they are non-existant. With transparent surfaces, you have to do alpha-testing which can result in either jagged or blurred out edges. Bitmap images do a fairly good job on small to medium size surfaces that tile, but once you need a unique pattern over a large surface, you have to rely on larger images which requires larger file sizes, larger bandwidth, more video memory.

The advantages of vector images for game textures are that they are infinitely scalable. Since they are just mathematical equations, you can just multiply or divide its values to scale them up and down without loss in definition. You don't have to do any alpha-testing, you can specify exact transparency levels and create smooth gradients between and even modulate the values independently for each point (you could do that with colour as well, making some sort of trippy, seizure-inducing, changing rainbow texture). For file sizes, vector graphics will usually have smaller file sizes compared to bitmaps, though this heavily depends on the complexity of the image, but because they are infinitely scalable, the physical size of the texture won't impact file size.

On the down side, no hardware is optimized to handle vector images since we've been using bitmaps for years and that's the way things have developed. AFAIK, you have to processes the vectors though shaders which probably brings up all sorts of programming and performance issues which will need to be ironed out, but I supposed if Valve can do it... Also, it's hard to define small pixelated details using vectors, its really much stronger for smooth gradient textures with sharp, well defined edges. That worked out well for TF2 since everything was cel-animation styled anyway.

I'm not really working with a vector engine so at the time, textures are still being rasterized to bitmap for final use, but even from an artist's point of view there are a few advantages. Its hard working on a large detailed texture at 1024x1024 only to have texture budget constraints put on you and you have to resize things down to 256x256. Resizing bitmaps also causes you to lose most of the fine-lined details painted into the texture. Creating textures in vectors, you can choose your final output size when you need them exported to bitmap form without having to resample and losing details.

Vectors are also easier to work with when you are trying to create smooth curves. I tried painting the above texture at first in Photoshop, but even with a drawing tablet, it's hard to get the smooth curves while also maintaining that razor sharp edge. The pen tool in Photoshop stinks. So I imported a hand-drawn bitmap into Illustrator using the "place" command (which really tightens up integration between Photoshop and Illustrator since, I think CS1) traced it manually with the pen tool and then "placed" back in Photoshop for some final touches and exported to TGA. The place command is awesome because you can make changes to the source file and it will automatically be updated in the working file, so if I make changes to the Illustrator file, it'll automatically update back in Photoshop, so I alt-tab between programs to flip-flop between vector and bitmap versions.


As far as vectors being used in games, I think it has a strength as an alternative to alpha-testing. I'm sure it can be implemented so that you use vectors to define the edge of a texture rather than an alpha-channel to get a sharp edge without jaggies. It'll also be significant for HUD's (font rendering) and GUI's (like Doom3 style in-game menu systems) and for some special effects, particle systems perhaps. It'll probably see a lot more use in games like Paper-Mario style games, but a little more limited on your traditional FPS game where fine texture details are more of the norm.

Here's a SIGGRAPH 2007 Paper by Chris Green at Valve (PDF):
http://www.valvesoftware.com/publicatio ... cation.pdf

obsidian wrote:outpouring of information

Thanks--for the generous info and the link! Education is good.
I hope you feel better.

obsidian wrote:a little more limited on your traditional FPS game where fine texture details are more of the norm

Why can't people do fine texture details in vectors?

It's difficult to create pixelated details like sand or gravel for instance using vector art - not to say that it can't be done, I'm sure it has - it just takes a phenomenal amount of work to create something like that that is photorealistic. For something like that, it would be easier with a normal bitmap so you have to play to the strengths of each format to the situation.

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Think the terrain looks a little to round-ish pherhaps put some rock models in there to make it look more natural and sharper. I think you done a good job on blending the textures on the terrain but it would look better if you used more then 2 textures. I dunno really what the rest is but I think it looks random and strange (I mean you don't find metal barrels in a forest) Pherhaps you have ideas to add more stuff so that it make sense. Is this for COD4?

anyway it looks like you're in for a good start. Keep at it

Ahoy Plan B, been a while since I've seen any level editing stuff from you. Looks interesting, almost surreal in a way, but there's something that I really like about it, looks like some sort of impressionist painting by Monet or something. I like the minimalist look.

I disagree with g0th about the roundish hills, I don't think you intended it to look like mountains, more like small bunny hills out in the country somewhere. I would go so far as to say to smooth them out more so that they are less mountain-like and more like hills. Especially that taller hump on the left. But that's my opinion.

Yeah, just a shot of me getting to grips with the COD4 editing tools, checking out interaction between textures and various sun/lighting settings, etc.

Also, I never worked with terrain, and I really enjoy experimenting with it in this incarnation of Radiant.

At this point I liked the atmosphere of this simplistic little scene (felt 'feng shui'), but I fully acknowledge the lack of realism.

Hey obsidian
Still occasionally lurking, but my mapping sessions have been few and far between.
But the COD4 engine and assets interest me, and I want to see if I'm able to create something worthwhile with them.

Oh my.. Plan B posting an actual screenshot in the WIP thread is a sign for ragnarok. Lloyd M prolly pops up with a finished version of Tempest Utopia anyday now.
Looks sweet btw.

Fjoggs wrote:Lloyd M prolly pops up with a finished version of Tempest Utopia anyday now.

Lol, funny you mention that map. Recently remembered it (saw screenies here many years ago) and googled for it only to find that it still doesn't exist, it seems. It's almost like Duke Nukem Forever.

The shortest time he's ever taken to build a map was 1 day. The longest is 3.5 years (and counting) for his CTF Tempest Utopia. It is said that should he ever complete this map, the dead will rise from their tombs, and Enemy Territory will be released as a free standalone download. No, wait!...AAAAGH!

I remember someone (Digibob?) saying that they've had a few rounds on the unfinished map at the office.

haha (@quote)

Plan B wrote:pikcher

i cold have sworn this was HL2. even the crate model and wooden posts are identical

iirc CoD4 uses patches for terrain. has the terrain patch editing technique been improved since CoD? i remember it involved a load of vertex-dragging, which allowed more precision than, say, the displacements in hammer, but was a lot more time-consuming when going for surface 'noise'

Plan B wrote:I liked the atmosphere of this simplistic little scene (felt 'feng shui'), but I fully acknowledge the lack of realism.

Using feng shui as a reason for place stuff in maps is acually quite funny I mean no one can argue with you about the placement because these feng shui ppl tell different things all the time, or at least that's what they claimed on the Pen and Taller tv show.

A few OverDose pick up items and stuff...

Keep in mind most of these are animated, so will look different ingame. Plus this shots with bloom turned off: