Ziemanskye on 21/10/2005 at 09:54
Which denies the point people were trying to make about the engine conversions - plans for one engine don't necessarily work in another. I had a map move from Half-life to Unreal 2. Gods that was a mess - it came out with only the core concept of the map intact!
If you plan it before you can play with the editor to see what's there and what isn't, you're probably not going to be able to build it.
At least not yet.
SubJeff on 22/10/2005 at 01:11
As I see it the things that you need to watch out for in T3 are-
- no swimable water
- no rope arrows
- inability to manage large draw distances.
This last one is the killer. You have to make winding levels. You can't have huge open spaces, though you could have a huge maze as the line of sight would be small and you can portalise it. Or course you can create the illusion of a large space. . .
OrbWeaver on 22/10/2005 at 09:51
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
This last one is the killer. You have to make winding levels. You can't have huge open spaces, though you could have a huge maze as the line of sight would be small and you can portalise it. Or course you can create the
illusion of a large space. . .
This is true up to a point, but it does tend to be exaggerated somewhat. Granted, T3 cannot do the massive outdoor scenes that Half-Life 2 was good at, but neither can T2. It is perfectly possible to make T3 levels that are comparable to T2 in terms of size, as long as you are careful about lighting and shadows.
Also, as with all performance issues, this will become less and less of a problem as graphics hardware improves.
nomad of the pacific on 22/10/2005 at 10:42
Actually, I made a rather large open park (2000x4000 Unreal Units) with a lot of torches, trees and people and I didn't have any slow-downs, so it is possible to create large areas in T3. Might be bad for slower systems, though.:erm:
Komag on 22/10/2005 at 12:49
Thief 3 will really slow down with too many lights that cast shadows, shadow-casting meshes, etc. Even in a small room this can wreak havok (no pun involved).
So that's the main issue with long view distances, the fact that the game is capable of such beautiful lighting and shadows but only at high cost to framerate, and you typically can see more lights/shadows with large views. But if you REALLY wanted to recreate a Thief 2 environment, complete with no realtime shadows and normal map-less textures, etc, you could probably do it reasonably well (I haven't tried though)
Crispy on 22/10/2005 at 12:59
Heh, yeah, if you turned off shadow casting on EVERYTHING it would probably run pretty smoothly; shadowing is *the* big performance killer. Unfortunately you'd get a lot of glitches... like light bleeding through walls and so on... but in a completely open environment it would work! If you didn't mind the obvious gameplay problems. :p
Hollow on 23/10/2005 at 10:15
Ive been working with UnrealED since about 3-4 months after the first UT was finished, have they deleted the options of shadow quality? couse you can zone an area in UnrealED and then choose the Quality, and that way make it run better? and for taking away shadows, that could work well for walls that are placed with the void behind? and then just in complete dark areas change the quality to be on lowest quality, couse if you change to low quality in the game then it will even be a lower standard then that. but that dont work?
Ziemanskye on 23/10/2005 at 11:02
As far as I know those options don't have any effect - because it's all real-time per-pixel lighting with stencil shadows.
(at least, I think that's what the <tech> mumbo-jombo was)
Hollow on 23/10/2005 at 20:40
I see, tough it has to be a way aroudn that...
