Please ask your basic (newbie) questions in here. - by scumble
str8g8 on 18/9/2007 at 14:11
Quote:
But there were three giant chimneys...you could even reach them and touch their bricks.
Smoke and mirrors :cheeky: You saw the chimneys from far away in the skybox and then came across the "real" ones in another part of the level.
It it fine to use different textures on the skydome, you just have to make it that way (in 3dsmax). I was just too lazy and didn't think anyone would notice.
Ziemanskye on 18/9/2007 at 17:25
Okay, just in case you care: I've been away a few days, not ignoring people deliberately.
Links? If you mean to my smeshes, there aren't any (yet) - though the hope/plan is to release them all for people to use once the Cabal comes out; it might just kind of lessen the impact of things if other people were using our "unique" stuff before we were.
Horizontal portals? Perfectly possible. They seem to harm performance rather more than normal "vertical" ones, but they still work okay. Experiment and be careful with them - or not, if you don't care about performance much.
And yes, they can hide lights as normal, so if you have a horizontal portal above the third level, but only lights on the ground floor (and small enough radius, obviously) they shouldn't impact things too much. Hopefully: the engine is a bit weird about lights and portals at times, but if you cut the brush work and things too you should be able to reduce that some. As in, try a single brush per floor, rather than one for all the floors with repeated/stretched texture - that way the lower floors are more likely to get portalled out rather than hitting performance though being touched by a light, and if you similarly use multiple small smeshes rather than big ones so that there's more objects (bad) but less "distance" being hit by the light (erm, like you render the whole smesh on the lighting if it's touched by one: ergo a 4 floor beam being hit by a ground level light still hurts performance even if you only see it barely from the top, where a three floor not even being touched by the light and a one floor being portalled out shouldn't hurt as much)
NPCs? They affect performance less with distance: they still take a bit of a tick even when you can't see them, but there's no point wasting time on hearing checks when they're on the other side of the level or vision checks beyond the likes of "are they in a zone I can see (and so affect)", and beyond a certain radius (I forget what, but I think it has a property anyway) they get fazed down in being stupider anyway.
And if you're doing things in 3DSMax anyway, you can kind of cheat: make part of the smesh a giant simple 2-triangle sheet which can cover the whole level at the roof level - any time you can see the sheet (as in it enters a zone you want it in, and you're looking in that kind of direction) the building/roof/whatever it's attached too gets drawn too. Saves a lot of headaches with portals and things stretching far enough to actually "see" the object in the traditonal sense, though it is a shame you can't associate any smesh you wanted to a giant sheet and have that force it to display (did that experiment :().
Brush work and longer distances, well, that's either smoke and mirros (which you need to be good at for level designing anyway :p) or a nightmare balancing act between art and performance *even if you don't care about the performance*
BlackRuin on 26/9/2007 at 00:12
Hello to all in the TTLG community,
Does anybody know what version of the Unreal engine T3 is using? I know its not 2.5. UT2004 is using 2.5, version 3, if im not mistaken. Is it a modified 2.5 or perhaps a modified U3 engine? I'm hoping you say modified 3.0!
Thanks for your help!:D
scumble on 26/9/2007 at 08:31
I think it's pretty much based on 2.5, but the lighting engine was replaced and a lot of it was extensively modified. You can see from the editor that it's been thoroughly hacked up, for want of a better phrase.
I know it appears to have some of the features that UE3 has, but it definitely isn't new enough to use any of the UE3 technology. Licensees have not had it for that long, as far as I know.
Ziemanskye on 26/9/2007 at 17:05
Best quote I heard was "UE1.8" - this was pre-feature-lock on UE2, but they stripped the renderer off the top and beat Havok into it (possibly even before Karma made it to core). The code-drops for full UE2 became too hard to negotiate with in regards to getting that part compliant with all the stuff they changed/added, so it never made it that far up the evolutionary ladder.
Beyond that though, it's the Flesh Engine: it's too hollowed out to really think of as Unreal apart from (similarities in) the editor.
(But it's also an XBox game, not a Xbox360 one, and came out in 2004, I think, so it's definately not UE3)
Tazonne on 6/10/2007 at 17:48
I'm having a little problem: I've recently built a new, small area.It's about a 2 floor house.It was done in quite a rush.Hence, I had some bsp errors(seeing through the ceiling etc.).ok,I solved those, but now when I try to climb the stairs and go to the 2nd floor,G just stops at the end of the stairway.It is like something is blocking him.When I try to 'fly' G up, and then drop him at the 2nd floor I receive a message, camera out of world or something like this.Then G just falls and inevitably dies....
What can this be caused by?
Thanks in advance.
Ziemanskye on 6/10/2007 at 18:07
There's a few things that might cause that, but the main ones are usually not compiling the level fully, or there being a staticmesh blocking things - it may not be visible, and sometimes you can end up inside them by accident.
Sometimes it's also a case of simply not having the BSP problems fixed - I had a similar problem (at the bottom of the stairs) once, because there was a 0 - 1 unit sliver of BSP that shouldn't have been there, but we could see through it as though it wasn't there for some reason.
Beleg Cúthalion on 16/10/2007 at 11:25
Hello everyone,
I'm almost done with the tutorial (the ingame test with the gmp did not work yesterday, but that is something I could even leave to someone else in the worst case...) and I made up my mind already too many times about an FM. In fact I would like to add a lot of the improvements that came out for TDS itself, i.e. JohnP's textures and the Minimalist Project (or at least the HUD and Garrett's movement tweaks that it had).
I think that simply installing JohnP's files into the Thief3Edit directory would cause the editor (and whatever makes the FM zip file in the end) to export them along with the rest of the mission – I have seen some JP-skins in FMs (e.g. "All the world's a stage", if I'm not mistaken) and I think they did it this way. But I don't know how to insert the other elements. Does anyone know which (or possess the) files I'd had to replace in Thief3Edit in order to gain the MP tweaks? Plus, I would like to change the ingame music. New Horizon wrote to me that there would be a perl script with/in/at the editor which could be used to create new csc files (the issue that time was if it was possible to translate the game with new sound files). But of course I have absolutely no idea how to do this. The audio files (or even a new soundtrack) would be no problem, but the know-how is in short supply.
I'd be glad if you guys could help me. :) By the way, there are no T3Ed girls, are there...?
Tiens on 18/10/2007 at 01:10
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
...I would like to add a lot of the improvements...
Try to look here for the answers:
(
http://www.ttlg.com/wiki/)
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
By the way, there are no T3Ed girls, are there...?
well, is the answer "was a girl but has grown up into a woman" suitable for you? :angel:
