jtr7 on 6/1/2010 at 20:09
The towers look like they are colder than everything else, like it's a humid day, and condensation is freezing all over them. It's like they are refrigerating the outdoors, and they are coated completely, instead of on top and at an angle, or something to show precipitation instead of global icing. That torch stands out considering how frikkin' cold those towers look, like it's just been lit since the stone behind it is not showing any sign of the heat. :p A very effective effect.
Judith on 7/1/2010 at 18:21
The torch is for test purposes only, to see how normals will react to light. Since the mission is set in the daytime there's no need for them really, not in the open.
jtr7 on 8/1/2010 at 00:39
Yeah. It wasn't a criticism of the torch, just that it's so cold around it, the contrast made it stand out.
str8g8 on 11/1/2010 at 16:22
Looks really nice, something different for a TDS FM
Judith, you probably know more about snow than me being Russian ;) but we in the UK are in the midst of a big freeze at the moment, and driving home the other night, I noticed how the snow only collects on horizontal surfaces, and leaves perpendicular surfaces free. On trees for instance the trunks were black, while branches had a foot of snow on them.
In this case I would model the snow on the ruin, and leave the stone texture free of snow.
Uncharted 2 has some really nice snow stuff in it, you should check it out if you can.
Judith on 11/1/2010 at 18:04
I just got some piece of advice from Pinkdot (TDM team), you can use your normalmap to create that small particles of snow that tend to stay, even on relatively flat, vertically oriented surfaces. Use the green channel, which is responsible for up/down direction, desaturated and invert it, play with levels a bit, so you get the clear black/white contrast between the snow and the rest. Then use black color to alpha and paste a new layer onto your texture. This plus some painting on the model should give you something like this:
(
http://img245.imageshack.us/i/wall01snowd.jpg/)
Inline Image:
http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/116/wall01snowd.th.jpgNot yet perfect, but still much better than these ice-frozen columns :)
clearing on 24/1/2010 at 17:30
Siberia :joke:
Beleg Cúthalion on 24/1/2010 at 18:34
Oh that's really beautiful. Can't wait to hear the snow crack beneath Garrett's feet.
Judith on 24/1/2010 at 22:26
Also, I've found a few peculiar things about the lightning:
<strike>1) There are 18 small omni-non shadow lights there to simulate the sun rays hitting the trees and slope above, and they don't make my PC choke until I manage to keep the "overlit geometry" at bay. When I increase the radius,the trees on the filter get red, game slows down awfully. Funny, the same thing happens when I switch lights to AmbientVertex.
2) Another thing is the "lights that touch too many objects" filter. When your light is omni, the object threshold is pretty low, it gets red quickly. But when you change it to non-shadow, the same light changes from red to green on your filter. This might be the indication of the large polycount those lights add for calculating shadow volumes. I'm not sure.
3) In both cases BSP is included in the filter. At one time the whole large floor was red, and there was a huge framerate dropdown. But when I changed the BSP floor for a few static mesh planes (and textured the BSP with invisible BF texture) there was no red on the filter and I got 60 FPS again. And I didn't have to remove any lights.
So it seems when you're using static meshes for everything, you divide them carefully, and you observe what is going on with lights using those filters, you might get really nice performance, even using many lights.</strike>
Scratch all that, the only thing that matters in the long run is the "lights that touch too many objects" filter. I increased the number of lights to 26 (I set in the MinLightCount to 1 and MaxLightCount to 255 in my LevelInfo), some of them were shadow casting and the geometry was heavily overlit but all the lights remained green on the "lights that touch too many objects" filter. Solid 60 FPS everywhere, even with max multisampling.
At certain point I'll prepare some small demo mainly for gameplay testing, but also to get feedback about the performance, until then i can't be sure it works in every case.
