Beleg Cúthalion on 20/9/2011 at 08:33
You better make yourself whole facade static meshes or else you'll run into the property limit after a couple of streets. There are in fact more things I can think of of which I'd like to have pre-arranged versions to save properties. :erg: Seeing your windows, when will we finally see those great half-transparent and maybe even coloured glass windows in a mission? I mean it's such a pretty thing to show off...
By the way, little status report, apparently snobel fixed a bug with the hacked T3/T3Ed executables for me which prevented new static meshes or scripts from "leaving" T3Ed and "entering" the actual game. When it works out, I'll probably be able to clean out my multiple T3Ed installs and focus on two working ones (one modified for me and one for vanilla TDS and the T3Gold project).
Judith on 20/9/2011 at 13:47
I plan to use static meshes only, with BSP only to make room for it. Of course it means tons and tons of work.. Meshes are relatively low-poly, 100 max for the facade piece so far. What worries me is, as usual, the texture size and the final filesize. I even thought about refraining from using normals on bigger surfaces, to save the space and get more classic feel.
Also, I got an idea about making a mission without using dynamic lights at all :laff:, getting more T2 vibe. But that requires even more work and a few more experiments. Initially I can only say that it is possible to use lightmapping technique in T3, but as of now the look of it leaves a lot to be desired ;)
Beleg Cúthalion on 22/9/2011 at 08:24
Pre-rendered shadows? Moar screenshots! :p
Quote Posted by Judith
I plan to use static meshes only, with BSP only to make room for it. Of course it means tons and tons of work..
That's exactly what worries me: Unless you can have whole building sections as single SMs, it will probably take more objects (and thus properties) than building with brushes, at least that was my experience, especially when trying to make something organic and twisted. By now we shouldn't even have the technical problems of worse performance with brushes, so I've come to the (very personal) conclusion that the brush/static mesh mixture of the original missions isn't too bad at all. And after all these missions look very organic.
Oh, and I know that I'm spoiled for life with this property storage count limit.
Judith on 22/9/2011 at 18:55
Screenshots are in order as soon as I develop more systematic approach and find the values suitable for most of the situations you'd want to use that method ;)
It's true that building with brushes and SMs could be utilized as in OMs, given the current average PC capabilities, but there are a few advantages of using SMs that I find quite favorable here. First of all, when using all the fancy effects like cube mapping (either to fake reflections or specularity), it seems like BSP has problems with points of reference in 3d space. I mean, reflections working on SM suddenly get wonky and unpredictable on BSP. Also I think that the engine somehow applies much heavier mipmapping on BSP surfaces that on SMs, even when you control the mipmap quality within your dds textures for your custom materials. Whenever Garrett moves like 128 uu away from a BSP wall, it looks like the textures get scaled down a half.
I'm not saying SMs are a perfect cure for everything, actually I'd like to know what's their average property count vs BSP, that might be a valuable for future calculations.
Beleg Cúthalion on 26/9/2011 at 07:57
Now I'm impressed. Does it use the same atten.dds that T3Ed/TDS uses for creating shadows? I found an altered atten.dds in one of the TDS tweak guides which was supposed to make the shadows more natural but I didn't notice a significantly better effect.
And it will probably work only with non-moveable lights, right? What about switching it on and off? And the lightgem?
Judith on 26/9/2011 at 10:11
Quote Posted by Beleg Cúthalion
Now I'm impressed. Does it use the same atten.dds that T3Ed/TDS uses for creating shadows? I found an altered atten.dds in one of the TDS tweak guides which was supposed to make the shadows more natural but I didn't notice a significantly better effect.
And it will probably work only with non-moveable lights, right? What about switching it on and off? And the lightgem?
It's not a shadow generated by the omni or spotlight, and that's the point, these are most CPU-heavy and it would be great to replace them. This is a lightmap, generated on a similar basis, as in typical unreal engines these days. I had problems with finding the best material to do it but basically a "decal mesh" will do. Or a SM 1 UU smaller than your room, if you need shadows all over the place.
All you need is just a simple "use alpha" material, with one dds diffuse texture: shadow is a solid color and the shadow shape is stored in the alpha channel. Basicaly a gradient, so no need for huge textures and DXT5 compression works great here. This room is 512x256x192 and the all shadows fit nicely on a 512x512 texture. I think it would still look good on a texture twice as small.
Of course this is just a visual feature now, but I already made a nice, volume-based system for my snow map, where you could hide in the bushes and be "invisible". Basically it uses LightWeight parameter and two scripts. You'd just have to align a volume with shadows and the lightgem would respond as it should.
If you want such shadows for torches and other switchable lights, you may tweak the parameters so the shadow is almost unnoticeable in the dark, although I never got to eliminate it completely. But, you could make it go away using scripts, as usual.
I'm just wondering whether it's worth the hassle in terms of performance. These shadow-casting lights eat up a lot of CPU power, but multiple transparent shadow meshes might have some impact as well, and will add a bit to the file size (not much though, if you keep reasonable texture size).
Anyway, those shadows look much better than dynamic ones and might be an option. The problem is, as always, additional workflow. You have to bake these in external 3d app, basically recreating particular scene from your level. It's not that much of a hassle if your map is 90% custom content though ;)
By the way, this method is pretty much all-purpose, since you have to use 3dsmax, Maya, Modo or something similar, so The Dark Mod folks could use it as well, since they have similar problems with performance and lightning.
IronEagle on 4/10/2011 at 19:38
Hi.
hello
I am continuing to work on an old work left incomplete
but I need some help with this. I need someone good to resolve some errors like crazy brushs and scripts. and a brave moviemaker...like scorzese to make a briefing.
I have no patience to think about these things i want dedicate more time to map and the architecture and history, if anyone wants to help me complete the mission is welcome
I'm a musician and a painter, I love surrealism
(
http://darkfate.org/view/simple/files/fan-missions/thief3/old_big_castle/screenshots)
IronEagle:erg:
