Beleg Cúthalion on 5/3/2008 at 20:30
The long building from where the photo was taken is white. :p But you're right, thank you. The colors are a little better in the game, but I'm still not quite sure if/how I can create a good mix of a visible (i.e. not too dark) environment without killing the whole light-shadow-play which the game relies on...with respect to the fact that we have to be careful with the lights. One cannot make a good-looking daylight mission with this thing, can he*? And last but not least the sky is still not finished; I wish it had more saturation while having no "colorful" color at the same time. Does it make sense?
* Is there a common question tag for "one" at all? :weird:
Flux on 5/3/2008 at 22:00
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One cannot make a good-looking daylight mission with this thing, can he*?
It's all matter of static meshes. If your whole area, let's say terrain, is sm then no-shadow directional light even with a large radius won't effect performance at all(tested). If that light touches any bsp surface, forget about it. But then, with only static meshes, you'll have to mess around with the problem of light leaking through static meshes, in case of directional light.
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we have to be careful with the lights.
What saddens me a bit, we're several years left behind game industry. Everyone ditched bsp around 2000-2002, which is slower. All these next-gen engines, meaning per-pixel ones, are built to use mostly with static meshes. And, successfully, tds is a fine example of them in terms of renderer. That "success" might be unfortunate in our case, because of the known static mesh import issue.
You can make 15-20 times larger
and detailed levels and run perfectly fine on current hardware if the whole level is made of static meshes in t3ed. That's what the trend is anyway. Maybe trend is not the right word, more like a mandatory thing. Take any unreal engine 3 level or crysis, the bsp/static mesh ratio is almost 10/90 percent.
Even, take two split-up original missions from tds. Go through the painful process of uv-mapping and turn the whole level into chunks of static meshes. Batch import them back to editor, merge them, you won't even hit vertex pool limit, meaning they would have even worked at xbox if they had gone this route.
I tend to get little bit off topic nowadays easily, I hope you folks don't mind it much.
Ok back on topic:
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I wish it had more saturation while having no "colorful" color at the same time. Does it make sense?
I *think* I know what you mean, that also annoys me from time to time. It's a matter of realism in my case, I mean street light give out "bulb" light and it's color has to match and torch lights should look like "fire" light, right?
Can you guys suggest me on some idea for light sources for terrain/cave levels? I mean default crystal/mushroom combinations gets boring after a while, what's there to light up a cave other than torch light which will give and should all the time brownish tones? I don't like the idea of "magical" pagan blue fires.
In your case Beleg,(I'm talking about the last screenshot) add a torch inside the arch area on the lower left corner and make a bit brighter than usual, lower its saturation and make its radius smaller than usual. Maybe you tried that already, if not, hope it might give you an idea.
Ziemanskye on 5/3/2008 at 22:31
Terrain/cave doesn't have to mean unoccupied, so camp-fire type things are okay. And you can have breaks in the roof to have some sun/moonlight coming through (I think I had a picture way back when I was working on Forgotten Spaces which did both of those).
Also, if I remember the cutscenes in the games right, you can have a sort of low-lying firefly-type mystic light too.
Watery reflections, luminecant (probably spelled wrong) rocks/fungus - other than the crystals and mushrooms, but essentially the same idea. Lava might be appropriate if you're going that far pagan/underground/away.
None of these are good for "brown" light, but really that should either be level minimum light or the texture colour for most of it (or a post-process screen tint). "Brown" lights in real life are more likely to be diffusions and reflections than an actual light source, and in low light the human eye tends to pick up more red-tones anyway as far as I remember (longer-wavelengths travelling further/keeping their energy longer or some nonsense like that on the physics side of things).
The Pagan blue-magic fires have a long traditon - Wightlights and Wisps, but you can change the colours by hand: there's nothing forcing the magic lights to be blue except that it's an unnatural colour (well, unusual) for lighting, but otherwise doesn't colour perceptions as much as red or green does - they're usually used more as mood/atmosphere identifiers.
I think Flares - like in TMA were orangey-green though, and shouldn't be too hard to rig back in to the game (at least as smeshes of someone else placeing them) if you wanted that kind of light too. Might be a good way to show someone else is exploring, and not so far ahead of the player that the flares have gone out.
Finally, don't forget you can just collapse the City into the underground in places: normal "human", even electric lights could appear in a cave type place.
Flux on 5/3/2008 at 22:36
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Flares...Might be a good way to show someone else is exploring, and not so far ahead of the player that the flares have gone out.
That's a neat idea, thanks.
Judith on 21/5/2008 at 12:02
It might be a good idea to post some screens from your new mission, Flux, or create a separate preview thread in Thief FMs ;)
clearing on 21/5/2008 at 13:29
:eek: :eek: :eek: GREAT!
bikerdude on 23/5/2008 at 12:44
Quote Posted by clearing
http://images.bittersense.com/valley1.jpg
... I never thought T3 could be manipulated like that...
awesome, cant wait to play, blimeyt if this gets released in may, we will be swaped in Fm's.. :D
biker
Abru on 23/5/2008 at 16:53
Really nice screenshots!:thumb:
Beleg Cúthalion on 23/5/2008 at 19:02
Quote Posted by Bikerdude
... I never thought T3 could be manipulated like that...
In fact especially this first picture doesn't show stuff to which the game/editor/engine had to be forced, it's simply what hasn't really been done until now. With enough creativity one can easily learn how to make acceptable Thief missions with T3Ed (and with that I mean that the essence of Thief is not necessarily built of rope arrows and water). The list of abandoned projects at Komag's Shadowdark Keep features quite interesting achievements which are already two years old. But thanks to TDS's bad publicity hardly anyone cared for the advantages of this editor or at least the sheer fact that one
can build Thief missions with it.
