wip screen

Currently working on a new map.



The rough building is done with Maplet, furniture then added in SlimShady. The Shadows are very soft, I'll probably use some more detailed lightmapping in the final map. Just don't know if a 16 MB Lightmap is an overkill (2048 texel). Then again - most people have 128 MB or more these days.

looking good jfk

JFK, just remember that older cards (like early GFs) support only max 1K maps... I *think* that Blitz scales the 2K map to 1K if this is the case, but not 100% sure. But I'm planning to use 2K maps myself too. :)

Thanks. I have a Radeon9200se with 128 MB. It seems like it fully uses the 2k map since it looks much more detailed than the 1k map.

BTW. anyone recognizes the App that is running on that monitor? :)

EDIT: ah, I just realized you meant it eventually scales them down IF the maxsize is 1k. I'd really like to know that too, maybe only Mark can tell. Or one of those species knows as old-GF-owners.

Whats the point of 2k maps when you can fit them into 512k? also larger maps render slower on older hardware - even if they do fit.

My recommendation is multiple 512x512 lightmaps. At least they will fit in the agp fairly well if paging absolutely has to happen - see laptops and older hardware...

JFK - I didn't like the screenshot above because although the shadows are nice, they don't use 2x blend. You really should have a vibrant look to the game...

I think 1024*1024 texture size is supported on Geforce2 cards and up but I remember games that you could choose the size always ran like a 3 legged dog at that size yet at 512*512 were lighting fast.

I never understood what's that x2 anyway.

looks great J... first rate

Dark Basic ide running in the monitor??? :)

--Miike

cool JFK your lightmapper is looking good also

Basically every pixel on your lightmap works like this :

128,128,128 - neutral, no affect on base texture

above 128,128,128 - brighter than base texture

below 128,128,128 - duller than base texture.


It does avoid that slightly sullen, moody look that shadowmaps often have. Of course, if the game should look moody then that's no bad thing.

Slim Shady use the PD lightmapper floating around here, doesn't it? Does it allow you to use more than one lightmap per level or would it be easy to modify for more than one lightmap per level? I have noticed an improvement in my lightmaps since I moved from one big one to several small ones.

Looks good as it is though. Really nice texture work on the computer and monitor. The shadows are quite soft, but I like them anyway.

Thanks to all of you. Yes, it's using YAL from the Archives. To be honest, I don't understand it fully, it's a bunch of functions and currently any massive modification is beyond my head. Well, maybe one day :)

And thanks for explaining the x2 thing.

Here's another screen.



I have successfully implemented my new water effects. It's looking really nice. It's an animated texture that was "wobbled" by using sin/cos distortion, also a lot of handwork optimations. The Maplet Level can now use textures with the string "WATERMAT" in their names, this will automaticly blend an animated texture on an additional layer.

Thanks to rogue vector for his MP5 you can see here. My Mp5K simply looked bad when close up, so I was happy to find this.
Also thanks to halo, since I use several textures he used to release to the public some time ago (industrial package etc.)

I like the last screenshot? What GUI are you using? I'm looking for a good one and need some suggestions.

in the game engine I currently use a custom gui for the options interface, a 2nd one for the screen setting mode, and what you see here on the screenie isn't really a gui, just some screen HUD overlays. The luger round with the number tells how much rounds are left for the active gun. The guns show which guns are already available and the green bar at the left side shows your health.

Basicly these are Quads parented to the camera, using a add-blendmode. First I used sprites, but they cannot handle fog, so I chanched it to use Quads. Note that big alpha-sprites may slow down rendering, threfore it might be better to use a number of smaller ones instead. (as I do here, each element is a quad)