Not necessarily, it depends a lot on how detailed you want the trees to be, and how much is infront/behind/inside them. And how picky you want to be about framerates - I'm very picky (the hardline for Forgotten Spaces is technically 8 fps on the internal counter of the OptVersion.exe, though I'm breaking that to 6 in a couple of places already - it looked too good to optimise!)Originally Posted by GlasWolf
If you could model/texture some new trees it could work better - the main frame rate hit is in layers of alphas, so looking into one thing isn't so bad, but looking through 2 is bad, and 4-5 worse, though it's less of hit if they are kept seperate (ie, looking at one set of leaves in each tree, and the don't overlap)
Also, would it have to be trees? There are some good (large) one sided bush smeshes which could work quite well.
It's to imply an inaccessable forest behind a tall wall, so you'd only see the top half of the trees. Maybe a flat dark textured background with a few tree/bush smeshes in front of it to give depth would work... I'll have to try it and see.
You could use some small trees in the skybox at the right place to spoof the effect perhaps? I'm realising that creating the illusion of something is all important in this engine, and it's the way to do alot of stuff we think is hard/impossible.
Litton Grange.
i just messed around with static meshes to get a clue of positioning and looks.
actually, it's just a rebuild of a structure in the tutorial mission
A bit blocky in design, but some really nice colors going there, w00t!
Nice architecture and lighting, although it would look cool with a bit of dark blue ambient light to simulate the moonlight.
Thanks for the comment. It's a pretty large open area there so I'm being conscious of performance and not adding too many frills (yet). It's running fine on my machine though, but I guess the downside of having a fairly fast PC (3.4GHz/6800GT) is not being sure how it'll perform on a more typical setup. Still, by the time it's released that WILL be a typical setup.
I don't know if the die hard fans will be ticked at me, but I have some plans for some non-(Garrett/City) FMs with this engine. I like the play style, and want to do some different things with it.
I have started one of our family campground in Idaho, with the cabin and woods. Still trying to work out the wide open spaces, and I plan on a lot of custom textures and smeshes for it.
Another that I am further on is the Ways from Wheel of Time. Maybe using them to link several parts of my mission. I'm basing it off of this pic I found on a fan site.
http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/8809/wayseg2io.jpg
I'm not quite sure I can make the stone reflective like that. I don't even know yet what I would have at either end, like WoT locations or Thief locations.
DragonLance, Lord of the Rings, who knows. I almost wonder if it is crazy to turn Thief into something else, or like the DarkMod, take a total conversion from Doom3 to Thief, and then want to convert it again into something different again.
Why do I always end up rambling at 5 in the morning. That's it, I'm going to bed. By the way, some good stuff judging by the screenshots. I can't wait to see how some of them turn out.
I'm about 40% through KOMAG's tutorial ...
Here's a shot of my progress so far:
Be gentle guys, I'm an FM virgin
Sometimes I see wall textures that seem to have the bump maps inverted such as in that last screenshot -- grout pokes out and bricks cave inward. How does this happen in the editor?
There's information on how to fix flipped normals in the wiki here.
As for why it happens: Unlike bumpmaps, which only store depth values, normal maps also contain information about which direction each pixel should appear to be facing (left or right, up or down, etc.). This means that if a normal map is flipped vertically or horizontally, the values for left and right or up and down will be reversed, and the normal map will appear to be inverted. I think. There's a better explanation of how normal maps work here.
I just built this to test a few ideas out, but after a bit of work I thought it looked interesting enough to share. There's enough done that I'm considering expanding it into a quick little mission, but I haven't decided yet.
me drools
Hmm, those remind me a bit of Red Alert 2 nuclear missile silos
Great design, one just feels the weight and power emanating from those structures!
Frame rate measured per minute rather than per second, Gestalt?
The framerate's surprisingly good, considering the number of lights in there. I expect I'll have to cut back on a few things before I'm done (like the absurd number of OmniNoShadow lights I have in one part), but it's definitely playable on my Radeon 9600.
What happens when I add some AI and a few more sections might be a different story, though.
Wow. That's awesome.
I really haven't got the hang of level editing yet... I mean, I'm fine with the technical side, but my maps don't tend to look very good or play all that well.
I am working on a FM which is called the Van Eden Estate until now. Its been a month when i started working on it and it will probably take very long 'till its finished. But here are some screens...
screen1: Cellar
screen2: Bar1
screen3: Bar2
screen4: Tavern inside
screen5: A drawable drawer
screen6: Tavern outside
screen7: Warehouse outside
screen8: Warehouse
Thats it...
I hope to finish that project in the next 2 months. But it will probably take longer...
Looking good.
But I have a really petty thing to pick on - in the Tavern shot, it looks like the bed is the wrong way around, most people put their pillows at the wall rather than into the room (look at how the light-projection bends).
I was thinking about that too, but it is common too to arrange a bed so that you can look out of the window. And besides that fact, i liked that projected light with the shadow of the bed. So i left it that way...
It's looking really good! But I can only see half of screen 4 - tavern inside. Even if I download the jpg, I open it up and the top half is fine but the bottom half is messed up and blank.
I did say it was really petty.
If you like the bed where it is, leave it. At worst case you could always have a note beside it saying for the cleaners not to move it again or something, but it should be okay.
Hmn it works fine for me. Even after deleting my cache it downloads the whole picture. Perhaps you should try to delete your cache too.
Editor shot from the entrance to Litton Grange. Well, Garrett's entrance at least...
I'm currently struggling to work out how to get roof sections to intersect (as above) without causing all sorts of slicing and dicing. Elsewhere, most of the BSP is done, just need to inject some life, personality, plot and gameplay into it. I mean, how hard can it be?
looks cool! But you are going to add some more lights to side scene later on, arent you? Also your ambient is a little bit too blue in my oppinion, but its only the editor view. It always looks "completely" different ingame, so it might fit well after all.
I have problems with my roof too. I will play around a little bit with semisolids now and if that wount work ill just build up a static mesh for it...
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