Actually you can have the whole mission concept, if you like: It was supposed to be superficially embedded into TDS's storyline. Garrett was traveling to Auldale (where, for some reason, no enforcers can be found) and the idea was to make a homage to the T2 Equilibrium FM. Daylight, interesting Gothic/Art Nouveau architecture to traverse (pretty much the stuff they did for the T3 artworks of which only fragments made it into the game) glass-metal palaces, balconies, warehouses and all the time you would have the contrast between busy street life down below and the tension of Keeper enforcers chasing you on the Thieves' highway. They would stay in the deep shadows caused by the stark daylight and you would have to hide between solid objects to avoid them, maybe manipulate the environment.
I had to shelve my FM due to real-life activities, but I'm trying to write a piece on Thief3 performance issues, and engine scalability with hardware. There seems to be some sort of improvement with better specs, at least with number of polygons rendered without performance hit. I didn't have time to create a nice looking environment, so I did something more abstract for my testsThat scene runs in 60 PFS in 1440p with maximum (i.e. awfully resource-consuming) in-game multisampling.
Last edited by Judith; 13th May 2016 at 02:28.
Originally Posted by Judith
Interesting scene.I didn't have time to create a nice looking environment, so I did something more abstract for my tests
@Judith, very impressive. Have you manage to gain lower level access to the engine or is this just the latest vanilla build..?
No this is just the game-shipped version with Sneaky Upgrade Editor Edition applied.
This link with Unreal Engine 2 specs says you can have 100k polygons or more, per scene. While T3Ed's Flesh Engine isn't Unreal, it does inherit some of its limits and features. Actually, you can get away with much more than 100k polygons per scene, as some things seem to scale up with better hardware.
Careful use of lights helps a lot here. When you press the Ion button to preview your lightning, you get access to Lights That Touch Too Many Objects metric, which is probably the most important debugging tool in this editor. If you keep your lights in the green/yellow, you can have 6 shadow casting lights in player's view without framerate drops, at least on my hardware. Now, this is with multisampling set to max. If you use Bloom instead (and that forces the ms to switch off), the number of lights is effectively doubled. I managed to set up even more ridiculous scene, with over 200k polygons and several Omni and OmniNoShadow lights, without any framerate drops:
Edit: Now that's weird. Fraps takes screenshots without multisampling applied? Only SU EE's screenshot tool seems to get it right
Last edited by Judith; 14th May 2016 at 12:25.
Hey, Judith. Out of curiosity, have you ever futzed around with Substance Designer? I'm riding the 30 day trial, and after just a couple of tutorials, I've already managed to make this on my own...
Here
With a bit of tweaking, you could make tons of textures that'd fit right in T3ed with only a minimal amount of effort.
Last edited by Renzatic; 15th May 2016 at 14:47.
Hey Renz, funny you should mention that, I was thinking about getting it. I watched a few videos on their YT channel recently, pretty impressive stuff. And the node-based interface reminds me of the material editor in UDK, which I always liked.
Now I'm trying to focus more on rendering textures from meshes, to get the effect you often see in From games, like physical tiles and bricks mixed with tiled textures:
You should really consider it. It's so fast, and the amount of detail you can get out of it is just insane.
@Judith, very impressive work.
"Good thing I'm not afraid of heights."
The image link is broken fella.
What's new about the T3ed editor on here these days? I know, this game doesn't get very much attention when it comes to new upcoming fan missions unfortunately.
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