WIP screenshots

The brushwork and textures are great but the colors are odd

jal wrote:
There's a command you can use on the light trim shader. It was _lightsubdivide I think. I think the trims in wdm4 use it, check there.

I know, I used it before the new lighting came, but it comes with many little odd problems, like the intensity of the light changes with the surface size of the face you put the texture on, which results in a pretty messed up lighting. You basically have to adjust the light intensity in the shader based on how long you make the brush, which is far more work then just setting it up with entity lights.
I already tried just increasing the shaderlight values but somehow the result is not the same as it was before the new lighting patch, say some areas look decent with the shaderlights while others look completely blown out of proportion.
I learned to hate the lighting option of shaders, and in my opinion shader lights alone just can't be used to sufficiently light a map, at least not if your lights are long stretched trims which vary in length throughout the whole map.

m0t0 wrote:
No I mean if you're aiming for best quality,then you should probably rebuilt the whole lighting if its fully fucked up.I can't say which is the best option since i dont know how much time you got and so on.but since you have probably mapped this for 4 years or so I could think that time is not an issue here.

oh and hard to say about lighting by looking picture from one spot.

That's what I'm currently doing. After the new lighting patch of Warsow, my map was completely changed in terms of lighting because they changed how the new lighting was calculated, and because I build my map up nearly entirely on shaderlights, everything was completely different after it. (say my map was suddenly 80% darker in overall)
There is no other way than to redo the whole lighting, because atm the map just does have no lighting.
That's also why I'm testing out what form of lighting I should use in one spot of the map, before lighting the whole map with one method and then finding out that it doesn't look that good XD

Ultrak1ll wrote:
The brushwork and textures are great but the colors are odd

Thanks but I don't need feedback to brushwork/textures, at least not yet. I plan to remake the whole lighting and then putting it up here for feedback regarding details. I think you can't really say much about the color scheme of this map without seeing the whole picture, the dark blue lighting scheme was decided by the clan and I created the textures and the brushwork in regards to it.
But without the proper lighting the map used to have, a lot of things just don't fit together and look odd in place.



I have to recreate the lighting with light entities, maybe I can still use the shaderlights to get the 'lightsource'-effect without affecting the real lighting too much, I will post again if I made some better results.

dump the shaderlight, did that a long time ago, when i want to light up a room even a ordinary light with no source looks better than shaderlights :D

I, like you, used shaderlights on 0.5 where they were almost perfect for everything lol

Ultrak1ll wrote:
dump the shaderlight, did that a long time ago, when i want to light up a room even a ordinary light with no source looks better than shaderlights :D

I, like you, used shaderlights on 0.5 where they were almost perfect for everything lol

ye, looking back at it now it was the biggest mistake ever to use shaderlights ^^


I mean they wouldn't be that bad if they would light an area equally throughout the whole surface, but instead they just place light entities which kinda ruins the intial idea of making a surface emitting smooth equal light values throughout it's whole face.
Maybe if you could split the surface into small squares of fixed unit size (1 unit preferably), each of them emitting a small but highly intense light value, directed in a half-sphere direction, but uniform for every square and the surface just gets filled with as many squares as fit instead of placing one light entity in front of the texture every x units. Like LED-lamps work basically. But I understand too few of game development to know if this would be even possible to develop or how complicate it would be.

In their current state shaderlights are just a quick and dirty method to light an area pseudoequally without having to place light entities.
(updated 2012-06-12 15:45:04)

Maybe if you could split the surface into small squares of fixed unit size (1 unit preferably), each of them emitting a small but highly intense light value, directed in a half-sphere direction, but uniform for every square and the surface just gets filled with as many squares as fit instead of placing one light entity in front of the texture every x units. Like LED-lamps work basically

this would require changing q3map2

Wishlist:

Dear Santa,

Pls add a -lightemitgrid [n] flag to q3map2




... lol wait u want 1 unit .... erm kill ur CPU, a light stripe with length 512 and height 32 would be then 16384 good luck with that


EDIT solid fake ITS POSSIBLE TO RENDER LIGHMAP WITH CUSTOM SHIT in blender


get this




im too noob at UV mapping i dont know nothing about it, u export baked shadowmap as UV map photoshop it to lightmap and use -import then EPIC WIN some guy managed to do this but he was too faggot and kept most of the process secret
(updated 2012-06-12 16:01:11)

SolidFake wrote:

jal wrote:
There's a command you can use on the light trim shader. It was _lightsubdivide I think. I think the trims in wdm4 use it, check there.

I know, I used it before the new lighting came, but it comes with many little odd problems, like the intensity of the light changes with the surface size of the face you put the texture on, which results in a pretty messed up lighting. You basically have to adjust the light intensity in the shader based on how long you make the brush, which is far more work then just setting it up with entity lights.

It isn't more work. You are just trying to make things work against the way they work. Light trims are surfaces that emit light, not receive. If you put light entities in front of the trim what you are doing is casting light over the trim, not making the trim emit light.

If you want to make light trims just use light subdivisions and disable backsplash (or use my qfmap2 instead of netradiant's). That way the light won't lit on self and you won't get any light points on the trim. Otherwise just don't use light trims. They don't emit nice light anyway.
(updated 2012-06-13 17:58:12)

jal wrote:


It isn't more work. You are just trying to make things work against the way they work. Light trims are surfaces that emit light, not receive. If you put light entities in front of the trim what you are doing is casting light over the trim, not making the trim emit light.

I thought lighttrims don't emit light themself, but rather 'create' light entities in front of them, which position in x and y direction you can influence with subdivisions and backsplash?


edit: i will make some tests with the new q3map2,if the backsplash is really gone, I might consider using lighttrims again
I guess the said qfmap2 is in the 0.62 sdk?
(updated 2012-06-12 19:19:20)

jal, how do I properly install the qfmap2.exe ? :S

Do I just need to copy it into the netradiant folder and change the -fs_game and -game values in the build menu, or do I also need the libraries?

The wtfc4 ones look awesome, so smooth...

edit: oh, lol, I never knew you can even turn backsplash off by simply giving it a value of zero...
I guess I will try if I can recreate one area with lighttrims, if it works, the rest will follow.

I kinda see now that I completely misunderstood how surfacelights work, I ever thought that the light that lights the texture itself and the light that the texture emits are one and the same. But it is not the same, the light that lights the texture itself is a backsplash light which you can completely turn off and is basically independant of the light the texture emits.
If I just knew that earlier, it is kinda annoying that there is neither a mention of lightsubdivide, nor backsplash or even how they work in the shader manual :S
(updated 2012-06-12 22:17:33)

Adjusted lighting intensity, color and lightsubdivisions and turned off backsplash, lighted only with shaderlights now.

I also made lighttrims with higher light intensity at the top which drop when going down to the bottom, which makes it look like the ground floor is more dark and gloomy, also it creates a nice diversity when the top lights passes through e.g. grates or other objects and because the light intesities differ they don't start to fight other which made the grates look so odd.

I still get some nasty small errors with the shaderlights, one main problem is that in an edge where two lighttrims meet, they gonna light each other and make it look like they are lighting themself. Maybe I can make at the edges a shader which doesn't emit light, so it falls off towards the edges. Or maybe I just gonna keep it that way, dunno.
The screenshots where also without bounce, maybe when I add bounce that little dark patches will go away.

I am really really rusty in regards to wsw mapping now, but slowly I'm getting into again XD
Gonna adjust the lighting for the whole map now I guess. Maybe I gonna tone the map down to a dev-texture map and prerelease it that way, so people don't have to wait forever just to play it and I get feedback regarding gameplay.

I'm glad my explanation helped.

SolidFake wrote:

If I just knew that earlier, it is kinda annoying that there is neither a mention of lightsubdivide, nor backsplash or even how they work in the shader manual :S

There's a general confusion about the 2 different shader manuals. It has always been confusing cause of a bad shader sinthax design.

There are the engine engine shader manual and the q3map2 shader manual. The one in the wiki is a qfusion shader manual, the one at ydnar's website is the q3map2 shader manual, and in that one, the q3map2 commands are explained. Things like backsplash or light subdivision commands are q3map2 commands and do nothing on the engine, so they are not part of qfusion's shader manual.

SIDE NOTE: Surfacelight's backsplash was an ancient "feature" (aka Hack) of q3map to get light surfaces to cast light on self as a bad replacement of radiosity lighting. All it does is placing small light entities in front of the surface. IMO, it should have been removed from q3map2 the same day bounce passes were included, but they kept it in there. I did disable it on qfmap2 cause of that reason, but that change wasn't wanted in netradiant's q3map2 main tree. In any case, it can be disabled at each light shader and I highly recommend to do it.
(updated 2012-06-13 18:15:59)

Been making a random race map generator, it doesn't make very good maps nor do I think there is a need to make one. But it is fun to make : )

Currently this is what it makes:
A single path non-overlapping with a low chance of ramps being built instead of a regular brush.

It also builds a skybox around that path with a distance of a variable called SKYCLEARANCE.

Example

TODO:
add start/end brushes + targets
add player spawn
add possibilites of vertical drops
overlapping brushes if height difference is larger than some variable? unsure about that.

I was first experimenting with maps that are made up of pads, with a sine function(with increasing wavelength) to model player speed. But the maps created were too similar and I couldn't get the function right. I ended up having to build a large floor under all the pads and use the pads as some sort of obstacle course. Didn't like the results so I went for a single path instead : )
(updated 2012-06-14 15:01:51)

SF, still no test version of your map atleast?

brushwork of a new duel map



(updated 2012-06-14 17:30:50)

zfight spotted

too big/will have height problems probably because of 256 height difference between levels.Simplicity looks nice tho

thelawenforcer wrote:
SF, still no test version of your map atleast?

not really, I wanted to fix the lighting and one/two areas at first before giving it for feedback, say I wanted to fix areas of which I know they are everything but finished so people can focus on stuff I myself can't evaluate

this stuff though is mainly visual nature, gameplay-wise the map is pretty solid and finished anyway (like it was since 2 years, haha)

for sure I could just give out the current version for people to test, but I don't want to waste resources (speak time) by getting told what is already known by me

but like said, I may release a 'ugly' version of the map soon, without any visuals basically so people can play it just for the gameplay :P

Thank you that you asked :D

ok, tnx for info, but it seems to me that you have gone about this a bit wrong? i mean this map has been in dev for ages, and its never ever been playtested. what are you going to do if certain areas of the map are totally flawed?

Maps can't be flawed. They're just unique in game play.

thelawenforcer wrote:
ok, tnx for info, but it seems to me that you have gone about this a bit wrong? i mean this map has been in dev for ages, and its never ever been playtested. what are you going to do if certain areas of the map are totally flawed?

I think you don't understand completely in what status this map is at the moment. The words which would best describe it would be "broken" or a "mess". The thing is, certain areas ARE flawed, and I know of these areas from previous feedback of screenshots I put on here.

It also has been playtested multiple times by the bef-clan, when it was still alive, so gameplay-wise I am pretty sure that not much will change any more.

And yes, I started this map completely wrong and made many mistakes while (trying) to make it. I learned so much while making this map, that the experience I gained while making it created discrepancies in the quality of areas in the map. You can read more about all my mistakes here :P

What I'm basically doing right now is trying to bring all the areas of the map to one unified quality and style level. If this level doesn't meet my possibly abilities doesn't really matter, it is important that the whole map does share the same style. Many areas are just too gfx-effect heavy compared to others e.g.. Additionally I have to recreate the whole lighting and remove some major quality discrepancies.

Once I finished fixing these major flaws, i will give the map out for feedback regarding mainly design, to see if I successfully removed the flaws and what is still there. Feedback is a resource you should not waste, especially in such small communities like Warsow is one.

I haven't had any time to map since the last time I posted here, but now I plan to get more into it again.

Crizis asked me if I wanted to make a quick retexturing of Xanthus's rduel3 map with a cyperpunk style. So I decided to just go for a very similiar style to the UI background map I made.

WIP screenshot:




A 'before' screenshot of the same area: