gleeful

Hm, this thread has gone pretty much off-topic but has become rather educational I must say.

I've often wondered the same thing. From what I gathered it is mainly video vs. film (though today there are video-cameras that can emulate even 70mm film cameras), lighting (very important because reality is very badly lit mostly) and color post-production.

It's not the lights themselves actually (which are dark-orangey colored), but the lamp-textures which whiten out when close to the lightsource to my great dismay. It's on my to-do list.

Making the night grey rather than blue was a conscious decision. Don't let the video fool you however, it's a lot less dark and b/w in-game - the compression just eliminates all the finer nuances. You're totally right about the windows though - I just slapped the same 2 textures in all the frames. That will of course be remedied in due course.

I know. I often think that the next generation of 3D-engines could well be the last one for which it will be feasible to do large scale mods. Sad.

Not a lot of single-player mods have seen completion in the last 3 or 4 years.

How did you make that excellent looking texture, if I may ask?

I think the reason why some people (including me) are so fussy about it, is that if we're not it might get used on the public forums (ours and others) and that might be trouble.

Hear, hear! So please, let's all stick to "-inspired" (a seemingly magic word to keep Cease and Desist orders away).

Its detailed models on the inside (of the citywalls) and a few dozen dummy buildings on the outside. They only have a few hundred polys each, so they don't tax the engine much. Yup, for some reason the moon turns dark occasionally - we're on it. It's highly unlikely cause I'm way too lazy for that. From a performance standpoint it actually wouldn't matter much - given that you visportal it properly.

Nice - I didn't know that. If only I could get myself to switch. Alas, I'm so unmotivated to re-learn everything.

Not that I'm the pro-skinner (far from it), but are you using Unfold3D? If not, you really, really should: http://www.polygonal-design.fr/e_unfold/frater.php

It looks fantastic - an even dirtier, grittier alternative skin would be great though.

That looks great already - with holes in the stone like Schatten suggested it would seriously kick arse.