Epifire

Yeah man, I was able to play the game for a bit on a friend's Index and I'd definitely say some puzzles would be near impossible to do with mouse/keyboard inputs. I had to cancel my Index order (twice) due to the fact it only charges you the 1k, 8 months later when finances might want to say otherwise. Otherwise, I'm still planning on picking up VR gear to play it; just PC rebuild + car projects kinda took priority.

If you're running advanced (I think it's maps?) lighting mode, you will actually have alpha tracing on your leaf-alpha cards unless it's disabled in the mtr. Topiary garden bushes are still a good bit of work in any engine, as it's hard to get looking 100% right without a lot of polys thrown at it. The only problem I myself had with this kind of modeling, is I never had a populate/scatter system to automate my leaf cards across the surface. Doing this by hand sucks but your poly count really starts to go up when you're using two sided planes for those tasty, tasty shadows. If you use decent sized leaf cards, they don't have to be as dense to fake the details. But one thing I'd recommend is to do your shape hull (stupidly simple) do a cage over that (running alpha leaves) and then your individual randomized cards on top of that. The dual cage method, if running a good material, will help soften the hard non-seethrough edges you'd get otherwise. Also, if the texture for the cage has really loose alpha, you could maybe have the two cages running shadows and noshadow the expensive leaf cards. Your dropshadow will capture those see through edges and still breakup your plant silhouette but at much less performance cost. Old old proof of concept here (not enough leaf cards either) but it gets away with less because of that dual hull method. With a better alpha texture for the secondary hull it would look even better. I think this one also had baked ground plane occlusion as a blend multiply and then in a separate layer tiled the leaf texture separately for the detail pass. Don't discount baked occlusion on stuff like this either. Just because we have SSAO now, doesn't mean it will create as dramatic of visual effect. The reason I'd do baked AO is to help contrast otherwise, featureless plant shapes. So my method would have two texture resources, a tiling base (with and without alpha) for the two primary hulls and one leaf set for the cards. Best of luck in any case, I'm just tossing my two cents out there!

Half-Life 2 is definitely one I'd love to play again with no prior memory of it. EDIT: So I feel more obligated to explain my feelings as to why. HL2 was first and foremost something I played much later after it's release (with the Orange Box set) but I ran into it because of the want to mod something more accessible. At the time I was cutting my teeth on trying to learn Softimage XSI for models in the original Star Wars Battlefront. I wasn't a fan of needing some program called "Steam" to run it, however at the behest of a friend; I took first just grabbed the demo. I probably played that demo six times through before my copy of the Orange Box arrived at my buddy's house, I loved it that much. Up to that point I hadn't played anything that took it's physics or it's world experience that seriously. I think what still sells it for me today is how it feels like a single take experience, start to finish. It tries to realize it's environment as an actual place and continues to handle it as such. It both rewarded or punished the player if they did (or didn't) think ahead, so while being linear it still gave way to this feeling of play-it-how-you-want. Dishonored continued and expanded on that whole world realization in gaming, and given the heavy influence of Antonov; really explains that connection. You can probably imagine my disappointment when I couldn't continue the experience (Half Life Alyx) for my lack in VR gear.

It really is true then, I'm so sad to hear the news. Grayman was always very open to working/advising with big and strange gameplay features I was throwing around. He was skilled in his craft but never placed himself over anyone else, and struck me as a very humble man. Be it the case, I am glad to have worked with him for the time that I did. He was always great to collaborate with and was very direct with any kind of models he needed from me. His presence will most certainly be missed here.

I think what you would need to set the tone for a mission like this is to have new scary/irregular enemies that are creatively introduced. The biggest working component of what makes the Cradle work as good as it does is uncertainty. If you can get a new enemy that is brooding with unpredictable animations/pathing, you could do a lot right there. One way I always thought this fear factor could be done, would be through the means of making the enemy combatant more illusive and mobile than the player. In Thief games you normally have a vastly superior ability to outwit the dumb NPCs in the game. If that could be changed up or even leveled, I think it would be winner. In a separate project we talked about the possibility of seeing an NPC that could use a code/script, that would actually teleport it around the map. The attempt would be to paint an enemy that understands the area better than you. Trying to convey the undertones that you're in his domain. It would likely have to be some kind of behavioral controller (separate from the specified NPC) that would kick into gear in a alert state. We'd command the NPC to run to different targets (a trigger teleport door/vent). I don't think it would be easy but what you'd have is an NPC that can run through a panel behind you and emerge from another panel on the opposite side of the room. The theory would go that the controller would create a path target to the nearest tele region. The controller would then change that region's teleport target to the one closest to the player. The caveat would be that you'd have to find a way of reliably enabling/disabling the controller so that the NPC can go back to searching for the player as soon as the tele is done. That and you'd have to find a good distance value to the player that would toggle the control state again if the NPC gets alerted but is too far. Lotta mumbo-jumbo to some but man if that could be implemented, to me would be a crazy scary enemy. In my head I imagine something that looks kinda like the puppets, but would be able to navigate in the walls and play a deadly game of peekaboo.

Older post I know, but my recommendation (from the modeling aspect) would be to use tiling materials for the large faces and model/bake out unique details for pillars, frames and corners on a single UV texture. What you basically could have is a three or four texture building that way, you only would want to focus on the cool detail bits as unique and then use a tiling texture for the upper and lower portions where the wall changes color/features. Otherwise it's an easy project for burn out if you don't prioritize what should be left as unique details and what can be fudged with tiling materials. I like to think of it as, frame the thing in with hand crafted details and fill in the gaps with tiling. Very cool building nonetheless, I do hope you push that to completion because it's a very unique and interesting design.

If I'm reading this correctly I think it's just some needless complication I left in the material. As a matter of fact I'm not even sure why it has a local map when it's so tiny to really not need it. I was pretty extra back then but I'm 99% certain this is something off in the MTR. I'll make a note to self and check this when I wake up tomorrow.

feather_duster_001.zip Okay, it's super lightweight as I didn't wanna kill the budget for a tiny carry-able but I think it'll do the trick. Give me a holler if something is up and I'll try to take a look at it!

Alright, so here's the first pass. If you want it more dense with feathers I can add in more. The lighting is a bit harsh but I'm kinda running into the limitations of our lack in subsurface scattering. Or soft alpha filtering. Let me know what you think, it's super simple but I figured was about the detail you'd need. NOTE: it's only static so it'll need a collision hull treatment if you want it to be player-chuckable...

Sorry I'm not near as active on the forums these days since pursuing the portfolio again but this could be quickly whipped up I think. If anything I'd just need to get a suitable material for the feathery parts to look... feathery. If Springheel provides a model, obviously we shouldn't need two but in the case that cannot be done I'm sure I could come up with something.

While it seems like the next step at pushing boundaries, (which is what HL games tend to try and do) they intentionally didn't do this with HL3. I see this as a creative reintroduction to the series and my hopes are that we finally get some kind of EP2 sequel in the not so far future. As a major HL2 fan (that being the game that kept me in modding btw) still has me really stoked. That will however leave me very stoked and broke for the next couple months. ?

Thanks! It happened to be the only map I had to test with water and a working cubemap already setup. However one day when I'm ready to get back to work on it, I'm hoping to reshape it into a neat FM.

A new Gondola for Neon's project. (NOTE the background map isn't related to it). Still kinda swamped with stuff to do (and other requests!) but least to say the Epi is still cranking models here and there.

Ahhh my bad, I thought the camera tutorial was just for the one that buzzes the alarm if it spots something. Yeah that looks to be the reference material I was needing. Just kinda wanting to reverse engineer some template so I think this will work.

Yeah it's not working now on my end either. Trying to figure out why the hell we keep having so many outages in recent.