Epifire

Thanks! That's the benefit of throwing all the detailing at texture data. There's actually very few (separated) meshes in that scene. Most areas are divided into single chunks to save on the draw calls. Currently with the entire scene in view, it clocks at 454 draw calls and 16,625 shadow count. That's the added benefit of a fully modeled scene and having total control. Downside is that with it being all combined, major changes to the layout a very difficult to do when it's all finished. So it forces you to plan well in advance and anything reworked has to fit in the bounds of what you've already made.

As some of you may know, I've been building up my dev portfolio in preparation for launching into professional Environment Modeling. Goldwell was kind enough to offer me a collaboration in an all new seaside location, which in turn granted me something neat to showcase. The goal was to create a larger area using all models to attempt something unique and visually compelling. This is a combination of high resolution sculpts in Zbrush + more traditional hard surface modeling in Maya, & textured in Substance Painter. Cape Aniva was also a huge inspiration for the lighthouse design. Very excited for the final playable version but till then, we've got some teaser shots for ya'll!

Fantastic! Very happy to see how this turned out!

Considering the fact any of the developers (to my knowledge) interested in adding this save room feature, are just going to bank on adding both difficulty sets; none of the cvar stuff would be necessary. As then people could play the standard difficulties or just stick with the hardcore saveroom mode. Hazard Pay was simply a test bed for this but clearly there would be a different approach were this implemented in future mission releases. Let me remind folks, nobody during testing was ever advocating for all out replacing the standard difficulty mode but rather more exploring a new feature. This feature if implemented further, will just be offered alongside existing ones so that nobody is forced to go without.

I really enjoyed the save room option and was a strong advocate for it in testing. It puts a slightly more real spin on the consequences of player actions. As yes, should you not ration out your save progress; it can end badly. It forces you to play much more intentionally as you don't have a safety net, which I much prefer.

Really enjoyed playtesting on this one! Quite varied and a wonderful change of pace to the expected norm.

I just downloaded it now and I gotta say, there's a lot more here than I was initially hearing about. Fantastic work fellas!

Yeah editing the ruleset would be your best bet for that scenario I think. However that does really bring up the idea of different outcomes. It's a lot more gameplay to manage but I know you can set conditions in the level that will only activate, depending on the difficulty you chose (as the FM designer). I always wanted to do one with an RPG choice kinda spin. Where depending on the difficulty you chose, whole areas will either be added or removed; creating a much different experience.

Hello Aosys! I just happened to run past your thread here as I've returned recently to the forums myself. I might be able to help you here with your Substance Painter setup, as I use it exclusively now. You wont get a one to one render preview in Painter, akin to that of the properties you'll see in-game. However you can get pretty close. I do use the non-pbr mode but once you've got the settings and layers optioned correctly, it'll work. Firstly, are you using current versions? This is important as shaders and various versions of Painter have broke in the past (especially since Adobe bought them). I normally bake my Ambient Occlusion into my diffuse texture. Until (or really if ever) we get PBR in game, this shouldn't be changing; however baking the AO really helps if you're wanting dramatic lighting for cheap. If you can, try to multiply the AO over the diffuse texture in Photoshop and then save that to DDS. Personally I don't much like how powerful (and plastic like) specular effects are in TDM, so I usually will just end up with a final diffuse and normal texture. The only time I'd recommend blending the AO via mtr file is if you needed to preserve the UV's for the diffuse but had to multiply that over a tiling texture independently. Otherwise we can just cut down on the file consumption and go without the mask. Also, Greebo just made a file converter to take FBX to LWO. I use MayaLT now, so if you have to pull anything in from FBX; that can now be handled directly. It also handles vertex paints and smoothing options! This was a big requested feature from me and I'm really excited to start using it here myself. Greebo made it to work with his Dark Radiant upgrade project but it's also directly accessible via a batch file! So what this means is we'll be able to just save FBX to a mirrored directory and then run the batch file and it'll convert/copy the new LWO files to your chosen models destination. If you want, I can show you how I've got my Substance Painter setup for TDM too. I could probably best do that via screenshare over Discord, so lemme know if you'd like to do that at some point.

Fantastic work Greebo! When you mentioned you were revamping the texture editor in DR, I had no idea it was going to be this in depth. This is nearing modeling app levels of accessibility and I know we've got a lot of mappers who are still purely working in the editor, vs making & importing meshes. Being able to skew UVs like that in a handy UI, is gonna be a godsend for people.

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!