Maximius
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Posts posted by Maximius
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Thats a great idea greebo, thanks for mentioning it, I don't want to do an OS reinstall right away and now LW is crashing in Layout whether I have an image loaded or not.
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The latest issue of Harpers magazine, a great and inexpensive publication that I cannot recommend highly enough, has on its cover an article entitled: Cold Rush The coming fight for the melting North. Its about what you are all talking about and its pretty scary.
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Those aren't exactly exotic image formats. Weird.
Congrats on your first normal map. I was happy to figure out a grey-scale height map is good enough, because you can pretty much take any design you can make or find, grey-scale it and adjust the height by lightening or darkening it.
I'm also finding orienting the textures strange. I drew my texture on a screenshot of the wireframe, but when I tried to put it on, I had to squeeze it out of proportion, basically I need to redraw it in the right proportions using the render as a reference, which I thought was strange. Doesn't the wireframe automatically have the right proportions?
Its really frustrating, I was really enjoying the learning process and it stopped dead with these crashes. Anyway,I just cut out my image and applied it under bump map, it looked wrong because I had forgot to trim the white area from around the image, but it was in place and I managed to move the image around a bit before it crashed. Its tricky placing it right with the buttons in the image I can see where I have to go from here. If we could get that plugin I sent you working, not the VIPER replacement but the other one about making and opening normal maps IN lightwave, we would be in good shape. Ill try to install it tomorrow, even if it doesnt work or causes problems Im reinstalling the OS tomorrow night anyway so its a good time to tinker with it.
I did not draw a wireframe, I don't know what one is actually, I just made a file of the image and imported it into LW through bump/image then tweaked its x,y,z until it was roughly in alignment at the right size. Im probably doing a million things wrong and missing a lot of short cuts but it worked for a second.
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You mean progressing through a level felt like it had to be too linear, so the plot would progress properly? I think I agree.
yes, thats pretty much what I meant. There was never really the feeling that I could take off into a random direction and find some thing interesting, everything was laid out like a big plan, at least thats how it felt.
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edit: Now that I've read your response I see you are talking about something different Macsen, it was different from the other missions in those ways, much less medieval and more Victorian.
The Cradle was ok but it suffered from what I was just whining about in another thread. The storyline and the environment were overdeveloped, for lack of a better term, they were too closely married together to be convincing I thought. When I broke into the Cradle, I had this deep sense of dread forming, similar to a dream where you are doing something you know will get you into danger but you cannot stop doing it. This place was the seat of a madness that kept the dead locked into life, trapped. The Cradle at first reminded me of the Cathedral of the Damned for this reason, every instinct told you to avoid this place but you had to go in. That initial presentation should have set a mood that lasted throughout.
But it wasn't sustained and one reason why was because everything I found inside, in one way or another, was tied into the mission. All the notes were clues, all the objects were necessary items, the rooms either had something mission specific in them or they were empty. Not really all but it seemed that way, there was not enough incidental stuff to convince me that this was a real place with a really horrible past where the dead drag themselves about. The environment was not telling me a story just by being the way it was, rather everything felt contrived and intentional, which sank the immersion for me. It seemed like a big empty building with a few items tossed about and some things stumbling around. The girl ghost was annoying, she alone should have spooky to meet and talk with and she's an ally. Instead we got a Disney character.
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He gives Crysis as an example of interactivity, which is good but != realism. I never finished Farcry because of the goofy weapon handling. Everything seemed so realistic until I got into a gunfight, which gave me eighties flashbacks. Is it really too much to ask that a game primarily about shooting stuff has satisfying weapon feel and somewhat realistic ballistics? Cartoony glowing bullets lazily meandering back and forth doesn't exactly keep me immersed in an otherwise convincing world.
What blew FarCry for me was the ridiculous storyline and especially the upper level mutant AIs which were freaking ludicrous conceptions. The game went (for me) from a pretty fun shoot em up with some hugely fun boat battles and on expert setting some nearly impossible shoot outs with the mercs to total crap.
Suddenly, completely idiotic monsters, not scary at all but stupid looking, the little ones looked like something from a 2d game and the big ones looked like strogg. The fast middle ones looked like disco studs carrying machines guns and wearing monster masks, with those tight jeans they were wearing. It took me five months to play through to the rest of the merc battles, which were ok but not great. But it could have been a thousand times better without those cornball monsters. A straight out merc/reality setting would have been a better game, blow up a coke ring or an arms dealer or something.
I'm struck by just how severe the obsession with "realism" is within the game industry.My honest suggestion, let artists come up with interesting character designs, art styles, atmospheric lighting, etc. altogether to make the visual design of a game fluid and seamless. Then, focus on gameplay. Much like Thief was constructed under LGS
On one final note, unrealistic doesn't automatically mean cartoony either. There are plenty of styles out there where characters have realistic proportions, gritty faces, quality expressions, but still don't look "realistic" either.
These are some really interesting points. One thing I remember from the THief games was how even with the simple and repetitive objects available, good settings and lighting, careful object use and a general sense of things being in their places provided a foundation on which to build storyline and gameplay. It still got old of course but only because it was so good I played it to pieces.
To bring up a boogeyman as a counter example, I think one of TDSs problems was that the relationship between the gameplay and the environment was over done, over developed in a way. I rarely felt the sense of freedom that I did while playing T1/2 at its best, that I could dart off in any direction and start messing around, feeling my way through the map and all the various situations it presents, soaking myself in that world and feeling like I was actually running around in it.
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Well bad news but a bit of good. I reinstalled LW and in that time successfully transferred one of my engraving images to the head of the axe. Unfortunately, its crashed again soon afterwards and continued to do so, so Im going to get on the girlfriend to back up her files and reinstall the OS.
BUT I did it, I loaded my first normal map that I have made myself! I could not orient it correctly in time, it doesn't look right but its the first step. Yay!
Could it be the image files Im using? I tried both JPEG and Targa formats but both crash LW when loaded. This sucks! The longsword is ready to texture too and the war hammer looks Fing cool IMO
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Still not able to texture. Im going to be reinstalling everything soon anyway so we will see if that helps.
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Congratulations, I hope to hear about a little one on the way soon!
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I'd deffinately like to see someone putting in time on quaility textures.
One thing I'd really like to see is a set of metal textures much like T2's for the Inventors. Panels and whatnot. Not the ArtDeco ones but the metal families like newmetal.grates, square metal plates, metal plates that only have ' binding' on the sides so they can tile up a tall wall but not be squares. Brass, copper, steel, ect... New, dirt, old
Stuff that could also be used on the machines as well as walls/floors.
If you could find some visual examples of what it is you want, not to copy but simply to provide inspiration, I would start on some metal textures. It would be a great primer for me to get into texturing my objects well. I could really use some experience drawing 2D designs for textures, learning GIMP better would not hurt at all.
This leads to some other questions I've had about copyright and such, right now I took down a design from the Web, a kind of scalloped shell design, and took it apart to use sections of it as a relief design on my axe. Is this cool? How much does something have to be changed to be legal and square?
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My LW layout has suddenly started crashing when I try to load textures or normals into it. The Modeler works just fine, and so does Layout, until I try to load something and then it just blinks off. Whats going on, do I not have enough RAM? This sucks, I was about to actually put some engravings on my war axe.
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I have both good things and bad to say about this game, so I want to make sure you get the right idea: I recommend Call of Cthulhu, Dark Corners of the Earth, but some of that feeling is due to my Lovecraft bias.
Thanks for the breakdown, I will give it a shot now, I love Lovecraft too and I was heartbroken at some of the things I've heard. If another devotee of his liked it, sign me up.
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But like I said, I've heard D3 converts heightmaps to normalmaps anyway. If so, there's not much difference. I can't verify that it's true, but I have heard it more than once.
I just read this somewhere in the D3 texturing Wiki a day ago or so.
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I doubt ID will start using steam, their probably just raking in cash for 'old' games. Doom3 is already starting to get very dated in comparison to some of the newer stuff coming out and steam is a good way to have people get influenced to buy it before it goes 'dry'.
Do you mean as a full time platform for game distribution? I agree with that, it will probably be the older stuff.
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You can always paint your greyscale heightmap and then run it through the nvidia filter in PS. That's how I created a lot of my hand-made normalmaps.
Is this possible through GIMP?
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Im considering buying Nexus:The Jupiter Incident from STEAM, its only 10$ and the graphics are really sweet. I love immersing myself in grand space battle type games as some of you know. homeworld etc. Its supposedly really high maintenance in terms of technology trees and can drag on a bit according to some of the reviews I read, but for that price I'll get some kind of fun out of it. Has anyone played this?
Call of Juarez looks incredible. Im a big Western movie fan but all the Western games I've seen have always seemed too flawed to make it worthwhile. C of J looks really well done, its on the list for sure. I downloaded the "fire" sample video, pretty wicked stuff.
Im thinking about Call of Cthulu but I've read enough negative stuff to put it on the "wait till its almost free" list right now.
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I was reading a forum somewhere that claimed STEAM collects data about your OS and shares it for advertising purposes. The people talking seemed to know that they were talking about, lots of specific tech references and such, but Im not a good judge TBH. The one commenter did say he didn't think they collected personal or internet activity information but stuff like what kind of system you have and what amount of memory and so on.
If id does start using STEAM, its bad news in terms of further consolidating STEAM as a power to be reckoned with in gaming distribution, it seems to me. For one thing, if id is using them, its because they must already have good coverage if not great coverage of the market. Secondly, id isn't Garage Games, nothing against GG, but ids name alone has power in gamers heads. It will legitimize STEAM in the next generation of gamers to come in and it will be there for a few more after too. They are becoming the Wal-Mart of gaming, unless there are some other big distributors that I am not aware of.
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I see what you mean, but its still great to finally see this stuff coming together.
Give me a few days to reorganize my files, then its OS replacement time, then I'll reinstall everything including D3 and start making some mtr files. -
This makes sense. For my own part, I gave away my Thief 2 disks, as much as I love them if I were install one right now and started watching those AI do they "circle search pattern with sword arm extended even if you dont carry a sword" I would shut the thing down. Too burnt out on the way things work, too predictable, even with New Horizons difficulty improvements and all that. It got way too easy to break the maps, pitting AI against one another to empty rooms, trapping/drowning AI, blocking them with objects, whatever. I never even used the Nudge, never needed to.
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I did it, I got the cast iron texture into LW and the normal map too. Just as you insert the image file into the color T box submenu image, for the normal map you do the same thing under bump T box submenu, all of this is on the surface editor of course. Theres a bit of a difference but its kind of hard to see, the texture I made is the first image, the second is LWs stock.
http://aycu20.webshots.com/image/23259/200...90801298_rs.jpg
http://aycu17.webshots.com/image/24936/200...73705582_rs.jpg
Im guessing that a specular map could be loaded under specularity T submenu image too, Im going to make one of those next. This if fun!
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Lord no, we couldn't use them....they're no better than T2 assets really...and it would be illegal.
Oh I thought they were being released for general consumption.
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Thanks for your responses guys. Im not certain but I suspect that I am going to have to install D3 again to actually use these mtr. files, is that correct? Forgive me if thats obvious. This means I'm going to go ahead and do a complete OS re installation, the puter has been a bit slow recently anyway and its heavily cluttered with crap so its a good time for a number of reasons.
cog, bear with me a second longer. So only normals can be loaded in LW itself (assuming .mtr's are for D3) So if I wanted to really pull out the pitted detail of the cast iron, I make the texture at least 512 by 512, which would mean I have to tile it, then make a normal map of it, then load both of these into the image editor.
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Would these assets be of use to the Mod, would they not be outdated?
Lightwave Layout crashing when textures loaded
in I want to Help
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Thanks, Ill DL it tomorrow and post if I have encounter any major problems.
That sounds like a good idea, but I have to reinstall D3.