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Gildoran

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Everything posted by Gildoran

  1. Gildoran

    Internships

    I know some people here work for the game industry... I'm looking for a first-time job and I was wondering if anybody had any kind of advice for getting internships. What do such companies look for? Do you have any contacts? Etc?
  2. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    There's no reason this couldn't be applied to moon-beams... just keep in mind that in order to get rays, you need to block the moon with something thick that has occasional holes (hence why the clouds look different in the rays AVI - the original clouds tend to produce a warm glow rather than sun-rays), so fog might not work so well. I guess if you're not worried about whether the rays are tied to the shape of the fog, you could use an arbitrary texture to produce moon-rays. I don't have SVN access at the moment, and I think I'd upload the sky as a PK4, so FTP might be more appropriate. In any case, I'd like to try improving the sky a little (moving the sun towards the horizon and increasing the contrast of the clouds a bit more, so that sunbeams tend to be more apparent with more realistic clouds) before uploading it.
  3. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    It does use up some fill-rate, but my computer doesn't drop below 60 fps when running the sky (except when using fraps). This kind of volumetric light is nowhere near as expensive as the volumetric lighting testmap, since I can make assumptions about the viewer's position and don't need to use D3's lighting system. This effect is probably just fine to use as long as you carefully optimize your level's lighting; in any case, if worse comes to worse, you can trade off sun-beam quality in exchange for speed.
  4. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Whoops, I keep on forgetting to update the links when I copy 'n paste them... sleep deprivation must be getting to me.
  5. Here seems like a good place to mention elite guards... I'm under the impression they'll tend not to announce their feelings, and instead just sneak up on the player.
  6. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Ask and ye shall receive... I've temporarily altered the clouds to be more suitable for producing "god-rays", and increased the intensity of said "god-rays", resulting in this (2531K). Yes, but I've given up on shadows since they don't improve the clouds much and cost lots of extra fill-rate.
  7. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    It works by taking a bunch of horizontal cross-sections of the clouds. You have an image represent the density of each cross-section. The material first draws the highest layers, then the lower layers. The lower layers are slightly scaled up, with the origin at the viewer, to make the texture parallax as it scrolls across the screen. Lighting is done via the alpha-channel. When a layer is drawn, the alpha channel is first set to the amount of light that reaches that layer; shadows are done by taking the density image from an upper layer and scaling it as though it were a lower layer, and multiplying the alpha channel by that; after repeating this for each upper layer, you have an alpha channel which can be used to control how bright that layer is drawn. You can also shift shadows as they are drawn in lower layers - this can simulate being lit from an angle. However, I've noticed that it seems to be almost as effective to just draw the upper layers with a monotone bright color, and each lower layer with something slightly darker - this combined with the parallaxing will make the cloud look 3D. Here's a picture of the skybox, as you can see, the clouds are all a single material, and they don't look 3D if you're not looking at them from the proper perspective. Note: The finished V3 sky uses several materials, not just one.
  8. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    I'll try out a few different cloud shapes and see if any have more noticable light-shafts. In theory, it would be entirely possible to move the sun around (the material file uses tables as constants, so that the color of the sky and the position of the sun can be easily modified), but in practice the sky is more like a parabola than a dome, and it can be hard to keep the textures synched if you move the sun around, especially the glow around the sun.
  9. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Prepare to be amazed! I was awake all last night and I've constructed the V3 sky (7330K)! I'm very happy with it! It was a pain to figure out colors that resembled a sunset and to synch up the various textures, but I finally did it. The clouds look great, and the volumetric light emanating from the sun looks even better! If you look closely in-game, you can even sort of see the individual shafts of light moving as they get swallowed up by the clouds; unfortunately, the light-shafts aren't usually well-defined due to the fuzzy clouds, and they tend to appear as a glow around the sun. Also, I've discovered a couple of optimizations - clouds look just fine without realistic shadows, and since the skybox has a static perspective I can greatly reduce the cost of using volumetric light; the sky runs at above 60fps on my somewhat old system. I think this means current TDM maps could use such a sky. Some screenshots while waiting for the video: In this screenshot, you can sort of see the beams of light caused by the sun shining through the clouds: The sun is clearly shining here, and starts to get obscured by a cloud here:
  10. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Heh, try out my volumetric lightshaft testmap on SVN, then imagine using something like that to create rays of volumetric sunlight that dynamically change shape as they're occluded by clouds.
  11. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    BTW, if you want to see something really cool, check out the V3 sky prototype (2267K). The V3 sky uses a single Doom 3 material that's put on a sky-dome. The material simulates 3D volumetric clouds that shapeshift and cast soft shadows on eachother. No pixel-shaders were used in the making of this sky; Doom 3 materials are that powerful/flexible. I think this goes to show how extensible the D3 engine is, and how it can continue to look good as machines improve... eventually TDM maps could have skyboxes with pseudo-volumetric clouds. I don't remember the Source engine giving mappers enough flexibility to make their own volumetric clouds. Edit: I've added a movie of the view spinning (3126K), so you can watch passing clouds from a changing perspective.
  12. To be honest, I too hope that there won't be robots, though admittedly a necro-steambot story could be very interesting and disturbing if done right. Imagine the following: You're sneaking into a noble family's home. One of their young daughters was recently raped and murdered by a deranged peasant who broke into their home. The family, still grief-stricken and horrified has kept her room just the way it was, and has decided to donate a large sum of money to the Inventor's Guild in exchange for the added protection of one of the new-fangled steambots. As you read the notes left by the family, you learn that the steambot hasn't worked as well as expected. It doesn't stick to patrol routes well, and is usually found standing in their daughter's room. The father's diary mentions much contempt for the useless thing, and he yells at the bot whenever he finds in standing in the daughter's room. So you make your way to the daughter's room, open the door, and find yourself face-to-face with a huge steambot holding a doll. It drops the doll and promptly chases after you. I guess there'd be some kind of implication of the daughter's soul being bound to the bot when it was constructed. I think such a story could combine a good bit of tragedy and irony while being just plain creepy.
  13. I agree with you, but I can think of a reason: tickets provide funds, and the police would already be patrolling the area anyway, so looking for people not wearing seat-belts probably doesn't cost anything extra. The town where I live is notorious for using traffic tickets as a source of funding; I've had friends get ticketed for driving 40mph (65kph) by a school - past midnight.
  14. Maybe the game takes place in 1996 in an alternate universe?
  15. Blue room trickery is a Dromed mapping term where you set up all sorts of Rube-Goldberg-esque machinery in a room the player can't reach, to handle more complicated logic than simple stim/response would allow. The vault with the missle-launcher struck me as blue-room trickery.
  16. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    It's automatic, since it uses a light texture that's carefully synced with the skybox. But there is an important limitation with the way I did it. It uses a light falloff that's scaled to be infinitely large and scrolls with the same parameters as the clouds. This means that the moonlight can't have an X/Y falloff, and it isn't clamped; the mapper needs to ensure that the edges of the light are in shadow, or you'll end up with problems where triangles suddenly become fully lit/unlit when they intersect or stop intersecting the moonlight volume. Something I'd love to see would be a script function to read a color off of an image pixel and return it as a vector, so a script could easily keep track of the clouds in front of the moon no matter how complicated their shape. This would allow for lights with falloffs (such as projected lights coming from windows) to be synced with the clouds, and also make multiple cloud decks possible (so you could have clouds that shift shape as they move). Edit: Some other ideas for fun things to do with skyboxes... Make a magic compass leading to a treasure. When the player has the magic compass selected as an inventory item, perhaps certain constellations of stars light up to give the player hints, or maybe stars twinkle more brightly in the direction of the treasure. I've also talked to people who wanted shooting stars, or lightning amongst the clouds, which would be possible.
  17. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Ok, the videos have been hosted. Edit: I've added an example of sinusoidal shearing.
  18. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Ok, I've banged out a simple texture that has a vague resemblance to grass. Here's a video. With a more complicated table, you could have less predictable swaying. Anyway, the way to do it is pretty much code along these lines (except with multipliers to control speed/amplitude): textures/gil/grass { { blend diffusemap map textures/gil/grass_d translate 0, 0.5 shear sintable[time+parm4], 0 translate 0, -0.5 alphatest 0.5 } { blend bumpmap map textures/gil/grass_n translate 0, 0.5 shear sintable[time+parm4], 0 translate 0, -0.5 } } Shaderparm 4 is used as a time offset, so that you can have the grass sway in waves.
  19. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Ok, I just banged out a slight modification to the gilsky2 testmap to make it look a little more like a real map. Anyway, this sky is constructed out of textures in a skybox. It may be a little too "cartoony" looking, most people don't much care for the moon, and the clouds are probably moving slightly too fast (to show off the sky), but it illustrates that you can easily have intricate skies if you try. Here are the videos: A walk around the testmap. (1989K) Close-up of the sky, showing twinkly stars and shifting clouds. (2846K) Moonlight being obscured by clouds. (6869K) For those who don't want to download the movies, here's a couple of screenshots:
  20. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    Yeah, you can do all sorts of cool things with D3 materials. In fact, as OrbWeaver noted, a lot of the D3 material keywords/commands are based off of openGL commands, so in some ways their capabilities are similar. I honestly believe it would be possible to do many rust-monkey-style cutscenes entirely with D3 materials without resorting to ROQs; however, it'd probably be much easier and less limiting to be able to use video editing software.
  21. Gildoran

    Cutscenes?

    About using ROQs for swaying trees, scrolling clouds, etc, that's really not necessary. I've set up textures which use sinusoidal shearing to appear to sway; with multiple layers and different scaling, you could have a whole forest appearing to sway, all without using a large ROQ. (you could also use non-sinusoidal tables for less predictable swaying) As for things like scrolling clouds, all the demo skies I've made have done that. The second one even had the in-level moon-light be dependent on the density of the clouds covering the moon. (so you could predict when the clouds would obscure it and time your moves accordingly) I've also added code to make skyboxes rotatable, so they can be used to simulate the view from a turning airship. All the things described such as blinking lights, smokestacks, etc are possible in a skybox. You could even synch the skybox with the player position and provide low-poly low-fillrate versions of nearby level geometry such as a clocktower, so it can be visible from the whole level without making PVS difficult or inefficient. (this was the technique I suggested for two-state LoD using skyboxes in the thread about how to do cities) @NH: Would you mind if I tried to make a demo video of the V2 sky I constructed a while back, to show what D3 textures can do?
  22. Gildoran

    Tremulous ?

    Sounds like Natural Selection...
  23. Although I didn't enjoy HL2 (except Nova Prospekt, which was great fun), I did enjoy HL1 a lot. Before then, all the FPSes I had played didn't have much in the way of puzzles. They were all just about running around and shooting things. At least in HL1, you had more of a chance to interact with the environment and even stop and think in a few spots. Also, you never quite knew what you were going to encounter next, and there was a wide range of gameplay - one moment you'd be running for your life with a gargantua on your tail, and the next moment you'd be trying to carefully navigate around laser trip-wire bombs setup in a nuke storage facility. The first time I encountered the tentacles or the gargantua really creeped me out. All in all, when I first played HL1, it did a lot of things I had been really wanting to see in an FPS. Having said that, I also really enjoyed DX1. Talking to people, having an inventory, hacking into surveillance systems, discovering more of the story, etc, was loads of fun. Although I consider DX1 to be a truly great game, I think HL1 praise-worthy too; it was certainly better than anything before it.
  24. Leisure Suit Larry, anyone? In fact, it was so popular, they even made several sequels.
  25. @Demagogue: You sure the Thief universe even had trials? I kinda figured if a thief were ever caught, they probably just ended up in some noble's torture chamber, or Cragscleft. (same thing in the end, really)
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