Al_B

Facebook has too much money to spare?

How about Borthwick castle? It's has a pretty compact style but still quite interesting: Additional floorplans of it and other similar castles available here: http://socks-studio.com/2012/04/06/walls-as-rooms-british-castles-and-louis-khan/

Screenshot does look good - even with the unaligned textures I'm not sure I understand the motivation for having a separate scaling per texture. Isn't the scaling factor(s) that you need determined by the world coordinates that you're using when you write the map file rather than the textures themselves? I'm not an expert on this but from what I've seen you essentially need to determine the matrix required to transform surface coordinates of the tile to texture coordinates. This would be something like: [rs0 rs1 tx] [rs2 rs3 ty] [ 0 0 1] rs0..3 control scaling and rotation, tx and ty control translation. As the "Z" coordinate isn't useful the last row is always 0,0,1 and not saved in the map file. Even for flat floors you'll eventually need to tackle rs0..3 to ensure textures are rotated correctly although in Underworld at least the rotation is always the same for all tiles from what I remember. The tricky bit is obviously computing this matrix as in a general case I'd guess you'd need to compute the inverse of the world -> surface matrix and then use that to set up the appropriate scaling, rotation and offset. However, in this case I'd guess that you may get away with altering the values of tx and ty by an amount based on the direction of the slope and it's height. As far as specific links, this seems the most useful I spotted in a quick google but obviously it doesn't hold your hand through the matrix maths: http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16228

If this is going to act in a similar way to the original games then yes, persistence is essential. Unlike Deus Ex the games freely allow you to leave objects in any location and return to them later - it would break quests if essential items could be lost by a level transition. In the Underworld games interactions with NPCs also rely on character specific and global variables being maintained. That's not meant to discourage - I'm sure it's possible to implement but it's potentially a big task.

Great to see the new screenshots. Hope you don't mind a little feedback on the UW2 pics: I'm sure it's on your list but it appears that you have green and red swapped in the UW2 textures which gives those levels a strange appearance. The textures appear quite dark - my guess would be that you may not have scaled the colours from the original 0..63 to 0..255. The orientation of floor textures on non-sloping floors are out by 90 degrees. It's quite noticable in the throne room near the bottom of the ramp. The vertical scaling of the level seems a little "squashed". Again, looking at the throne room each "step" should roughly correspond to a run of stone blocks. It looks about half to three quarters of that at the moment. These are just nitpicks, of course, and I suspect some of them may be because you've been concentrating on getting things working for SS. Looking forward to the next installment!

Fantastic to see the work on this - Underworld / Underworld 2 has always been a particular passion of mine so I'm watching this keenly. (I've also taken the liberty of posting a link to this thread on TTLG as there may be some there that miss this thread)