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Springheel

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This is more a 'what are you surprised to discover?'

 

post-35144-0-69196900-1508459195_thumb.jpg

 

Some caveats:

  • You can have a bumpmap, but can't e.g. scroll it. A HeatHaze stage before the texgen one will work though, so locally fake-reflective water may be possible.
  • Postprocess sorting only, otherwise contact with light glitches the colours. Hence no light interactions; for those you'd still need to make dedicated, per-skybox materials in the usual way, or deploy nbohr1more's ambient cubic lights. Possible use cases are basically glass, water, and highly reflective metals placed where the sky is the only possible light source (a blend filter stage can tone down the reflection a bit).
  • I've only tested in small, isolated, cubic rooms so far; I don't know how complex geometry, visportals, or proximity to other cubemap-using materials will affect this. Even in those simple rooms, if there isn't a cubemapped skybox in the area, or if there is but it's just one wall, glitches result. (It's possible to put the cubemapped skybox in a portalSky area, though.)
Edit: further testing shows the presence of other cubemapped materials does mess this up, so I'm afraid it's just a curio after all. Too easily broken for general use.

 

If you want to try it, have a stage with texgen reflect, but don't declare a cubemap; instead use 'map _black', or 'map _currentRender' and a blend mode if you want transparency.

Edited by VanishedOne
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Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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For the version above, since it piggy-backs on LOD, that'll depend on the entity's 'think' rate set by dist_check_period.

 

A hypothetical script-controlled version would presumably be slower, and I'm not sure how best to optimise it (waitForRender?).

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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From my knowledge this had a lot to do with those games utilizing sprites that maintained the same size in screen space. Therefore it would achieve this sizing out of it's own inherit design principal. Last I heard our sprites weren't all that fun and intuitive but I could have just heard it wrong.

Modeler galore & co-authors literally everything

 

 

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There must be a bit more to the implementation since they scale between minimum and maximum sizes. Or at any rate Unreal's do: the page I linked refers to MinCoronaSize and MaxaCoronaSize values.

 

What I demo'd above does use a func_static patch with a deform sprite material: the size of the patch defines the maximum size (in the world, not screen space), and the rest involves passing shaderParms to the material. However, it's supposed to be possible to use shaderParms in particle defs, which will be a more flexible method if it works.

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Nice to see a bunch of missions nearing completion, and that Springheel's module sets are getting good use! Goldwell: is this Accountant 1 going to replace the old one with a similar story line? Looks fantastic from the screenshot, makes me want to help you beta test!

I'm working on my own mission based on the Springheel module set. Still a lot to be done but I have a few areas that are almost ready.

 

 

Thanks Bienie! And yes Springheel's modules are fantastic, they really help to add depth to exterior scenes in a fast way.

 

The new accountant 1 will completely replace the old, there are elements of the story that are the same however just about everything in it is brand new. I went back to the drawing board and decided that rather than simply updating the old one I would start over with a new vision and the result is a mission closer inline to the accountant 2 both in terms of level design, story and detail.

 

Your level is looking fantastic too btw! I especially like that last screenshot, godrays <3

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm working on a couple of Blender Python scripts to make it easier to work with materials and textures.

 

1: Set material names from textures. In Blender, materials with any names are assigned to faces, and each material has a TDM texture (extracted from the pk4 files and maintaining the folder structures). The script uses the texture to work out the correct material name.

 

2: Load textures based on material names. This is for imported models, which already have TDM material names. It loads the diffuse texture of each material.

 

To associate materials with textures I wrote a program that scanned all the mtr files and generated a simple list of the form material=texture and saved it to a file. That was written in C# but that's probably because I'm more used to that language. After getting back into Python scripting I think I could use that to also do that part too. Then the user would only have to extract from the pk4 files.

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Cool. That's from Jermi's background, right? Too bad there wasn't a way to get the clouds working...his original sky was pretty impressive.

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Cool. That's from Jermi's background, right? Too bad there wasn't a way to get the clouds working...his original sky was pretty impressive.

Yeah, and I used the same method you use for the background (a patch cylinder with the texture, so technically I dont see any reason we cant use our clouds with it. One thing I would like to try is create sparkling/twinkling lights - would welcome any help or direction on how to do this.

 

Talking of Jermi, is he on this forum? as it would be useful to get the master copy of that background. Even though I used a 2048*512 image you can still see lots of jaggies.

Edited by Bikerdude
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Yeah, and I used the same method you use for the background (a patch cylinder with the texture, so technically I dont see any reason we cant use our clouds with it.

 

Talking of Jermi, is he on this forum? as I would be useful to get the master copy of that background. Even though I used a 2048*512 image you can still see lots of jaggies.

 

I dunno I don't think it looks too bad. I feel like the resolution difference might be overkill for the how lowres all the common assets are in the foreground elements. That's the toughy, trying to add in high resolution assets alongside the legacy files still in the mix. To be fair we're not exactly a AAA studio so it's not like we can just straight up petition a full database revise at the drop of a hat... unless you just make a map from scratch.

Modeler galore & co-authors literally everything

 

 

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Now that I have TDM compiled again, and soon I will be self-employed and working from home, I will finally be able to put work into my pagan village mission. It has been a work in progress since 2011 and has undergone some major changes, but the environment is starting to take form.

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System: Mageia Linux Cauldron, aka Mageia 8

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