So, what are you working on right now?

[VanishedOne 550]

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

 

 

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 October 20, 2017 by VanishedOne

[VanishedOne 550]

While I'm posting stuff that works when the stars are suitably aligned, here's my new experiment:

 

 

Basically, a while back I was playing Unreal and Red Faction, and noticed that they had light corona effects that scaled between minimum and maximum sizes with player proximity to the light. So I tried hijacking the LOD fading mechanism to emulate the effect. (Another reason I'm interested in distance-dependent manipulation of glow effects is the possibility of light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel flares.)

 

I got it basically working: well enough to add to the mansion courtyard in ITB (which is about to return to beta testing). However, since LOD wasn't designed to be co-opted for this, there seems to be no way to disable scaling by Object Detail option for values above Normal, so the higher the value you have in your settings, the further you have to be to see the full size. Also, the sprite can clip through geometry; ignoreDepth can fix that, but then it draws over everything and only visportals can cull it. (A full corona replica would fade out when its origin was occluded.) So I have some thoughts about the possibility of an improved version using script control.

[Bikerdude 3743]

hmm interesting, I wonder how this impacts perfirmance?

[VanishedOne 550]

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?).

[Epifire 793]

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.

[VanishedOne 550]

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.

[ERH+ 662]

Still looking for beta testers in this thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 29, 2017 by ERH+

[Bikerdude 3743]

One of my WIPs is getting close to beta, so here is a little taster, enjoy.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AShoaqaREGw

[ERH+ 662]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Believe it or not but this mission is not supposed to be a slide show.

[MirceaKitsune 261]

That looks like a fantastic FM, ERH+! It's really nice to see a fantasy map of these proportions in TDM

[Springheel 4683]

Looking forward to seeing that giant mech-beast in action ERH+!

[HMart 345]

Fantastic work Bikerdude and you as well ERH+ your mission looks very original congrats.

[VanishedOne 550]

 

Trick or thief...

[Goldwell 2502]

After months of working on it, The Accountant 1: Thieves and Heirs is finally finished! It is a completely brand new mission in the accountant series that serves as the predecessor to the accountant 2.

 

Now I will be rolling out the beta to my testers with the hopes of seeing release within 1-2 weeks of this post. In the meantime here is the briefing video and an in-game screenshot.

 

https://youtu.be/Tk9DtOT4kjc

 

 

 

[Epifire 793]

EDIT: Post removed

[Bienie 440]

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.

 

 

 

[Goldwell 2502]

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

[Springheel 4683]

Cool! Looking forward to these.

[R Soul 199]

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.

[R Soul 199]

I got the material reader implemented in Blender. Paths are hardcoded so the next step is to have them set by the user.

[Bikerdude 3743]

Just created a new city background for my wip -

 

[Springheel 4683]

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.

[Bikerdude 3743]

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 November 26, 2017 by Bikerdude

[Epifire 793]

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.

[PranQster 459]

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.