So, what are you working on right now?

[MirceaKitsune]

2 hours ago, grodenglaive said:

that's gonna be a creepy one!

Yep: Wanted to see how weird and surreal I could get, the plan was to do something for Halloween but unlikely it will be ready before then. More crazy stuff I added in the meantime... much fun you can have using heads as animated props.

Spoiler

 

Edited September 14 by MirceaKitsune

[MirceaKitsune]

Different FM, because I like to work on 1000 things and finish none apparently. The awesomeness of the church interior modules may be underestimated.

[MirceaKitsune]

Naturalist yet industrial mountain side town, coming together very well so far and quite close to what I imagined. Quite happy with the detail even if that part of me feels it needs more. From the same FM as the church I posted last time, that's the interior of the white mansion building.

[joebarnin]

I like the curves (bridge & road)

[MirceaKitsune]

32 minutes ago, joebarnin said:

I like the curves (bridge & road)

I did those with patches, always love the flexibility that offers compared to more fixed models. Wasn't sure how that bridge would turn out but it ended up alright. Same as the river that flows down in steps, waterfalls are tricky to do but it's a challenge I figured I'd go for and it looks acceptable in the end.

[Amadeus]

13 hours ago, MirceaKitsune said:

Naturalist yet industrial mountain side town, coming together very well so far and quite close to what I imagined. Quite happy with the detail even if that part of me feels it needs more. From the same FM as the church I posted last time, that's the interior of the white mansion building.

 

Yeah, I agree with joebarnin, I really like the curves on the roads and bridges, and I really like your use of mixing natural elements with city infrastructure, like the stream, the forest, etc. I hope you ramp up the natural elements a bit more because I think you have a cool mountain scene going on here. Great work!

[MirceaKitsune]

Added an arch to make the bridge better, also lowered the railing a bit and fixed its texture: It's going to be a nice view both when on it and from afar! Hoping to work on the outside forest a bit next.

As for the guards I actually pathed the entire road system with a common circuit: You can see a bunch of them together like that when they happen to clump together from different parts of town, which personally I think is more random and natural. There will only be this many of them on the last difficulty: I now set them to Easy = 4, Normal = 8, Hard = 12.

[MirceaKitsune]

So I may become the first mapper crazy enough to not only make a full on daytime FM, but the ever first TDM level to have a daytime cycle. Not a smooth one where you watch the sun go down, the system for that would be far more complex and the rotating parallel light would wreck performance. Instead there's going to be a day a dusk and a night that switch when the player completes key objectives.

I'm using 4 global lights only 2 of which change: The ambient world which I may want to remove, and fog which is constant since that seems to have issues with being toggled... the actual ambiance is achieved by using cubemap illumination which was recently fixed, and of course a parallel light sun. All torches and street lamps are off during the day and dusk and come on during night... for performance sake more than anything, even without other lights a single parallel sky will still wreck the FPS. Kinda tragic that volumetric lighting doesn't work with parallel / parallelsky or else it would be even prettier... rather tempted to ask about that.

Don't worry about the lightgem: The goal is to only have guards turn hostile at night... either the player must do something to upset them before the sun goes down, or I might go with the classic curfew so they're only enemies at night. I thought of making it cyclical so you can use the bed to endlessly advance by 6 hours, but I doubt it's worth the extra complexity for an already complex setup, I may leave it for my open world concept if that ever happens. In the meantime, if anyone's wondered what a detailed daytime level looks like in TheDarkMod, here's a glimpse into something more unusual!

Edited September 24 by MirceaKitsune

[AluminumHaste]

There's been a few daytime missions, but none with a day/night cycle

[MirceaKitsune]

55 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

There's been a few daytime missions, but none with a day/night cycle

I only remember one that was full daytime and had sunlight: Very old roughly 10 years ago, the action took place somewhere in a network of barns I think. I remember I didn't enjoy it as much since it wasn't too detailed: This was well before building modules and more existed, the brush work was rough but the result was unique in its way.

But yes mine may end up using time advancement with 2 or 3 or 4 modes, I've considered making it rain / snow in one. The setup is ridiculously simple too: I didn't even use a script just a few triggers, sun lights and ambience can be toggled like normal lamps while the skybox cubemap can be converted to func_static and use the "hide" spawnarg to be targeted the same way; Kinda surprised no one's done it yet given how easy it is with just a couple of entities, only limitation is you don't want the player to see the sky when the skybox switches so the triggering objective must be indoor.

Parallel lights are very performance intensive sadly: Between one sun light covering the whole map versus 10 lamps and torches visible at a time, the former is more than 30 FPS slower than the later! I got a lot of FPS back by using the LOD models of building modules as well as noshadows on every module after a low distance; You now see shadows snapping a lot as you navigate but it's consistently close to 90 FPS now so I'll take it.

[MirceaKitsune]

Added sunlight shining through windows for the player's house. This was a bit more complex: You need a set for each daytime and window which all have to be toggled in order, thankfully I only use a sun during day and dusk but still. There are two lights, one for the sun shining through and one for ambient lighting around the window meant to represent sky light instead, for the best realism you have to check which windows are hit by the sun and not shadowed then only add the sun light for those.

[grodenglaive]

That sunlight effect looks really cool. It's looking to be a very beautiful fm

[kin]

On 9/25/2024 at 5:45 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Added sunlight shining through windows for the player's house. This was a bit more complex: You need a set for each daytime and window which all have to be toggled in order, thankfully I only use a sun during day and dusk but still. There are two lights, one for the sun shining through and one for ambient lighting around the window meant to represent sky light instead, for the best realism you have to check which windows are hit by the sun and not shadowed then only add the sun light for those.

Can you make that tree in the last pic cast alpha shadows through the leaves on the ground? Daylight mission looks amazing!

[MirceaKitsune]

8 hours ago, kin said:

Can you make that tree in the last pic cast alpha shadows through the leaves on the ground? Daylight mission looks amazing!

Thanks! If you mean through the window not easily, I'd need a custom window texture and for now I added a lot of complexity as is. I do wish the default trees and grass would cast alpha shadows though: Their materials have always been set to noshadows, but in the meantime shadow maps with support for transparent shadow casters were added, despite this the default grass was never modified to allow them which I'm definitely in favor of changing.

[MirceaKitsune]

Dusk lighting and skybox, first change you get after using the bed then comes night. The lightgem is slightly lower but still high; Guards will remain non-hostile at this stage, I may add a few AI that attack if you get too close since you can sneak around at a distance if you avoid sunlight. Totally wish volumetrics for parallel lights could be fixed to make this even prettier.

[AluminumHaste]

Welcome back to Morrowind

EDIT: wasn't an insult, 2nd screenshot looks like morrowind in a good way. Looking great

[Bergante]

On 9/24/2024 at 2:51 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Instead there's going to be a day a dusk and a night that switch when the player completes key objectives.

I love it 
especially the Dawn look 
Daylight now seems - for my taste - much too bright/white

and ( I don't know about your plot - so I don't know if it would fit)
the idea : Give the player a bedroom to rest -
so he chooses at what time of day he will carry out the mission through sleep 

[Arcturus]

2 hours ago, Bergante said:

Daylight now seems - for my taste - much too bright/white

The highlights are blown out. I can see from quick search that tone mapping has been discussed on the forum in the past. The game settings menu has the 64 bit color precision option (it mentions that it is needed for bloom), but tone mapping like Filmic or AgX has not been implemented so far?

[MirceaKitsune]

10 hours ago, Bergante said:

I love it 
especially the Dawn look 
Daylight now seems - for my taste - much too bright/white

and ( I don't know about your plot - so I don't know if it would fit)
the idea : Give the player a bedroom to rest -
so he chooses at what time of day he will carry out the mission through sleep 

I tried to make day and dusk as different as possible, the goal is for day mode to be fully bright. Personally I like how that looks given how different it is from standard TDM for a change. Tone mapping would definitely be nice, and I have indeed been hoping for Filmic / AgX support but never asked about that; There are some settings to tune the color curve but I haven't messed around with them, as well as a desaturation filter which can make things look a little more grimy and realistic.

[SeriousToni]

On 9/24/2024 at 2:51 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

So I may become the first mapper crazy enough to not only make a full on daytime FM, but the ever first TDM level to have a daytime cycle. Not a smooth one where you watch the sun go down, the system for that would be far more complex and the rotating parallel light would wreck performance. Instead there's going to be a day a dusk and a night that switch when the player completes key objectives.

I'm using 4 global lights only 2 of which change: The ambient world which I may want to remove, and fog which is constant since that seems to have issues with being toggled... the actual ambiance is achieved by using cubemap illumination which was recently fixed, and of course a parallel light sun. All torches and street lamps are off during the day and dusk and come on during night... for performance sake more than anything, even without other lights a single parallel sky will still wreck the FPS. Kinda tragic that volumetric lighting doesn't work with parallel / parallelsky or else it would be even prettier... rather tempted to ask about that.

Don't worry about the lightgem: The goal is to only have guards turn hostile at night... either the player must do something to upset them before the sun goes down, or I might go with the classic curfew so they're only enemies at night. I thought of making it cyclical so you can use the bed to endlessly advance by 6 hours, but I doubt it's worth the extra complexity for an already complex setup, I may leave it for my open world concept if that ever happens. In the meantime, if anyone's wondered what a detailed daytime level looks like in TheDarkMod, here's a glimpse into something more unusual!

Oh wow TDM now looks like TES Oblivion!

[datiswous]

On 9/24/2024 at 2:51 AM, MirceaKitsune said:

Don't worry about the lightgem

Maybe you could remove the lightgem in daylight scenes. Or better, make one that does nothing (because you keep the duck/standup indicator). Not sure, just a thought..

Edited October 1 by datiswous

[Goldwell]

 

This is the opening scene in Shadows of Northdale Act 3.

 

Sometimes I like to take a break after finishing a scene and just take it in. This scene was inspired by the calm and comfy feeling I felt when I first played @Moonbo's A House of Locked Secrets mission, in particular that first scene with the beautiful scenery and calming ambient. Right before diving into one of the best Dark Mod missions.

 

Good times!

 

[AluminumHaste]

I like it a lot, is the Ambient really that high in the mission?

[Goldwell]

9 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

I like it a lot, is the Ambient really that high in the mission?

Only the intro area is. The rest of the mission is at night.

[MirceaKitsune]

Very beautiful and inspiring shot! Working on one or two mountain maps, wanted to make something a bit like that, that does give me a bit of extra motivation for some designs.