Technical questions for GC

[Goldchocobo]

Some people wanted to ask technical questions, so I started a thread for it.

Either me or MD will answer

Ask away...

[Bikerdude]

Ask away...

 

How did you do the following:

• the fog beams on some of the lights..
• the mist on harbor and the tower..
• you make the flowers move..
• the rocking boats..
• and last the 4000 bloody trees without getting fps drop..?

[Goldchocobo]

How did you do the following:

• the fog beams on some of the lights..
• the mist on harbor and the tower..
• you make the flowers move..
• the rocking boats..
• and last the 4000 bloody trees without getting fps drop..?

 

The light beams I did with a particle emitter. I'm not sure the name, but it's called "light" something something.

 

The mist/fog is done with more particle emitters. The particle in question is "TDM_dust", there are several different kind in there. I wish there were more, but it worked out nicely. It has a nice animated 3d look to it, floating about.

 

For anything rocking/swaying/moving, I used a func_pendulum. You simply place your pendulum at the base of the item that you want to swing, and designate the degree's and speed of which you want it to swing at, and bind your item to the pendulum. I made whole "chains" of items bound to each other, including swinging torches, lanterns. ie light_142 is bound to lantern, lantern is bound to a chain, chain is bound to the func_pendulum at the base of the swinging point. I hope this makes sense. I'm sure there's a wiki for it somewhere.

 

Since I had so much foliage for the forest, I made massive visportals that FORCE CLOSE on a certain distance, I think 1400 units. You don't notice them closing though since there is so many tree/foliage in the way. I also did this for certain city portions. The entity that does this is called "func_portal", and has a distcheck_period 1 and portal_dist 1400 (or whatever value you want). You place the func_portal ON your visportal, at about ground level.

 

Hope this helps . I'm sure MD has a couple things to add as well.

[Bikerdude]

The light beams I did with a particle emitter. I'm not sure the name, but it's called "light" something something.

 

The mist/fog is done with more particle emitters. The particle in question is "TDM_dust", there are several different kind in there. I wish there were more, but it worked out nicely. It has a nice animated 3d look to it, floating about.

 

For anything rocking/swaying/moving, I used a func_pendulum. You simply place your pendulum at the base of the item that you want to swing, and designate the degree's and speed of which you want it to swing at, and bind your item to the pendulum. I made whole "chains" of items bound to each other, including swinging torches, lanterns. ie light_142 is bound to lantern, lantern is bound to a chain, chain is bound to the func_pendulum at the base of the swinging point. I hope this makes sense. I'm sure there's a wiki for it somewhere.

 

Since I had so much foliage for the forest, I made massive visportals that FORCE CLOSE on a certain distance, I think 1400 units. You don't notice them closing though since there is so many tree/foliage in the way. I also did this for certain city portions. The entity that does this is called "func_portal", and has a distcheck_period 1 and portal_dist 1400 (or whatever value you want). You place the func_portal ON your visportal, at about ground level.

 

Hope this helps . I'm sure MD has a couple things to add as well.

 

Sweet I'm gonna have a go at some of that..

[Mortem Desino]

Doom 3's renderer somehow got lazy optimizing their particle system, so giant particle effects (while great eye candy) can tax performance. Those fog beams on lights can also be done with cylinder patches. There's a semi-transparent decal texture called "textures/darkmod/sfx/moon_light_rays" that's got a pleasant grey-blue tint. I've mocked up a prefab, pictured below.

moon_rays_window.pfb.txt

 

(Looking at it, one of those prefabs counts up to only ~36 polys. Hardly performance intensive at all.)

 

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The mist around the harbor seems to be a func_emitter "model" "tdm_dustfog3.prt" and "shaderparm7" "any value from 0-1" (Just like the fog beams above use shaderparm7 = any value 0-1)

 

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See GoldChocobo's post above to make entities "sway" (binding to a func_pendulum)

 

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You can force visportals to close at a certain distance with an entity named func_portal. See the attached picture for an example.

What happens is that it checks the distance from the func_portal to the player every 1 second. If the player is greater than 1200 units away from "func_portal_12", the visportal that "func_portal_12" touches will close up.

 

I've used this in my own personal WIP map. Suppose there's a building with simple holes for windows. Putting only visportals in those holes will do no good optimizing at all, cuz they'll never close as long as they are in my view. But if I put a func_portal on each one, they can close up at a distance, and then open discretely as I get closer to the building.

 

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Also related to those trees: Not all the tree models are extremely hi-poly. The leaves on the trees are mostly particle effects. And every single tree in the forest has "noshadows" "1" set. I can get away with that because I've drawn my own light textures with shadows "hand-painted in." It's a bit painstaking at first, but I could recycle the same light texture over and over again to save on performance.

 

Here's an example of one light texture I drew. I took a photo of a forest canopy, touched it up in GIMP, and used it to draw leafy shadows on the ground.

[Tels]

Here's an example of one light texture I drew. I took a photo of a forest canopy, touched it up in GIMP, and used it to draw leafy shadows on the ground.

 

These (and a prefab wood) would make great additions to TDM!

[killhour]

Doom 3's renderer somehow got lazy optimizing their particle system, so giant particle effects (while great eye candy) can tax performance. Those fog beams on lights can also be done with cylinder patches. There's a semi-transparent decal texture called "textures/darkmod/sfx/moon_light_rays" that's got a pleasant grey-blue tint. I've mocked up a prefab, pictured below.

moon_rays_window.pfb.txt

 

(Looking at it, one of those prefabs counts up to only ~36 polys. Hardly performance intensive at all.)

 

I tried putting this in one of my maps, but it doesn't show up in-game.

[Mortem Desino]

Strange. Did you turn them into a func_static with the spawnarg "shaderparm7" "(any value from 0 (invisible)-1(strong))"

[killhour]

Strange. Did you turn them into a func_static with the spawnarg "shaderparm7" "(any value from 0 (invisible)-1(strong)) "

 

Yes, they're set to 0.6.

[Goldchocobo]

Yes, they're set to 0.6.

I think this may be a mod bug... not too sure why it started showing up recently. I'm having the same problem.

We're working on it.