Inspiring Photographs For Missions

[Ombrenuit]

I was planning a mission for the Dark Mod featuring a castle that exists in the real world, namely France. However, when I first saw this photograph I felt I needed to share it with you all, and why not make a thread for these sorts of moody photographs? It would be great for mission inspiration I would think and a bit of fun too. Here is mine:

 

[sparhawk]

That looks really cool.

[loudogskank]

 

Imagine this at night, without the cars, in the fog, with zombies all around. Only issue I can see is its a shitload of polygons.

[sparhawk]

Since you don't get near a lot of these structures, it might also work with creating textures and normalmaps.

[Dram]

you know, i was thinking. Since d3 has parallax map support, why don't we take advantage of it and use it for things like this? itd beat using thousands of polygons.

[Macsen]

My fave building, at night.

[Entropy]

you know, i was thinking. Since d3 has parallax map support, why don't we take advantage of it and use it for things like this? itd beat using thousands of polygons.

 

What sort of performance hit do you get? Has anyone got a working demo going with a solid framerate?

[Dram]

the performance hit was about 10-15fps in normal d3 maps.

 

i would imagine this parralax mapping would be only good for the future, as now our pcs arent good enough imo

[obscurus]

They are good enough if you happen to have a top of the line AMD 64 FX with 2 GB RAM and an SLI dual nVidia FX 7800 setup... anything less will run like a tortoise in honey.

[Dram]

nah, i have a amd athlon xp 2600+ , geforce 6600gt 128mb, 512ddr ram.

 

runs ok on doom3 maps, as i said before. plus its not much of a hassle to add anyways, because all you have to do is run the normal maps through a plugin and it makes the parallax maps.

 

thats what he said anyways (the creator of the plugin).

 

could have potential in darkmod methinks. as an option though lol.

[sxotty]

Err, I don't know if this counts, but I drew it sorry I don't have a scanner...

[Dram]

hehehe, thats sick

[OrbWeaver]

Did anyone else see quite a lot of Thief-like potential in the LoTR films?

 

I thought Moria would be a very good setting for a level, as would Minas Morgul.

[Hylix Ulyx]

I thought the LoTR films had a lot of potential...

 

But that's how these things go....

[Entropy]

nah, i have a amd athlon xp 2600+ , geforce 6600gt 128mb, 512ddr ram.

 

runs ok on doom3 maps, as i said before. plus its not much of a hassle to add anyways, because all you have to do is run the normal maps through a plugin and it makes the parallax maps.

 

thats what he said anyways (the creator of the plugin).

 

could have potential in darkmod methinks. as an option though lol.

 

My thoughts are 'sure, go for it.' If the performance hit isn't too bad, well when Dark Mod comes into it's own people will have upgraded anyway in all likelihood and counteract the hit to framerate. Project Offset was featured on AOTS last night or the night before and they appeared to be using parallax mapping on the floor at one point, making a flat 2-poly surface appear very convincingly to have much more detail. If you download sneak preview 2 then it's under the troll at the beginning. Unfortunately you only get a glimpse in that video, and I'm not 100% sure it's parallax mapping.

Edited October 28, 2005 by Entropy

[FishFace]

I'd like to see more maps with huge structures. You know, something like Angelwatch, except bigger and with more architecture. With something that big, you get such a 'woooaah' factor looking up at such a massive structure - and that kind of awe is so rarely felt in games. Occasionally you get some snazzy graphics that make you think, "neat," but true awe, such as that inspired by real-life architecture, is something out of that league. We wants it.

 

I feel that that castle would do something like that - it would feel appropriate to start the level down there in that river, clamber among the rocks, and then have to climb up a scree slope, so you're looking up at this humongous beast of a building, then having a selection of windows to shoot rope arrows it.

I get a similar feeling looking at the gates of Mordor, or the Deeping Wall & Hornburg.

 

In short, give me architecture and give it me BIG!

[Macsen]

In short, give me architecture and give it me BIG!

 

You know, the point of the Dark Mod is that it provides tools for people to build stuff themselves.

[sxotty]

I feel that that castle would do something like that - it would feel appropriate to start the level down there in that river, clamber among the rocks, and then have to climb up a scree slope, so you're looking up at this humongous beast of a building, then having a selection of windows to shoot rope arrows it.

I get a similar feeling looking at the gates of Mordor, or the Deeping Wall & Hornburg.

 

In short, give me architecture and give it me BIG!

I was actually writing a story and the castle was in it. I drew the castle so I could describe it. I also tried making it in doom3 but ran into snags.

 

 

That is a shot from blender, but getting it into doom3 has proven very difficult. I have it now in doom3, but the silly thing is transluscent, and I really have no idea how one would texture it, but it is huge... Anyway if someone here could build the terrain easily, I could make the castle exterior, and obviously for a map like that you would have exterior separated from interior so it could truly be epic in scale...

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

polygons schmolygons.. things should be built to take the most powerful hardware to the limit. Some people spend their time on their career and have the money for the latest machine but have no time, some people have tons of time, but no money. And, yes yes, huge castles, huge cities are good. Moody architecture is good. I'm still in shock from playing TDP the first time. I have a few castles and old Victorian and Edwardian monoliths standing around my town - maybe I'll someday have time to grab my camera and go for a walk around town. By the way, here's an idea: invest a couple hundred man-hours into assessing the feasibility of running Darkmod, flushed with polygons on linux-beowulf combo with software pre-processing and gigabit ethernet. ;-)

[FishFace]

You know, the point of the Dark Mod is that it provides tools for people to build stuff themselves.

 

In short, give me the capability to build architecture and give me the capability to build it BIG!

 

And give me someone with more skill than me to build it

[OrbWeaver]

That is a shot from blender, but getting it into doom3 has proven very difficult. I have it now in doom3, but the silly thing is transluscent, and I really have no idea how one would texture it, but it is huge... Anyway if someone here could build the terrain easily, I could make the castle exterior, and obviously for a map like that you would have exterior separated from interior so it could truly be epic in scale...

 

I wouldn't recommend trying to model the entire terrain as one huge object. The amount of overdraw will be phenomenal once you start adding lights, and there will be no occlusion or portalling possible.

 

Best to draw out the basic spaces in Radiant and then start adding individual models or patches to make it look "natural".

[god_is_my_goldfish]

Project Offset was featured on AOTS last night or the night before and they appeared to be using parallax mapping on the floor at one point, making a flat 2-poly surface appear very convincingly to have much more detail. If you download sneak preview 2 then it's under the troll at the beginning. Unfortunately you only get a glimpse in that video, and I'm not 100% sure it's parallax mapping.

 

It is, I read an article on offset in my mag last month that explains some of the tech used in it. Almost every surface in that game will have parallax mapping.

[Maximius]

Did anyone else see quite a lot of Thief-like potential in the LoTR films?

 

I thought Moria would be a very good setting for a level, as would Minas Morgul.

 

The Hobbit has Bilbo sneaking into Smaugs lair, it would be fun to do something along those lines.

[Order of the Hammer Bureaucrat]

Sure, there's potential in LOTR. Just the ambience of the tavern on the edge of town is priceless. I still think however that the biggest potential in terms of novels comes from the works of Sir Doyle and O. Henry: the atmosphere, the times and the people...

[bardic]

Does anyone know how many polys or objects you could conceivably put into a room in a Dark Mod map? Just for fun messing with the T3 editor, I had a huge room with 1700 plants and trees (no lights, just upped the ambient lighting) and performance dropped to about 10-15fps. I then did it with 2000 chairs, which have more polys, and managed to choke it down to 5-8 fps.

 

So my question is, the lights in the first picture would probably kill performance, but how would the D3 engine handle that many of the same mesh, or different meshes if that doesn't make a difference? Could a huge outdoor area like that be made?

Edited November 1, 2005 by bardic