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Glass Shader/texture


Fingernail

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wicked.jpg

 

Wee....you can see through the windows, and it nicely distorts/defracts the image.

 

So no more flat windows.

 

 

Anyway, I haven't yet made it so that the black lattice bars are entirely opaque, but that should be easy, a few tweaks to the alpha at best.

 

Anyway, I'll do a tut soon. It's all in the .mtr definition files...and it kills framerate in the editor, but ingame, it's fine.

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I have to be honest...I actually like the opaque ones better. :) I'm sure transluscent windows will be useful, but a lot of windows of the time period actually WERE pretty opaque.

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Hey, this may be stuff you already know, but people are asking about making coloured glass and stuff in this thread at D3W.

 

http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=5833

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wicked.jpg

 

Wee....you can see through the windows, and it nicely distorts/defracts the image.

 

So no more flat windows.

 

 

Anyway, I haven't yet made it so that the black lattice bars are entirely opaque, but that should be easy, a few tweaks to the alpha at best.

 

Anyway, I'll do a tut soon. It's all in the .mtr definition files...and it kills framerate in the editor, but ingame, it's fine.

Wow, great work. Once I'm finished up with my studying and side projects I'll really have to fire up the doom editor and learn how to use it. It looks like a hell of a lot of fun. :)

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I have to be honest...I actually like the opaque ones better. :)  I'm sure transluscent windows will be useful, but a lot of windows of the time period actually WERE pretty opaque.

But they key word is "pretty" isn't it? They still weren't TOTALLY opaque - what was on the other side - light, shapes, etc. would affect what the window looked like, and you could tell there was a whole 'nother world on the other side, and not just a solid wall with a texture on it and a light object in front (a la T2).

 

Windows that are translucent would look WAY more atmospheric than the original "fake" windows, or perfectly transparent windows.

 

I would think with more fiddling with the alpha transparency and the 'wobbly' effect of Fingernail's windows, you could get a 'translucent' effect.

 

Imagine; it's not transparent enough for you to see properly through it, but it's not actually a solid wall either (the way it is in T2).

You can make out forms and light on the other side, and it would change as you move. This would look very cool and atmospheric, since the environment on the other side would affect what the window looks like, which is the kind of thing we've been trying to fake with textures and light objects in the previous games.

 

My only concern is how showing the extra geometry would affect frame rate. I guess you would only put translucent windows where you could afford the polycount.

Edited by Domarius
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You could probably cheat the translucent effect by using light materials but still keep the windows completely opaque. Say you were to make a small picture of a few silhouetted buildings and have it cast really faintly by a light onto a window. If you were tweak it just right you'd get a similar effect...not as good, of course, but it'd save on performance if you're hard up for it.

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I have no doubt about that. And while seeing a full courtyard through a transparent pane of glass is undeniably cool, you always have to take performance issues into consideration. You might have so much detail down there that an opaque window would be the better option. I'd rather go with highly detailed areas that are somewhat closed off from each other, IE you can't see inside a house from outside or outside from the inside, than sparse open areas. Visportals can help with this a little bit, but a few sacrifices will have to be made to make sure it runs well for everybody.

 

I'm not saying we can't use transparent windows, we'll just have to be selective about how we use em. I remember a map for Vamp I made that had almost 2000 brushes on display in a single screen...ran great on my comp, but it crashed the game for alot of other people. Since then I've tried learning how to keep something that looks good in check with it's performance.

Edited by Renzatic
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Yeah I mentioned that - its a feature like any other. Has to be used appropriately.

 

It would go really well in a church hall (that has been designed at a low poly count) with big windows. The church hall is really simple, and only has the windows on one wall (the others are fake, or non-existant maybe). Since the room is so simple, you can afford to be inside, looking out onto part of the street outside, or on the street outside, looking in.

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The big question is figuring out when to make these sacrifices and why. I'm intending on using a few more brushes than what we saw in Id's maps because Thief is a much slower game and can probably afford a slight framerate drop in comparison. We have this awesome engine at our disposal and all, so of course we should take advantage of it and do things we haven't seen in any Thief game to date....we just gotta use some common sense and think some stuff out.

 

From what I've seen Doom 3 uses about 4000-7000 brushes per map, with usually about 200-400 on display in a single scene (an admittedly pulled-out-of-my-ass estimation) . I plan on using about that same amount of brushes, maybe a little more if the memory requirements aren't too high, and about at most 700 of em onscreen at once. Since the engine can handle that amount you don't have to worry about making any threadbare rooms to save on performance, but to be on the safe side I wouldn't go over that mark.

 

For a quick example here...say you're in a bedroom that's made up of about 150 brushes...you could go ahead and throw a nice transluscent window in there and not worry about choking your graphics card...but if you're in a giant ass entryroom with a grand staircase I'd throw curtains over the windows to keep from drawing what's outside and adding to the burden.

 

lol, kind of a longwinded and sorta preachy post just to say what everyone pretty much already knows, but I wanted to throw it out anyway just to show how I plan on doing the maps.

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We need a target platform.

 

It is really handy in DromEd to have the showstats feature, and the recommendation in the Manual that "300 polys is okay for high detail areas, but try to keep areas that may have action in them down to 200 polys". Of course, nowadays we up that, for our target audience. I generally try to keep to 300, and only go higher for "pretty" areas.

 

I hope there is a similar "showstats" feature in Doom 3, 'cause then we can pick a statistic(s), like polys, brushes, or something, and set guideline limits that are appropriate for our target platform. Eg. 300 polys, 1000 portals.

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Well, don't forget that you can turn off the shadows completely in Doom 3 for really low-end PCs.....gulp....that destroys much of Thief gameplay for you, it would end up like quick-lighting in DromEd.

 

So we need to have a PC which can run the realtime shadows, which means probably a Pentium 2GHz at the low end and an Athlon 64 at the high end. Which approximately equates to a 128Mb Graphics card (Radeon or GeForce), for Medium to High detail. So if we aim for a PC like this:

 

Pentium 4 2.5Ghz/Athlon XP equiv

128Mb Graphics card (Radeon 9800 or GeForce FX recommended)

256Mb of Ram (512Mb most definitely recommended)

Some sort of sound, we like 5.1 surround.

OpenGL....weeeee.

 

Anyway, that's roughly what I expect the very average PC will be in 6 months/a years time.

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Yeah, it's key to remember that we won't be releasing this baby for a year (or I will be shocked). So it's ok to aim a little higher in terms of poly count and so forth, since the average Doom-playing machine will be better a year from now than it might be at this moment.

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I might be able to push the brushcount a bit farther then. Since Thief isn't quite so fast paced, and most of the NPC's won't be casting fireballs or summoning more crap and loading the screen with a billion effects, then I should be able to pull it off. It's also pretty unlikely that you'll see more than 4 guards onscreen at once...

 

But the first thing I need to do is get more ram. 512 megs just isn't cutting it anymore, and the editor likes to crash on me when my available ram gets too low. So to fix this little problem I'm gonna fire up the old Poor Renzatic Fund (The PRF) again so now you all can donate to a most worthy cause....getting me more stuff! ;)

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Have you tried opening one of the Id maps yet? It'll slow my comp down to a crawl if I turn on realtime rendering and eat up all but a few megs of my ram even at default fullbright. If we're gonna make bigger maps than what Doom 3 had, and chances are we will, I'll have to upgrade to a gig at least.

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I reckon with Fingernail's target platform suggestion, and Kappow's "low end" system, we (well, you guys, cause I don't have D3 just yet) could use the equivelant of the "show stats" feature and come up with some guidline figures to keep the complexity at, for people who are level editing.

 

Good point Renzatic, if Doom 3 plays like Doom 2, with its hundreds of monsters at one time stuff, we should be able to make things look prettier than the original Doom3 levels in our Thief version.

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I'd love to have translucent windows used. The windows in Doom 3 -- when you can look outside, for instance -- were pretty cool in that they weren't perfect. The glass was imperfect, with a warbled effect. Will come in handy to have this at our disposal for Thief's time and age.

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Good point Renzatic, if Doom 3 plays like Doom 2, with its hundreds of monsters at one time stuff, we should be able to make things look prettier than the original Doom3 levels in our Thief version.

 

lol, nooo. Doom 3 isn't near as action packed as Doom 2 was. I'd say at most you'll get about 9 or 10 enemies onscreen at once, but they're usually throwing lightsourced fireballs or doing other cool looking things that could potentially eat up framerate. In Thief the guards don't do anything superfluous...they just walk around, talk, or occasionally carry a lantern. That's the big advantage we have.

 

Course that might change if we do zombies, haunts, ghosts, and other supernatural entities. We could really go to town with them.

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