Skyboxing a City

[HappyCheeze]

So all some of you know, I've been working on a city map.

 

I started to learn about visportals and I realized that the way I designed my map would be tricky when it comes to visportals. One big thing thats hindering my progress is the fact that I did the ultimate mapper no-no (enclosing the entire map in a cube of skybox)

 

I have a question and one thing to say.

 

First is, How should I (like the title says) sky box a city?

I'm trying to avoid doing the ultimate mapper no-no

 

What I'm gonna say is in my attempt at teaching my self vispotaling and getting to understand them I started with an indoor map to practice on, well one thing led to another and soon I've gotten better at making archways and bevels and working with patch meshes. Than I started going crazy with putting in details to give the place some variety... And what do you know? I've got another map )

Sorry that its on facebook, you can still see it even without logging on, I'll soon look into photo bucket or something like that so I won't have to get the resolution reduced, but this is what I got until than.

 

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=...p;id=1263360620

I'm thinking its some sort of temple part of a large castle or something along those lines. Like a technologically advance people's temple )

 

What do you guys think?

[Baddcog]

You've got some pretty cool details there.

 

They seem overly hi-tech though. Mix with the stone and old-school lamps seems like an odd mix to me.

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As far as the city. Don't think of it as much inthe terms as a large city, but more like a series of hallways. The outermost of which just have 'city' painted on the walls.

 

I think alot of people get in the 'huge wall' rut too. Sometimes a tall wall is a good barier to the other parts of a city. But alot of time buildings are best. Buildings that can or can't be entered.

Build facades around the edges of gameplay area, but don't build them all flat along a wall, give that outside wall alot of shape. Some buildings stick out aways, some are set back...

[jdude]

You have to be very planned out and creative when it comes to visportaling a city. I'm currently trying to work about it to create a tutorial on it. Listen to what Baddcog said though and read up on vis portals. That unfortunately is the only advice I can give at this time. I'll post here when I'm finished a wiki article on it.

 

BTW cool picture I like the architecture in ti :]

[HappyCheeze]

As far as the city. Don't think of it as much inthe terms as a large city, but more like a series of hallways. The outermost of which just have 'city' painted on the walls.

 

Interesting

 

 

They seem overly hi-tech though. Mix with the stone and old-school lamps seems like an odd mix to me.

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Well I was just going with what I have :-P

 

I can only do so much with thief's den resources :-D

[Domarius]

It really helps to open the original Thief 2 city maps in DromEd, such as Life of the Party, and Tracing the Courier.

 

You can really see how from a top down view, it simply is a snaking maze of hallways, and yet from the player's perspective, the illusion of being in a fully modelled city is very convincing.

 

So then you wonder why - and you start seeing the artistic placement of "background buildings" in certain spots where you can see between buildings, and tricks like that.

[Bukary]

As far as the city. Don't think of it as much inthe terms as a large city, but more like a series of hallways. The outermost of which just have 'city' painted on the walls.

That's the most common advice you will hear, HappyCheeze. And probably the wisest advice.

 

What's interesting? The biggest and most impressive city in the history of thiefy missions was NOT built that way. Just open Purah's "Midnight in Murkbell" in DromEd. You will see 4 (if I remember correctly) giant cubes (with 4 giant cones as floors) filled with buildings.

 

Would it be possible to build that way in DarkRadiant? I don't know. Perhaps someone here will tell you. Would it be possible to build Murkbell with the use of 'hallways technique'? I also don't know. But these giant cones and cubes allowed Purah to create [a] very interesting and beautiful places, some GREAT views from the roofs (do you remember cathedral seen from the other side of the canal?) [c] and get rid of this 'it's just a series of hallways' feeling that you might experience while playing many city FMs.

 

 

 

 

 

Perhaps it is possible to create some large cube and fill it carefully with solid brushes and visportals. The problem is how to block views in a way that makes the player think he/she can look everywhere and see some huge portions of terrain from the roofs. City enclosed from above (without 'thief's highway') might be boring.

 

A good tutorial is definitely needed. Good luck and thanks in advance, jdude!

Edited August 8, 2008 by Bukary

[Baddcog]

To what Bukary said:

 

Yep, CL is probably one of the most impressive T2 missions. The major issue most people had with it at the time is

Performance. I beta tested, my machine ran T2 great. But I had so many crashes I hadn't finished the first mission by the tme the entire team had played through the end.

I do want to get T@ installed on Vista and play through it now, with my current hardware I bet I'd get 30 fps+ everywhere.

 

But also, T2 didn't handle terrain the same. What you see is what it rendered, so while usually not recommended you do do the big airspace filled with solid and get away with it.

I think it would be VERY hard to vis-portal and get good performance with Darkmod that way.

 

It would have been possible to build that mission in hallways, but might've taken more time, might've also exceeded the brush limit of T2.

 

Keep in mind that your hallways don't have to be straight walls, They don't have to be straight up from the ground. You can have overhangs, recesses, etc...

 

But with Darkmod we have one VERY valuable resource T2 did not have.

Skyboxes. This is a term that I think alot of people get confused by. The actual sky around the player is NOT the sky box. That's just sky texture.

The skybox is an actual area outside the play area that player can never get to. It can be a box but doesn't have to be, it just needs to be sealed. In thiefs den it contains the moon, the sky and some buildings that are rendered on the play area sky tex so it looks like there are things behind the playable area.

The cool thing is that you can texture the close buildings with normal tex, building further back you can do in black for a siloette. That can add an immense level of depth that couldn't be had in T2. They had some really simple building siloettes painted on a texture.

 

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Remeber too that Purah was one of the few Thief FM level designers to go on to a profession career designing for Arx Fatalis, then Dark Messiah. He's really good

[SneaksieDave]

@HappyCheeze: some very cool stencil-like brushwork there, I really like where that's going. Interesting and different. Makes me think of either a tech-meets-earthy cult thing, or perhaps a mysterious/lost civilization type of dealie. Upon opening the first image, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, "now that's cool."

 

 

(I'd do away with the carpet, myself. Or at least that carpet.)

[HappyCheeze]

a tech-meets-earthy cult thing, or perhaps a mysterious/lost civilization type of dealie.

 

Thats sort of what I thought after I stopped going on my spree of making the wall plating.

 

I'm thinking some sort of tech temple, like an old Builder secret hang out or something along those lines.

[Bukary]

But with Darkmod we have one VERY valuable resource T2 did not have.

[...]

The cool thing is that you can texture the close buildings with normal tex, building further back you can do in black for a siloette. That can add an immense level of depth that couldn't be had in T2. They had some really simple building siloettes painted on a texture.

 

Simple siloettes? Are you sure?

 

 

[Baddcog]

That's Vigils texture that I think was probably released sometime around 2004.

 

I didn't mean that a better one couldn't be made, just that T2's were very basic. But still, we could add that to Darkmod AND put a layer of real skybox buildings in between.

 

We can also do what is very well done in TF2 (Team Fortress 2). Actually have a street leaving from behind a gate that looks like world terrain but is simply skybox terrain.

[Bukary]

We can also do what is very well done in TF2 (Team Fortress 2). Actually have a street leaving from behind a gate that looks like world terrain but is simply skybox terrain.

Is there any advantage of placing such brushes (buildings) inside the skybox instead of making another street (cube with buildings) behind the gate? Performance?

[Domarius]

Calendra's Legacy was great - but because it used a big air brush it would have ran like crap on the Thief 2 target system. But supposedly a lot of people's systems were faster than the original T2 specs so it was actually possible for people to play it.

 

Likewise, if you try to make a city at comparable level of detail to a Thief Deadly Shadows city, using one huge area, it will also run like crap on todays systems, but faster systems in the future could run it. Oh probably not, since faster systems just use more cores these days, and Doom 3 can only use one core.

[HappyCheeze]

Thief Deadly Shadows city, using one huge area

 

Would you be able to split into multiple level transitions?

 

Like in the deadly shadows missions, theres usually multiple parts of the same mission, ie. The rutherford mansion, there is the average area and than the place with the cook and lord rutherford's bedroom etc.

[Komag]

Seeing as how everyone hated that aspect of the game I'm not sure it would be a smart idea to try to replicate it. But as far as Dark Mod being able to do so, I imagine it could to some degree at least, since in Doom 3 you could go back to previous sections. I'm not sure how it would be handled for details such as whether you moved those crates, whether a guard was chasing you, etc.

[Baddcog]

Well, in TF@ everything is at 16th scale in the skybox. All the props,etc...

They also use 'skybox props' which are lwoer poly and lower tex res than the same props used in the gameplay areas. So that helps add details to the skybox and save system resources. It also helps eliminate vis-leafs (which is a drawback to Hammer). They are autmotically created somewhat haphazardly by the editor. We can add visportals ONLY where we want them which is a plus for Radiant.

 

I think one way it could help performance is to eliminate pathfinding in alleys off to the side, ofcource filling them with monster clip might do just as well.

 

I haven't messed with skyboxes in Radiant enough. But some cool things I did with Hammer like making a chapel in the game area. It's tower ended at the sky, but the roof was 16th scale and rendered directly on top of the church tower. That saved me about 40 feet in hieght in the gameplay area. I think this could also be donw in the middle of a level in Radiant to simulate a very tall tower that can be seen from all over the city. It would always be rendered in the sky behind the buildings you could see but you could close off areas to help with vis-portalling.

[Domarius]

Seeing as how everyone hated that aspect of the game I'm not sure it would be a smart idea to try to replicate it. But as far as Dark Mod being able to do so, I imagine it could to some degree at least, since in Doom 3 you could go back to previous sections.

No you couldn't - whenever you saw a loading screen, it was loading a new level. The "going back" levels were entire new levels that only looked like the previous levels, but with changes.

 

We have talked about adding support for this, simply because it lets you create missions that are just larger than the possible maximum map size, but not for the first release.

[Komag]

Ah I see. But it doesn't matter too much at this point since we can currently make pretty huge maps without any "loading zones".

[jdude]

Here's a small tutorial I've written up. It deals mainly with optimization right now, I haven't got around to talking about some stuff but I think it may help:

 

http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/...ing_Large_Areas

 

I still need to talk about making climbable buildings because they require different styles of planning, and errors within large maps one may encounter.

[Crispy]

Cool. Excellent start.

 

One comment: Rather than hosting images on imageshack, which tends to delete them after a while, may I suggest you upload images to be hosted on the wiki using this link: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Special:Upload . That way we won't lose them.

[Bukary]

Great tutorial, jdude! Thank you!

 

I am eagerly waiting for the guide explaining how to build climbable areas of the city.

Edited August 11, 2008 by Bukary

[greebo]

One comment: Rather than hosting images on imageshack, which tends to delete them after a while, may I suggest you upload images to be hosted on the wiki using this link: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Special:Upload . That way we won't lose them.

I've pushed the images to our own server and replaced the links in the article. I also took the freedom to replace "noshadow" with "noshadows" which is the correct name of the light spawnarg. The illustration still says "noshadow" - jdude, do you still have the working copy of that illustration at hand?

[HappyCheeze]

Rather than hosting images on imageshack, which tends to delete them after a while, may I suggest you upload images to be hosted on the wiki using this link: http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Special:Upload . That way we won't lose them.

 

I actually just got a deviant art account,

 

you can check mine out at http://happycheeze.deviantart.com/

 

But if I were to use that special upload, do I need to have a special TDM wiki account?

[Tels]

I actually just got a deviant art account,

 

you can check mine out at http://happycheeze.deviantart.com/

 

But if I were to use that special upload, do I need to have a special TDM wiki account?

 

Yes I think you can just register at the wiki - either it works automatically, or some admin will get notified and set you up.

[HappyCheeze]

Yes I think you can just register at the wiki - either it works automatically, or some admin will get notified and set you up.

 

Sweet just registered.

 

Would it be okay if I made a tutorial?

 

Also, the spiral staircase tutorial has missing images, just thought I'd point that out.