[WIP] Precipice

[Dwood]

Add trees now so you can add lightmaps via 3ds max at high quality.

[Siliconmaster]

There are trees. And bushes. And stuff. But lightmaps come last- I want to make sure everything is where I want it first. That means a playtest, which I might be able to do next week at my friend's house.

Edit: Finally- fixed the last stubborn visual error. Precipice is now (as far as I know) 100% portal-error free.

[DarkHalo003]

Basically you should portal stuff anyway, but necessary portals are related to poly count, not size. You can have a massive 6 sided cube for a map, but you'll hit the default engine render distance before the game will start complaining about portals. And vice versa, you can have a really small, detailed map that MUST have portals. It all depends on how much stuff there is in your map.

For Precipice, most of my exterior stuff has no portals whatsoever, because it's fairly low-poly. However, my interiors have a lot more detail. My big problem has been my bases- optimized, each one has 20,690 faces. That's right, all in one room. 17,000 of those are on one wall. And you wonder why I've been struggling to get that room working right. However, now all I have to do is tweak the portals in red base to fix one very small problem, and then all the portals are done, thank god. Then I can move on to fixing glitches like the flag animations, figuring out why the spartan laser fix didn't work as planned, and tweaking spawn points and weapon spawn times. The end is near.

Oh yeah, and I still want to do custom lightmaps. Might as well go all out on this thing.

Okay thanks. I think this advice will become greatly in handy, since one of my maps is completely an interior and the other has a part of the a30 BSP interior (2nd part by the cliff), which is beyond an astronomical amount of faces.

[Siliconmaster]

Been doing some custom lightmap prep work. Got a lot of the outdoor stuff lit, and working on red base now. I think it looks pretty damned good so far. Of course, it's taking a shitton of lights to replicate the look of Halo's strip lights, and just to render a frame it already requires more than 4 Gb of ram. Thank god I upgraded to 8 Gb and Windows 7 64 bit.

Of course, I won't actually be able to render or import the lightmaps until I'm sure the bsp is finalized, which means a new beta test. No idea how I'll pull it off, but I'm sure I'll find a way.

[Inferno]

That looks... ominous... I like it a lot.

[PopeAK49]

I like how you are being original with the lighting.

[Higuy]

That looks really nice!! Keep up the good work.

[Siliconmaster]

Finished the red base sniper roosts.

Edit: And the flag room:

[jcap]

That lighting is crazy.

[DarkHalo003]

Looks very classic. I hope it is perfectly legit for gameplay. You wouldn't believe all of the pretty maps that don't play out well.