[WIP] Simba (updated)

[LlamaMaster]

Original thread here:

http://www.modacity.net/forums/showthread.php?18116-WIP-Simba

Well, it took me an unhealthy amount of time, and Halo gave me the middle finger the entire way through with an unholy amount of errors and engine limitations, and I had to cut out several detailing techniques because Halo hates me, but at least it still looks decent. I haven't tested gameplay, and it could be pretty bad, but honestly, nobody is going to play this anyway. That's the way of Halo.

Here is a album of screenshots if you don't want to click the ones below:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/9/haloce2012031222162968.jpg/

Here are the shitton of screenshots:

http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/8677/haloce2012031222171481.th.jpg (http://img338.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222171481.jpg/)http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/4655/haloce2012031222165668.th.jpg (http://img210.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222165668.jpg/)http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/7849/haloce2012031222164418.th.jpg (http://img269.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222164418.jpg/)http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4420/haloce2012031222162968.th.jpg (http://img9.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222162968.jpg/)http://img854.imageshack.us/img854/339/haloce2012031222014575.th.jpg (http://img854.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222014575.jpg/)http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/5958/haloce2012031222065480.th.jpg (http://img141.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222065480.jpg/)http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/1418/haloce2012031222160213.th.jpg (http://img651.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222160213.jpg/)http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/8736/haloce2012031222020550.th.jpg (http://img853.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222020550.jpg/)http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/1008/haloce2012031222015271.th.jpg (http://img717.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222015271.jpg/)http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/8800/haloce2012031222161176.th.jpg (http://img13.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222161176.jpg/)http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/9596/haloce2012031222024133.th.jpg (http://img714.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222024133.jpg/)http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/1831/haloce2012031222022143.th.jpg (http://img191.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222022143.jpg/)http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/4239/haloce2012031222010753.th.jpg (http://img43.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222010753.jpg/)http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/7269/haloce2012031222011075.th.jpg (http://img638.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222011075.jpg/)http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/6553/haloce2012031222025636.th.jpg 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(http://img855.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222142537.jpg/)http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/1200/haloce2012031222134002.th.jpg (http://img809.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222134002.jpg/)http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/2549/haloce2012031222130104.th.jpg (http://img40.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222130104.jpg/)http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/3084/haloce2012031222123883.th.jpg (http://img31.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222123883.jpg/)http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/7280/haloce2012031222121591.th.jpg (http://img811.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222121591.jpg/)http://img851.imageshack.us/img851/230/haloce2012031222114988.th.jpg (http://img851.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222114988.jpg/)http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/8739/haloce2012031222110353.th.jpg (http://img38.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222110353.jpg/)http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/4241/haloce2012031222105382.th.jpg 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(http://img163.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222073098.jpg/)http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/1887/haloce2012031222071253.th.jpg (http://img822.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222071253.jpg/)http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/5958/haloce2012031222065480.th.jpg (http://img818.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222065480.jpg/)http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/752/haloce2012031222064060.th.jpg (http://img687.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222064060.jpg/)http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/4833/haloce2012031222060683.th.jpg (http://img201.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222060683.jpg/)http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/6799/haloce2012031222054144.th.jpg (http://img3.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222054144.jpg/)http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/4797/haloce2012031222050252.th.jpg (http://img191.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222050252.jpg/)http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/3290/haloce2012031222044784.th.jpg (http://img138.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222044784.jpg/)http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/8417/haloce2012031222042146.th.jpg (http://img18.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222042146.jpg/)http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/7233/haloce2012031222035872.th.jpg (http://img577.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222035872.jpg/)http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3026/haloce2012031222031118.th.jpg (http://img11.imageshack.us/i/haloce2012031222031118.jpg/)

Almost every texture in those pics was either made by me, or a photosourced texture from cgtextures.com that I edited to be game friendly. Same goes for shaders and models (with the exception of the waterfall shader I ripped from mystic, and the H2 teleporters). All screenshots are ingame, but require forced AF through your video card's control pannel to look that good. The poly count of the level is very high, but there is extremely limited to no clipping (which was extremely painful to accomplish).

Play testing is the only thing left, along with any other last minute shits-n-giggles stuff I might want to add. All models, tags, data, source files, and programs (that I can legally include) will be released to the community after the map is complete.

I should note that this map was originally supposed to be far more detailed, and I got the engine to render millions of polygons at a time, but Halo's shader system for scenery was so god awful that it made my carefully rendered lightmaps useless.

Example:

http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/65/unledmcj.jpg
http://img694.imageshack.us/img694/7021/halopolytest5.jpg

Oh, and regarding this comment from 3 years ago:


I don't know what gameplay you say you considered, as everything is just wide open for pistol and grenade spam, and sniping, as well as vehicle whoring.

I took out pistols as a starting weapon. I'll see how that works out. Also, I made several paths around the side for a reason. If the top is a circle jerk, you should be able to sneak around the sides. If this is actually the case has yet to be seen, but it shouldn't be too bad. Also, there are no vehicles.

Edit: Oh, and I know the ground texture is awful. I'm bad at pure texturing.

Edit again: Does anybody know if the name Simba is taken already? I searched Halomaps and got nothing.

[Higuy]

I aint going to go on a giant crit spree becuase I see alot of stuff that has room for improvement, but overall its neat and interesting.

Here's some stuff you could work on however:

1. Like you said yourself, the ground map really isn't that great. Some things you could do to improve it is to simply add in more detail around where rocks and such are, that greatly add's realsim. Just try to paint flow of terrain and streaks for erosion. It takes a bit of time but can help. I also cant really tell but utilizing an alpha for multiple textures also helps.

2. The Water. This goes along with your terrain texture slightly - by adding a darker, muddier looking portion to your river bed it really draws out a better looking water system. You should also revise the textures used in the waterfall and stream - both look pretty low res and don't really help the map in being pretty. Another thing you can do is add a second layer of water on the streams using a water! shader (no fog, just no collision), which adds a nice subtle realistic touch to it with some waves. As long as uv'd right, this can look pretty nice. There's also some other water I can see, which would do quite nicely with fog.

3. Lighting needs vast improvement. Honestly, this map could probably look alot better during night time, as those giant pink crystals could bring out some really cool lighting, along with other affects you could add.

Some other minor crap; the leaves on the tree are neat and unique but the shader dosen't do it justice what so ever, there way to bright. Add some tree's on top of the map (like flat plane ones from a30), this will make it not as boring up top even though you have the giant rainbow things and hands going on.

Overall its an interesting and unique map but some polish could do it justice and make it alot more pretty.

[LlamaMaster]

3. Lighting needs vast improvement. Honestly, this map could probably look alot better during night time, as those giant pink crystals could bring out some really cool lighting, along with other affects you could add.


This just kills me. I feel like this is a case of "monitor brightness," but it looks as perfect as I can possible get it on my screen. There is nothing I can do in my power on my side to make it look better than I see it. Rerendering is completely out of the question, as I had to paint over thousands of errors on individual polygons by hand to get it to this point, and rerendering would make it all useless.


1. Like you said yourself, the ground map really isn't that great. Some things you could do to improve it is to simply add in more detail around where rocks and such are, that greatly add's realsim. Just try to paint flow of terrain and streaks for erosion. It takes a bit of time but can help. I also cant really tell but utilizing an alpha for multiple textures also helps.

I did use alpha for multiple textures. As for the erosion and stuff....ugh, I really don't know how to go about doing that without repainting the thing completely. I might look into it, but if it proves too difficult and time comsuming I won't.


2. The Water. This goes along with your terrain texture slightly - by adding a darker, muddier looking portion to your river bed it really draws out a better looking water system. You should also revise the textures used in the waterfall and stream - both look pretty low res and don't really help the map in being pretty. Another thing you can do is add a second layer of water on the streams using a water! shader (no fog, just no collision), which adds a nice subtle realistic touch to it with some waves. As long as uv'd right, this can look pretty nice. There's also some other water I can see, which would do quite nicely with fog.

I can probably do something about the water texture, but there is nothing I can do about the fog. I know it's shitty, but Halo's engine makes it impossible (within my knowledge) to add a fog plane to a localized area without it engulfing every part of the map below that elevation.


Some other minor crap; the leaves on the tree are neat and unique but the shader dosen't do it justice what so ever, there way to bright. Add some tree's on top of the map (like flat plane ones from a30), this will make it not as boring up top even though you have the giant rainbow things and hands going on.

The shader was bright on purpose. It was supposed to be a source of light, but I cut that idea out later because it would ruin all the shadow detail below the tree. But yeah, even if people hate that, I'm not changing it. I intended it to look like that.

As for the trees on top, hmmmm. I....I don't know, I'll think about it.

But yeah, again, do those lightmaps seriously look bad? I worked my fucking ass off getting those to look good on my screen. I tweaked settings on vary hours and hours on end, I adjusted my gamma to try to calibrate it to a "correct" setting for people, and I hand painted a retarded amount of the lightmaps that vray couldn't do itself. This, just, kills me.


Edit: I just looked at my screenshots on my laptop screen. They look like shit. Fucking hell, how am I supposed to keep the quality consistent across different screens? If I make it look good on one, then it looks bad on another. The colors on the screen I was making the map on look bright, vivid, and contrasted. On my laptop screen all the subtle lighting effects are gone, and everything looks bland and overbright. I hate this.

[Ki11a_FTW]

I like the weeds and grass. How did you do that? Detail objects or what?

[LlamaMaster]

I like the weeds and grass. How did you do that? Detail objects or what?
I went out into my yard, ripped up about 12 different types of weeds, scanned them against a velvet-backed magnetic dart board (for a black background), cropped out the weeds to add an alpha channel, placed all the weeds into a single bitmap, made 12 different plane objects in MAX with the UV's of each weed, used a scattering plugin to randomly place the weeds on my ground geometry (using the alpha channel of my ground bitmap to tell the plugin where to place weeds), exported parts of the weed clusters to a scenery model, and placed in sapien. This would have worked perfectly, but Halo's scenery lighting engine fucked everything up.

[DarkHalo003]

I'm not digging the cliff textures; they look too tiled and grainy IMO. Try something broader perhaps?

[PopeAK49]

I'm not expecting too much more to be done to your map. Seeing as it is a Halo CE map, you only need a few minor adjustments here and there with the terrain textures but nothing drastic. Hell I'd say it would be a great map if you populated it already.

Love the originality with random objects. Can't wait for the release!

[Cortexian]

Lighting.

Make it better if you can please! :)

[LlamaMaster]

Lighting.

Make it better if you can please! :)
I'll just say this again, because lots of people probably aren't going to read my tl;dr post. It's as perfect as I can get it on my screen. In fact, it looks fantastic. However, that doesn't matter if everybody doesn't have the same settings as me. How do I go about fixing this? So far my only idea is editing the saturation/contrast of all my lightmaps and textures in photoshop to fit the settings of a "typical" screen (whatever that is), or give up.

[Cortexian]

Whole thing seems way to bright, like the contrast is turned all the way up.

[Higuy]

The lighting overall feels flat, of course you can see shadows and some pink around the crystals, but honestly, overall, its just boring and flat. The Shadows themselves aren't even that dark, rather a light gray. I'm sorry if you took alot of time on it, but, well... yeah.

You also said you cannot add fog under the water due to more playspace geometry being under. If that is the case, the simple thing to do would be to add a secondary plane under the water that has a dark blue texture with some transparency. I used this in Lumoria: EP 1 in one area and it worked fine.

The texture painting isn't that difficult. Just get some decent brushes and paint a few strokes. I'm no where near the level of even a decent texturer and its pretty easy in my honest opinion as long as you know how to paint on a diffuse :p

[LlamaMaster]

Hopefully this is clear up why I'm so butthurt:

http://i.imgur.com/RhUoO.jpg


Laptop screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/oD1yj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/APz3y.jpg

Desktop (monitor) screenshots:
http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/7849/haloce2012031222164418.jpg
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/7269/haloce2012031222011075.jpg

[Higuy]

Well I guess that verify you have something wrong with your monitor and may want to get a new one :p

No idea what kind of PC/monitor you have but you should get a Samsung monitor. I have dual 22" Samsung "SyncMaster 2233"'s and they work amazing. I've had them for a couple years now.

[LlamaMaster]

Nothing is wrong with my montior, it's what's wrong with everybody elses... Almost nobody bothers to change their settings from the factory defaults, which are usually badly messed up. I calibrated mine so I could do texture work without it fucking up on people's screens, but I got the exact opposite result since nobody configures their stuff correctly to start with.

The amount of hurt my butt is experiencing is going to create a singularity. I'm going to have to make things look bad for me to look decent for all of you.

[legionaire45]

Well I guess that verify you have something wrong with your monitor and may want to get a new one :p

No idea what kind of PC/monitor you have but you should get a Samsung monitor. I have dual 22" Samsung "SyncMaster 2233"'s and they work amazing. I've had them for a couple years now.

It looks fine on my (calibrated) display.

[Patrickssj6]

Calibrate my eyes. For some reason it reminds me of H2V :P

[Tnnaas]

I've changed my monitor settings so bad that they might actually be worse than the factory defaults. Let me tell you, people won't often give a damn. Hell, I'd play the game with my monitor if it looked worse than your laptop's version and I still wouldn't care.

I believe that as long as the environment is easy to navigate and the game plays well the visuals don't matter.

[Sean Aero]

I haven't tested gameplay, and it could be pretty bad, but honestly, nobody is going to play this anyway. That's the way of Halo.
Not true, there is quite a good possibility this could be played. Realworld has a custom edition session multiple times a week, perhaps this map would be interesting to use for a session called "Horizon" (playing custom maps that are new or have not become a standard in the CE community)
(not sure if you can see it: http://www.realworldce.com/viewforum.php?f=65)
If a map is truely enjoyed it's added to a large custom map cycle, which usually has a full server on Sundays night UK time.



Edit again: Does anybody know if the name Simba is taken already? I searched Halomaps and got nothing.

That name is not yet taken, Dennis shared most of the halomaps file indexes with me a few months back.
Did a database check, no titles show up with the word "simba". (unless it was added recently, which I doubt)

[LlamaMaster]

Alright, I'm going to shit all over my work and run everything through a contrast/saturation filter in photoshop so you guys get a hint of what I see on my end.

brb cutting self


If a map is truely enjoyed it's added to a large custom map cycle, which usually has a full server on Sundays night UK time.


Didn't know this. Interesting.


That name is not yet taken
Thanks for letting me know.


Calibrate my eyes. For some reason it reminds me of H2V :P
Does that mean it looks good on your screen?