[WIP] Precipice

Of course. :P Had to get the shape right first.

Edit: I've been working hard on this all day, but it isn't quite ready to show yet. There are more details on the walls, correct uving, and a better design in general. Hopefully I'll have good renders up in a day or two, but no promises.
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Update: I now consider the new banshee/wasp platform complete, unless there are drastic complaints. Renders:

Overall view:


A different view of the platform supports:


The platform gizmos, which have lights as well as a cool recessed area under glass. Thanks to Lightning for that idea:


New details on the wall, light fixtures, a border along the edges, etc:


The overall interior:


The new hollow section, with glass showing:


And without:


I'm happy with this section, and I think with the doors in place and the correct indicator lights working it will work well for gameplay as well. The new hollow section in the outcropping will prevent players from camping on the other side.

So the glass is destructible?

It annoys me when you join a running server and the glass is out of sync but w/e. Looks really good now :)

(The boxes which I assume are lights over the doors don't look very forruner though)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by n00b1n8R

So the glass is destructible?

It annoys me when you join a running server and the glass is out of sync but w/e. Looks really good now :)

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It's not like that's going to effect gameplay that much, if at all, unless we can walk through it when the glass is gone.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by n00b1n8R

So the glass is destructible?

It annoys me when you join a running server and the glass is out of sync but w/e. Looks really good now :)

(The boxes which I assume are lights over the doors don't look very forruner though)

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No, the glass will be unbreakable. Might as well keep all variables the same for everyone. You'll just be able to see through to the other side. I made that second render with transparent glass so you could see the inside better.

As for the light fixture, I admit they might not be the most brilliant thing I've ever made, but they work, and I think the light will look quite cool ingame, assuming it works right.

Those look good, especially that glass box thing.

Generally, insets aren't quite that sharp.

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...ider_inset.png
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...upport_top.png

Other than that I like it, even if it feels a bit boxy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cagerrin

Generally, insets aren't quite that sharp.

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...ider_inset.png
http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...upport_top.png

Other than that I like it, even if it feels a bit boxy.

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Happy? :P



I hate redoing uvs. So obnoxious. At least it looks nice at the end.

Also, after some accidental modification, I decided it looked better to have a slight extrusion in the center. I also adjusted the glass section so the vehicles would spawn where players could enter easily. Before, if the banshee spawned there, the player would have issues getting in because the banshee would have been right up against the wall.

Why are the things on the side holding up the platform, like... leaning out. Looks bad. Make them straight.

They are straight. The canyon wall is sloped. It is all relative, my dear Watson.

Better be. <:maddowns:>

:downs: It's looking great btw.

Thanks. :D I'm working now to get all 4 platforms updated. Shouldn't take long, all I have to do is get them positioned and attached, then change 2 of them to have blue lights.

Did you make that light texture your self or what? I like it :)

No, I didn't. It's a cropped version of the light strips textures. There's a large yellow/orange light (depending on whether it's the blue or red lights) at the end of the strip texture which not a whole lot of people use. I was looking for a cool one, and decided to crop that. Glad you like it. : )

Looks great!

Becoming quite a work of art.

Quote:

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Couldn't read map file './toolbeta.map'
culling uncompressed model vertices...done

WARNING: 26 clusters in structure_bsp levels\precipice\precipice have no background sound or sound environment.

culling uncompressed structure bsp vertices...done
culling uncompressed model animation data...done
building predicted resources for structures...done
structure bsp 'levels\precipice\precipice' is 19.34M
tag headers and names are 0.21M
streaming model vertex and index buffers...done
streaming tags...........................done
writing vertex and index buffers...done 7.81M
writing tags...done (2738 tags for 5.74M)
tags are 2.08M too large for structure bsps (5.74M+19.34M>23.00M).
### FAILED TO BUILD CACHE FILE.

Cache pack file bitmaps hits: 952 for 56.05M
Cache pack file bitmaps adds/misses: 98 for 17.68M
Cache pack file sounds hits: 672 for 10.70M
Cache pack file sounds adds/misses: 28 for 2.15M
Cache pack file loc hits: 104 for 0.22M
Cache pack file loc adds/misses: 0 for 0.00M

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Well then. It appears that the map does not want to compile. Am I just screwed, or is there some way around it?

Edit: Even toolio, the hacked tool doesn't compile it. Lol.

it appears you have too many tags.

Ah, you're indeed right. I thought it was the structure itself, but it's the tags. I'll go in and delete any I'm not using.

Damn, I can get it to within 1.57 Mb by deleting unused tags, but the structure bsp is almost 20 mb by itself. Wait a sec, aren't there maps much larger than this? Like the SP maps? How can they compile?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster482

Ah, you're indeed right. I thought it was the structure itself, but it's the tags. I'll go in and delete any I'm not using.

Damn, I can get it to within 1.57 Mb by deleting unused tags, but the structure bsp is almost 20 mb by itself. Wait a sec, aren't there maps much larger than this? Like the SP maps? How can they compile?

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Ask masterz for that one tool that compiles more then than that. or something

It compiles with that, but still crashes. Isn't it a hard-coded limit?

It's just frustrating to have a limit on the structure. It either means I have to do a LOT of optimizing, which wouldn't be such a bad idea anyway, or I can't make everything that detailed.

If you need to reduce tag space talk to me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Inferno

If you need to reduce tag space talk to me.

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Yeah man I have no idea how you got YoYoV2 to compile at all. That map's got more tags than CMT SPv2.

Well, since even with all tags deleted off the map, the file is still .44 Mb too large, I can only take sapien screenshots.

The pads ingame, with banshees since the wasps are still being problematic:

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/8365/padlighting.jpg

http://img28.imageshack.us/img28/6844/padlighting2.jpg

I guess I'm going to have to do some major optimizing before I continue anything else. Drat.

Message Inferno.

Already did. He led me through the globals.globals routine, but it only cut down a few decimal points. I think the only way I can continue is by getting rid of useless faces. Unfortunately, that's harder than just deleting some tags.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster482

Already did. He led me through the globals.globals routine, but it only cut down a few decimal points. I think the only way I can continue is by getting rid of useless faces. Unfortunately, that's harder than just deleting some tags.

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Have you tried to use OS_Tool to compile?

That wall looks extremely bland in the second sapien picture. How big is it?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ThePlague

That wall looks extremely bland in the second sapien picture. How big is it?

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I refer you to a picture in the OP:


See that gargantuan diagonal canyon wall? Yeah. It's about... 3000 feet 19409.8 3ds units tall. Well aware that it needs to be interestingified, but it's so huge that it will be a project in itself.

It depends how many polys it is.

The map, or the wall? There are just a lot of places that could use optimizing.

I think he meant the whole map....Still depends on how many faces, i have maps that are well over 50,000 and run fine because of portals, i have another with just over 20,000 that made sapien scream for all the scenery but it works.

Your map is but .16 megs too big with all the vehicles removed.

I have no idea what the heck's wrong with 'dis. Especially when YoYoRastV2 is over 3 times the size.

SM's been having problems with the # of tri's in the map.... (# of Tris >75,000)

He's currently optimizing so no update outside of what I've been doing..

The triangle count has been an issue from the beginning, a remnant of my '05 tessellation mapping days. Ew. I've been keeping an eye on the problem areas, basically hoping I wouldn't have to deal with it. Apparently it's finally caught up with me.

To illustrate:


And a close-up on the lower land bridge, one particular offender:


I'm swamped with homework this week, but hopefully I can get on that optimization fairly soon. Also, thanks Podacity for the mention. Even if you guys haven't paid a whole lot of close attention to the map, it was cool to see it recognized. : )

Time for double post, bump, and update all in one go! Though not much of an update, I'm sorry to say. College and video projects have begun to eat my life. To illustrate, last Friday I spent 11 hours filming- 4:30pm to 3:30am. Dwood seems interested in helping to optimize the map, which would be a big help for me.

And yes, I know I seemed dead. I promise RaperReaperMan didn't kill me. I'm still alive and well, just busy.

Polygon cruncher does a decent job of optimizing, you may wanna look at that.
You will have a lot of stuff still to do manually, but it could be a big time saver.

Well, here I am again, now back at school. I've started doing some optimization on those problem spots- polygon cruncher does indeed help a lot, thanks Maniac. I hope I can get this thing fixed up and working, so I can actually do something with it. Consider it a WIP with semi-low priority compared to my film classes. If anyone else wants to help with the optimization/modeling, just PM me- I'd appreciate the assistance.

Edit: The good news is, the map compiles without errors. The bad news is that it also exceptions upon load in CE. I already tried erasing the bsp and recompiling from scratch to clear any old weather palettes (the solution last time this happened), and I erased all tags from a version and tried compiling that. Same result. It has to be something that only loads in the full game, since it appears in sapien just fine. Maybe something to do with the portalling?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster

Well, here I am again, now back at school. I've started doing some optimization on those problem spots- polygon cruncher does indeed help a lot, thanks Maniac. I hope I can get this thing fixed up and working, so I can actually do something with it. Consider it a WIP with semi-low priority compared to my film classes. If anyone else wants to help with the optimization/modeling, just PM me- I'd appreciate the assistance.

Edit: The good news is, the map compiles without errors. The bad news is that it also exceptions upon load in CE. I already tried erasing the bsp and recompiling from scratch to clear any old weather palettes (the solution last time this happened), and I erased all tags from a version and tried compiling that. Same result. It has to be something that only loads in the full game, since it appears in sapien just fine. Maybe something to do with the portalling?

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It's not the poly count? Perhaps it's the bitmaps?

Well, this is interesting. I compiled the tutorial map to double check my globals, and that crashed too. Looks like sometime in the past month or to something went weird in the globals (this is assuming that's the only stuff that carries over from one map to the next).

Edit: Or weapons. Those don't spawn in sapien either, so they would only crash the full game. Is there a way to look at what causes an exception in the game? Or only in sapien? I vaguely remember Korn mentioning something about that a long while back.

Edit edit: Yep, it was the globals- tutorial now compiles fine. Checking Precipice.

If that works fine let's rig it with os-postprocessing.

The map loads. Yay. Now to get a lightmap in there so I can see what I'm doing. As for the OS stuff, wouldn't it make sense for me to finish working with the tools I understand, then add that stuff at the end?

Edit: Well, wouldn't you know- the old .bsp file had issues too. I switched it back in when I realized it was the globals with issues, and the map crashed again. Two problems at once. Jeez. Well, at least it's fixed now.

Edit edit: Gyaa. It worked until I added a lightmap, then it crashed again. Maybe it is a bitmap or something, but sapien works fine, and that loads all the bitmaps. Maybe a shader effect then. If there is a way to examine the exception reports, that would be extremely helpful.

Isn't there a crashlog type thing?... I wanna say debug.txt in your CE root... but Iunno it's been forever.

After hours of painful trial and error, I have decided that the most likely issue is tagspace. I was able to track the problem down by deleting groups one by one, but then it would change if I kept something else in. After a while I decided it was either trying to drive me insane, or it was random because it wasn't the particular thing causing a problem, but how many things were in it at once. I checked the tool log, and with all the tags in the map, it's .01Mb from the tag limit. It works fine when it has .55Mb of space left. I wonder if it needs breathing room to function.

Assuming this assumption is correct, I'm going to do more optimization- that should cut down on overall size, and if I'm right, I'll be able to compile with all the tags included at once. If I'm wrong, I'll be even more confused and frustrated than I am right now.

You are using the default tag set, right?

Sorry that I wound up being little/no help :(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by higuy

You are using the default tag set, right?

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Mostly. I have some holograms from the campaigns, and I've tweaked some stuff, but overall it's normal. It shouldn't really make a difference.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dwood

Sorry that I wound up being little/no help :(

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Don't worry about it. I'm always open to help, but at least if I screw something up I can then spend hours trying to figure out what I did. :P Would be a little harder swapping files back and forth. More variables.

EDIT:


PRECIPICE LIVES. Cut out 3,000 faces from the Control Room, and although the texturing is now gone to hell, the map compiles and loads with all tags included. Tool reported .70Mb of space for breathing room. Took fucking long enough. Now of course there's a shit ton of stuff to do, especially since if you look in the opposite direction it looks like this:



There is no spoonwall. I decided to delete it all and work from scratch. It had major issues anyway. I may use parts of the old model, but for now that's just a large skybox wall.

Looking good!

Very nice c;

Are you doing what I suggested like 3 months ago over xfire?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dwood

Are you doing what I suggested like 3 months ago over xfire?

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Honestly, I can't remember what your suggestion was. :P Remind me?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster

Honestly, I can't remember what your suggestion was. :P Remind me?

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To remove like 3 layers of the walls lol b/c that area's huge down there.

Oh, the scenery interlocks behind the giant wall? Well, for the moment that doesn't matter at all, because none of that exists any more. :downs:

Edit: Hey look, some overnight lightmaps:

Needs more smexy Falcon :P (No, not just because it is in the next game I want to copy, but because it looks sexy :P )

Looks awesome :)

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...cipice_wtf.png

misaligned stuff :saddowns:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cagerrin

http://www.majhost.com/gallery/Talon...cipice_wtf.png

misaligned stuff :saddowns:

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The canyon wall is slanted- the outside bay border matches that, but everything else is vertical. It makes sense if you're moving around in the map, even if it looks odd in screenshots.

Edit: Here's a side view of the bay, both textured and wireframe:




As you can see, everything except right where the canyon wall meets the bay is perfectly vertical. The only way not to have that border match the wall would be to extend the ceiling of the bay out a little, which would look strange and ugly.

Okay, that makes sense. 's just sort of wtf when I can only see a bit of the wall.

Why would the wall be slanted, anyways?

The whole canyon is wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. Makes sense for structural purposes- either that or some sort of empire-state-building-esque steppe architecture. It's also a left-over from the original '05 design that I really don't have the time or effort to change. :P Every doorway on the map aligns with it, and even though it would be easier to make new doors if I fixed them all, that would take forever.

Oh, and if you didn't see, I updated the post above with a better view of the wall.

Lookin good :)

New quick update:

I've been fighting a slow battle with the polygons, but now I know the size limits, so I can work without worrying about something random going wrong. It also turns out I don't need the additional portalling, and now you can see most of the map without portal errors.

At the moment I can show off some work on the control room I did.

The back wall now has large glass-and-circuit alcoves, which are relatively low-poly, but at least give the player something to look at instead of the large blank walls from before.


I've also done some structure and texturing work on the floor, with the new glass/grate/symbol sections and the modified ramp.




It's sort of hard to see with the current lighting, but the ramp now has tile borders, and the old flared-out base is gone. The original structure is still a little hard to pass off as forerunner, but with the new additions it's a lot better looking.

It's looking awesome.

I want to play this.

Starship Enterprise? Nah seriously the ramp looks good and original forerunner :)

Nice work. :D

Good work! you're improving.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Now to show off the stuff I'm really happy with. I won't know how it really looks until I see it lit in game, so I fully expect some comments revolving around "fix the empty spaces." If all goes well, the lighting will fix that, but if not, I'll change things once I can see how it looks.

First, the old flag room:




Very boring, ugly walls, and bizarre lumpy architecture. This was one of the last remaining areas from the original design.

And now, the new WIP flag rooms:









It's more of a small cathedral now, complete with a forerunner-esque chandelier. Similar to the large wall in the bases, this will be lit with a lot of recessed and soft lighting, and that will make the view look considerably cooler. The blank area above the chandelier, near where the well emerges, was going to be another recessed lighting area, but I decided to hold off until I could see it ingame. I may be able to save the polygons for elsewhere, seeing as I already blew the bsp limit to hell already with this addition.

Also: I would be eternally grateful if someone with better organic modeling skills than myself could assist with redoing the interior base rock walls, as well as the underground tunnels. It's not a huge task, and it would be fairly low poly, but I'm not that adept at organics, and I don't have the time to practice enough.

that's a nice improvement minus the gross flag ramp.

even if you made it an octagon it would look better and save you a few polies vs the current one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sleepy1212

that's a nice improvement minus the gross flag ramp.

even if you made it an octagon it would look better and save you a few polies vs the current one.

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Haha- I was just looking at that a second ago and thinking "wow, that is ugly."

Technically the octagon (including ramps) would add 8 triangles compared to the current one. However, even just retexturing this one would help a lot, or maybe removing two of the ramps to make it unidirectional.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster

Technically the octagon (including ramps) would add 8 triangles compared to the current one.

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i meant like this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...agroomold1.jpg

considering the rest of the room though i'm sure you can come up with a better ramp than that

Quote:

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Originally Posted by sleepy1212

i meant like this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...agroomold1.jpg

considering the rest of the room though i'm sure you can come up with a better ramp than that

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Oh, I see what you were saying. Yeah, I'll mess with the ramp, see if I can't get it looking better.

The organics would be extremely easy if you just use the cut tool and make lots of cuts, weld and collapse unneeded verts, and then just move the verts you then created to how/where you want. Just make it kinda rugged and rough, becuase thats how cliffs are. I always see people making smooth cliffs, which really looks bad and unnatural when compared to regular, rough cliffs. ( I for one use to be one of these people until I learned that method from a friend)

I ran lightmaps last night, then adjusted some stuff and ran them again. Still not quite perfect, but pretty close to what I had envisioned.









'Tis all pretty now. ^_^

Looking nice.. Good work of the strip textures and uving them, thats one of the things I always have a difficult time at when uving structures.

I'm liking the lightmaps but I think they could over all be a bit better. Add some floating planes in front of the generator and name the material this:

c10light_inv_10paleblue!

It's a lighter blue then what you now and have a different intensity. Adding the floating planes with different intensity helps bring out lightmaps alot more. It's just one of those final touch's, but it works and looks nice (they are invisible too). Not sure if your doing this already or not though. You may also want to think about doing the same thing were that grayish part is, (on the first picture) on the bottom part of the wall under I guess what is a light. Just have another invisible light thats diagonal and faces the wall.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by higuy

Looking nice.. Good work of the strip textures and uving them, thats one of the things I always have a difficult time at when uving structures.

I'm liking the lightmaps but I think they could over all be a bit better. Add some floating planes in front of the generator and name the material this:

c10light_inv_10paleblue!

It's a lighter blue then what you now and have a different intensity. Adding the floating planes with different intensity helps bring out lightmaps alot more. It's just one of those final touch's, but it works and looks nice (they are invisible too). Not sure if your doing this already or not though. You may also want to think about doing the same thing were that grayish part is, (on the first picture) on the bottom part of the wall under I guess what is a light. Just have another invisible light thats diagonal and faces the wall.

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Yeah, I've been using those a lot- this was only the second version of lighting in this area, so I will probably add more of those in at varying intensities when I get a chance.

Update:
I've put finalizing the flag room lightmaps on hold because they were being frustrating, and I'd rather just wait until the end to fix any lighting issues. And yes, I just said "the end", because the end might actually be in sight. Over the past few days I've sat down and changed (hopefully) the last huge issues with the map. Now, while visuals might need more work, the basic gameplay structure should be improved, enough to warrent a real playtest.

A list of new stuff and changes:

Moved the control room upward vertically about 500 feet, and that entire end of the map forward so it's much closer to the rest of the map. This will drastically reduce tunnel traveling times, as well as shrink the overall play area. Now, someone in the control room can pretty easily hit players on the closest banshee pads, which were too far away before. The control room windows now have a purpose. :downs:

The old version:


The new version:


The control room is now a looming presence when players exit the bases:

Inside the control room, I have removed the lower banshee exits. They were ugly, useless, and causing portalling issues, so they're gone. There's just a placeholder wall sitting where the tunnel used to be while I decide what to do with the banshee pit.

The now-lonesome banshee. Ignore the sniper rifle- it's spawning in the old spot from before the move.

The map also now has forerunner doors wherever they make sense- mainly the banshee pads and the bases. Nowhere that would impede line of sight. I really like how they look in place.

The base doors:


The banshee pad. The second room now serves as a nice locked door- nothing like a few of those to make the player feel like there's stuff beyond what they see. There's also a little surprise that I won't spoil until people see it in game.

The only big gameplay stuff left to fix is stuff like working on cover for the upper fields, and making sure the balance is right. Visually, I need to redo both the wall behind the control room and the wall on the opposite side of the canyon. The canyon walls themselves, as always, should be improved, but are on the "figure it out later" list.

looks verry nice....cant wait to play :-)

I love the look of the control room from below.

Verrry nice. You should get someone to fix up your lightmaps now that Firescythe has made it possible to make custom ones.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dwood

Verrry nice. You should get someone to fix up your lightmaps now that Firescythe has made it possible to make custom ones.

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His tutorial suggests to wait until the very last build to start messing with the custom lightmaps. That's one of the reasons I'm waiting to mess with the flag rooms more- it won't matter once I get to that stage. I definitely want to take advantage of Aether and the custom lightmap uvs, anything to make it look better.

Looks nice, is there any way to stop the fog being a cunt and making random objects - usually scenery - bright/stand out through it? If you get what I mean (Pic 1 and 2)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Hunter

Looks nice, is there any way to stop the fog being a cunt and making random objects - usually scenery - bright/stand out through it? If you get what I mean (Pic 1 and 2)

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As far as I know you can't change how the fog reacts sometimes with scenery. However, the bright areas near the banshee bay in those pics are due to portalling errors, not the fog issue, thankfully. When the serious portalling work gets done that should all be fixed.

Cool. And @Fog, your a bitch. :)

I think there is a checkbox somewhere in the shader tag or the scenery tag that fixes the fog problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chrisk123999

I think there is a checkbox somewhere in the shader tag or the scenery tag that fixes the fog problem.

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Hmm- there must be, because the trees are scenery, and they don't have that issue. If you add other custom scenery down in the real fog, it does turn white. Interesting.

Edit:

Just hosted an hour-long playtest with Klange, ShadowSpartan, Reaper, myself, and a local friend. We started with two FFA slayer games, which went pretty darn well. The banshees are what they always are, but were significantly less whoreable this time due to increased banshee user damage, the base turrets, and a wider selection of rocket launchers and other weapons. Could still be balanced a little, but a lot better than last time. Then we played a 2v2 game of CTF, which should have been obscenely retarded on a map this large, but actually played quite well. It reminded me a lot of the H3 action sack gametype "Shotty CTF" due to the H1 rule of "must have flag at base to score". There was a lot of hiding with the flag while the other teammate went to try to get our own flag back. There was even one memorable instance where Adam was hiding in our base with the flag, and Reaper tossed grenades down the well and killed him. That was how I had planned that feature years ago, but to have it work before my eyes was hilarious and rewarding.

List of tester suggestions and changes:
-Use the CMT spartan laser to balance the banshees. I'm thinking replace the sniper in the control room with the Splaser. This would make that room a lot more important, and it would help control the banshee whoring.

-Make the base turrets movable, like the SP versions, so they can be knocked off the platforms.

-Make labels or logos so players know which teleporter goes where. This only really matters for the two teleporters near the front of the bases- they're symmeterical, so depending on which base you're in you go to different places on the right or the left. Got really confusing in this playtest for me at least, and I made the dang thing.

-Fix the bizarre flag-vehicle glitch. For some reason, if you have the flag, and you get in a vehicle, instead of disappearing so you can fire a weapon, etc. it sticks out of your body at odd angles, and if you so much as tap the trigger, you drop it. ShadowSpartan became quite frustrated with this one, and I agree it's really weird. Anyone know why this might be happening?

Overall, I'm extremely happy with how this test went, and I can now move on to fixing little things- the large play area has been broadly finished. That being said, stuff will definitely change- more cover, better terrain, etc.

The portals made the map so confusing, random sections of geometry would disappear. Otherwise the map played fairly well, save my banshee whoring.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Reaper Man

The portals made the map so confusing, random sections of geometry would disappear. Otherwise the map played fairly well, save my banshee whoring.

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Yeah, as I mentioned in game, blame blue base. Halo seems to flip a coin when it comes to registering exact portals. Last build, red base wasn't portalled and blue base was fine. This time, red base worked, but blue base didn't. As a result, if you looked in the direction of blue base at any time, in all likelihood half the map would disappear. This was extremely noticeable when topside red base. I'll make sure to at the very least get those two exact portal sections working for next time.


Edit:

Hey look, some WIP wall pics. I already like this one far better than the old lolmassive one. Plus this one looks cooler.

Overview


The energy port (more info on this at some point)


Middle Detail


Topside

nice.....i like all the detail on that center section,but now it makes the big grey walls on either side look really bland

Heh- yeah, well, I suppose that was unavoidable. But better to have at least one wall look nice than to have all of them looking shitty. Wish I had more polies to work with- damn Halo 1's engine.

I guess my question is why do you have the big gray walls? Why not make them cliffs. Would look much better.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by BobtheGreatII

I guess my question is why do you have the big gray walls? Why not make them cliffs. Would look much better.

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Because the idea was that the whole thing is artificial. Also, at the moment I barely have enough poly structure space to fix up the areas that need it for gameplay, let alone completely redesigning an area that spans 3/4 of the map. I do agree it looks plain, but that's one of the last things I'm going to address. Maybe some pipes or similar tech objects to break up the surface. Not sure yet. It's a frustrating dilemma.

Use bump maps and texshurs to make it look purty.

The idea of using shaders to make larger flat areas look nicer is definitely appealing. I'll look into it once the bsp itself is finished. I've thrown some new stuff into the map, and I have some debug-lightmapped screenshots to prove it:

The new wall in action:


From the control room window...


...and from the land bridge. I personally love this pic.


New teleporter labels, matching Bungie's death island banshee and turret icons:


And the new control room banshee pit, which actually lives up to its name now. Don't fall.


And thus progress. :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Siliconmaster

...and from the land bridge. I personally love this pic.

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The fog seems a bit heavy and you can't really see the lights coming from the strips (I assume there's lights there), perhaps turn it down a bit?

Looking really good otherwise :)

I'm liking the interior. I find the exterior wall a bit vacant though, unless you plan to fill it up later. However, the fog looks great with the exterior, very mysterious!

The fog density will definitely be played with- I want it to be sort of hard to see the area down there, but not too dense. Part of the problem is that sapien is still rendering sunlight all the way down the canyon wall- as a result the contrast of those lights is somewhat muted. The right side of the picture is more like what it would look like with better lightmaps. Either way, I'll make it so you can see the lights. As for the canyon wall, I know it's plain- the concept of using shaders to make it more interesting is high on the list. No idea how to implement it quite yet though.

yea those strip lights don't like to work when there's a lot of other light around....or fog. Been trying to find a workaround this myself. no luck yet.

I'll just leave this here.

One giant beam coming out would be sort of cool. With rings surrounding it... I dunno. Guess that's what my imagination went to.

Why is it pink? I do not like pink forerunner stuff.



Do not like the pink.

Red base is red. Blue base is blue. Control room is purple. Been the color scheme the whole time. Most forerunner stuff is blue, but I didn't want players to confuse the control room with blue base. Moving forward with that color scheme, I made the beam purple. However, light purple looks like pink. I've darkened the beam bitmap as much as I can, but idk how else to change it. The flare is purple on the outside, but it fades to white, and looks pink. The red flames are left over from the infinity red beam, but I sort of like them.

Looking fantastic!

Meh. Purple is too... non-forerunner, but whatever. Go for it.