Awesome. :woop:
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Awesome. :woop:
Updaet?
Fine, only because I haven't updated in a while, not because I give in to beggars. :P
After the last playtest, Con and I sat down for 3 hours andargueddebated over certain elements of the map that were either not working for gameplay, were destroying gameplay, or just downright sucked. As a result, I took a few weeks to massively revamp sections of the map to try to put gameplay more in line with what it needed to be. A short, and not necessarily comprehensive list of changes is as follows:
- Removed the tunnels/landbridge teleporters as well as the tunnels themselves- they were a useless gameplay path, and nobody ever used it- the few who did got lost and couldn't find their way back.
- Completely redesigned the rear of the bases- now much closer to the base entrance, and featuring a delayed teleporter: Players come in, drop down to the flag, and cannot get back to the teleporter unless they run all the way around the walkways on the sides of the base. This fixes the "grab the flag and escape" problem, and it also puts escaping players directly in conflict with home defenders.
- The broken bridge now sags realistically as it goes toward the broken middle section- Con's idea- a nice touch, subtle, but not over the top
- The old "credits tower" has been removed, and instead there is a credits room located where the energy beam emerges from the control room tunnels. To get there one must take a banshee, and time it right so as to reach the entrance before the next beam kills you. Makes it sort of fun to get there, and once you're there, if your banshee respawns, it effectively removes you from gameplay, preventing Yoyorast style secret room hunts.
- The rear-most center tunnel behind the control room has been removed. Now players driving/flying through the tunnels must pass via the control room, not only making that room far more important, but putting them at risk of being shot with whoever is controlling the spartan laser. Now the control room is a viable option for stopping an enemy on vehicle from getting far with the flag. Before, enemies could bypass the control room completely via the rear tunnel.
- The spartan laser HUD has been fixed, thanks to chrisk123999. However, the flag/vehicle glitch is still present and a major issue.
Custom lightmaps continue to be prepped. Very soon I hope to run some render tests and see if I can get something ingame. For now, however, here are a few lighting test renders to tide you over:
Adding in the hologram lights
Blue base flag test render
And red base as it looks now, with Con's suggestions and the current custom lighting. The more precise shadows make every little bsp error show up, so ignore the weird shadows that pop up in places. I'll fix them eventually.
Now back to lighting work.
must spread rep ><
Looking great, hopefully we can get a gamenight on once this is done :o
Thanks, and I'd love to have a gamenight or three. Main issue is that I can't play online until I get back to school in September. So, assuming I finish this thing long before then, we might have to have 2- one at release, and one when I can actually join in. :P Or I could just wait to release it until I can play it. :evil:
I'm in. Your lighting looks great. And if we do a gamenight why not throw in my old map pack that we were supposed to gamenight on as well? I've been meaning to make a thread about it...
I'll go for a gamenight. I have yet to play Inferno's maps on any (decent) server, and I'd love to try Precipice.
do this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Inferno
fake E: hell, why not just make it a Modacity gamenight and put all the good maps that've been pumped out of this forum over the years, I'd love to nostalgia all over myself with you guys :-3
Yes yes very very gamenight want!!
Fucking do it. Use the modacity server too. If that still works.
e/ and give me Rcon so I can rotate the maps.
You bastards, wait until September for this epicness! I can't join in! Ever! I've always missed the gamenights- I refuse to miss the one my map is part of as well. Lol.
Also, lightmaps: wtf. Got some basic ones imported via aether. First there was all this random red- confused the hell out of me. Until I realized it was max telling me that every red place was a glitched render spot. - _ - So I fixed the red by turning the glitch test off, but then you can just see all the glitches. And tool's fail lightmap uvs are now incredibly apparent- shadows start on one lightmap, and just stop on the next one, shading fades in and out from object to object, it's bizarre. So I decided screw it, I'll render every lightmap at 2048 by 2048. I'll be back tomorrow explaining just how much the game hates me now.
Edit: Okay, after some frustrating trial and error, I'm finally getting the hang of this. I managed to render one lightmap without any red errors, but the shadows are still doing odd things. Still, it's progress. We had a short-lived and laggy playtest today, which basically confirmed that the new layout seems to work well enough to forward with it. I'm leaving for 2 weeks on vacation with my family, but I'll be back after that, and ready to work on finishing up the bsp with the last of the poly space, and getting those lightmaps fixed up. I've talked to Inferno about fixing the phantom geometry as well, so that shouldn't be an issue for long. Let's finish this damned project, shall we?
Edit Edit: Before I leave, I wanted to make sure everyone understands that although the lighting looks great in Max, I have no idea how good it will actually look in the engine. At the best it will be lower res- at the worst it will be all pixelly and fugly looking. But I'm going to do my best to make sure it looks as good as possible. If that means rerendering a bunch of times to get the settings right, and reuving half the lightmaps, so be it. Also, it looks like a few of the lightmaps still have errors- I'll have to fix that after I get back. Still, better than before.
Edit Edit Edit: Okay, this is getting ridiculous. More people need to post so I don't have to do this so as not to double post. :P
I was heading out the door when I realized the lightmaps had finished rendering- took a screenshot from generally the same angle as one of the renders on the last page. Should provide a pretty good comparison from render to current ingame lighting. It's pretty darn rough, but tool uv and rendering errors aside, it looks better than Halo's lighting did.
What's with the weird lines on the wall?
Those would be the aforementioned uv errors. They're everywhere- will be quite the undertaking to try to fix them all.
This stuff looks not only vastly improved, but incredibly well done! Once again, I can't wait till this is released.
I pray for your lightmaps, but the shear size of your map makes me lose hope. I really hope you can work this out, because I was practically creaming myself over those previous renders. Good luck to you, and godsend.
Haha thanks. Im hoping to get them looking better as well. I've heard that setting all the shaders to "simple parameterization" forces tool to make them less retarded- is this true? If so, I'll change them all to that, and even if they look bad in Halo radiosity, the uvs might be better for max lightmap rendering.
dont suppose anyone can make a way to import custom lightmap-UVs into halo eh?
FireScythe's UserTool has a command that can import new UV's from an .obj file. More information is here
Yep, I know Firescythe's stuff can do it- it's that Halo has happily split entire areas into two separate bitmaps- even by fixing uvs you can't fix that. So half the platform will be on one bitmap, and the other one will be on another. I can try to line the bitmaps up as best I can, but it still still look weird until I get the entire platform together on one bitmap. I was wondering if simple parameterization forces tool to put larger sections together. Idk- might not.
Oh god yes. Simple param is important. Simple param means "Not Retarded Lightmaps" mode.
Hey everyone,
I'm back from vacation and working 40 hours a week, but in my small amounts of free time I'm doing my best to wrap this project up. Lightmaps are temporarily on hold until I finish the last bsp touches (which by all rights I should have done in the first place). In an attempt to make the canyon a little more interesting, I've added a sort of conduit running sideways at about the level of the beam. My plan is to have a scrolling energy shader or something cool behind the grate/glass. Since I don't know a whole lot about shaders, I decided to use the b30 waves shader as a standin so I could get a feel for direction, speed, etc.
It's sort of hard to see in the second pic, but the waves ended up coming down the glass from the top, which is absolutely surreal, and makes it look like water is pouring down the inside of the glass. Obviously needs some tweaking. On the other hand, why the hell hasn't anyone used a version of that shader to make it look like rain is cascading off slanted surfaces? That would be so cool! Precipice has more of a light mist than a heavy rain, so using that might seem overkill. But to any of the remaining CE mappers: use this. Would look awesome.
:allears: Awesome. Pure awesome.
There- both the temp water shaders and Con's sky in motion. The video file is in HD, but it doesn't quite seem to have processed it quite yet. I'll set it as youtubeHD anyway- maybe it will be at full quality by the time most people watch it.
Who knows a lot about shaders? I need to get a cool looking energy shader, and I honestly have no clue how I'd do that. Doesn't need to be too complicated, but nice-looking would be great, if possible.
Edit: Fixed the youtube link. Sorry about that.
Very nice.
dude...nice.....love the weather
how do you lighting?
Uh- what? Rephrase please.Quote:
Originally Posted by sleepy1212
I've added some cool flood-related AI off behind some glass, but I've run into a problem: they refuse to spawn. Every other ai spawns- the few infection forms near the banshee pads, and the bipeds I'm using to kill off the new infection forms before they multiply. However, the new infection forms themselves are nowhere to be found. They show up in sapien, leading me to wonder if there's some setting somewhere that I'm missing. Any suggestions?
Looking very cool.
I am SO making a promo vid for this. Tell me when there's a beta or gamenight so I can film some combat.
lulz....how did con do the lightning?Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Oh haha. As I remember, he said he used shaders with a long strip of single pixels. A few of them were white, and the rest were transparent. He set them to scroll, and when you have a few of them in the sky, it makes really nice random lightning flashes.Quote:
Originally Posted by sleepy1212
Awesome, wanted to do almost the same thing but i wasn't sure how good it would actually look. Now that i see it looks really great i think i might give a go.Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
There's one map that's static and doesn't move. That's the mask for the plane itself so just make its alpha a fuzzy blob. Then add a new map and this will be the long skinny scrolling texture. It only needs to be 4 pixels tall and have the alpha have vertical strips of white every once and a while. You can even put a fade on them by adding grey pixels to either side. Then you just need to adjust the horizontal scaling of this map so it's 1/width in pixels. Set its alpha to multiply and its colour can be next map or current, depending on which of the two maps you want to use for the colour of the lightning. What you can do is for each plane in the sky you map this to you slide the UV mapped polygons over a number of full texture lengths in the UV editor. This means they won't all flash at the same time but rather have a delay or a pseudo-random look.
The planes were placed above the cloud layer and I made the clouds slightly transparent in the areas of the the lightning. This makes it look like it's happening inside the cloud instead of in front of it.
If you want to make visible lightning bolts all you need to do is change that first maps alpha from a fuzzy blob to a lightning bolt.
It's 3:45 am EST, and thanks to some help from Firescythe, I've just made a major breakthrough with Precipice lightmapping. Not only are the uvs only mildly screwed up in this build, but the lightmap rendering actually seems to be running fairly smoothly for once. I made some test renders with only the sun and its skylight counterpart, and then another few for one of the banshee pads.
Blue Banshee Pad (In Shadow)
Red Banshee Pad (In Sunlight)
Red Banshee Pad (Lit)
Red Pad Teleporter Room
I'll run all the lightmaps with all the lights on overnight and post the results tomorrow. For now, time to crash.
woo, looks good so far
Looking awesome man!
beautiful, that is all :clap:
FANTASTIC!
:woop:
Glad you guys like it. However, I have some more eyecandy for you: The full lightmaps just finished, and I have to say, for the first real test, these are gorgeous. They definitely need some work, but hell, this is far better than I had hoped for.
awesome...lets play :-)
Hmmm....
Where is here: http://img693.imageshack.us/img693/8...ightmaps10.jpg
in relation to here: http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/2...lightmaps8.jpg?
Gorgeous, indeed. I've never seen a Halo map that good looking.
The first one is outside, looking toward blue base. The second one is inside blue base, looking generally back toward the camera of the first picture, but at an angle.Quote:
Originally Posted by EX12693
As nice as these look, there are a lot of uv errors, and a few places where it looks totally bizarre. However, those are relatively few and far between, and won't be all that hard to fix, assuming the final build has similar lightmap uvs (I can only hope). Also, it looks like there is a difference between Max's rendering and the way Halo displays the lightmaps. If you look at the render with the blue tunnels, where the blue light is the brightest, it fades into a sort of offwhite color. I think that's Halo overexposing it, so I need to go experiment in Max to tone down the intensity of that blue. The same issue shows up in a lot of other places where the color is so bright in Max that it looks faded white in Halo. In addition, some colors are more or less intense than they looked in Max, so I need to adjust those.
Edit: Oops, looks like imageshack somehow missed one in the batch upload, and then I accidentally doubled some of the images. Fixed.
Oh okay. So there's a whole other structure inside the canyon walls... now it makes sense..
you didn't unwrap your power-cables things right btw.
looks pretty neat though!
Which power cable things are you referring to? The energy cables holding up the bases, or the pipes/cables underneath the broken bridge? The ones under the bridge only look odd where they bend out of shape, but I decided that would make sense if they were all melted and such.
pretty sure he meant the blue energy ropes, i noticed that too but it looks intentional
Ah- yeah, the are textured differently than Bungie did it, but I sort of like the way this looks. It's nicer to look at, instead of a very long blue gradient.
Edit: Alright, got a silly question: anyone have the fixed tags for Guilty Spark? I was thinking about playing with the AI a little, but I can't even do that since HEK+ corrupts the animations. I know Masterz put up a fixed version ages ago, but he's not sure where it is and I can't find it on halomaps.
Tried the CMT tag release? I'll upload the tags if anyone really needs them.
GS343 isn't in their latest tag release- not sure about any others. All I need are working animation tags- according to sapien that's what's crashing it. Of course, having a full working folder would be nice just to make sure.
Beautiful. Very much appreciated. As a reward, you get this entertaining screenshot:
LOL!
And, Silicon, it is coming along wonderfully!! I think this will be the most beautiful CE map in the history of CE. I get those same feelings of wonder, awe and excitement when I look at these images as I did when I first walked out of the Bumblebee pod onto Installation 04's surface for the first time, many years ago...
...And it's FANTASTIC!!!! Keep it up!! It's an amazing job so far, and I'm sure with your talent, come the release date, it will be absolutely awe-inspiring!!!:woop:
EDIT: Will 343 hum/say amusing things? =)
Thanks! He does indeed hum to himself and say entertaining things, and he'll say hello to you sometimes as well. I won't give away where he'll be in the map, but it will be near the credits, and you'll have to look for it/them.
I will have to disagree with you there. It does look good though. Good job man.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vadam930
Haha yeah, there are some pretty darned nice looking maps out there, and right now mine still has some issues to fix. Portent comes to mind as a beautiful example of forerunner architecture.
3 days later.. how's it coming along? And... why is there ai in the map?
:expost:Quote:
Originally Posted by EX12693
Don't just bump to ask if there has been progress after 3 days. He's working on the map in his spare time.
Inferno's right- 3 days is a little short to be asking for an update.
However, this is me we're talking about- barring unforeseen complications, which does happen often, a lot can happen in 3 days with me working in my free time. I've screwed up the lightmaps, fixed the lightmaps, installed some pretty fun easter egg ai, and am now slowly fine tuning all the light settings. This involves turning on each bank of lights one at a time and rerendering the lightmap, then tweaking, then rerendering, etc. Will take a while, but it's totally worth it. It already looks far better than it used to.
And as for the ai, it won't be interactive- scenery purposes only, and in relatively unobtrusive parts of the map.
Edit:
Just about tweaked the control room to the way I want it. Ignore the obvious lightmap uv errors- those I'll fix last. This applies to all renders from here on out.
First, compare this, from last week:
To this:
Here's the reverse angle:
Eventually I'll get the whole map calibrated to my liking, but that might take a bit. Worth the wait, I say, and I'll keep updating with screenshots as I progress.
Very nice. Good lightmapping is always worth the patience and effort.
Gorgeous. Simply stunning.
Very, very nice!
I'm curious. Do you have a description for the map? If not, I may be able to help. =)
EDIT: I bet that comes last, anyway.
At first I was like: :raise:
But now I'm like: :woop:
New update time!
Today's focus has been the banshee pads:
Compare this old render:
to this:
I also turned the skylight waaaay down, so it no longer washes out the shadows from the hard sunlight:
Then I realized the shadows didn't quite line up with the sun ingame. I personally like the shadows, so I tried to move the sun. It refused to budge, so I tried a trick which has worked before- I doubled the sun and tried moving the second one. That failed too, but instead I ended up with something cool- what looks like a normal Halo sun, but when you look directly at it there's an enormous amount of bloom. so BEHOLD, SUNLIGHT:
Overkill? Maybe.
Damned epic? Absolutely. I'm keeping this accidental bit of awesome unless people don't like it.
How directly do you have to look at the sun for that to kick in?
I could see it getting really annoying when you're trying to shoot a banshee (but then you can see the tactical application of it too :p)
Yeah, it's pretty much only straight at it, and a little to either side. And if anything goes across the sun, the flare stops, just like the normal sun flare. Also, the sun is at such an angle that the odds of you flying up in that direction are fairly slim. I'm flying around in circles with the dev cam and the sun really doesn't disrupt sight unless you're midway down the canyon and possibly trying to hit someone on the rim. But in that case it's sort of cool to be blinded by the sun. :P
FANTASTIC!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Can't. Wait. Silicon!
I'll record a short video f me flying around in a banshee tomorrow to show the flare and how big it is. It seems a lot smaller then you're moving around compared to that still image, which was picked for the emphasis on the overepicness.
Keep it. No matter what. I think that totally rocks. I'm definitely seeing the tactical application http://www.modacity.net/forums/../im...ies/tongue.gif
Open Sauce postprocessing + Bloom = ?Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Haha- that would be insane. This is just with normal Halo graphics, no OS used. God, with bloom you wouldn't be able to see anything if you were looking in that direction.
Do it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Yeah dude keep the sunlight as it is, looks epic :D
Let there be light!!:iamafag:Quote:
Originally Posted by Lateksi
Got that sunlight test uploaded to youtube finally. Might still be processing.
I'm not running OS at the moment, so excuse the stretched HUD. Also, I had SCII running in the background, hence the lag. That game is eating my life lately.
<drooling>Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
Again...this looks FANTASTIC!
</drooling>
Can't. Wait.
:woop:
Hey SM when I get to work on the scenario is it cool if I bolster the default FOV to 85? I can't stand how "zoomed in" halo looks by default.
Use a fov mod then. I use 90 degrees. I had to change the fov to "75" for TLMP maps in order to retain it xD
Yeah, I suggest using a FOV hack- according to Con, if you bump the FOV up by much, the portal errors start to get more noticeable due to more being rendered at once..
:saddowns:
Oh well. I guess I'll have to find a FOV hack to play this on the gamenight.
Here, let me help you with that:Quote:
Originally Posted by Inferno
1.07- http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=2645
1.08- http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=4049
1.09- http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=5267
These are, of course, just the simple app ones and not Yelo or anything OS related.
tbh, you need more light inside, it's all really dark, and being forced to use a flashlight isn't really cool in multiplayer games.
That build had more than half of the lights turned off. I'm still calibrating them all, so the only ones that were turned on were the ones I had finished working on.I was telling ShadowSpartan that the base was actually brighter than it theoretically should have been because of the fog and an odd red glow that was coming from nowhere and everywhere. That won't be noticeable once all the lights are turned on in the base, but it struck me as fairly odd. Some of the lights were probably instances to lights I had already calibrated, so when I turned them on in the banshee pads they must have turned on in the base- same thing for the teleporter.
You heard it here first kiddos.Quote:
Originally Posted by Siliconmaster
RIP Precipice.
Looks smashing though sir, nice work, nice work indeed.
I've been working on blue base this weekend, trying to calibrate all the lights to my liking. Still haven't gotten to the flag room, but the rest of it is essentially done.
Compare this:
To this:
I've fixed almost all the overexposure problems and mixed up some of the blue hues.
When I have time, probably tomorrow, I'll start on the flag room.
See neuro, lights! :P
Don't really like some of the geometry(that inset in the last two pics), but daaang, that's some good lighting.
Wow...again!
:shocked:
Very Nice. You've outdone yourself.
Just fix those insets. they don't look like Forerunner.
What do you mean by that? If you mean the blacony-type-thing (at the walkway with the Banshee teleporters) looking out into Blue base... I'd a agree. They just look like plain, square windows from inside the base. Everything else looks amazing!! That is some great lighting!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Dwood
add an ambient light.
only has to be a power of like 0.15 or something, and set it to a faint purple hue.
trust me.
looks great but what's with those funky lines on either side of the door in the first pic? is that the lightmap UV or do you have a seam there?
also i like the insets...but then again i don't give a shit about FOARUNNR11!?>!
That thing where the banshee outline is.... is an inset.Quote:
Originally Posted by Vadam930
Yeah, that inset was never really forerunnerish ,but nobody seemed to mind through all the betatests. - _ - I blame you for not pointing it out haha. Would be pretty easy to fix- I'll do it when I do my last uv error check on all the texturing.
As for the ambient purple light, neuro, how are you thinking? For the entire base? Just the sniper roosts? The issue with adding an abient light is that all of a sudden there are no more shadows, and part of the fun in the base is having areas of light and dark- I don't want to be able to see the bottom of the base, where the pit falls into sahdow. Wouldn't be too hard to stop the light before it hits that, but I'd like to know what your concept is before I start messing with stuff.
Also, I want to point out that Bungie has, from time to time, used odd-looking little indents in their levels to make blank walls look more interesting. Here's an example, from GS343:
I took my initial inspiration from that little doodad.
The inset looks fine IMO.
I never did notice that inset... but it's just the overall shape... also, no one ever sent me any maps to do a beta test. You have me on xfire for pete's sake! (Saint Peter, lawl)
That inset was in Halo? My god, what were they thinking?
Forerunners do insets I guess.. look fine though. Plain walls are... plain. :|
Plain walls are always better than vomit-inducing "detailed" ones.Quote:
Originally Posted by EX12693
But that was a non-detailed vomit-inducing inset.Quote:
Originally Posted by LlamaMaster
