Anyone know why when I light my map, the map itself gets lit by the sun light I set up, but in game the player & vehicle models remain unlit unless passing under a "regular" light?
suns are not good to use *my opinion*
if your smart you light the map whit a big loud of lights yust like raven suns mostly bring more errors then good ligthing whit them its like having a bad sun burn
and small lgihts lets you make your own kind of light at all places :)
Shader suns >> Entity suns
Entity sun... with worldspawn -noshadersun 1 set.
First, some relatively minor gripes:
- I'd like the ground texture outside better if it wasn't blown up so damn big. Right now all I see are brown and green pixels.
- In shot 05, your struts against the walls have ugly misaligned textures.
- What's that to the right of shot 07? A lake, or ground fog? it looks kinda strange.
- In my opinion, shot 08 is the best you have. Looks mostly like the movie, looks like a forest. Nice blending into the skybox. Good job!
The big problems I have are still the same as before...the cyan fog does NOT look good on Endor! I suggest, again, you make a light brownish-greenish-grayish fog that won't be such an eyesore and won't hold attention the way your current fog does. After the color change, increase the drawdist of your fog and add the key "_fogstart 2000" to your worldspawn. That way the fog won't even start being draw till 2000 units away, which will give you a clear view until that point. Try it out and see how it looks, trust me on that. You can always paste back your old fog and write "wedge sucks" if you hate it. Then, add a tree-lines skybox with q3map_nofog in it, so the sky shows through the fog instead of the map fading to bright cyan nothingness.
Believe me Wedge, I've had the fog set to all sorts of draw distances and am still working on it...
You can complain to me about misaligned textures/texture sizes once the BETA comes out!!! ;)
Currently I don't care too much since I'm just trying to get a map layout that works.
The thing with skyboxes and fog seems to be an all or nothing thing. Either it doesn't show through the fog at all or it looks like the fog doesn't effect it at all. I kind of want a 50/50 split.
There's something in the portal sky about having fog in there but haven't figured out how that works.
I've done more work on the Rebel Commando since these shots were taken. He should look A LOT better after I get a skin on him.
Just working on getting the new player models finished...
Have you done a light compile yet, monsoon? Or is this the level of lighting you're looking to achieve in this map?
I suspect you haven't done a light compile yet, because the player models in the shots appear to be unlit and lighting is very uniform outside with no shadows at all.
I've comped with an entity sun but it doesn't light the players or vehicles...
in what way dit you compile?
becouse this looks realy nasty :(
Entity suns suck balls, they always will.
Don't go all "But raven used them too", because in all honesty, Raven's outdoor lighting wasn't that great at all.
Use shader suns, they make awesome shadows.
raven also preverse to use normal lighting instead of suns i also don't like suns
Originally posted by Nokill
raven also preverse to use normal lighting instead of suns i also don't like suns
Except for that Raven didn't do that, they used entity suns. And suns only suck when you don't know how they work, and how they can be used to their full extent.
Didn't Raven post a bunch of stuff on the entity sun on the map maker.com forums?
Yes, but there's absolutely no reason to use entity suns.
q3map_sunExt along with q3map_skylight in your skybox shader (along with some decent parameters) is far superior to the best entity suns.
monsoon, if you need any help with the shader code feel free to contact me via PM or messenger program.
No progress this week. My wife's been in hospital...
No, but it eats up all my spare time...
Anyway am 50% through UVmapping The Rebel Commando player model. Psyk0Sith has kindly acquessed to do the rigging on this and the AT-ST Pilot.
Have decided to rework several large sections of the map - including the main terrain section (To allow better speeder-bike battles) and have drastically shortened the way through the bunker, past the generators and up to the landing platform in order to speed up play. I also removed the two turbo-lifts in this section, since lifts seem to cause annoying bottlenecks during play.
Have rezed up the ground textures from 215x215 to 1024x1024, so it "should" look better.
Originally posted by monsoontide
Have rezed up the ground textures from 215x215 to 1024x1024, so it "should" look better.
I hope you meant 256x256...
The textures won't look any better if you just resized them in Photoshop or PSP - you'd have to get ahold of larger originals.
Ooops, yeah, I did mean 256 :eek:
I went out and took some photos with my digital camera of various ground surfaces (I'm not that silly to just resize a texture - jeesh, sounds like something one of my clients would want to do!) LOL.
The battlefront textures are just placeholders, indicating what I want the texture to look like, until I can make better versions.
Good news, Psyk0-Sith has finished rigging the AT-ST Pilot and he works wonderfully. So should look great in the map.
I've been busy trying to finish up a whole slew of old models I started way back in late 2003/ early 2004, so I've currently released the Rebel Transport, The Queens Starship and the desert skiff over at
www.pcgamemods.com).
Have a couple more releases planned then it'll be back to endor, which I'm a lot happier with now with the new layout and landscape. The hi-res textures make a huge difference too.
However, lighting with a sky shader doesn't seem to light as "evenly" through fog as an entity_sun.
Will post some screens soon.
So what does Psyk0-Sith do? LODing? Btw, when do you think you might get to work on the AT-ST?
It's (the AT-ST) in the pipeline - but its a special project. These other ones are already 80% coompleted and just need some attention to get out the door.
Psyk0 Rigs the models in 3DS Max (Which I don't have)
Rig? The reasone I am pestering you so is because Hapslash is looking for someone to LOD and weight alot of his models. So I've been keeping an eye out for people who do that sort of thing.
Rig = Weight.
The process of setting up the 'bones' within the model so they properly deform the model during animation.
LODs are of course models with fewer polys for viewing at a distance instead of using a hi-poly version. I'm not sure if Psyk0-Sith does that but he's done a lot of rigging and is quite efficient at it.
Is he bussy? How may I contact him?
Sorry...
Been er... busy playing KOTOR 2.
Quite a compelling story line - if only the battles weren't so tediously boring it might be fun rather than a chore.
Still just finished it now on the light side - why the first thing everyone else does is turn to the dark side, I just don't know.
Anyway, the place to get hold of Psyk0-Sith is
http://www3.sympatico.ca/psykopat/)
Will get this project back on track now...
Originally posted by monsoontide
Sorry...
Been er... busy playing KOTOR 2.
That game is so damn distracting ... I also stopped all my modding work to finish it :>
Originally posted by Pahricida
That game is so damn distracting ... I also stopped all my modding work to finish it :>
same here and also whit Kotor1 :D
If only they would combine the cool story and character interaction of KOTOR with the direct action and dueling of Jedi Knight and the size and scope of the battles in Battlefront - then we'd get GAME!! lol
Thanks to Psyk0Sith, the ATST Pilot is ready for release - just waiting on a permission or two before release...
Things are cycling around to the point where I'm able to resume this project again... Hooray!
Originally posted by Pahricida
That game is so damn distracting ... I also stopped all my modding work to finish it :>
wich can only mean that lucasarts is finaly starting to put more quality into their games
Alas, no... KOTOR 2 was rushed to meet the Xmas deadline and as a result the last third of the game is badly broken with quests that are impossible to complete an entirely missing planet, character arcs that go nowhere and lots of bugs.
Its just the first half that sucks you in - If they hadn't been rushed to finish this, this game could have been absolutley fantastic.
OK, permissions received - so ATST pilot release will be all GO! So am planning to get it released tonight! (Though the best laid plans...)
ALso got back to work on the mapping last night. Just a little bit, but something to get me motivated again. (Its so hard to keep ones enthusiasm for a project going sometimes... but I am determined to get it finished)
just asking out of curiosity:
for what did you have to ask permission for?
Originally posted by monsoontide
(Its so hard to keep ones enthusiasm for a project going sometimes... but I am determined to get it finished)
i know exactly what you mean ive had that problem with hoth several times
I used their model as a base and simply reworked a lot of the mesh, rather than starting from scratch. Same with textures - notably on the holster, gloves, face and goggles. No point reinventing the wheel, when I have such a small amount of time to work on the project in the first place!!! ;)
Anyone know of a way to block vehicles but NOT players???
(Currently the AT-ST's in the map can walk up into the Ewok village and it looks a little rediculous!)
i dunno if theres an entity or a system shader for it but my best gues is that you could put somekind of clip brush above the walkway upto the village blocking off the at-st but not the players
this would not be a smart thing to do if your map is gonna have jedi players
vehicles are NPCs, theres an npc blocker texture in the system textures, you might try that and see if it blocks the ATST.
Ok, I've redone the forest facade texture so it matches the model trees a lot better, I've added a couple of hollow tree trunks to run through. rezzed up (redid) most of the ground textures, finished the AT-ST Pilot and added him in the team classes, changed the Vader model to the VaderVm one (Hapslash's one looks great but since he rarely releases anything, I'm not holding out hope).
Also started work on the log swings and it kinda looks good but needs a lot more work - will probably have to script them to get them to swing only once, perhaps with some sort of delayed reset on them
Have the primary Siege Objectives working properly but still need to add the secondaries. When activated, I'm hoping to spawn in some NPC backup forces - though not certain if that will work well or not.
Have finsihed the handrails on the four main Ewok platforms - now just have to do the small ones and the bridges (Which are a pain in the arse).
Am working on the map screen and objective icons.
Added some more lighting and sound effects but still much more to add.
Am definitely going to have to add fog as it runs a bit too choppily without it.
Hope to have some new screenshots in bit.
Also been playing Lego Star Wars: The Game - Dang! If that Revenge Of The Sith Space Battle level isn't full on!!!
As an aside, what Game Engine do you think should be used for the "next" Jedi Knight game? (Assuming one ever gets made of course.)
The Half Life engine looks good from what ive seen, or perhaps the engine from Quake 4, since I assume it has the same type of engine as Q3a, just more powerful. I doubt LA would make another Jedi Knight game, thats something modders would have to do.
Hmmm... Seems I'm getting too ambitious again for the Q3 engine. I keep getting the MAX_MAP_VERTS error - so looks like I'll have to split the map into two separate ones.
Will probably make the Forest - Ewok Village - Bunker portion into the Siege map and the Bunker - Shield Generator - Landing Platform into a FFA map. Sigh.
There is one alterative I'm going to try, but I've never seen it done before and have no idea if it will work - merely that I have seen the option.
OK. Once I get the damnthing working again, I plan to finish the UV mapping on the Rebel commando and get him to Psyk0Sith for rigging.
Progress is being made and I'll put some updated screeenshots up as soon as I get the map to compile again...
Perhaps you're using too many patch meshes? Try compiling with a set LOD in the patches, or perhaps just try removing some unnecessary ones.
Found it!
Was my shader.... generating too many plant models on the surface of my terrain!
Now that's taken care off... I can get back to it.
Can someone please send me scans of the Endor stuff from the Incredible Cross Sections book?
I've seen the book in stores but haven't been able to justify the purchase.
It's a pretty good reference too and I'd like to make the Ewok village section of the map a bit more "accurate".
Thanks