LEarned something and so more screens

[Tabulanis]

I figured out how to optimize polys and textures in single models so no more lining up many actors.

These shots of a hallway that is under 400 polys and the textures are copied along sets of geometry to make the lighting.

If not for the glitch in the alspa on the wire it would really be perfect. Also on my machine it runs this MUCH faster than doom3 even on low settings.
Does any one know the poly limite on actors?

[Tabulanis]

4000 not 400.
Typo Been up 48 hrs.

[ZenBudha]

Very nice work. Looks very professional.

[hike1]

48 hours? Take a break!

What program are you using?

Demos, tuts http://terrymorgan.net/download.htm

[Tabulanis]

HA Still awake. Working on outdorr scenes. Astudio, Gmax, photoshop, poser, dynabump, milkshape.

Textures are made with a combonation of programs.

IF, you set up your textures on multiple objects and unrap them you can creat texture sets that can be reused if the lighting in the scene is consistant. Then copy past together. you small actors the hard part is getting the UV mapping to stay together when you optimise. Best to start small. One peice at a time.

Having fits with alpha. I have two Characters Imported with alpha hair. Looks great every wgere but in the game engine. The bits alpha'ed dopnt just see through the hair they see through the whole mesh. Gonna try multi textureing head hiar and body seperatly to fix it but I dont know if it will work. I'll post a screen later to help explain.

Outdoors are going ok but lots of detail loss do to large mapps spread out over the terrain. I wish I could repeat a texture and draw a light map but cest la vie.

[GD1]

You're putting us to shame. those are some of the best RF screens i've ever seen. Can't wait to see how this plays!

[hike1]

The only transparency that works on Actors is to use a 256 color
.bmp file with the last color what you want invisible, like I did
on some bird wings (the parts between the feathers) and bird
feet (the parts between the feet).

[AndyCR]

absolutely astounding shots, never seen better with rf. way to go!

Hike, i think tga's work too, i'm 99.9999% sure. if you export them from milkshape i think you need to run gebodyfix.

do get some rest, you dont want to fall asleep on your keyboard with your nose stuck onto the delete key or something like that

[Tabulanis]

just tested TGA alpha works but with the problem I mentioned.
in fact I used a TGA in the screen shots abbove for the grid wires.

Thanks.

Hey if you know any one that wants to try and program specific features for the engine I got some ideas. I think this thing can be used to make a pretty good game. But right now ACT files are HUGE. 27 megs.

[ZenBudha]

27 megs? Is that for a whole level?

I think a lot of the .act file size comes from the size of the textures contained in them.

Example if your act file has 50 textures around 500kb each thats 25 megs in textures right there. If your bumpmapping x3 on textures and thus size.

Probably the reason a lot of new games come on DVDRom instead of CDRoms. Since texture size, and number of textures keeps increasing.

Pert of the reason I dumped using bumpmapping with .bsp levels is because of the increased textures I noticed a considerable drop in FPS. Especially since a level could easily have 50+ textures. Bumpmap them and you have 150 textures. You would have to scale a 512x512 texture down to 128x128 in order to not see a performance hit.

So with the .act files so long as the performance is there I wouldn't worry too much on size of the end product. Heck most demo's now are 600 megs anyway.

Not to down on the 56k dialup users. But any demo or game that looks somewhat modern is going to be 128+ megs at least. By todays standards that would be small for a demo. Just can't pack 3 good looking levels and a game into a 25 meg download.

Anyway keep up the good work. You screens are re-inspiring me to start up some of my old projects with a new approach.

As well I'm curious are you using BSP for collision or AB style actor collision?

[Tabulanis]

Well I was going to use BSP but I may end up creating super simple meshes for collision. I noticed that the player can get stuck easily.I am using BSP for clipping and as a behind the scenes kinda thing. Honestly BSP doesnt look good enough to used for visual geometry. I am working on water. Any ideas there? Also any one know about reflectivity in textrues. Is there anything in this engine that can do like a specular map the way Unreal 2003\2004 does. Even fake shine will work to give a little realtime life to the modles.

I quess I could cut down un colors to get the sizes under mega. 27 megs was for one act file.

Is there any possibility for more file types in the futer DDS?
And same goes for modle types like ASE or some other type of file that could load textures and materials before runtime instead of packing them in the file. Plus with ASE you can have more than 1 UV channel that give you lightmapping with a bit of tweaking.

I have the graphics bit licked but I am horrid at scripting.

[AndyCR]

you might look into sphere mapping, it gives a shiny look.

RF 080, should it succeed, (080 is the planned version number, though it most likely will be closer to 085 or 090) will support over a dozen model formats, though i do not plan with the initial release to support ase. the same is true of dds. both may very well be added later, but, to speed the initial release, i do not plan to incorporate them at first.

i do not know if cutting down on the bit depth of the textures will help the file size, since in-engine it sees all textures as the same high-color format, the question is whether it is converted when loaded into the scene (in which case reducing the color depth would indeed help the file size) or whether its converted when the actor is compiled (in which case it wouldnt help the file size any). i would say try it, and if it reduces it, great, if not, well, youll have big files but as least you wont have to (or be able to) sacrifice color detail.

[hike1]

27 megs? Is that for a whole level?

I had to leave my outdoor level out of my demo because the
terrain .act textures were 48 MB and they didn't .zip at all. That's how battle 1942 does it though, there were about 30 1024x1024 .dds
textures just for the terrain. The .act files as
big level geometry have collision sticking problems, not to mention a huge pain in the butt (edited by moderator, minors visit the forum) to deal with in the editors,

so I'm working on a set of terrain
tiles for brush terrain like in Ultima 9, it's
a lot harder than taking a screen shot in
Terragen.

Terrain shots at
http://terrymorgan.net/screensh.htm

[Tabulanis]

When is that going to be realeased any info hell that would cut down the file size just by conserving maps and using light maps. The 27 megs is for those screen shots above that is made of one object 7 textures. 1 alpha mapped texture.
with uv 2 and the ability to light map it would be 2 textures and 1 light map.
it would run faster and have more detail.

Yeah I am diein for more formats. And light maps.

[GD1]

Yep, you can have a sort of specular effect over a diffuse texture. It takes a hit to poly-count, but it looks pretty decent. just take your model, copy it, increase the size of the copy slightly, and change the texture for the copy to a spheremap, and adjust the alpha setting in the SEP properties. place both models at the exact same place in the level and you should get a glossy look over the model. If i remember correctly though, this only worked with SEP's, not SEM's. You also have to change the BBox settings so the one SEP doesn't clip the other. It's complicated, but with the right optimization it can work really well.

also, if bumpmapping gives a hit on framerate on your machine, there's no need not to include it. Open up d3d.ini and set extratextures=0 to disable bumpmapping. it should speed it up a lot, and you can still include your effect for faster machines.