Forum posts

Those were made as a general idea, at this stage the level is just for building up the layout of rooms and scaling everything. I'm definitely going to use your advice when taking care of the visual side of things!

Some minor changes, but I think that the main layout is done.

My vote's on Xen. It was such an otherworldly level that it literally made my jaw drop.

Greetings!

I love Hazard Course, but Questionable Ethics wins this one. Those labs were amazing!

Power Up, even though it felt a lot like a bit less tedious Blast Pit. Endgame was cool but had no gameplay.

Looks nice, Insert The Core release date joke here.

Changed the small temporary storage building into a larger warehouse. It's split into three parts and there will be offices on the second floor. It's still WIP and not textured, and there are placeholder "stairs".The map is going to feature a ship (it's a dock-based mission). I'm going to build it according to "The Northwind" plans. I'll most likely build it with brushes and patches.

It's good to see that you're still working on Sandpit! I had a blast toying with it back when I was learning about modding and Half-Life mapping. It brings back some memories - that was 11 years ago!

Side Meyer's Pirates! is an excellent game. It can really give you a serious M&B vibe even though combat and sieges are much different. Definitely worth playing if you're in a mood for games about sailing, pirates or adventure games.

in comparement

DarkRadiant is awesome indeed, it beats even Sledge for me.

A little side project (I seem to have a never ending supply of those). A fan mission for The Dark Mod set in dock warehouses. I'm starting with a small, basic warehouse building.That's a warehouse for short-term storage, objects placed there are meant to be moved shortly.

I've been using Real World Paint along with Gimp for a few years and I've been satisfied with it, making textures for a wide variety of engines. Recently I started using Inkscape for vector graphics (though RW Paint supports it and is easier to use).

I'm working on a main menu that'd be compatible with all non-BFG forks of idTech 4. I've already got it working, but it still is highly WIP. I'm writing it completely in Doom 3 guiscript focusing on functionality and minimizing required number of assets. I'll post a video once it's done or more functional.

There should be no problem with modular level design in GoldSrc. It was possible from the very beginning with use of prefabs, though most of them were used for more detailed objects.

I think that you may check texture alignment to avoid issues, but there should be no problems besides that.

I think it might be due to brightness setting of my screen. I always keep it at the lowest level, just because I prefer lower brightness levels. I'm used to it and even work on my maps like that.

Looks intriguing, though maybe a little bit too dark for the amount of light getting through those windows - they're bright as if a nuke hit outside, while it only illuminates a small part of the hallway (this may be due to lowest brightness settings of my screen at all times), but still it looks great.

After starting with mapping or any development in general I got even more curious how developers made certain things work and became much more observant. It was mostly a change of experience for me as well.

@Admer - You may want to keep current scale and make it a rats_ level.

that piece of shit

Correct me if I'm wrong Windawz, but I don't see any shit on the screenshot. I want my money back!

There is one for both entities, brushwork, lighting and anything related. It is called: Post your screenshots! WIP thread

A small sauna.

I've got a problem launching it - it can't load client.dll. I checked the web if other people had problems with it and made sure all the files were put in the right place.

I tried to run it under WON and Xash 3D, to no avail. It's the only mod that gave me this error so far...

Edit: Nevermind, just noticed that it only supports steam version right now.

Going to try it out this midnight. When I'll finish, it'll be hammer time

Subdivision + Smoothing:Gauntlets will be provided soon. I know I'll have to make legs thicker...

Looks cool Windawz!

Excellent sculpt kruk! I thought about starting with sculpting lately, what software you're using? Blender, Zbrush, Sculptris, Mudbox?

Haven't done too much since college started, so I can show you a pic of crude level with very early crappy texture placeholders and eye-candy particles I made a week earlier:

I get those Black Mesa vibes from it as well, it reminds me of early levels with just a bit downtuned lighting.

Like above, I only have a few moments to log on and check the forums during the day. By the evening I'm either tired, or working on another project.

I didn't spot those problems at first as well, but then I looked at it only for like three minutes. I'm not an engine coder, so things like these get past my vulnerability checking easily.

@Screamernail

We keep telling you from the beginning - start with beginner tutorials and slowly move on. The thing is not about whinning about being lazy or clueless, or having a bad attitude. It's about just doing it. Start reading about coding and practising, and keep doing it for long time. Only then you'll become coding god like Solokiller.

It's easy to quit early, that's what a lot of people did in the beginning. If you want to make progress, then you have to keep moving, or get back to work after a break.

Lemme guess... searches for entity name, returns it and prints it. With a quick glance you can see constants, char variables, member access operators and good old printf.

Starting with a simple fence model. It's still low-poly. I'll give it some more details, then make even much higher poly version to bake normals off. Once exported and scaled 16x up (I work in 16x smaller scale than engine), the base will be 24 units high, 16 wide and 136 long. Bars will be 128 units high, so overally the model will be 152 units high.It can be snapped together with another fence like this, or an end cap model.

Edit

More rounded bars, smoothing works nicely on it, though larger bars are still somewhat jaggy.

See candles in these ones (it may be hard to spot them on those dark screenshots):These were one of my first models I made for Half-Life. Back then I thought that I won't be able to ever get more complex models and I'm only good at modelling simple props.

Now, some of my recent models:

Without learning and practice I wouldn't be able to do any of those.

I never was that much into tabletops/pen and paper games, but for video games RPG is my favourite genre.

I started playing RPGs with TES III: Morrowind. One hell of a ride, with great soundtrack, excellent atmosphere, curious game mechanics (am I the only one that loves this game's rng? Or stamina affecting all actions?), amazing story and world building (and more exploits than you can think of). I can also recommend TES II: Daggerfall if you're into dungeon crawler RPGs. This game can be depressingly funny at times. It gives a lot of freedom and has some interesting mechanics (gold weight and banks, buying houses, boats, item repair taking a few days depending on how worn out they are). Too bad that it was a rushed release and still may contain more bugs than you can count, and some things were never finished. You may find yourself out of things to do and feel that the world is pretty generic though.

From whole Might and Magic series I played only Mandate of Heavens. It's quite hard in the beginning, but it's quite good.

First two games in Gothic series were great as well and both are incredibly hard in the beginning, keeping up with challenges later on. Gothic 2 with it's expansion is much better than the first one IMO.

Then there's The Witcher. I enjoyed the first one the most, mostly due to it's character progression being more meaningful than in later games (in second and third they were smaller, incremental bonuses). Third one got best combat mechanics, open world and movement not restricted by player clips, though second one has cool stuff like baits, throwing knives, traps and highest difficulty in the series.

If you're willing to try turn-based games, both parts of Baldur's Gate are great games. They're oriented towards parties, but are possible to beat alone as well (won both with neutral evil sorcerer). Planescape: Torment is great story-wise and similar in gameplay mechanics to Baldur's Gate. Kinda weird, but really cool game. I also played Divine Divinity. Couldn't stand it's graphics, but otherwise it was quite solid game.

I also like hack & slash variety of RPG games. Diablo 1 has great atmosphere and provides a nice challenge. Second game in the series greatly expands upon it, adding much more gameplay mechanics.

Dark Souls games are incredibly good, that whole extremely high difficulty is kinda myth. It's just much less forgiving than other games. Once you get a good grasp of gameplay mechanics, it flows smoothly. It's not as in-depth RPG game as TES or Gothic, but it has awesome story, great level design and gives a lot of satisfaction.

EDIT

Forgot to mention Heretic and Hexen series. Brutal, raw and atmospheric. There weren't many RPG mechanics in those and gameplay was more like fantasy Doom, but I still count them as early slashers.

Assembling your own game engine is not easy, and writing everything from scratch is even harder. That's why most people choose engines that are already up and running - writing something from scratch would really take a lot of time just to get something that may become obsolete with an update on already developed engine. And if the goal is making a game, then it'd take much less time to develop on an engine you already have.

If you want to write an engine from scratch, then you'll have a great deal of work that requires really good understanding of coding, libraries and APIs you're going to use.

If you want to assemble an engine from ready elements, you can check some free engines based on them. Things like OGRE renderer, OpenAL, and SDL provide you with graphics, sound and io. Newton Game Dynamics, ODE or Bullet would give you physics. Then you'll have to check libraries/APIs for other stuff like networking, but assembling a game engine from those would still take a lot of time.

It's generally a better idea to use an already developed engine, except if you want to make your own for educational purposes or something.

You have patches and patch subdivision, which works roughly the same. It may not have displacements, but it has curved terrain and supports NURBS and CatmullRom curves (so you can make things like cameras follow easily set up curve instead of path entities). But modelled terrain is easier, and vertex painting gives much more control over the blended texture than messing with displacements (like in source).

Terrain from patch meshes with subdivisions, 2 parts tutorial.

Just make up your mind.

With proper schedule planning you can get time for almost anything.

If you don't have knowledge, start low on tutorials. Once again, print "Hello World" and learn basics. Then move on to what can be helpful in your goal. You don't need Vulkan to make a game - SDL or SFML are APIs that provide your with code for display, io, audio, multithreading (SFML) - in a convenient form. You only need knowledge and practice.

If you get a good handle of that, you can move on to some game engine. Then, you might want to assemble your own for whatever reason you might have. Ogre (rendering engine), OpenAL, ODE or Bullet and (again) SDL or SFML are your friends.

There is a lot of stuff that you might need good understanding of coding for, that's why I keep saying that you really need basics. You don't need to remember everything - few people do - but having an idea how to do something and use reference materials well helps a lot.

+What Solokiller said, you're trying to chew off more than you can.

SDL and SFML are APIs, just like OpenGL, but they're designed with game and multimedia development in mind (OpenGL is mostly graphics API). Neither of them provide already created graphics - you only get code to make your own graphics.

Seriously, if you want to make a game from scratch you must consider SDL or SFML, even if they'd be used only for io. There are other things like Allegro library, but there's nothing like the two mentioned above.

If you want to create your own graphics API, OS or gaming platform on your own then good luck. You'll need extreme amounts of coding knowledge.

Notice lack of texture blending - engine requires vertex painting for it, so making modelled terrain is not only easier, but also possibly better looking.

Nothing stops from building level completely out of brushes. Engine can handle more than 65k tris. It's lighting that always killed it and required a lot of optimisation.

Next on improvement list: Squash some SE2 bugs, get M&B combat system and Thief like climbing (ports from The Darkmod), implement PoM.

If you know how to use most of C++ stuff, move on to one of it's libraries. If you want to make games or go to graphics, hit SDL or SFML.

Another crappy textures test...

Learn how to print "Hello World", then go through basics.

Changed several design decisions lately - the project would be slightly more linear, without character customisation and too much rpg mechanics. I started making simple and crude concept arts.This is view from Dhynn's Spike, from where you can see Height Keep on mountain tops far away. This would be also an excellent view point in Deadlands, if not for the fact that most of it is hidden behind several layers of thick, green fog. The fog stays at low altitude, but from within the valleys it would look like an overcast, green-ish sky.

These were done in NeoTextureEdit, but I also can use Blender for this.

I use a node based editor to generate textures using things like patterns, noises and numerous filters.

Woo, doublepost!

Gave procedural texture generation a try. It's much quicker and easier to get nice, seamless textures this way.

Back when I had Intel GMA 955, I had horrible lags using OpenGL renderer. Got very good performance on D3D though.

Not the same as American or British, just a bit similar.

You can check with Google Translate using the speaker button - use the one on left though.

Or with Visual Basic Scripts. You can make your sound card say what you write in a script on Windows OS.

There is a simple solution for that problem though. Either make player character say it, or let people pronounce it how they want.

Also, polish pronounciation of Admer is similar to Add-mer.

And then we poles pronounce everything just like we write it in our language. Admer is pronounced Admer.

Sounds like something I should try with next playthrough, I'll have to beat vanilla CS (always kinda dropped halfway) and CoP first though.