Forum posts

PS3 isn't out in Europe so I can't tell.
On the other hand I have seen the Wii and I'm quite dissapointed at how Twilight Princess looks compared to Ocarina of Time. Who would say 8 years have passed between both releases? I'm not sure how Nintendo's console will do commercially once the novelty of the wii-mote fades away. If graphics don't matter, they should've made a wii-mote for Gamecube.

Main reason: It would take longer to upload.

Besides, it's like if a movie studio released the 3dStudio models and SFX files they used to make a film inside the DVD. It's not essential to the enjoyment of the map.

It's not really a support structure, and you will find out why it has that texture once you play it
r_speeds are a bit high in that scene (around 1000), but this time I don't really care. I'd rather have players see more detail than reading a little number.

Correct!

Register with a secondary fake email or something.
Fileplanet is not something you want to exclude yourself from!

Unfortunately for Star Trek fans, each time I find it more difficult to make any progress in the minimod. It seems I get stuck if a project is too big or if I know I will have to map non-interesting and transitory places.

On the other hand, I have gone back to another SP theme, and I'm quite happy with how things are going. Expect another SP map, this time with more thinking involved and a longer duration.

Teaser screenshot http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/772/bigjc2.jpg

OK, I have a func_conveyor representing some sort of waterfall.
The thing is, I want it to be toggled on and off. With a couple of env_renders, it is possible to make it visible/invisible. The problem is, that when it becomes visible after having dissapeared, the func_conveyor is not moving. Is it possible that the targetting done by the env_renders is also making it stop?

Edit: apparently, it does. And you need to trigger the func_conveyor two more times. With the first of those, it will start moving again, but in the wrong direction. With the second one, it will move the way it's meant to.
I hope this helps someone in the future!

Years ago, Microsoft said the first Xbox was going to have Toy Story image quality... And the PS2 was going to have an "Emotion Engine" and who knows what else. Everyone lies from time to time. We'll just have to wait for a Buzz Lightyear model to compare ingame with Alyx.

Was it Project Offset? (the columns weren't Greek style, but there was a lot of light and some particle/motion blur effects)

It doesn't really matter if the idea is good (seems original to me) or if you can actually map the school. A HL2 mod with your description won't work unless you have the necessary models and skins to make all those "nerds", "chicks" etc. Are you planning on using the standard npc_citizen models for that? I'm not sure that would work either...

For anyone who wants to make a mod, my advice is to ask yourself some basic questions:
-Do you have an idea of the scope of the mod? (how many maps will it have, how long it will take to make them, etc)
-Do you have the resources (models, materials) needed for your theme, or at least, the time and skill to make them?
-Is your idea enough to interest serious level designers?
-Will your inspiration to make the mod last or fade away?
I'm saying these things because I was working on a mod years ago, and my answers to some of those questions were negative. I haven't started any big projects since then, or the ones I tried just failed

Maybe not a particle system, but games really need new material systems that go further than tiled-images. Take for example the materials in 3D rendering software like Bryce:
There are different texture components, and the result depends on terrain altitude and angles.Result

What Buildfacelights does is build face lights on your level, calculating all the shadows created by your enviroment light. It can take long depending on your level, but it is not frozen. Be patient.
By the way, you wrote in the wrong forum. If you had posted in the "Source engine discussion", I would say that the process is sometimes VERY long.

I don't know how much progress you've made with the hub, but I had an interesting idea. Imagine an hexagonal room, for example, in which 5 sides have a portal to a different puzzle, and the sixth side has a locked door. The door would lead to a level right above the one you are in, with again a set of portals and a locked door. With this system, you would have a sort of tower full of portals which you could see at all times but not enter. In my opinion it would be a great way to keep players motivated.
To prevent the player from knowing how much game there is left, you could always have another secret hub hidden from view.

Edit: now that I think of it, it sounds just like Crash Bandicoot portals mixed with Kula World!

It's just an effect from those particular textures. If you take a look at the combine rooms in dm_punishment, you will find this effect in several faces. Just experiment with the different Combine materials until you find the ones that work best.
By the way, I think it's present in some Valve maps, but it never bothered me much.

Isn't there are thread about it already?
http://twhl.co.za/forums.php?pgt=1&action=viewthread&id=13084&pg=1

On the other hand, it is possible to make a mistake by giving the players a big view of what they are about to do.
Sometimes, in several games I've played, there has been a big area where you can see what your goal is but can't reach it. That's OK if you don't know what you're going to have to do in order to get there (some levels in the first Tomb Raider work that way) because it can make you want to get involved. IF the steps needed to accomplish your task are very clear, it can produce a contrary effect because the player already knows what he's going to see in the next minutes, sometimes even the enemies he will have to fight.
As I said somewhere in this thread, the key is to tell the player he is in point A and has to get to point B (motivation), without telling him what he will find on the way.

It should treat contiguous displacement surfaces as just one surface, so that the vertices that make up the limit lines between those surfaces are treated as the same thing.

Although we don't usually make long singleplayer mods, I think there's an important aspect that level designers often forget.
In a time when there are countless singleplayer games out there, you need to make yours special. Some games do this by adding addictive and variated gameplay (strange weapons, nice effects) but most important, they keep the player motivated. If a game has no surprises, it becomes predictable and boring. I've seen it countless times. A lot of Unreal II and the parts of Quake IV I've played suffered from this.

On the other hand, you have other games in which you are motivated to follow the story somehow. For example, since the moment you see the Citadel in HL2 after leaving the train station, you are subconsciously thinking that you will eventually make it there. You get far away from it in parts of the game, but when you return to City17, the Citadel is closer and closer as you complete the game, giving you a sense of progress and never thinking: When will this killing-the-bad-guys end? (think about the middle levels of F.E.A.R...)
If there's a reason for the player to progress, something to look forward to, your game/mod will be much more entertaining and interesting.
From what I've played so far of PREY, they motivate the player by showing the brief encounters with the rail-transport thing carrying his girlfriend around the ship. Other things such as portals, antigrav walkways and wondering what has happened to the other humans in the area also contributes in some way.

I'm not exactly sure how we can make use of these principles, but I'll try to do something for my minimod. I can't compete with the high-tech style games out there but imagination is sometimes better than more polygons and high-res textures.

I can't open it because of some .Net Framework error

How exactly did you measure the size of the ship exterior?
Did you decompile the map and it didn't fit into Hammer?
Perhaps you mean that the range of visibility was larger than in other maps. This is changed in the "max viewable distance" property in the "map properties" toolbar in Hammer.

Yeah, all the bright textures (including the panels) are texlights. The bridge takes 3 minutes to compile with cordon bounds, so it'll be even less in the future. (I turned the gamma up for the screenshot. It's darker ingame)

What a pointless discussion. Everyone was right some way or another.
In any case, in a fully playable map, making the skybox taller can mean more wpolies in terms of what the engine sees, even though it will visually look the same to the player.

More progress. I made some textures specifically for the brushes I was going to use. The light effects under the carpet are done with a func_illusionary with additive properties. Texture lights just can't make the blue glow as defined as I want it

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/5223/commandck5.jpg

And here's the proof that this room is the hardest thing I've ever done in Hammer. It looks really messy because of the crazy VM, but the brushwork is actually efficient in terms of compile time and ingame performance. Or so I want to think...

http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/9560/command2lm4.jpg

I think Raa's question was more oriented towards knowing if making the skybox taller (as seen in my example pic) would have any effect on the r_speeds of a regular map.
If the added area is playable (which was not stated in the question), then the lines of sight are longer and might have more wpolies, as Orpheus said.
Either way, compile times will increase.

you can have a skybox thats big, with say 800 r's, and make the skybox twice as big and have 1000 r's without adding any detail.

I fail to see why...Note, the only thing that we would be changing is the height of the skybox.

If I might add, bigger areas always means more faces. In this case, making the skybox taller doesn't really add any new faces. I think it only becomes an issue when it comes to portal visibility.

Answer to second question:

It increases compile times since it creates more portals.
With more portals, the chance of a portal seeing another portal when it shouldn't becomes higher, meaning: yes, it can have effects in the r_speeds and performance.

Antimatter progress:
With each attempt, the main bridge looks more like the one from the Enterprise-E!
This time I used a bridge floorplan texture and built on top of it.I still need to retexture things and adjust the texlight values a bit.

As a reminder, the other three versions:
2006
2004
2002

Any framerate difference above 60 fps is imperceptible to the human eye, n00bs!
TV's usually run at 50 or 60 Hz/fps anyways.

My own PC specs are a bit irrelevant since my old TFT screen has a response time of 25 ms, which means a crappy max 40 fps @ 1024x768

Well, I don't really find HL annoying to map for - it's pretty easy because I'm so familiar with it - but whenever I want to do anything serious, HL is too limiting for me now.

Same here. None of my recent Source maps are really possible with the outdated HL1 engine: St Mark's, Serene, Carceri, Kaufmann House, Railway 21...
If you have imagination, there's a lot you can still do for HL1, true. But if you have even more imagination, there's a whole lot you just can't do with HL1.

Yeah , that's how fluorescent lights are supposed to work.

Deathmatch maps don't rely on lighting to offer good gameplay. I consider Crossfire to have uninteresting lighting, yet I find it many times more fun than Rapidcore, for example.
For singleplayer, good lighting is a must since it makes the mood and ambience work.

I wouldn't say one is much better than the other. As a matter of fact, the one on the left could be for a deathmatch map while the darker image on the right could belong to the singleplayer version of the same map.
Things are not always black or white. A type of lighting that looks horrible in one map can be just what another map needs.

Congrats!

I don't really see where the problem is. If the "setang" command works, your only problem would be to surround the player with an invisible door.

I can tweak the speed easily. There's acutally a splash sprite, but the video is a bit dark. At least it looks a bit better than the ripples I used in Sandscroll and Molten Gold, those with animated textures.

My New Years Resolutions are 1024x768 in both my desktop and laptop PCs...
jk

-Do well @ Univeristy, now that I have the chance
-Finish the map of St Mark's Square
-Make progress in the Star Trek minimod
-And last but not least, get a GF

Here's a video of the ripple effect I mentioned. It's a bit dark though.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpithv2ET-U

A very nice mod. The spaceship textures were specially neat.

Did any one else think "Max Payne" while looking around Nation City? It even had a secret underground base!

I haven't downloaded it yet. TBH it's the first time I hear about it!

Are there any memorable or interesting places in this mod? If so, I will give it a try and maybe get some ideas for my recently revived Star Trek SP story.

point_clientcommand and tell it to set setang 60 or whatever value you wish to restric the view angle to.
I've never it tried, by the way. I'm not sure how you would set it back to normal either!

"Misc special effects" sounds nice. Yesterday I managed to create a good looking water ripple effect using scroll textures with this method >> http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/7947/pikjf5.jpg !

A big space station. The water is the effect of a "coolant leak". It's the typical excuse used in sci-fi to explain huge amounts of water inside a ship.

I really haven't made any progress in St Mark's Square these past two weeks. I have plenty of time until classes start again so I'm not worried.
Besides finishing that abstract hldm map, I've worked a bit on the Antimatter Star Trek minimod. I'm having trouble with the scripted_sentences, so I decided to work on other things and shaping the story a bit. I know that my maps won't look as detailed as anything you have seen in Natural Selection, Quake4, Unreal II or the dozens of space-themed games out there. I'll try to add "something" to make it unique or fun...

You can use a func_wall_toggle with the "null" or "{invisible" texture and trigger it when the item is picked up. In case of using the "{invisible" texture, set the redermode to solid, fx amount=100
In any case, it sounds like a bad design decission and players don't like that kind of artificial barriers. You should find another way to do it...

Remember to check out this site for ship designs >>
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/gallery/bridges1.htm

The Blockbullets texture will indeed block bullets. But be careful how you place it, since it also prevents decals from showing up in the walls you are shooting at.

You can't make a Block_light-brush and use it as an entity.
The RAD process is the one that makes the light calculations. If it finds a brush with that texture, it will act as if a wall was in the doorway.
You can't alter the lighting in-game. That is called dynamic lighting, and is not a commonly used feauture of the Source engine. We will have to wait for updates if we want to see the kind of effect you are talking about.

Edit: no idea... If those weapons had a name, you could trigger them with a point_clientcommand and ent_fire + something...

Why not? You can trigger events with OnStartTouch/OnEndTouch
right?