DM-GrandCanyon : BETA by TerOmen

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Andirez

push the limits
Jan 23, 2000
390
0
0
Belgium
www.planetunreal.com
Well, since I couldn't find a topic about this map, I thought why don't I start one ?
It's at the betasection of realmaps for your downloading pleasure. www.planetunreal.com/realmaps

Pro's :
- Absolutely marvelous texturing : Really TerOmen, it's great ! Did you use one texture 1024*1024 and scaled it to fit the entire brush ?
- Terrain looks great, sunflare and skybox are cool

Con's :
- Still to many poly's in some areas, certainly with some bots
- Glitters, but you can't do anything about that. You can make them harder to see by using a nightfall setting but inf doesn't have many daylight maps.
- bots seem to see through the treesheets

Ideas :
- An objective would be nice, I don't like simple DM'ing with inf weapons much
- Maybe you can add undergroud connections between the different houses

Great job TerOmen, now do something about those polys /infopop/emoticons\icon_wink.gif !


[This message has been edited by Andirez (edited 04-01-2000).]
 

bastard_o

Lead Designer
Just beat me to it Andirez... /infopop/emoticons\icon_wink.gif,

Dm-GrandCanyon(Beta) by TerOmen.

Indeed the texturing skill alone in this level is jaw-dropping, true light fall effect, shadows and shading where you would expect, haze hilighting on the mountain tops, easy to navigate slopes and small hills, non-navigable unpassable slopes where necessary, very real terrain indeed.

Highest poly count encountered within normal player navigation was 412.

I guess I have said enough now on polycount issues in conjuction with many bots 7-11 and mod special effects, I look forward to the day when all gamers can afford PIII600 or higher spec kit, so all of us can enjoy playing levels made in this way, I look forward to that day.

I also look forward to more work from this talented texture artist.

Some fine looking mounted textures indeed.

Any chance of some 260'ish max PC levels my PC is still only driven by a PII350, plus I also only like playing team games with SpawnInTeamArea set 7 or more bot... that would be excellent.

Bastard'O


[This message has been edited by bastard_o (edited 04-01-2000).]
 

bastard_o

Lead Designer
In depth view of this beta.

I was curious as you may imagine to find out how the lighting had been done, so as you would expect I opened up the level...

Ahhhhhh BIG shock... What no lighting..

All done with mirrors...

I will try to explain the TerOmen approach..

Four light actors which act as special_lite properties for the four huts, I was wondering why the insides of each hut was so bright..

So the methods used were total level property ambience. 255,0,255, no zoning at all, hence the hut issue, all lighting effect was purely created the 10 or 12 256x256 non tileable textures, must have taken a month of sundays to texture, pan & rotate on each of the thousands of polygons, there must be a auto alignment editor trick for that we don't know about to do that...

Plus I noticed rather a lot of BSP issues and hall or mirrors effects see from (I admit not player viewable) but maybe 40 feet off the ground looked tricky to fix.

Bastard'O
 

hunchback

New Member
Mar 25, 2000
150
0
0
Oakdale, CA, USA
www2.ucsc.edu
Texture auto-alignment trick? Just select all of the faces, align them as floor/ceiling, and open the log window and type "poly texscale relative uu=j vv=j", where j is the reciprocal of the scale that you want to use (i.e. if you want to scale by 2.0, put in 0.5, and if you want 4.0, put in 0.25). Works for me. /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

I've been working on a map that uses the same trick for the terrain as of late, but my computer crawls when I'm working on the 1024 x 1536 ground texture. /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif
 

disturbed

New Member
Nov 10, 1999
404
0
0
www.research-center.org
Very nice map. When I first saw a screenshot it almost reminded me of a Myth level. The terrain and texturing is excellent. On my Voodoo 2 I even get a pretty good frame rate. Best of all this map really looks good when using the darkmatch setting. I have only one suggestion:

Make the team start points more defined. I'm desperate for some more good team standoff maps. This map has potential.

------------------
Jon Merriman
The Research Center
http://www.research-center.org/
 

TerOmen

Member
Mar 24, 2000
186
0
16
www.planetunreal.com
Ok, underground tunnels will be in the next release. I need to think of a way to fit a realistic cabin though? Any ideas?

Maybe a big rock or boulder in the right spot will help the fps a lot.

Yea, there isn't a better way to do outdoor lighting with Ut other than drawing it on the textures. Using spotlights adds alot of glitches, and it's harder on the cpu
anyway.

I'll add some team starts too. Hopefully they can still be set separately in Ut.

I must mention that in the areas where it has 500 polygons it also has about 700-800 nodes. Most indoor maps with 500 polys can have 900-1000 nodes easily.
Although I wouldn't be surprised to find a spot where the nodes did hit 900.

After that version was released I went back and made some 4x more detailed textures but I don't think they look as good. They also put more strain on the ram so
my 40mb system slows down noticeably. Would everyone want me to release two versions next, one with the old textures and one with the new? That way you can
decide which is better?

Thanks for the impute.

TerOmen
 

Andirez

push the limits
Jan 23, 2000
390
0
0
Belgium
www.planetunreal.com
Disturbed, I don't think making it a little bigger is an option. The brush is created with terraedit and all the textures are handmade for this particular terrainbrush.

I don't see what's the problem with tunnels anyway, they enlarge the map and give it better connectivity. You can still have cool battles on the surface and you can escape by diving in to a house and take a tunnel to somewhere else.

The thing you can do TerOmen, is making the level a bit like Sylvester's Les3Vallees (for the old inf). You could have two terrainbrushes opposite to eachother and in the middle a bridge and water. This would be so cool in standoff. (you can change the terrainbrush you already have a bit, so the two camps aren't exactly the same).

------------------
Name : Andirez
Status : INFiltrated the messageboard
 

bastard_o

Lead Designer
Again I must completely disagree with TerOmen's comment on lighting a UT level,

The UT light actors if they are NOT dynamic do NOT effect fps at all, spot lights are normal lights and are NOT dynamic and have NO extra effect or hit on cpu or fps.

Glitches also untrue, these glitches you mention are NOT caused by NON dynamic lights.

Please TerOmen when you state what you think are facts, then you had better be correct.

Or another option is to word it to say IMHO or something like that. You stated "there isn't a better way".

I do not want incorrect information posted here, UnrealEd and level design in general is complex enough, you are not helping anybody by posted incorrect information.

Bastard'O
 

hunchback

New Member
Mar 25, 2000
150
0
0
Oakdale, CA, USA
www2.ucsc.edu
No problem bastard_o, always glad to help a fellow mapper save some time. /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

Are you sure about the "static light actors not affecting FPS" thing? I was under the impression that the Unreal engine uses multipass rendering; that is, that it makes an initial pass to draw the texturemaps, and then a second pass to apply the lightmaps. I always assumed that if the surface was marked unlit, the engine wouldn't even bother with the second pass. Doesn't "stat fps" (or maybe it's "stat global") display a line saying "light=x", where x is the number of ms it took to draw the lights in the last frame? I'll test it out the next time I boot back to Windows to make sure I'm not way off base here... /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif

You're 100% correct on the "lights not causing glitches" statement, though. The glitches are caused by BSP errors, when (not certain about this) UnrealEd divides the brushes into polygons incorrectly, leaving little "leaks" in the walls of the level. If you watch the status bar during the rebuild phase, you can see that the BSP pass comes before the lighting pass.

Oh, and I'm not a big fan of excessive ambient lighting (which I thought DM-GrandCanyon had). The models look pretty damn ugly when they're completely unshaded. /infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif If you want to get the (assumed) speedup from skipping the engine's lighting pass, just mark the surfaces unlit, but still put lights in your level to shade the actors.
 

TerOmen

Member
Mar 24, 2000
186
0
16
www.planetunreal.com
Bastard_O. I suggest you get your facts right before calling me an idiot. Lighting does hit the cpu. Try high shadow detail and super low shadow detail in Ut with stat global and you'll see what I mean. As you said, not everyone has a 600mhz to spare 5-10% on high detail lighting. As you'll expect the hit on a 350 is alot bigger. I've played levels, that with no dynamic lighting still killed my fps cause the lighting detail was too much.

The glitches I'm refering to are where the polys meet on terrain, there is dark edges. Even when using "bright corners" it still gets the glitches ocasionaly.


"Or another option is to word it to say IMHO or something like that. You stated "there isn't a better way."

Well if Epic releases the outdoor engine with true lighting then there will be a better way. But untill then there isn't. Believe me, i've tried for over a year to get good lighting on outdoor stuff.

That align trick won't work perfect on terrains with custom textures. It will get them initially aligned, but then you have to go through on each texture and set them to a drawscale of something like 8.03(instead of 8) and pan them over a few pixels. Each texture tends to need to be panned seperate amounts. If you don't do this then you'll get lots of blurred lines in your map.

In Grand Canyon I left ambient brightness on so guns still cast light when fired.

I wouldn't make the map any larger(if I could). It's perfect for 3-5 bots imho.

OK, no underground tunnels.