Reality engine

i get the feeling that if in six years of development valve didn't improve the tools for themselves then we can't expect them to do so for us.

Quote from ReNo

The problem is that I don't see much alternative. Any engine or tool that allows you to create many variants of the same image (eg. source offers different lighting models, automatic detail props like grass/plants, shader effects like reflections and refraction, normal maps, etc...), will need some sort of data to specify which options you are going to use. A simple TGA or BMP isn't going to do that itself - your game will need a proprietary format (such as source's VTFs/VMTs), and to create such a format from a standard like TGA will require further data (taken from an associated txt file, for example). The more advanced the capabilities of resources like textures become, the more steps there will be involved in creating them. Yes a GUI frontend would be nice, but there will be essentially the same steps needed regardless.

Ive created hundreds of advanced materials and shaders trough the past few years, I know how they work and what it takes to make materials but theres a difference between doing this the easy and fast way and using prehistoric txts

Ofcourse you will always need things like spec maps and normal maps and whatever else and ofcourse you will always need to be able of configuring those but the difference is in how you configure them, not in what you configure. A txt is not done, that is 1995like and were currently 2005 for crying out loud. Its not just source that does it, afaik doom3 is doing it the same way with txts not ?

You are saying the more advanced the materials become the more steps you need. Ofcourse but that also means that those steps must be done as efficiently as possible to reduce the time you need for the "longer than used to be" method. Basically txts slow you down and are not efficient, especially not when talking about those advanced and complex materials.

What you need is no compiling ! No exporting ! Simple importing ! Visual shader network creation (a la max and maya) ! And realtime updating and previewing !

As far as I understand source compiles a texture pack from the info it finds in a txt and then it gives you this vmt file or whatever ? So what if someone would be working on his level with custom textures and he would say "hey that wall is too saturated, let me adjust the texture" ? Wouldnt he then need to turn off hammer and recompile the entire package and then restart hammer to see a difference ? Because that would be -really- bad for your workflow..

its not only the importing texture problem i have ran into.

its also so many bugs that there are now in hammer that wherent in the older versions (carve tool now really is totally useless) they even fucked the clipping tool for god sake (when i use it it snaps the point 1 unit next to where i click) wtf did they do that for??

and to make matters even worse sometimes hammer fucks up the grid making it always stick to grid size 1 (only thing to resolve this seems to copy paste your brushes into a new map)

and to finish it off and being a complete hammer basher i HATE the displacement editing! why couldnt they do this more like on the unreal engine, i mean you can only use 2 materials on a displacement that is so crappy man

Good tools are very important to a game developer. Why do you think everyone seems to be lisencing UE3 and not Source? Easy to use tools. Both engines are awsome, but the one that is easier to use will be the most used and most popular with devs.

Importing textures/materials:

UE2 - http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/TextureBro ... nce#Import

Source - http://adamowen.com/tut_cmats.htm

As a mapper or artist, which would you rather deal with on a day to day basis?

Quote from Hourences

As far as I understand source compiles a texture pack from the info it finds in a txt and then it gives you this vmt file or whatever ? So what if someone would be working on his level with custom textures and he would say "hey that wall is too saturated, let me adjust the texture" ? Wouldnt he then need to turn off hammer and recompile the entire package and then restart hammer to see a difference ? Because that would be -really- bad for your workflow..

No they want u to rename the txt into vmt and manually copy the file to the right directory

I can't really believe they work that way at Valve and they probebly have some other tools (or maybe bat files?) what do that stuff for them, and if they do, its not that hard to believe the delay on hl2

Even tough I haven't had to mutch problems importing custom content to my maps (besides anoying path problems) but can't call it easy or fast

Also this should not be a option for Hammer, but more a plugin for photoshop, just like cryengine has dds (or something) compiled in photoshop.

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re http://www.artificialstudios.com/compare.php

How unbiased is this comparisation if its done by the guys from the reality engine?

I bet the other engines have 'yes' where Reality would have 'no'

And if the engine doesn't have it does not mean its not possible,

I can't imagine the mmo what took a licence on source has no day/night cyclus, and somebody posted on these forums already a mod what did it for doom3

btw. light preview for hammer wil come, its just a matter of when,

Maybe with the hdr update?

In the past 5 weeks of working with unreal2 I'm turning to it for one reason. The easyness to import texturse and static meshes keeps me moving at a fast pace. I'm not wasting my time compiling _anything_. I can quickly export a non-uvw'd model into unrealed and I can see what it looks like quickly with dynamic lighting in editor. This helps me make sure things are to scale while i'm building it, meaning less time correcting later on when I polish stuff. I'll probably only do one more source map so that I can say I'm profficient enough in the engine for portfolio reasons, than turn to the Unreal 3 engine.

The major plus with the Source engine is the community tied to HL2/CS. Make a decent map, and its more or less guaranteed to get some playtime, which in my opinion, is the whole point of mapping.

Tools to ease the process of creating new assets will come, but it will probably mostly be fan-made (another plus by having such a huge community).

Ferret, you've just about converted me with that talk of importing non-skinned models for testing

Quote from ReNo

Ferret, you've just about converted me with that talk of importing non-skinned models for testing

You can always compile a model for HL2 and check it without a skin, just to a flatten UV map for it (which takes like 2 secs).But importing stuff to Source is a pain in the ass, I miss Wally~

True, but it still involves compiling the model, importing it into the level, compiling the level, launching the game and looking at it. Thats a fair few steps more than UE.

exaclty stolve, compiel this compile that. WTF. Unreal there is no such thing. You simply export the model as an .ase and import it in unreal and you're DONE. Unreal will automaticaly throw on a texture if you dont have one on it and it's dynamicaly lit inside the editor. I can say it takes more time to do that crap in source huh?

the only thing the unreal editor isnt superior in when you compare it to hammer is its texture aplication tool but he who cares about aligning all that base geometry right :wink:

it looks alot like the Far Cry engine, which isnt half bad, but cant really hold a candle to Unreal 3 in terms of lighting, shader usage, LODs

Quote from rockdude86

the only thing the unreal editor isnt superior in when you compare it to hammer is its texture aplication tool but he who cares about aligning all that base geometry right :wink:

hows that any better in source? I find the texture system HORRIBLE in source...it gives me nightmares!

The next version of Hammer had better support lighting previews or I will fucking cry.

As for UnrealEd, the reason I didn't really get into it was the way you have to give exact values when hollowing out sections to work in. Is there any way to make it so you can drag stuff out ala Hammer, because I don't think I will be able to resist a dabble in Unreal 3 Engine mapping in the future.

Quote from rockdude86

the only thing the unreal editor isnt superior in when you compare it to hammer is its texture aplication tool but he who cares about aligning all that base geometry right :wink:

As much as HL veterans tend to claim otherwise at the beginning, nothing compares to the ease and joy of texturing in Radiant, at least the d3 version... at least, as long as you build on a reasonable grid! Still by far the most raw construction power available in any engine on the market today

Anywho. D3 does indeed use a text-style material system, but it seems much better implemented than the source version. Most things are text-based, whether it be the .def files, .mtr files, or the scripting, but I really like it that way, especially the script. Visual scripting systems are ok, but there's no telling what they're doing under the hood and whether or not it's the most efficient means of doing it. Writing each line yourself remedies that problem.

There's some shortcuts, too, to make a standard material not a bloated process - you can just paste the path and all is well.

I've been through enough discussions about which editor is the best, don't you people realize that each editor/engine has strengths and weaknesses and when you talk about your favorite editor, in 99% of all cases it comes down to the editor the person works most of his time with. Because the more time you spend with an editor, the more comfortable you feel with it and when you haven't even touched the other ones....you get the point.

I'm also wondering why you guys compare today's engines with the Unreal 3 engine? You won't be able to see it in any game before 2006, so it would make more sense to draw either the Unreal 2.5 engine or the next gen engines of the competitors for comparison (I know there is nothing to see from them yet, but be sure that they are in the works).

Quote from Tequila

The next version of Hammer had better support lighting previews or I will fucking cry.As for UnrealEd, the reason I didn't really get into it was the way you have to give exact values when hollowing out sections to work in. Is there any way to make it so you can drag stuff out ala Hammer, because I don't think I will be able to resist a dabble in Unreal 3 Engine mapping in the future.

Make a standard cube and go in vertex edit mode (top right button toolbar or type in "mode vertexedit" in command box then just drag the sides around in top down or whatever till you what you want

I barely type in numbers anymore

You dont use a lot of bsp anymore anyway

I cant judge texturing because I dont have enough texturing experience with radiant and hammer but never had any probs with ueds tex alignment, it does most things itself already. One thing that is missing is a deadsimple UV unwrap window tho

And ofcourse you have your favorite engine and an engine in which you work really fast or know really well, sure but that doesnt mean its all dependant on prefference. If for example an editor like hammer has no lighting preview its not just a fact of prefference anymore. Its simply a lacking feature and a bad thing for your workflow, objectively saw

Quote from kleinluka

hows that any better in source? I find the texture system HORRIBLE in source...it gives me nightmares!

well google up a texture tutorial for halflife1 (its the same as for hl2) and you will find a lot of tricks for aligning textures (especially for rounded stuff)

and those are things that are fucking tricky to do with the unreal editor