El Paso [Outlaws&Lawmen] (updated 17 jan)

Every western town needs a sheriff office, here's El Paso one:

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From For a few dollars more, you know. This was the last building, now rest some tweaking, fixes, optimization, game play issues, etc.

Yes, I agree. The outer zone is almost empty now, when you make a map like this is quite unclear what final performance will be, so that kind of props must be added at the end.

Adding animals is not easy, they need animations, and that wastes lots of resources.

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wasnt el paso allready a texas map?Looks like you duplicate the themes from the aged el paso map..

don't understand this sorry, do you mean my previous level "Presidio"? Both are for Outlaws&Lawmen, same western theme.

In this map there is something like a fountain

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align those wooden supports in the foreground of that shot - I can see the gaps

he he, it's not easy to align those models (there is a truckload of them), but I'll try!

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How did you do this? Imagine it's a client side effect so shouldn't lag a MP game?

No, that kind of wind shouldn't lag, if done properly. The main entity is the func_dustcluod, set it to emmit very few particles per second (I'm using 6 now on average), and alpha should be very low so sprite contour can't be seen (around 20-30). Particle size is 50-350, and particle lifetime 6-18s. Also important: visible distance should be low, around 1000-1500 is ok I guess, it's just a wind gust.

Well, once you got all your func_dustclouds around the map, where every wind gust will be seen, you need a env_wind to move those clouds, and of course, some logic_timers to activate and deactivate the clouds (off by default).

To make a first class effect , set an ambient generic with a wind gust sound that will be heard from each func_dustcloud. So when the logic_timer activates a dustcloud for 10-15 seconds, at the same time it also plays its correspondent wind gust. That's all I guess.

Wind is always welcomed at outdoors scenes IMO, except if overused like hmm ¿Dust maps?

And hey, this is Wesley's chuck wagon in-game, very nice contribution!

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Oh yes, prop shadows will come when ground LM is set to a final lower number. Also will be helpful -final compile, those proyected shadows are nicer when this setting will be applied. There will be some LM scale ajustments as well, thanks for pointing out.

Tumbleweeds are meant to move around the streets, if they don't cause any issue in online test then I'll keep as is now.

Regarding lighting, I suppose it'll look better next week, when final compile is made. I'll increase ambient lighting.

BTW, do you want to know what's my time in full vvis compile? 3:25, minutes of course Not bad for an entire town he he. It was really easy to optimize with those big boxed buildings. There is also big saving in performance, it's not a crappy vvis.

The idea behind the tumbleweeds was to inmerse players in the situation. If you hear wind in the background is okay, but if you see ocassional dust clouds comming to you and hear strong wind gust is better. If that's complemented with tumbleweeds then the inmersion is quite high. There is a small issue related to this: physic wind and dust puffs wind can't be coordinated, each one blows at its own direction. There is a bigger issue related to physic wind, the performance penalty is too high on some situations, so I'll need to restrict that effect to some areas.

Here is the new lighting with a -final compile. Unfortunately, I forgot to change the ground displacements lightmap scale to something lower. It was 64, 32 is the sweet spot, so very difuminate shadows in these shots. Vrad took 7 hours (and 5 minutes of vvis) so I won't repeat that expensive compile for the moment. This lighting is more in consonace with the movies I guess.

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