Black Mesa Source is back

    Quote from JeanPaul

    you're working on lamda core?PLEASE tell me you got rid of that jumping puzzle.

    No, I havent. I plan on really exapnding that area, while making it entertaining, as it seems that you didnt find the original that entertaining.

    i found it a bit frustrating is all. falling down a few stories into another teleport was kinda cool, though.

    Thats awesome! I just hope you're going to make some slight variations in the gameplay. Would be a shame to remake the entire game and not make it just a bit different~

    Quote from R_Yell

    Very nice, I wonder how long are their compile times with those low lightmap scales he he.

    I was under the impression they were shadow overlays

    Very nice stuff. I reeeeaaaally like the remade zombie scientist.

    Hey guys, I'm glad to hear you like it. We have been working hard for a long time to bring a nice media release, and hearing people warm up to it is nothing but awesome. Those light map scales you see on blast pit are usually 1 or 2 I believe. It's part of his style that he works with.

    I'm thinking the time behind this will pay off in the end. We have a lot done, but I will say we have a lot to do also. The levels have progressed 10 fold, however areas like scripted sequences are where we are focusing more work to. We are planning to make this work like HL2 to where everyone has something to do and things to say, not just 4 lines and standing around like in HL. So some extra love will be put into this I promise

    Quote from atrocity

    Those light map scales you see on blast pit are usually 1 or 2 I believe. It's part of his style that he works with.

    Seriously man, that's not "a style", its more like cheating Seriously though, I'm sure that using 1 or 2 unit luxels frequently is gonna take its toll on performance for a lot of people. I've yet to go below 4 I think.

    My personal belief is that it doesn't look all that good. Why, because when light hits an object it clearly depends on how bright the light is, and how close the object is to the source which the shadow is recieved. So the dimly lit blast pit is projecting shadows across to walls far away, with perfectly crisp shadows. I am not a light expert but these are my thoughts.

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    Is the performance hit associated with lightmap scale really that bad? Hell, I rarely go below 8 units per luxel.

    Have a look at a surface with low lightmapscale in wireframe mode. Its pretty wacky.

    I don't think the performance of higher resolution lightmaps is bad per se, it just takes up a lot more memory and will makes levels slower to load. As long as people use them sparingly it shouldn't be too bad.

    Mod is looking great btw

    Quote from JeanPaul

    There is very little to no performace hit in lowering the lightmap scale as Source pre-renders all lighting calculations.

    CPU wise yes, there is close to no performance hit yes. When we are talking GFX processing power it does however take a hit due to the extra amount of texture data being pushed to the screen per frame. The biggest hit however is for the gfx memory which quickly fills up if you use high res lightmaps.

    You might have done a test with a high lightmap scale and low lightmap scale and then in that test found that there was no performance difference. When we talk about memory consumption you can't just test this as easily though as it's very much about when you go through the roof and when you stay below.

    As long as the gfx card memory can still handle it, then the performance hit is low, but still there though. When however it needs to use the system ram, then we run into a lot of bottlenecks which slows things down quite a bit.

    You can use the texture budget panel to give you an idea of how much memory you are using with textures, and there is probably a way to get the entire gfx memory use too. Think the texture budget panel gives figures for different texture types too, so you see how much is being eaten up by diffuse/normal maps/specmaps/envmaps/lightmaps individually. It's not something I've ever really bothered checking as I was normally running and testing on a 128mb card; if it was running fine on that you probably didn't need to worry. Now I'm on a 256mb card I might start paying it more mind however.

    And CJ, I guess you mean you rarely go ABOVE 8 units per luxel? As in, you using 16 unit luxels is a rarity, whereas using 4 unit luxels is more common? It's annoying how whether people are talking about resolution or size means you have to switch words, despite the fact you are talking about exactly the same thing. Gets so confusing

    Quote from dissonance

    is there any way to dump the contents of the gpu memory to disk?

    When the GFX card memory runs out it transfers over the AGP/PCI-E bridge to the system memory. When system memory runs out it will in general swap on the hdd. I do however hope that there is some kind of priority system to avoid getting the GFX mem contents down to the hdd, as that would be a performance disaster.

    For all you that bitched at me read properly first before replying with something utterly stupid.

    I never said it looks bad infact it still looks nice but i am not impressed is what im saying(because everybody said wow and amazing impressive etc)

    Guess i did too much with the hl2 engine that everything made with it looks the same.

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