Posts by Hourences

I know you can tile them, but afaik its a second normal map

I checked it with Epic people and gow uses normal mapped detail textures in some cases says my info, might be wrong, might be right but point is, they are not useless at all.

The textures are not blurry. They are simply tiled really big. How are you suppose to texture a giant rock when you cant scale the texture big ?

So no other option to scale it up which will result in a blurry tex which you then hide with detail texturing.

I applied another texture from my own pack, pretty sharp.

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tex ... igh/60.jpg

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/hou ... iltex3.jpg

Better ? Not a lot...

If the detail tex makes the texture beneath too unrecognizable make the detail tex more grayish then. Less contrast.

I never said they are better than specularity or whatever else. I said it all has its own good and weak points and a combination of everything is best.

Making the combination only takes a couple of minutes, but even that seems to be asked too much.

Its evolution, I liked the simplicity of long ago as well. Just some bsp cubes and that was it but you gotto evolve along. More stuff has to be added and if you dont like that evolution you got a prob

Im not saying they are more important than lets say the floorplan or normal map support, they are just like 400 other things just extras but they do take little time to setup so why not use that extra little thing then. More is better in this case and it doesnt even take you effort.

I also know that at the end you sometimes dont like to fix something anymore cause youre so tired of the thing but on the other hand you should. Those 30 minutes wont kill you man. I created over dozens of maps, they all had detail textures. Every one of them, the 30 minutes were bearable.

HL2 was good, even without detail tex

But good /=perfection. Good simply means better than bad. If there was more stuff added it might have been gooder good or so

Dont stop at "it looks goods already", make it awesome if you can and yeah I know you dont always have the time for that but in a perfect world or a mod community...

Think we got pretty much everything said

Yes

And you basically just said I cant use my imagination

I wonder how I can create things then.

Setting it up for an entire map, eg all surfaces and shader configs, would take less than half an hour at max, using custom detail textures.

Youre telling me that you just spend 4 damn months of your life making an absolutely awesome map but that another 30 minutes is too much. If you already spend that much you can easily spend some more to be sure your 4 months of hard work really payed off and you really managed to make a great and super polished product of the highest possible standards

And they already spend so much more time to give "graphic orientated players" (wtf that may be) their thing. Thats why we have 3 million poly worlds right now, so to speak.

Wake up

Example of a shader based dynamic effect ? Normal map ?

Want another things thats considered "modern" ?

Customability and giving the user the choice what he wants is expected these days. If you do not want to see detailtex then turn them off in the menu, if you do want to see them turn it on. Both sides happy. Give people the choice.

Did you look at the pictures now ?

Can you tell me if you see a difference in visual quality ?

Detail tex add just as much value as any other graphical feature. You wanna go say none of those adds any game value ?

If you do youll end up in a gameplay vs visual discussion and you prolly know where that will take you

Dont deny visual stuff. The more you can have of such features the better. It wont hurt if you do, it can only end up possitive

You are underestimating your own eyes, eyes are super fast. Close your eyes and open them for just 0.1 second before closing them again. In that 0.1 second youve already saw your entire room and can describe it pretty much blindly already.

Details matter. You do see them no matter how fast they zip by or how small they seem to be. They make or break your world, the believe you can have in your created world. Details create immersion and immersion is important when designing environments. You do not design cubes to play in with weapons. You design a living and breathing environment with a war going on.

Looking at blurry textures does not help me believe in the virtual world.

If details would not matter we would still be playing 30 poly cube maps right now.

Useless ? Look at my example pics. Huge difference ?

Renderpasses ? A detail texture has an -extremely- limited influence on the cpu/gpu. 1998 games already had them actually. They ran just fine on 300 mhz pcs..

Lot of work ? Those 2 setups in my example pics took me the whole 10 to 15 seconds to set up and about 8 mouseclicks. What did you say ?

Memory usage ? An entire level only uses about 5-10 detail textures, resulting in about 1 MB memory usage in the current gen. Hmm ?

The textures are not blurry, 1024 res textures

None of the things you said can make a surface look like that besides higher res textures but for that youd need a 8192 texture and thats impossible

Unreal engine 3 and gears of wars in particullary support it heavily, theres a reason for that

Afaik it even uses normal mapped detail textures, so a second smaller scaled normal map just for detail texturing

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/hou ... iltex1.jpg

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/hou ... iltex2.jpg

All 1024 res textures btw, even the wood of the lamp

Thats cause Unreal doesnt use _ but -

+ the map is a retail game level from Chicoverde, you cant download it anyway

Detail tex + normal maps are less fun but in other situations they are absolutely required, altho obviously not for the hl community

If I review or play a map that uses custom tex without detail tex applied in Unreal Im going to complain about it and look at it as a sign the author didnt spend a lot of time and polishing effort on the map

HL2 tex are medium res btw, 512 isnt that big and certainly not "detailed" or "sharp"

A true detailtexture, just like a Macrotexture btw is tiling and repeating. Its scaled down to about 8 times the original texture and laid on top of the diffuse tex, so it doesnt matter if its the same texture as the diffuse or not because its going to get rescaled and thereby appear different anyway

Macrotextures are often forgotten but great stuff, other way around, an overlay texture thats bigger than the diffuse one so you can make a rock wall for example that looks more unique

Less tiling, the overlay macrotexture hides the repeating patern of the regular diffuse texture

You can re use 1 single 512 or 256 detail texture a dozen times. Thats how Unreal is working for years, you dont notice its always the same tex yet it makes stuff look way better near by, normal mapping doesnt help with that at all, and I do look to walls from nearby

UT1 floortiles = http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/Hou ... ot0007.jpg

More than just a detail tex tho in that pic

I dont know how to make blends

Cant edit the pack anymore now.

I know that some mod and level designers will prolly get just about any size of file if its interesting but the real players need to get it too. They need to download it to to play your map or mod and I dont see them download 100 meg or so just for fun

Oh well, enjoy them

I dont know any HL2 mappers, so cant give you examples of in game HL use. If anyone makes something with them in HL feel free to send me the pics

I made myself a couple of cubes to test in, if anyone wants to see them in game HL2 -> http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/hou ... pagain.zip

My cubes rock btw

Specially my super leet doorbrushes and their 40 meter thick frames

Ive tried to include normal maps and specularity stuff but it was too much, both too much work as too space consuming, its already 30 mb and with normal maps that would have been 50 or 60 you know. People wont download it anymore then. I also dont have time anymore

Ive just released my newest texture pack for both UT1, UT2004 as for HL2. HourPitores is a semi realistic Tech-Industrial themed pack of about 80 1024 resolution textures and is available in a JPG gallery, a UT1 UTX, a UT2004 UTX and a Half Life 2 VTF directory. In the compiled game versions of Pitores all shaders have been set. Footstep sounds have been added and correct compression has been used as well as other misc settings such as detailtextures.

[Blocked Image: http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tempne…mcollection.jpg]

The pack is mainly made up out of dark red, yellowish gray and some yellow lines but also features some blue variants of some textures so I hope it'll work well for example CTF or other teambased gametypes. The colors are subtle on purpose and the bright yellow gray is there to make sure the textures light better. The brighter a surface the easier it will be to light (brightness and shadow wise). The less saturated the textures the easier they will be to color by lighting. Too saturated colors would also be too flashy and not stylish enough

The pack is free for all non commercial mod and level use as long as you credit me somewhere. Im also always interested in seeing what people made with it so feel free to email me and show me

Along with the map three UT1 example maps have been created showing off these textures as well as textures from my previously released HourIndusX texture pack. Those three maps are N3oDoc's DM-Cityzen, KaMi's CTF-Gataka and DarthWeasels DM-Raze. Found on Nalicity ( http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com )

More info, pics, other stuff and whatever on http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/

Full res JPG gallery at http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/texturespitores.htm

I dont think that would be a disaster for him as he is prolly pretty rich by now anyway, as he sold his stuff to them prior he was hired, Were talking about more than just 20 000 dollar or so you know

Deal is ok, good for me but on the long term it might give them a bad name if they keep doing this kind of stuff

Using photo tex, correct door sizes and square rooms is dead and dead easy compared to basically being a concept artist for every single element in the world, doorhandles and lightswitch designs included

Non realism might indeed end up more unique and thus more artist specific but on the other hand you have this problem for any theme so also for realism. Style <> Theme. HL2 city 17 for example looks pretty realistic (apart from the zombies and whatever:) yet it feels different. It has a certain style layed on top of it, the colors, the feel and atmosphere.

Getting all your level designers to work in the exact same feel and style is a prob that you always have. I admit that is easier to do with realism tho but not non excistant

Both themes are just as hard for a bad mapper btw

Depends on the dude and his talent and prefference

The cyberpunk stuff is true and Epics and DE's fault, not all Unreal games look like that, eg Unreal 1, but unfortunally theyve dumped just about every castle or inca temple/whatever other theme..

Doom3 and Quake4 have just as many pipes

Usage of pipes or not is a concept thing, nothing to do with sci fi theme or not, pipes/steam etc are style elements and an art direction

Realism is easier to create, for fantasy/sci fi/whatever you need to design elements yourself, from the smallest thing to the biggest. With realism you can just copy what you see, the things you actually see you dont have to design yourself, only recreate...

The initial design and styling process is one of the most complicated and hardest parts of level design while realism barely requires that process..

They used max btw

I would use custom textures when you start texturing and also lots of wood to make it more peacefull and friendlyer

When youre done we wont see the edge of the terrain anymore right ?

Light really needs a lot of work but you said so

Colored team lighting is the absolute worst thing you could possibly do to a map like this

Your smoothing groups are possibly messed up because you assigned no smoothing groups in max, if a model has no group assigned to a face UED will asign it to group 1 and thus might end up smoothing the whole thing

Ofcourse the problem is players wont use whatever is introduced, apart from a few exceptions. Onslaught was an exception but didnt at all appeal to the already excisting public of UT, it only appealed to new people. All serious players ignored it

The game currently already is deadslow compared to UT1, suddenly making it another type of game and more semi realistic (like there are dozens of games already) is not going to help. You will seriously piss of all your excisting customers/players by doing that, is that the way to go ?...Youll get pissed of people, flame and bad mouth to mouth publicity

You want the middle way, enough new and fun stuff to attract new people yet still please the old group and let them move along instead of loosing them, but that isnt simple to do. Just polishing it to death might be the best in such case, quality vs quantity

FPS Singleplay stuff yes, a lot to do with but with fast paced arcade action multiplay games like Quake or UT ? I dont see that much possible

New gametype ? Offer a hardcore player CTF and some weird new gamemode and he wont even try to play the new mode, hell just stick to CTF right away...

UT1 and 2004 both have so incredibly many options and gametypes that the entire playercommunity is split up online, you may have 1000 players online for example but theyll barely see eachother because they are all spread out trough dozens of different gametypes and mutators

Adding more wouldnt really help. Im suprised they havent deleted more gametypes actually

Quote from mikezilla

well unreal 2 looked amazing and beyond anything ever concieved when they revealed it.when it came out it was old hat and sorta crappy.

Epic didnt made U2

Theres not THAT much inovation possible anymore, and any innovation will piss off the entire hardcore group of players or further split up the game

And game making is still their nr 1 job and money income altho I could see that change in the next few years