Posts by ReNo

Not sure I understand your question diss - completely get rid of what? The faces? The leaves?

Skip covered brushes won't do anything - the point of skip is that faces textured with it are ignored by the compile tools (which isn't entirely true, but its near enough). If you have a brush covered entirely in the skip texture, then there is no purpose to the brush (unless you created it to aid you in hammer, but that's another story), so you might as well just delete it.

Nodraw exists precisely for scenarios like the ones being talked about here - creating solid brushes for BSP/VIS purposes, without adding any rendering costs. If you want to simplify your BSP, then you can use nodraw brushes to make a simpler, not necessarily visible "hull" to your level, and use func_detail brushes to fill in the awkwardly shaped architecture.

Hey, nice to see you posting here mate

My main comment is you need to go to town on 3D skyboxes, particularly for gg_autumn, and even more desperately, dm_rust. That map looks pretty cool but the open sky area is so huge and the roof line is so flat that it looks unrealistic. With an interesting 3D skybox (especially if combined with more detail/structures above the current roof line) that could be alleviated.

I really like the look of the crossfire remake - I've seen it before but I think it must have been an earlier version as I don't remember liking it so much before

I'm a sucker for using hint brushes to the extreme to pretty much manually build my BSP. In a lot of places this is unnecessary as BSP would have cut things up that way anyway, but (if you know what you are doing), it doesn't hurt to do it's job for it. Even if you don't take it to the same extreme as I do, adding some well placed hint brushes can save masses of unnecessary BSP leaves, and therefore cut down VIS time significantly.

A good place to start with hint brushes would be in your doors and windows - BSP has a tendancy of pulling leaves out through doorways and into the open areas on either side, thereby making awkward leaf layouts. To minimise this, at each of your doors/windows, build a brush, covered in the skip texture, that fills up the hole. Now texture each of the open sides of the brush (the ones facing into the areas on either side) with the hint texture.

This won't help in EVERY case, but it does help in many, and so its good to get into the habit of shoving these hint brushes into doors and windows. Use GLView (as per Defrag's batch file) and/or mat_leafvis 1 in-game to get a feel for what effect your hint brushes are having. Once you've got a better understanding of how it all works you'll probably run into loads more ways that hint brushes could help optimise your BSP.

Hint brushes aren't only useful for cutting down on unnecessary visibility!

A mix of the following...

- Dead Rising (when the lads are over)

- Splinter Cell: Double Agent

- MotoGP (seriously satisfying racing game)

- Oblivion

- Lumines Live! (not too keen on their pricing strategy, but its still an awesome puzzle game)

Just bought myself a PC upgrade so once all that arrives and is setup, I'm probably gonna give Dark Messiah, Battlefield 2142, or Gothic 3 a spin. Can only really afford one of them after my recent spending but its a tough choice!

Pretty sure it's 360 only, but I wouldn't rule out a PC port at some point in the future.

Nice one Furyo, glad you got the Source engine work you were looking for I had no idea Dark Messiah was coming to the 360 - don't suppose there is any word on whether there will be any new content or anything is there? Or a release date for that matter? I tend to prefer playing games on consoles these days where possible.

Any chance of seeing the flats tomdon?

Apocalyptic shots make me think Auto Assault, small road shot makes me think Oblivion. Both in good ways

So, spotlight, yeah?

I read a review of the 4-slot motherboard, and they did manage to get 4 cards in there. Means you could set it up with 8 monitors if you wanted

Yay dux! So glad to hear you are going back to working on that map

Three is nothing, check out this quad PCI-E 16x motherboard from Asus...

http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l1=3 ... odelmenu=1

Not as well spaced as they seem to be on that on you posted however, so probably only gonna fit single slot graphics cards.

Well, the artists aren't really responsible for making the game playable, so having good art isn't really prohibiting the game from being solid and bug-free.

This fairly snuck onto market shelves didn't it? I mean, I've known about the game for a long while now, but I had no idea it was due out already, and normally I've got a least a few weeks notice before something appears.

I'm sad to hear it is so laden with bugs, as my old flatmates raved about the first two games so I was planning on picking this one up. I've only just gotten into Oblivion though, so maybe I'll hold off on Gothic 3 until some more patches have sorted out the worst of the issues.

20 great titles? I'm assuming you are rarely an early adopter of a system if you wait for that sort of number before committing!

Ahahahaaha

Oh boy that was good. Thank for the link Koko!

What are we looking at here dude? Thats barely recognisable as a PC to me

I think Fetter getting himself a game job is the biggest non-surpise I've had all year Was inevitable but doesn't make it any less of an achievement, so consider this post a non-physical pat on the back mate

That hole in the floor being right in the middle of the room looks really fake to me. Looking suitably grand outside but I think there's a little too much reliance on a single texture out there and it could do with more variety. The wood texture on that arch beam in the third shot should also be replaced as it looks extremely bland and cartoony when compared to the rather "busy" looking stone walls.

I agree with TeddyBear that the fog is a little too extreme, but I wouldn't reduce it by too much, as I think overall it adds to the look. For some reason its reminding me a lot of a certain part of "Breakdown" on the Xbox, though far far sexier I really like the new crossbeams you have added by the way.