Posts by Defrag

I'm just about to finish my computer games technology honours project. I've created a deferred shading renderer and a multi-pass forward shading renderer with the intention of comparing and contrasting. It's not a hugely complicated project with huge balls, but it has various common features such as normal mapping, spec mapping, shadow mapping, (shitty)HDR, fogging etc.

Anyway, one of the final things I have to do is render a few scenes that approximate conditions in games. E.g. large scenes with terrain and few light sources, interior scenes with some small meshes and lots of light sources. I've not had time to create a load of art for it (the art is not a graded part of the project so my time was better spent implementing more features, writing better code & shaders etc.), so I've mainly just re-used meshes from the DirectX and NVIDIA SDKs. However, I think most people are fed up of seeing the same meshes a million different times, so this is where you chaps come in.

So, I'd appreciate it if anyone were to 'loan' me a few of their models or 3d scenes. This could be anything. Terrain models, skybox textures, vehicle models, player models. Normal & spec maps would be nice (I support tangent space normal mapping) but they're not required. The more the merrier. Polycounts should be reasonable, but they can be higher fidelity than you'd find in most games as, with deferred shading, only one geometry pass is ever made.

As long as I can get them into max and re-export them in my preferred format, I'd be happy to accept anything. If I use your meshes, you will of course be credited in the writeup, and if I send this project as part of any job applications, I will make sure your name & email address are visible in the credits. I'd really need stuff to be sent to me by the end of the month (just drop a message here or send me a pm/email if you're interested )

Cheers!

That's the business, Warby. Awesome stuff.

Also you can use +showbudget_texture and +showbudget_texture_global which shows the texture usage stats for the current frame and the global texture usage respectively.

It depends on the normal map, but it's generally better to save it uncompressed if you can. If it's unimportant or doesn't contain much detail then you can compress it. Compressed textures definitely do take up less video memory because I looked into it a while back (and by "I", I mean decs!).

I like it, too.

I don't really trust the inquirer's opinion on this. Then again, I don't really trust their opinion on anything.

Thief & Thief2 are both brilliant games. I've not played the third, but I intend to at some point

"Someone is taffing around down here!"

Chucky Egg was ace. My friend had that on the BBC micro. Which reminds me, the Dizzy games were almost infuriatingly difficult. I think the original Dizzy game gave you 1 life (as in one, singular). When you died, the game was over. It had loads and loads of tricky bits so it was an absolute bastard to beat. Treasure island dizzy gave you the luxury of extra lives iirc.

Oh and my vote goes for pretty much any racing game with traffic. There's nothing like making four perfect laps and opening up a big lead, only for a car to T-bone you at a box junction when there's absolutely NOTHING you can do to avoid it. I fucking hate games like that. I can't get mad when I see something and have time to avoid it, but when I finish in 2nd because of a call to rand(), I just want to punch someone in the face.

Keiron Gillen... that brings back some memories. I used to love PC Gamer before James Flynn cleared off, and I really liked KG's reviews & stuff. Then again, I was a brain-dead 12 year old around that time, so maybe it's the ol' rose-tinteds beguiling me.

Compare the compile logs when you do a normal & expert compile then check if there's any different parameters being passed to the tools.

I've heard the name but I don't know what it is. The "mon" bit makes it sound like Pokemon. But not.

I tried various RAD settings and came to the conclusion that most of them don't seem to do anything these days

Mine are in the bin folder too, but it doesn't work for me for whatever reason.

There's some severe head tiltage going on there! I like!

Ooh, I never thought of that. Good idea.

Here's a link explaining how to add stuff to context menus so people can replicate it

Also, I had to make mine use the source sdk environment variable or it couldn't find the tools. Not sure how you've got yours set up but this worked for me.

Quote

%sourcesdk%/bin/vbsp.exe %1%sourcesdk%/bin/vvis.exe -fast %1

%sourcesdk%/bin/vrad.exe -ldr -fast %1

pause

Here's a load of pre-made .bat files people can drop them straight into their tools/bin dir : I also included 1 threaded versions for people that like to keep one core spare. My opteron grinds to a halt if I'm compiling with both cores, but if I run it with one thread I can keep mapping / doing other stuff in the meantime.

Download them from here.

I spy BF2 on the desktop!

I personally found this tutorial to be very useful: Very suspect URL but totally safe I guarantee it!.

Quote from Aggressor

Yeah, sure. I love how people jump to conclusions just to sound bombastic.

I don't really understand what you mean - that Stalker is running on a modified Source? Have you even played it?

BTW, there's a book I forgot the title of (GPU Gems 2 or something) that thoroughly explains Xray's way of rendering. It's nothing like Quake-based engines.

So uh, what exactly is cl_interpolate meant to indicate in the context of ripping off the source engine? cl_ is a common abbreviation for client variables and interpolation is a very common thing, too. I doubt it's a sign that it's been pilfered from the source engine; it's more likely they've just re-used common naming conventions.

The fact that STALKER uses deferred shading doesn't disprove any kind of code theft, though. The renderer is just one part of a game engine. It'd be possible to steal one part of an engine while writing the rest yourself (not saying they did, just saying ...)

Cover OK, original 10x better.

Battlezone was a fun game. I used to skii like a bitch in that game (and I'd never even played tribes :E).