Posts by Defrag

Really nice work! Nothing constructive from me, I'm afraid.

This thread does not deliver. I don't see Morrissey or Marr.

It's possible that someone just ripped them & put them ingame as placeholders, then forgot to take them out. If it's not been sanctioned by id, honest mistake or not (who knows?) it's not the smartest thing I've ever seen.

I've also had this problem and fixed it by turning my stair into a ramp. Hardly an ideal solution.

Quote from R_Yell

Ah, very interesting. Using displacements in that way probably will increase map size a lot, but quality will pay though. I love how lighting works over displacements. I had some problems when displacements are a continuation of a solid, lighting doesn't work well there.

Yeah, there's a few things you can do minimise lighting errors:

1. Keep the displacements as small as possible

2. Set their lightmap scale to a lower value (I think 4 is the lowest usable lightmap scale for displacements. You either can't set it lower or there is no image quality benefit for doing so)

3. Put very low intensity lights at the joining segments to smooth out the lighting.

Sony's "viral" PSP website was the best marking blunder ever.

Yes the tools are pretty good for terrain etc. but it's not really much use for creating curved geometry. The FF guys (particularly eat & the trepids) make a lot of curved geometry using displacements, but they manually nudge vertices around which, while it gets the job done, is about as fun as drowning in a recently used beday(sp) . If Hammer could ape patch functionality it'd be great for that sort of stuff. It wouldn't even need to support true curved surfaces, just imitating the functionality and baking out the explicit vertex positions rather than storing control points in the .bsp.

The reason we use displacements a lot is that we have a lot of curved geometry and we also have two bases in most maps. As a result, we tend to find ourselves overrunning the BSP limits for planes/faces/brushes. Displacements are much more efficient to render and also store, so they help avoid this problem.

I guess we're not really using displacements for their 'traditional' use, but if you can bend something to suit your own needs, then it makes sense.

It looks interesting, but the lighting & texturing in places makes it look really flat and disjointed. I don't much care for the sky, either. The sky is blue, orange, grey and has sunshine poking through, but the environment doesn't seem to match it at all. It doesn't feel like there's much of a coherent colour theme. Look at Erratic's DoD map and you'll see what I mean -- it has a strong and immediately arresting look to it whereas, with yours, I'm still trying to work out what time of day it is, whether it's warm/cool etc.

I agree with what FMPONE said. Start small and build up a coherent theme in a smallish area of the map. Once you've got the feel & look just right, then work your way through the map. Right now it's all a bit scattergun and feels a bit random.

When I get a bit of time, I plan to create a bezier patch creation application that will export a bezier patch as a displacement in .vmf format. It'll effectively function like a poor-man's radient patch tool.

I already have a bezier curve application I made that lets you place / drag control points to create a curve, so it will just be a case of extending it to support patches instead of curves, then finding the appropriate format for exporting. It's a shame Hammer doesn't have a plugin system or I could probably knock this up quickly. I don't fancy doing the GUI using Win32 and I don't know MFC. I might use it to learn a bit of C# I suppose.

Hey but Dodger is such an awesome texture artist, we should all listen to him. :roll:

You know what would really hurt Thompson? People not giving him the oxygen of publicity. Especially gaming sites/magazines/companies. He is a legitimised joke.

I personally think that's way too messy & distracting. It looks really nice, but I wouldn't want to actually use it.

As Harry Hill would say: "There's only one way to find out which is best. FIGGGGGGGGGGGGHT!"

My golden rule for a good HUD:

Make it unobtrusive & tasteful. I see so many garish and/or lame HUDs that take up half the screen and I want to scream

I would murder several children for a lighting preview in Hammer. It's easy enough to get some nice-ish lighting, but to truly get what you want, it takes a lot of toing & froing from editor to engine. Having it right there in the viewport would be the one major improvement that would increase my productivity twofold.

Brown and cream interiors...

Imagine the 3d version of a myspace page. You're looking at an interior design disaster of epic proportions.

It's cool and all... but all I want to do is:

A: Play games.

B: Let my friends know I'm playing games so they can join the game easily.

If they make it totally seamless it could be interesting, but I'm wondering what the angle is, really. Do people really care about having dancing avatars and kitting themselves out with hats? D:

Cool stuff. The only bit that looks a bit off to me is the nose -- it looks unnaturally thin & straight when viewing from the front. I always have a hard time doing that when I try head modelling but knowing you it'll be A1 next time you post it up

It just looks like a joy to use. No waiting. No fuss, just pure productivity. I really love the integrated what you see is what you get approach.