Posts by Defrag

God damnit, I suggested the bonus squad shit for BF2 on the EA UK forums nearly a year ago and they didn't implement it in BF2. Then again, I realised soon after that their support for BF2 patching was basically non-existent from a gameplay perspective...

There's so much dumb shit in that game regarding scoring. You get the same amount of points for killing a tank with 3 AT missiles as you do for killing a single infantry guy. Hmm what's easier? Also, you get 2 points for a revive even when a tank is sitting next to you to re-kill you .2 of a second later. I could go on all day.

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#3:Lack of reward for good squad leaders.

Squad leaders should be given an extra point or two when their squad members make x teamwork points. When I play squadleader, I usually don't try to capture flags / defend flags directly, but stay back instead. As a result, I don't get as many kills or flag captures compared to normal; so my score actually suffers for playing in a fashion that benefits my team/squad.

The ~average score per round per person is usually in the region of ~20-40 (good players can make 50- 100 each round in my experience, but they're exceptions rather than the norm, so please don't say "oh but I get 80 points per round Razz" as the majority make a fraction of that).

If you have a full squad (not including squadleader), that would add up to 5 * ~30 = 150 points. Probably 1/3 of those points are teamwork points (50), the rest are combat. If squadleaders were awarded one point for every five squadmember spawns on the squadleader's position, and something like one point for every 5 teamplay points their squad members scored, it'd add up to a decent return and reward those who play squad leader to help their team.

For example, at the end of a game, a squad leader might have his regular score plus 30 spawns (+6 points at 1 point per 5 spawns) and 10 additional teamplay points (50 team points achieved by squad, squadleader gets one point per five his squad members earn) giving a further 16 points to his score. If the squad leader is poor, then no-one will spawn on him (as they'll be dead all the time and can't get the bonus) and there'll be less flag neutralises/caps achieved by their squad, as they will effectively be operating under their own steam.

This is just an idea; the numbers / bonuses were just to illustrate that you could implement something that would reward squad leaders fairly if they played in an effective / considerate manner. IMO there's real potential for this sort of thing. You might have to disallow things like kill driver assists counting towards the point total if the squad is blackhawk personing etc. I'm sure the boffins at Dice could come up with something more concrete.

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Personally, I see room and the need for both realistic and stylised approaches.

It gives me something of a thrill to see just how far hardware & software has come when I see stuff like those Crysis shots. Remember back when we were running around in pseudo 3d games? It kinda blows my mind to know that we've (ok, they've) reached this kind of realism so quickly considering we were running around blasting sprites not so long ago.

Quote from Sa74n

to check out excellent photosources for textures go here: http://www.cgtextures.com

Wow, great resource, thanks.

Yeah BF2 is exactly like that, too... It amazes me that developers don't come up with solutions to some of these problems. For example: In BF2 various people will stand in front of a plane if you beat them to it, meaning you have to teamkill them with the plane when taking off. You lose points and can be banned. I once ended a round on something like -8 points even though I killed about 20 enemies and it was all down to a couple of dickheads standing in front of the plane as I took off. This happened about five times in a round (me running over both of them and losing eight points each time). On most servers the TK limit is 3 or 4 before you get banned, so the clown only has to die three times to get the plane.

However, there is pretty much ZERO chance of teamkilling someone in a moving plane without the other person being at fault. It begs the question: Why don't they just disable TKs for being struck by a plane? It doesn't make any sense and would eliminate a lot of the problems you see. I didn't start flying planes a lot until a few months back (I'm a chopper whore) and until then i didn't realise just how goddamn annoying some people are. Developers need to sort out these issues as it's often the small things that are the most annoying.

Quote from AdamBrome

Are you using them both at once? Or seperate. Try them both at the same time. Last time I tried it out I had an object under a shadow cast by a small pillar. Rather than the object being completely dark from its origin being in shadow the parts of the car that SHOULD have been under shadow were. The parts that would be lit were lit.*shrug*

I'm fairly sure you're barking up the wrong tree and that they've just enhanced the vertex-lighting model and the way in which props cast shadows rather than receive them. I've still found no evidence of anything approaching lightmapped props

Useful stuff to know nonetheless, so it's good you brought it up regardless.

I tested them with the Source SDK base, the new engine stuff. I have a prop half in shadow and half in light and it was unaffected by either vrad option. The latter command did what it was supposed to do, the former didn't seem to do anything.

First one didn't do anything. The second one appears to cast more precise lightmapped shadows from props onto world geometry only; prop lighting itself is unaffected.

This is all I can find, gonna try the first two to see what they do:

-StaticPropLighting : generate backed static prop vertex lighting

-StaticPropPolys : Perform shadow tests of static props at polygon precision

-OnlyStaticProps : Only perform direct static prop lighting (vrad debug option)

-StaticPropNormals : when lighting static props, just show their normal vector

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Defrag: As I mentioned, they added lightmaps for static props to Epi1. This gives the illusion of self-shadowing. It's very sexy. There's a -command that you have to run when cooking with vrad. I don't know it off hand, sorry.

If you could dig it out, I'd appreciate it. Is there a way to apply it to only specific props or is it a map-wide change?

Yeah but the ET:QW engine has obviously had a large amount of enhancements...

So then... XSI?

I've seen quite a few problems with z-ordering and transparency in Source and, as has been said, the only way to fix some of them is to use the 1-bit alpha (unless there's a trick everyone is missing).

I'm fairly sure that Episode 1 added localised vertex lighting (i.e. fairly accurate per-vertex lighting) as opposed to taking a light sample from the prop's origin and lighting vertices using that one lighting point.

There's very little information on the technical specifics unfortunately. The best explanation I found was from one of the DoD:S forum posts by a Valve guy. I've not seen anything similar to lightmaps for props. It'd be a nice thing to have for when the need arises

Max makes me want to frolic in the meadows with kittens

and punch babies.

Hey dux, I didn't realise it was you that made that AG2 level. That stuff looked amazing (especially since it was shown so early). It's a shame AG2 didn't come to pass; I was especially looking forward to seeing what scary_1 was up to

I've given up and I'm going to reinstall it. I'll be back here moaning like a bitch if that doesn't sort it out.

I think some of the textures are scaled up a bit too much which gives it a cute lego-ish look, but kinda destroys the feel a little. The interior texture scale of the blocks is bang on the money. As ferret said, it needs some different angles and some less chunky brushwork.

The theme is cool and I think it looks lovely, just needs a little more work on HL2-ising-inginging it

I always save before I unwrap, but that doesn't solve my problem. Currently if I want to unwrap anything I have to go max->maya->max again.

yup, SP3

This is really annoying me now. I'm using max8 and it is frequently bombing out when I unwrap stuff. When I apply a UVW unwrap modifier, a maxscript window pops up for a second and then max closes itself without error.

This has happened quite a few times now and it's really goddamn annoying. To sort it, I have to export to a format that maya can read, apply an unwrap modifier in maya and then re-import back into max. Doing so results in the unwrap modifier working properly in max, but it's not much of a fix.

Anyone encountered similar problems? Any help appreciated.