Posts by Captain P

  • Old pier - game environment

    Quote from capone_adam

    I'm quite happy with this but am dubious about the 'cylinder roof' texture.

    I think it's because it's too low-detail. It looks like it's very low-res and I think the colors aren't what I expected them to be. I had thought of a sort of greenish roof plates rather than a wooded one. Greenish, or metallic, but not brown. The other part looks fine though, indeed.

    The architecture looks better now, too. Good job.

  • Old pier - game environment

    I don't know how you usually work, creating rough geometry first and then detailing, but it starts looking good. Only thing though would be that it looks too 'clean', too straight-lined while the reference picture shows a more abandoned state. I can see some broken things in your model but its not really showing yet. Probably because most things are too well aligned.

    My 2 cents...

  • Finding a mod team worth your while 101

    Never realised the coder is so important but I think it's true. I don't need no fancy gattling model to test my custom weapon code... using an existing machingun model suffices for the most part. And that's when it works. A gattling model on itself doesn't do nothing but looking good.

    I think people have to learn making things work first, before making them look like they work...

  • Finding a mod team worth your while 101

    Small, frequent releases would work for multiplayer mods, but don't you think SP mods are a different story?

    Quote

    Betatesting is also one thing that is too overdone in some mods, teams like to clean all the bugs before release but IT'S IMPOSSIBLE. Any mod you release is going to have them, and most of them are easy to fix in the next release which will also bring some other features for the game.

    I remember reading Gabe Newell saying he couldn't play Half-Life without thinking "we should've done that different and changed that and that" every now and then. I think it's an important point. I've spent a lot of time fiddling with texture alignment on maps that I never finished because I had never done the layout beforehand and I didn't want to throw away all that detail work I had already done...

    Betatesting can not only be problematic because it keeps you from releasing... it can also keep you from finishing important parts.

    Man, I love bad textured layout test maps these days! :wink:

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    @Minotauro:

    Looks nice, real nice. Only thing that didn't look so good was the placement of the TV and TV-cable against a well-lit wall that's covered with paintings. Especially the cable would be something I'd rather hide behind something instead of putting a spot-light on it.

    Apart from that, things look good...

  • Mad scientist lab

    You forgot the typical rain/thunderstorm background...

    Anyway, why not mix it up? A medieval castle with cyber-tech touches? So instead of the steam-tech looking constructions you've got robo-arms, large monitors, greenish tubes with implantated/cloned humans, a super-warrior drawing table for the final domination plan, all placed in the old and trusted medieval environment?

  • SoW1 vs. HL2 - Graphic quality

    Technically, detail textures are easy. With my little OpenGL knowledge I can say it's just a layer that uses different texture coordinates. That's all. So all that makes it a detail texture is it's different scale. And those screenshot show that it can make a great difference.

    However, for the initial statement that HL2 should've used detail textures, I still think it wouldn't have added significantly to the overall impression. From Nova Prospekt, I remember the grim feeling of a half-destroyed prison. From City17, I remember the train-station with it's shiny floors and light rays coming through the windows. Those things made more impression on me than the texture detail pixel-per-unit wise. I agree it would've looked better, but I don't think it would've been that important.

    Also, I think individual details matter more than repeating details like detail textures. From your second screenshot, I remember the several bushes better than that one of those area's was more detailed texture-wise.

    I think Valve's time was spent well. And I agree there will always be things that could've been added, that could've been done better. But at a certain point, you just decide it's good the way it is. For me, HL2 was good. Without detail textures.

    For my own levels, I would consider using detail textures since I have the time for it, and by that time also the knowledge, hopefully.

  • SoW1 vs. HL2 - Graphic quality

    Quote from Zacker

    That is one of my points. Detail textures could have been added without raising the requirements very much.

    Sure they could have been added. My point was, however, that I probably wouldn't even have noticed it, and that it wouldn't have added significantly to the impression the levels already made.

    Taking into account the amount of time HL2 took to create, and the 1-year delay it had, I doubt that most people would've liked that extra detail texture if it meant another month or so of delay. I think Valve's time was best spent on the shaders and such. Those things make surfaces actually behave like their real-life counter-parts, where detail textures just make a texture look higher-res.

  • SoW1 vs. HL2 - Graphic quality

    Quote from Zacker

    An old HL1 mod competing with the new wonderful HL2 and its Source engine? Texture quality in a game requirering a 300 mhz vs. a game which require a 1.2 gz?

    Let's talk about all the other features that HL2 has over HL... that 900 mhz difference surely isn't caused by detail textures...

    I agree detail textures can make a surface look more 'cool', but then again, I'd rather have the whole load of shader stuff and other features than just a detail texture.

    And the fact that I didn't notice the absence of detail textures in HL2, just because those levels looked very convincing, does say something... I think the overall impression is much more important than the extra detail on your textures.

    As for macrotextures, they're good stuff in 3D RTS games (nice for simulating cloud shadows too).