Posts by Mr. Happy

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    Lol yes the shire was one inspiration

    The battle is to make a scene to "identify yourself." Three screenshots of a map that shows you, your personnality, whatever. This is a little house in the woods that I'd like to live in. When I'm done there will be mountains in the background, more monitors/wires/technological things hanging from the trees, and a few magical crystals sprinkled throughout. A love of technology and nature, two seemingly dichotomous things that I believe can be seemlessly merged, are what define me. And magical crystals with energy are cool The contest thread is over this way

    The steps, wall, and bridge-slats are semi-placeholders. Ideally I'd like to make them model's but there's only a day left. I'll definitely rough up the stairs though.

    I haven't really bothered scaling the water texture up yet

    KFS: What exactly strikes you as weird about it? The shape or texture alignment? It may just be the angle of the screenshot, but since the overhang inflects at the wall I made the roof follow its curve and dip in. Maybe I should pull the vert's on the displacement up a bit?

  • Unreal vs Source.

    For me it comes down to one thing: the result.

    To my eyes the lighting, shading, and rendering in source almost always looks more natural, more real. In all other engines I've worked with the result has this plasticy, unnatural look and it's not just the artistic capabilities of the people using the tools. Even if other modern engines can handle more polygons, or have better tools, or are more streamlined in asset creation, the result just never looks as good. At least, to me.

    It takes a little more effort in one editor to do some things, and a little more effort in another editor to do another thing. But you can make the exact same geometry in any engine, so long as it can support the number of polygons.

    For example, patches. Sure bezier surfaces are really easy to create and manipulate, but you can make the same thing with pyramical brushes.

    So for me it all comes down to how well the engine can render the scene.

  • Battlestar Galactica: Colonial forces looking for mapper

    Hey all!

    Battlestar Galactica: Colonial Forces is a "mini total-conversion" being built on the Source Engine that puts you on the ground in some of the most recognizable locations from the re-imagined series including the algae planet, Kobol, and New Caprica with deathmatch and command-point/assault style gameplay. Play as the quick and diversly armed Colonials who just want to reach earth, or the slow but powerfull Cylons trying to extinguish the human race!

    We are a small but dedicated team of experienced modders and we are now looking for another experienced level designer to...design levels.

    [email protected] if your interested. Include examples or links of/to your work. You can also post in the applications area on our forums.

  • First Rock Band footage

    Games like this are great because personnally, I'm not musical and would rather dick around on guitar hero for a couple hours and then spend my real time learning new software rather than an instrument that will never take me anywhere

  • WIP in WIP, post your level screenshots!

    oooh verticality im guessing thisll end up on my server

    Quote from the0rthopaedicsurgeon

    i'm trying to make the map as long as possible, but since i've already gone over the entity limit in two dod:s maps, i'm only adding the ones i need for now (lights, cubemaps). once the geometry's done i'll add more debris and group some props together in max to cut down on the entity count.

    Quote from Rof

    The entity lump can be a maximum of 256 kbytes long (MAX_MAP_ENTSTRING) and contain up to 4096 entities

    don' think ive ever hit that particular limit...

    love the outdoor shot

  • Half-Life 2 mapping project WIP Pics

    I took a closer look at the pics here then the ones over at interlopers. I still think you need more contrast and variety in your color pallette, and I gotta agree with hourences about lighting variation.

    It seems that none of the streetlamps have light coming our of them, I think it would improve the area if you switched the orangish lights off the buildings and over to the streetlamps and yellow them a bit, and put electric blue-white lights on the building lamps. Whatever you do, I think the lighting needs a good bit of work, as the overall scene, while built nicely, doesn't have much depth to it's visual impact.

    You don't often enough see structures so clean in shooters these days. Too many games and mod's focus on destruction as a way of adding detail and ambience. You've conveyed a feeling of woe without resorting to that cliched paradigm. But the buildings don't have the realistic grungy detail. You've overlooked things like gutters, trashcans, stains, all that type of thing.

    Overall the composition seems interesting from the street level, but I think it could be improved. Some areas would benefit from short "juttings" off the buildings, like porches, or just side "rooms." I can see you are going for a canyon-esque trapped feeling, but the street is fairly wide and having some height variation closer to the ground would be a good thing I think. Of course, environments always feel different in game then in editor or in screenshots, so I could be wrong.

    Needs more interesting brush work, pillars and whatnot, if it fits into your budget.

    On the last shot, I don't like how the central building is so flat at the intersection. Even with the textures, roofs, and dome, it looks like a big square box.

    In the second to last shot the blank what area of wall on the left side really bothers me :/

    Could you give maybe a little glimpse of what is generally happening in this area? Without spoiling anything of course It would help give better criticism.

    All that said, this is very very nice work, and I love it/you.