Posts by spence

Quote from Dejavo

Does anyone know why my normal map-gradients gets squashed in compression by vtfedit? I import the file with ABGR8888. You can see the jagged gradient in the first pic top left.

I dont know if it makes a difference (infact I just tested and couldn't notice a difference upon importing/comparing both) but I always used BGR888/BGRA8888 for uncompressed textures in Source. Also check your texture flags; there are a few for filtering and one for specifying the vtf as a normal map.

EDIT: I did another test this evening on a normal-mapped model for CSGO and didn't have any issues with the normal map flag ticked, with either ABGR or BGRA (versus obvious compression with DXT5).

Yes, displacements still get lightmapping. Props use lighting per-vertex in Source provided you compile with -staticproplighting AND their materials are diffuse/envmap only (if they have a normal map they still receive lighting at their origin). If you want to walk around terrain its probably best to make it out of displacements but if you want a mountain in the skybox or something you could probably model it and it would look fine. You might run into issues getting normal mapped props/meshes to blend in seamlessly with displacements without any lighting artifacts, but you might be able to cover this up in other ways depending on how your map is lit and designed.

Displacements are cheap, cheaper than regular BSP, and you can have a lot of them in any given map, so go wild with them! Its faster to block in some displacements in Hammer quickly and tweak them to order than it is to worry about compiling and exporting unique meshes for your terrain

I've been experimenting with it a bit since December when it was on a steam sale but I haven't had the time to really mess around with it yet. It seems very powerful though.

CSGO and L4D2 have curb models which are more detailed than displacements will ever be. If you have to use displacements for some reason, tie their 'front'/street facing sides, top sides, and 'back'/sidewalk facing sides to displacements for a total of three displacement faces per brush, then sew all the brushes together after adding a bit of noise if you so desire. Easy peasy.

Blender must have some way to instance the keys so when you edit one it edits them all, right?

To answer your second question; if you make a selection and a lot of things become shaded or highlighted, it's likely that they are brushes/primitives tied to a single entity (probably a func_detail). When you select models in Hammer, they don't become shaded/highlighted but instead just display their bounding box in yellow, whereas brush selection is shaded in red. You can get some more information about what you have selected by looking at the bottom of the editor window, near the grid snap display, where by default it says 'no selection'.

Another trick for identifying textures is to display only the used textures in the texture browser; click the 'browse' button on the texture panel on the right toolbar (unless you rearranged your panel layout) then at the bottom left of the browser window, tick 'only used textures' to filter by what is being used in the map you have open.

Great share

There are two objective-based gameplay modes in the beta (the video above shows what is essentially the standard TDM) but I haven't tried them so far so I can't speak to that extent. I would assume there are more game modes coming with the full game?

The benefits for escaping? You escape with your life and avoid humiliation

I figured it was just like the humiliation round in TF2 where you can boast that you survived and that the other team wasn't smart/fast enough to catch you. Of course if the enemy team destroys the dropship, then they have the last laugh.

The beta is a blast, so far. Shame I have to use Origin...blech.

Quote from Mazy

Signed up, mainly to see if my ancient relic of a PC can handle this.

I'm playing on an almost five year old laptop and it is certainly playable

Quote from dux

Just installed Chrome to sign up to the beta, let me do it in 20 seconds. I was also able to import all my Firefox bookmarks into Chrome within 5 seconds with a single push of a button without any bother or fuss. Hello new default browser.

OT, but I don't understand all the Chrome-hate. I have pals that swear by Firefox and absolutely despise Chrome, and I don't get why. It works and it works well.

Here are a handful of older material images from my archives.

Weathered metal panel wall

Worn old pipe from a factory and wet, rain-soaked pipes from an abandoned quarry

Glossy paint spec/reflection

Shiny metal sheet panels (somewhat warped)

Marble, glossy

Space shuttle fabric(?) panels

Cracked rubber (tire)

I've edited my post to include thumbnails and will follow this method from now on! I hope this speeds up the thread loading for everyone

I have to agree regarding detail; I looked at the images the other day and returning to them now I still feel the same; some areas feel a bit barren and could use a little more life (let me know if you want particulars). Also maybe it is just me but some of the props feel a little out of place; in particular the big air conditioning units and the utility cabinets. They don't seem to match the theme of the rest of the environment IMO. The broad structure of the map looks nice though and I think with a little more detail it would be complete.

Nice idea for a thread...can never have too much reference material! I posted my texture repository in the reference thread recently, but I have a huge backlog of hundreds of images to sort out from a visit to an airplane salvage yard last year. Here's a few to share for now. These are full resolution images so they may take a little while to load!

Crane hook (raw metal with gashes, dents and damage)

Crackly and damaged paintwork

Thick mud splatters

Peeling canvas/rubber/foam/adhesive

Aluminium with rust and wear

Dust and sand/grit accumulation

Mucky plastic paneling and cracking painted foam

Peeling window coating

Shredded aircraft skin, some sort of painted fabric canvas or aluminium

These ones are from a building that was undergoing demolition, which offered some interesting surfaces:

Concrete floor, covered in floor tile adhesive

Footprints in ink splatter

Hose spigot

Plaster/concrete wall

Shiny, warped door plates

Foul grease and food waste accumulation underneath a grill/deep fryer

Quote from FMPONE

A 90% finished remake of CS_747, was told the subject matter was probably too violent/controversial so I don't see myself returning to it

Heh, I've been having the same debate over a similar airport/hijack scenario for CSGO...significantly smaller than 747 though. I paused quite early along on it for the same reasoning but picked it back up rather recently.

[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/406357/hijack.jpg]

It's nowhere near as far along as your map though. nthing that you should finish it, controversy be damned; it looks fantastic.

The mountainbase map for ND looked really pretty too, Jeroen, I was really looking forward to it from the screenshots. I may have to check out the vmf

You'd be correct in that the web infrastructure in the states is a bit of a mess. You can certainly have access to fast speeds and fibre (where it is available anyway, mostly in newer developments where the infrastructure is easy to install) but the pricing is absolutely ludicrous, and it doesn't help that your choice of ISPs is extremely limited and essentially non-competitive.

Hopefully enough people will get annoyed and get interested in net neutrality as a result but I'm not really sure that will happen until the ISPs start charging extra for everyone to access their favorite services, at which point it will be somewhat ingrained into their business models, at least with the big name providers. If this means a bunch of smaller, competitive ISPs form and signals the death of the dominant corporate ones, I certainly wouldn't complain.

The green ones are; the yellow and red 'autumn' ones are reskins of the de_inferno big tree models.

http://www.texturehunt.com/

Contributing my little collection of texture/reference images, if it might help anyone. The site needs some work, I know

The settings for the Phong shading make a lot of difference when trying to get normal maps to pop in Source, I find. A lot of things just don't need extra maps when similar effects can be accomplished with less (or maybe more polygons, but this doesn't really matter in CSGO anyway; look at the budget when a bunch of expensive player models are on screen for example). As Steppen mentions, translucency overdraw is the big performance killer more than anything else.

You shouldn't have to fight the battle of performance vs graphical fidelity unless you're slapping normal maps on everything and using huge materials and expecting this to make everything look great, in which case you should probably rethink how you are using the assets and whether they really warrant the extra maps (or resolution) in the first place. You can get into a little trial-and-error when it comes to optimizing levels and visibility, but managing performance based on the assets you are using should be pretty straightforward.

If you really run into performance issues and you have a lot of materials that require normal maps consider using Source's self-shadowing bump maps which are slightly cheaper and sometimes provide a more suitable effect.