Schmung

Think you should be fine here as long as you can come up with substantive enough areas that you want to explore in this topic : what's different about the pipeline? do the rendering constraints of game engines make things too difficult from an asset creation perspective to make it worth it? are certain engines more inherently suited to this sort of thing than others?

So yeah, there's a ton of stuff you can explore in that field, it's just finding a way of presenting it as an academically interesting topic that you can explore in a fairly in depth way rather that 'I want to make building in UDK' or w/e.

I might be wrong here, but fairly sure that Source doesn't support multiple UV channels.

I am getting something on an Alien vibe off of this. thing. Looks great. Think adding some splodges of colour with the pipes (be it adding identification colour bands to each pipe or actually colouring the things themselves) and maybe doing something with the walkways as well.Give it a sort of Mirrors Edge in space vibe with splashes of colour delineating pathways etc. Locing the lighting and softish padded ceiling.

Played on 360 earlier. Single player was ok, bit confusing at times, but multiplayer is a total blast. Really like how the camera distortion etc is used to give the player feedback. Levels are stuffed with detail as well.

One of team members is a bit younger than the rest of us and I was speaking to him last night and he was just appalled at the amount of abuse the mod was getting. I think you just get used to tuning out the noise after a while. If people have the taken the time to write something half decent and well thought out then it's generally worth reading (even if you may disagree with the specifics of what they're saying) but if it's just a few lines of what amounts to abuse then it's generally best just to ignore it.

Check this one : http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/

It's a free tileable generic texture editor i use it and it's very intereting.

Have to say many thanks for this, just downloaded this yesterday and it's really nifty. Quite simple to use once you get your head round the concepts and what nodes can link to what. very useful to generate a template or base texture that you can then refine in photoshop. Great for bricks and stuff as I had a really hard time getting them to tile nicely when using photosourced stuff.

Further to what the other guys have said, what strikes me about this is that there's not really a sense of place. There doesn't seem to be any coherency or purpose to the placement of things in there that suggests what the area is or what any of the props in the room are doing. It all looks a bit too random at the moment. If you're aiming to scare to people then you need to keep them immersed and an environment that's too obviously artificial and obvious isn't going to help you. If you build something convincing that feels like a real place then building the scares in will come a lot easier.

Other people have mentioned the textures - you've got a couple of issues here.

Some of them aren't tiling too well, they have obvious artefacts when they are tiled.

Inconsistency of scale between textures

Alignment issues up the wazoo (the huge-o grate in the floor is a good example of this)

Excessive normalling; whereby it looks like you've auto generated the normal for the sake of having it and some areas of the texture have way more depth than they should. The floor texture for instance.

I can't find it right now, but back in the HL1 days there was a fairly nifty article by (I think) valve that covered creating a texture set and gave some decent advice on what elements you wanted to include and how to make it work together. Things have changed somewhat since then, but it's still worth a read if you can track it down.

Looking good Dan. Maybe some light fitting on those girders?

I'll update all the materials for the vehicles once I've finished rebuilding my PC. Again.

If memory serves it uses the origin of the model as a starting point to calculating the lighting. Plus, if you use the alphatest shader it's only doing very basic lighting any, so you tend to get artefacts everywhere. So -be careful with your origins and try and create a texture thats versatile and don't do anything too fancy with your lighting in areas where you have trees/

Might be worth trying blender or milkshape? They might have working plugins so you can export it.

I think the thing that's making it look a bit off is that the rest of the wearing and rusting doesn't match the amount of abuse you see from the scratched and spotted areas. Age the rest of it to the match that and you should be set.

Looking at the amount of rust on it you'd expect the bumpers to have aged more. The plastic used for bumpers tends to discolour a bit with age (especially if it's had something spilled on it) and it's probably going to be covered with all sorts of crap anyway. I'd expect to see a bit more rust around the bottom of the door where it meets the arch and at the bottom of the radiator grille. Pretty much where water is going to continually drip and pool.

Hope that helps a bit.

This program is a great timesaver and a total doddle to use. Having an absolute mare of a time getting hte files into max though.

Hullo there, I'm working on the same mod as Tanuki and in the interests of speeding things up (time difference and whatnot) I gave the file a quick go. Aside from the mental HDR settings in this map breaking it, I think it looks a bit better. I'd take a screen minus the HDR, but my PC is running a batch job and firing up HL2 would not be wise. Hopefully the unbloomed bit of the image is enough to get an idea.

Edit : Scratch that, non HDR screen now supplied as well, though it still looks a tad too bright. Forgive the intrusion of a tiny autumn tree in the BG as well - thats me faffing about.

Phongs are great for weapons, it's just a shame that you have to use a normal map as well unless you're on OB. In Ep1 you can just have your texture budget eaten away by unnecessary normal maps when all you want is a decent phong map.

DAmm, that track builder app looks awesome. I think I'm gonna have to give that a go.

Hi Tanuki - scene is shaping up really nicely so far, but the two things that bug me are the road and kerb texture. The road texture seems to be stretched a little bit and looks too soft and the kerb texture doesn't seem to be doing anything at present. Not sure where you're going with dirt/grime or if you want to keep it really clean, but even if you're doing that I think a bit of dirt and wear around the bottom of things and in corners etc would help it come alive a bit more.

Oh, another thing that I just noticed - left hand side market stall thing - there's a really blurry airvent type texture there at a weird angle. Looks very odd. Sort it or remove it. I'm still not too keen on the wood texture you've got on the frame of that thing either as it looks a bit low-res, though you may not be able to do anything about that.

Nit-picking aside, coming along very nicely. Nice job mate.

Awesome pictures - I visited Stockholm last month, 'tis a pretty place indeed. Loving some of the photos of the old town.

A few spotlights or some lighting on those walkways would really liven up the scene IMO

Awesome work so far.

I think it's the floor that's not working out too well. The green isn't working too well and the red in the centre isn't really working either IMO. I think it's because it's a really busy texture and that it's so light. Maybe use a variant of the green in the middle and put some spec on the existing stuff?

I think the busy texture actually works in the theatre area, but that you need to play around with your lighting in there a bit. It's pretty bland at present. What about dimming it a bit and using trim lighting on the floor and stairs?

Aha, well explained! Rather thick of me forgetting that it was the sea we're talking about.

I still think floating cities are cool though, thats perhaps the fault of reading too much SF.

I guess the feeling of emptiness if perhaps the lack of variation of vegetation and the stock props. With a bit more colour and texture in the terrain then you could probably fix that.

At present it's the overt brightness and repetitive nature of parts of it that are hurting you. I think the other guys are right with the lighting, you could really help the atmosphere with a slightly different setup. Failing that can you clamp the maximum value or something? That seems the main issue now, the average brightness in some shots is fine, but some of the rockfaces look like they've got lights inside them in one or two of those shots.

Anyway, it's a great idea for a theme and gives you loads of potential for dramatic areas - as you said the bombed out cities, the odd protected enclave with an almost post apocalyptic feel to it, higher parts of towns that people have somehow managed to hold out for a while. All sorts of stuff.

I get a nice vibe from some of those shots, but you say initially that it's meant to be war torn and ravaged etc. My feeling is that if the amount of land had been reduced then folk would be trying to use as much as possible of it for farming, or would have huge floating kelp/seaweed farms and floating towns. Plus, obviously if there's been a war then there's going to be lots of damage. I guess it depends on the when as much as anything though, how much the sea has risen etc.

Anyway, you seem to have built a nice environment thus far, but I think it needs populating somehow and the background story you've given yourself lets you have lots of different ways to approach that.

You're better off starting from scratch and just making a few test maps to get the hang of things. Source is different in some significant enough ways from GoldSRC that you'll have to change your approach. Last I checked there are a number of example maps included in the SDK that should give you most of what you need. Once you're more comfortable with source, go back to your HL1 version, delete everything but the essential geometry then go from from there.

The bad has, I think, been covered enough, so I'll talk about what I enjoyed instead.

Combat is awesome, the locking mechanic is a necessary evil. It makes you feel like such a badass mofo, pressure them to get an opening, counter their hits, throw them off of the rooftops. It's great fun, well though out and executed.

Freerunning is sublime. Some people moan that it's not hard, that it requires you to hold two buttons and a control stick and you're away. These people are miserable cunts. It give the player freedom, bring a smile to your face and allows you to make creative use of your environment and think about where you're going instead of how you get there. It's a very appropriate solution that works well within the context of the rest of the game.

Agreed on repetition and most other faults, but those two things along with story win it for me. Oh, non skippable cutscenes are hyper shite though.

Did this as well.

There's a wagamama in Covent Garden as well. Delicious!

That, the museums, Southbank and various train stations is about the extent of my knowledge of London. Imperial War Museum is pretty good as well and the HMS Belfast is pretty interesting.