SoW1 vs. HL2 - Graphic quality

[ctswin]

Sam 'n Max: Hit the Road and Day of the Tentacle

Stupid comparison. Really. Those two games are WAY too good

[Kosmo]

When I make 3d models from start to finish, concepts, modelling, tweaking, UW mapping, rigging, texturing and that is what I do today, soon you can add cooking normal maps and making shaders for the textures, making bones to react correctly to physics and whatnot.

I'm horrified by the things you and about half a million more effect junkies want me to add to my model, I remember quake 2 days when I basically did something that kinda looked like a dude with some sort of log that shoots rockets, and people were like "dude, that is the most awesome model ever!" and I was happy, and they were happy.

You spend 4 months on a map and you have a deadline of 6 months to do 5 maps with all the static meshes and textures, believe me, the 30 minutes of extra work can break you especially when you have quality to keep, the effect junkies demand movie quality graphics and usually so does your boss.

Now like I have been saying, there is nothing wrong with static detail textures, but what I am saying, they are not actually that great to begin with, first of all, they create extra work, second they really don't add that much compared to lighting, normal maps, HDRI, specular, bump and all kinds of road and whatnot maps, IF they be added I suggest that you look at the end of the project if you have time and need to use detail textures and then do them, not put them on a pile with things way more important than that, it doesn't save anything (not that it could destroy anything either).

If there are detail textres in a game, I don't mind, it's all good, but I did actually enjoy HL2 despite the "burry" textures and lack of detail textures and the addition of detail textures won't propably increase the enjoyment rate any further for me nor hundreds of other players. Now compared to the new HDRI thing they did, I might actually revisit some maps in HL2 if I'm really desperate of somekind of gaming experience and HL2 is the only game around.

[Hourences]

Its evolution, I liked the simplicity of long ago as well. Just some bsp cubes and that was it but you gotto evolve along. More stuff has to be added and if you dont like that evolution you got a prob

Im not saying they are more important than lets say the floorplan or normal map support, they are just like 400 other things just extras but they do take little time to setup so why not use that extra little thing then. More is better in this case and it doesnt even take you effort.

I also know that at the end you sometimes dont like to fix something anymore cause youre so tired of the thing but on the other hand you should. Those 30 minutes wont kill you man. I created over dozens of maps, they all had detail textures. Every one of them, the 30 minutes were bearable.

HL2 was good, even without detail tex

But good /=perfection. Good simply means better than bad. If there was more stuff added it might have been gooder good or so

Dont stop at "it looks goods already", make it awesome if you can and yeah I know you dont always have the time for that but in a perfect world or a mod community...

Think we got pretty much everything said

[Kosmo]

Fair enough

[kleinluka]

The textures are not blurry, 1024 res textures

None of the things you said can make a surface look like that besides higher res textures but for that youd need a 8192 texture and thats impossible

Unreal engine 3 and gears of wars in particullary support it heavily, theres a reason for that

Afaik it even uses normal mapped detail textures, so a second smaller scaled normal map just for detail texturing

They are blurry. And dont look like 1024s but more like 256.

Gears of War doesnt use normal mapped detail textures. You can manually alter the tiling rate of each map though. So that includes normal maps.

In the end, detail texture is just a layered semi transparent texture that tiles more than the underlaying texture. Of course it will make it look less blurry. Because the whole point of it is to give that impression by overlayed a texture that tiles a lot. I find detail textures always make a surface material very unrecognizable. Good use of normal and specular can give a surface a way more defined look and I'll take that any day over detail textures. In the end it all comes down to what you do with the pixels that are available to you. If you have a 1024x1024 texture that doesn't mean it looks sharp unless YOU PAINT IT SHARP and use every pixel in the texture with thought.

Meh. lunch time now. klein hungry.

[Hourences]

I know you can tile them, but afaik its a second normal map

I checked it with Epic people and gow uses normal mapped detail textures in some cases says my info, might be wrong, might be right but point is, they are not useless at all.

The textures are not blurry. They are simply tiled really big. How are you suppose to texture a giant rock when you cant scale the texture big ?

So no other option to scale it up which will result in a blurry tex which you then hide with detail texturing.

I applied another texture from my own pack, pretty sharp.

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/tex ... igh/60.jpg

http://www.planetunreal.com/phalanx/hou ... iltex3.jpg

Better ? Not a lot...

If the detail tex makes the texture beneath too unrecognizable make the detail tex more grayish then. Less contrast.

I never said they are better than specularity or whatever else. I said it all has its own good and weak points and a combination of everything is best.

Making the combination only takes a couple of minutes, but even that seems to be asked too much.

[The Postman]

It looks like you've got something massively screwed up in your specular maps in those page one shots. It looks like you're using a very low rez spec on a high rez surface that isn't matching up at all. Bad form sir, bad form!