Black Mesa Source is back

[Meotwister]

on of those screenshots had like a crisp shadow of a grate that looked really cool except the only thing wierd was there was another light that looks like it's shining light at the shadow..yet the shadow is still very black. If anyone understood that.

its this one

http://www.blackmesasource.com/media/blastpit_004.jpg

i hope he uses 1 or 2 as a lightmap scale on like one face per map.

still, awesome stuff

[Campaignjunkie]

Is the performance hit associated with lightmap scale really that bad? Hell, I rarely go below 8 units per luxel.

[insta]

Is the performance hit associated with lightmap scale really that bad? Hell, I rarely go below 8 units per luxel.

Have a look at a surface with low lightmapscale in wireframe mode. Its pretty wacky.

[Defrag]

I don't think the performance of higher resolution lightmaps is bad per se, it just takes up a lot more memory and will makes levels slower to load. As long as people use them sparingly it shouldn't be too bad.

Mod is looking great btw

[JeanPaul]

There is very little to no performace hit in lowering the lightmap scale as Source pre-renders all lighting calculations.

[Zacker]

There is very little to no performace hit in lowering the lightmap scale as Source pre-renders all lighting calculations.

CPU wise yes, there is close to no performance hit yes. When we are talking GFX processing power it does however take a hit due to the extra amount of texture data being pushed to the screen per frame. The biggest hit however is for the gfx memory which quickly fills up if you use high res lightmaps.

You might have done a test with a high lightmap scale and low lightmap scale and then in that test found that there was no performance difference. When we talk about memory consumption you can't just test this as easily though as it's very much about when you go through the roof and when you stay below.

As long as the gfx card memory can still handle it, then the performance hit is low, but still there though. When however it needs to use the system ram, then we run into a lot of bottlenecks which slows things down quite a bit.

[dissonance]

is there any way to dump the contents of the gpu memory to disk?

[ReNo]

You can use the texture budget panel to give you an idea of how much memory you are using with textures, and there is probably a way to get the entire gfx memory use too. Think the texture budget panel gives figures for different texture types too, so you see how much is being eaten up by diffuse/normal maps/specmaps/envmaps/lightmaps individually. It's not something I've ever really bothered checking as I was normally running and testing on a 128mb card; if it was running fine on that you probably didn't need to worry. Now I'm on a 256mb card I might start paying it more mind however.

And CJ, I guess you mean you rarely go ABOVE 8 units per luxel? As in, you using 16 unit luxels is a rarity, whereas using 4 unit luxels is more common? It's annoying how whether people are talking about resolution or size means you have to switch words, despite the fact you are talking about exactly the same thing. Gets so confusing

[Zacker]

is there any way to dump the contents of the gpu memory to disk?

When the GFX card memory runs out it transfers over the AGP/PCI-E bridge to the system memory. When system memory runs out it will in general swap on the hdd. I do however hope that there is some kind of priority system to avoid getting the GFX mem contents down to the hdd, as that would be a performance disaster.

[Dennispls]

For all you that bitched at me read properly first before replying with something utterly stupid.

I never said it looks bad infact it still looks nice but i am not impressed is what im saying(because everybody said wow and amazing impressive etc)

Guess i did too much with the hl2 engine that everything made with it looks the same.

[Dodger]

this is indeed very awesome. cant wait

YEA YEA

[D3ads]

An early look at the Second media release? I discovered some thumb images that are not present on the media page:

You can see them in the small media box just above the songs playlist.

h@x!!11

[Skjalg]

or you can see them high res in this folder:

http://images.rabid-monkey.com/bms_public/nov06_media/

[Campaignjunkie]

And CJ, I guess you mean you rarely go ABOVE 8 units per luxel? As in, you using 16 unit luxels is a rarity, whereas using 4 unit luxels is more common? It's annoying how whether people are talking about resolution or size means you have to switch words, despite the fact you are talking about exactly the same thing. Gets so confusing

Wait wait, I thought smaller luxels = more memory = more lightmap details. So I meant that I usually use 8 units, while 16 unit luxels are more common, and 4 unit luxels are a rarity... Okay now you're confusing me too!!

[Zacker]

People should quit talking about luxels and stick to talking about lightmap sizes as that is what we set in Hammer.