Today, I tried to teach my friend how to strafe-jump. After about half an hour, we managed to get a basic understanding of all basic functions, and got about halfway through cos1_beta7b's blue lane. Sadly, it will be 3 weeks before we can have another attempt, but when that time comes... I hope to record the whole adventure and use it as a sort-of guideline/tutorial for all new players to get into the game. It will be loads of fun.
In other news, I got 32GB of RAM, and a shitton of games on the Steam Summer Sale. I'll soon be getting back to Q3 mapping, but I'm afraid I might have to start from scratch, at least shader-wise. For some reason, I could compile my mctest map with 7.5GB RAM usage, but now it's taking 31.4GB, and still running into memory limitations (I'm compiling with 2K lightmaps and only 2x super-sampling). When that gets fixed, I'll have a lot more games to play with, and all of them owned legitimately, too! I also have to play through them all at least once. I might turn into a casual gamer, but every time I feel like I'm turning over to the dark side, I'll just go play some Quake to wash it all away.
No problem.
Also, no pics this time.
Sunday, 29 June 2014
Thursday, 8 May 2014
It's hard to both play games and play with them at the same time
My friends keep coming to me with new games to play, eating up all my free time. Combine that with a full-time job, there aren't many opportunities left to work on all my stupid projects. That, and I haven't really gotten any good ideas lately to start and never finish.
The Minecraft map's progress halted because it ended up being pretty shit, gameplay-wise. It needs to be a hell of a lot bigger, which is difficult to do in such a way that it can be compiled, not to mention that it takes forever to do all by hand. Compiling it also takes over 24 hours, even on lowish settings (lowish meaning still 2K lightmaps with low lightmap scale), with 8GB of RAM. One of my DIMMs died a little while ago, so I can't even compile it any more anyway.
Skyrim is totally a thing of the past, along with all Bethesda stuff. If I ever got a supercomputer, maybe I would revisit all that, but it just takes too long to compile, with too many bugs. Recreating it wouldn't be as big a deal if the textures were split up and used proper powers of 2, but they're weird dimensions like 2048x113, 2048x561 etc. etc. and mapping like that is awful.
Now that summer is closing in, I'll play a lot of CTFS, because that's the most reliable, consistent enjoyment there is. And the demos/recordings are amazing.
The Minecraft map's progress halted because it ended up being pretty shit, gameplay-wise. It needs to be a hell of a lot bigger, which is difficult to do in such a way that it can be compiled, not to mention that it takes forever to do all by hand. Compiling it also takes over 24 hours, even on lowish settings (lowish meaning still 2K lightmaps with low lightmap scale), with 8GB of RAM. One of my DIMMs died a little while ago, so I can't even compile it any more anyway.
Skyrim is totally a thing of the past, along with all Bethesda stuff. If I ever got a supercomputer, maybe I would revisit all that, but it just takes too long to compile, with too many bugs. Recreating it wouldn't be as big a deal if the textures were split up and used proper powers of 2, but they're weird dimensions like 2048x113, 2048x561 etc. etc. and mapping like that is awful.
Now that summer is closing in, I'll play a lot of CTFS, because that's the most reliable, consistent enjoyment there is. And the demos/recordings are amazing.
Also I apparently got a second-degree sun burn because I've been painting the outside of a house for the past 3 days. It really hurts, and my face is basically leaking. Nasty.
Here are some screenshots of the latest compile of my map.
Click this text for one of 15 raw lightmap pages used on this map.
Sunday, 23 February 2014
Real progress on my Minecraft map
Due to my lack of internet access these past few weeks, I've been able to get a lot of work done on quite a few projects, and the most fun one has definitely been my Minecraft map. Many moons ago, some friends and I created a relatively small Minecraft setup, intended for Hide and Seek/CTFS. Our intention was to make it something akin to Pillcity, which is a great map for both CTFS and Hide and Seek. It sat around for probably over a year, until I recently started working on it again. And I have made some great progress! I'm already almost half done, though less than half of the map is actually completed. The shaders caused a lot of issues, along with fixing some bugs in the map itself, and figuring out the scale of it all.
Compiling it takes a long time, and on my system I cannot do a whole lot in terms of extra settings. I don't know what the final map will look like, but I expect it will look amazing. My test compiles take several hours, and they are not as detailed as they could be.
Well, enough of that crap. This is the only real thing I've gotten much progress on, though I did finally find a god damn golden God's Hand in Disgaea 2. Even with 270+ hours poured into that game, my progress is shameful. It took me over 200 hours just to figure out what my goal was!
Here are some screenshots.
Compiling it takes a long time, and on my system I cannot do a whole lot in terms of extra settings. I don't know what the final map will look like, but I expect it will look amazing. My test compiles take several hours, and they are not as detailed as they could be.
Well, enough of that crap. This is the only real thing I've gotten much progress on, though I did finally find a god damn golden God's Hand in Disgaea 2. Even with 270+ hours poured into that game, my progress is shameful. It took me over 200 hours just to figure out what my goal was!
Here are some screenshots.
Tuesday, 21 January 2014
I've been doing a lot of not fruitless work recently!
Over the past weeks and months, I've been working on a lot of different projects. Some of them end up working out, while others just outright fail, but I've started taking things in differently. I'm doing my best to learn from everything I do, rather than simply forgetting about a project if it doesn't go exactly as I imagined it. A good example of this is video editing: I've made a lot of short clips, for different purposes, and though none of them have seen the light of day (one of them will soon enough), I've learned something useful from each of them. Now multiply that by about 4, and apply it to all sorts of fields - level design, art, etc. etc., and that's what I've been doing.
Obviously, I'm still messing with Skyrim and Minecraft, though I added Mirror's Edge to that pool of games to steal from, because its level design honestly has higher potential in Defrag than it does in Mirror's Edge, and all the tools are readily available to bring it all over. I made a few maps to learn what's what, and collision is going to be a breeze, because most of what you interact with is flat, unlike 90% of games these days. This means that I don't need Q3MAP2 to do its shitty collision hacks, and I can instead use caulk/clip brushes for collision, which also improves framerates substantially. That said, Mirror's Edge doesn't really destroy framerates the way Skyrim does, so it isn't a huge deal anyway. I might finish a map soon enough, and I have the potential to re-texture it and actually release it. Wouldn't that be fun?
Aside from Mirror's Edge, I've had a lot of ideas for Minecraft stuff, but because CPU still hasn't said a word regarding mc2map, I still can't do anything. The same goes for Skyrim, though obviously for different reasons: a lot of the models don't work, sadly, but also to re-create an area takes a lot of effort, and with the values I get from the Creation Kit differing from what they should be in Radiant, it's a lot of trouble, and I don't want to get too into it. It is still fun to play around with every once in a while though.
Now, on to the really juicy stuff.
My current project is to do with one of the most fun CTFS maps I've ever played: ojfc-12. I'm re-creating it with a bunch of weird shit. First off, I'm trying to figure out a good way to do fake fog, since real fog looks like crap. I basically have a texture running up the side of each column, and an alphamod function to create a gradient, from 100% to 0%. This makes it look like there's fog, because the texture is the same color as the bottom of the skybox. It looks really neat, but is also very inefficient, because it basically means two brushes for every pillar on the map, and the map is built from pillars. I also have some tentacles writhing around down there, but that's just me messing around a bit.
The real problem with this map is lighting it: with a good skybox, it took me literally 30+ hours to do a single light pass, not including radiosity. Hopefully I'll be able to use Maverick's super 16-core servers for that, but if not, I'm pretty screwed, as I also don't have enough memory to do some of the effects I want.
Speaking of effects I want, one idea I had was to make it somewhat cartoony, with all the textures picmip-y and cel shading and all that. It won't look super unique unless I do something super unique with that, but I don't know what yet. Same goes for the lighting - I want it to look special, but as it is, it just looks like a crappy space map. That is essentially what it is, but it's an amazingly fun crappy space map, and I want it to look great as well as play great. Hopefully I can figure all of this out, and if not, oh well: I only wasted a week on it, no big deal.
While I do all this (mostly while I'm waiting for a stupid light compile), I've been watching a lot of Quake movies, and movies in general. I've learned a lot, and I am hopefully going to be able to make some sweet movies soon. With the help of people like Entik, hopefully I'll be able to solve my biggest problem, which is that I don't know how to properly utilize the tools I have: namely Q3MME. Aside from maybe KOS, there isn't anyone to better learn from, and as soon as I can, I hope to start doing some badass learning. It's gonna be so much fun!
Obviously, I'm still messing with Skyrim and Minecraft, though I added Mirror's Edge to that pool of games to steal from, because its level design honestly has higher potential in Defrag than it does in Mirror's Edge, and all the tools are readily available to bring it all over. I made a few maps to learn what's what, and collision is going to be a breeze, because most of what you interact with is flat, unlike 90% of games these days. This means that I don't need Q3MAP2 to do its shitty collision hacks, and I can instead use caulk/clip brushes for collision, which also improves framerates substantially. That said, Mirror's Edge doesn't really destroy framerates the way Skyrim does, so it isn't a huge deal anyway. I might finish a map soon enough, and I have the potential to re-texture it and actually release it. Wouldn't that be fun?
Aside from Mirror's Edge, I've had a lot of ideas for Minecraft stuff, but because CPU still hasn't said a word regarding mc2map, I still can't do anything. The same goes for Skyrim, though obviously for different reasons: a lot of the models don't work, sadly, but also to re-create an area takes a lot of effort, and with the values I get from the Creation Kit differing from what they should be in Radiant, it's a lot of trouble, and I don't want to get too into it. It is still fun to play around with every once in a while though.
Now, on to the really juicy stuff.
My current project is to do with one of the most fun CTFS maps I've ever played: ojfc-12. I'm re-creating it with a bunch of weird shit. First off, I'm trying to figure out a good way to do fake fog, since real fog looks like crap. I basically have a texture running up the side of each column, and an alphamod function to create a gradient, from 100% to 0%. This makes it look like there's fog, because the texture is the same color as the bottom of the skybox. It looks really neat, but is also very inefficient, because it basically means two brushes for every pillar on the map, and the map is built from pillars. I also have some tentacles writhing around down there, but that's just me messing around a bit.
The real problem with this map is lighting it: with a good skybox, it took me literally 30+ hours to do a single light pass, not including radiosity. Hopefully I'll be able to use Maverick's super 16-core servers for that, but if not, I'm pretty screwed, as I also don't have enough memory to do some of the effects I want.
Speaking of effects I want, one idea I had was to make it somewhat cartoony, with all the textures picmip-y and cel shading and all that. It won't look super unique unless I do something super unique with that, but I don't know what yet. Same goes for the lighting - I want it to look special, but as it is, it just looks like a crappy space map. That is essentially what it is, but it's an amazingly fun crappy space map, and I want it to look great as well as play great. Hopefully I can figure all of this out, and if not, oh well: I only wasted a week on it, no big deal.
While I do all this (mostly while I'm waiting for a stupid light compile), I've been watching a lot of Quake movies, and movies in general. I've learned a lot, and I am hopefully going to be able to make some sweet movies soon. With the help of people like Entik, hopefully I'll be able to solve my biggest problem, which is that I don't know how to properly utilize the tools I have: namely Q3MME. Aside from maybe KOS, there isn't anyone to better learn from, and as soon as I can, I hope to start doing some badass learning. It's gonna be so much fun!
No pictures this time, because I had one, but it's lost in the interwebs now, never to be seen again. Maybe in a later post I'll add one.
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