What are you working on?

[ericw]

Yeah sorry partly my fault, I probably should start a new thread for the (quake 1) light stuff I was working on.
The latest build for now is in this post: http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thr ... &start=287

The new stuff it has is ambient occlusion (aka dirtmapping), a sun dome feature (_sunlight2), and jittering of the sunlight angle (_sunlight_penumbra).
The good news is, all of that stuff is relatively well documented in the manual

Maybe for the next build I'll try to get screenshots demonstrate each feature, and start a new thread for it so it's easier to find.

[jitspoe]

Cool. Can't remember the last time I tried mapping for Quake1.

This is for a Quake2 mapping contest, though. Then somebody informed me that ArghRad already had a better way of handling ambient light using "_sun_surface" instead of "_sun_ambient" *sigh* Precious contest time wasted! Argh!

This is how it looks with ArghRad:

(_sun_ambient, for reference):


_sun_surface:




When _sun_surface is set to 1, it uses the surface properties to light (like a normal sky), or you can use "r g b" values.

Now I'm being reminded of the little nuances in vanilla Quake2, like the somewhat short draw distance before the skybox starts overlapping map geometry...



Having to scale back some of my design ideas and use clever line of sight blockers so players don't see walls suddenly disappear.

[Shpuld]

I made a small video about exporting IQM with Blender.
If you've had trouble with materials or animations not exporting properly, it might help you.

[toneddu2000]

good Idea Shpuld! But usually material names should point to shadername instead of texture name. So I use as material name in Blender 'textures/myfolder/myshadername' and myshadername should be the one written in myshader.shader
It's not a rule, of course, but in this case you can use normal/spec/luma tweaking

I didn't understand the passage where you said: "exporting all the animations in a single animation is a bad practice". Were you be able to load in FTEQW singular iqm files as singular animations (no mesh, only animation data)? Because, for what I know, exporting an IQM with all the animations inside it's the only way to do it.

[Shpuld]

toneddu2000: Sure, you can have the material point to whatever you want, instead of "test123" you can have "textures/myfancyshader" or whatever. I personally just like to keep my shader names simple. In my models.shader file I have stuff like "playermat", "mgammomat" and so on, but others can add those subfolders to the names if they really want to.

EDIT:
Oh and for your 2nd question, the point for having the multiple animations is just that you don't export all your frames in a huge bulk and then use a special framegroup file, but you already have your different animations in their own framegroups, by separating them in the export process. I haven't yet tried separating the animations to separate files so I can't answer anything related to that.

[toneddu2000]

[Shpuld]

FTE is magic, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, so far bending it to power a bullet hell shmup hasn't been any trouble. Whole thing runs client-side because sending possibly hundreds of bullet-entities between client/server would probably not be good idea.

[toneddu2000]

Shpuld, you and me should work together...

[frag.machine]

[mankrip]

[r00k]

Beautiful images there jitspoe.. map really pops!

[Shpuld]

Thanks for the comments guys, small gameplay video of the current progress, doesn't look like christmas at the moment anymore:

[toneddu2000]

Gorgeous gameplay! It reminds me of Truxton for Sega Mega Drive! But why player doesn't die when hit by ufos projectiles?
Cool effect the timered rockets! Keep it up!!
Free or commercial? If commercial I'll buy it!

[Shpuld]

Toneddu2000:
The player hitbox is as big as the bright blue cockpit, so very small. That's how the bullet hell games play out, difficulty comes from seeing the paths inside the moving bullets and navigating through it.
I dunno about free or commerical yet, if I can get it polished on a good level I might put it up on greenlight or something.

[frag.machine]

Hard to believe it's a Quake-based engine behind it. As usual, great job. Only a personnal opinion: when I play shmups in general, the thing that is very frustating to me is when the miriad of enemy projectiles in the screen are of the same color of my ship missiles. After some time playing distinguish which ones I can safely ignore when moving and which ones need to be avoided produces a great eye strain and sometimes even headache (I believe my astigmatism is playing a key role on it, but then this is a fairly common vision problem). So please, use reasonably distinct colors to go easy on our eyes - say, yellow/orange tones for enemy fire and blue or even green based colors for the player projectiles would be a good choice.