WorldSpawn official WIP thread

[MadGypsy]

Yeah and he hates my guts... I basically leave him completely alone out of respect for his opinion of me.

BUT!!! He doesn't hate YOUR guts [hint hint]

[Mugwump]

Oh, OK. I can always ask him if there's a tut about particlefonts "for a friend", if you want. You can also try to dig into the SMC yourself, his mod is well documented.

What about Baker, does he hate you too? He worked on particles for Quakespasm-Spiked (I think I may have mentioned this before).

[MadGypsy]

I just don't know what a particle font is supposed to do. If I knew that I could probably figure the rest out. You don't really have to ask Seven "for a friend". I was joking more than anything.

[MadGypsy]

WorldSpawn Noir - perfectly weighted - my engine has no clue what an lmp is


set with "noir":true in descriptor.

my method will noir every texture in the map. If I had bsp models, they would be noir'ed too.
This was too simple - nothing but a custom saturation applied to the texture before it's set as a material.
1 line of code.

it's a hell of a line though.

var rc:Number = 0.30; 
var gc:Number = 0.59; 
var bc:Number = 0.11;
bmd.applyFilter(bmd, bmd.rect, new Point(), new ColorMatrixFilter([rc, gc, bc, 0, 0, rc, gc, bc, 0, 0, rc, gc, bc, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0]));

I know you're thinking "That's 4 lines."
No it's not. Storing 3 numbers doesn't count as 3 lines to me. They don't count at all. I could have just as easily wrote the numbers directly into the function.

[MadGypsy]

heh, due to how I program and unify, this means replacements get noir'ed too right out of the box


Pretty cool what you can do with one line of code, right?

[MadGypsy]

woops... I was looking at the first picture and thinking "something is wrong". I then remembered that I had a slight colored tint on the world lights.

here ya go...no worldlight tint.



I think this looks totally bad-ass with the blue sky.

[Dutch]

I've messed with the particlefont TGA and the accompanying effectinfo.txt script. The particlefont image is (in DP anyways) subdivided into 64 squares based on the image size. So if the image is 1024x1024 (needs to be square I think), it will subdivide into 64 squares that are 128x128. The engine references these squares to use as the appropriate particle image. It really is nothing more than loading a portion of the overall image, doing some alterations set by parameters in the effectinfo file (alpha-blend, additive-blend, inverse modulated are examples), and spawing it in-game. The default blood splatters are pulled from an index of subdivisions between 17 and 32 I believe (rows 3 and 4). But that can be changed in the script.

I really don't see why it needs to pull all particle images from 1 bigger image...maybe to reduce clutter?

Anyways, I used this documentation on the script for reference, it sheds some light on what kind of alterations the engine will do to the particles. I was actually able to get some neat shit to work.

effectinfo scripting reference

...not sure how much of this you already know though, hope it helps a bit.

[MadGypsy]

soooo, I already made particle fonts. I just do it a little bit different. Really the only thing I would need to do to truly have particlefonts is stick all my particles in one image. I can already use a subdivided image and pick portions of it. That's exactly how my rocket and my flame currently work.

[Mugwump]

heh, due to how I program and unify, this means replacements get noir'ed too right out of the box

Awesome! I had to put the noir jam in a separate install because my QRP textures weren't affected by the custom palette. And the still colored sky is exactly what I want to do with the map I'm currently trying to make. I don't know if you followed the noir jam thread at Func_ but I talked about it there: my idea is to make some kind of Sin City-inspired map. The geometry will be textured in pure black and white with no greys whatsoever, except for a few fullbright colors for buttons and stuff, and I want to use a bright red skybox with it. The enemies, view weapons and pickups will be greyscaled (except for the fullbright parts) and blood will be red. HUD will also be greyscaled with red numbers. I think it could look pretty cool.

That's exactly how my rocket and my flame currently work.

That would be useful for animated textures. Currently if a Quake mapper only applies frame 1 to a brush, the animation won't work. He has to ALSO put the other frames on extra brushes somewhere in the map for the texture to be animated.

[MadGypsy]

no noir


texture noir


light noir


particle noir


skybox noir


All set individually in the descriptor to the left. To get this to work I used a "while we're here" method. I hate "while we're here". I need to reorganize this part. If you don't understand what I mean by "while we're here". All of these decisions are mad in the BSP constructor class cause that class determines if there is a skybox or not. And that class is the one that reads the descriptor. I need to move that out of the BSP constructor class. I created 3 dependencies when I did this. The BSP constructor class had no idea of light,particles,textures. Now it does. Gonna change that.

edit: woops, the bsp construction class did have a texture class dependency but, it didn't have the rest. actually the whole desciptor needs to be moved out of the bsp construction class and turned into a self contained public static interface.

[Mugwump]

Cool! Were you inspired by the noir jam for this or is it just a timely coincidence?

Your descriptor is very understandable even for a n00b like me. But what's the difference between ambient and specular, exactly? AFAIK, specular is reflected light, right? Which is exactly what ambient light is, at least in the common language.

[MadGypsy]

@noir

I saw all the hubub about this noir stuff and I knew I could do it in one line. I read something by rook saying his engine had some noir capabilities but it wouldn't work for models. I knew I could cover it all in one line. I'm not new to quake and I knew replacements wouldn't work with the map jam. I knew my engine would do it all in one line cause I unify the snot out of every similar thing. In my engine, regardless of IMAGETYPE_IN it is ALL unified to bitmap data, with no conversion necessary cause this is mostly already built into flash, the only exception being textures from the map which I simply draw to bitmap data as soon as I have all the pixels. I have ATF texture capability in my engine and that breaks unification due to ATF being more of a container than an image type. I overcome this by unifying it after the fact with exceptions all the way down in my content manager. ATF textures can not be noired though. Cause it's a container. Doesn't matter, my script was smart enough to kow that long before I ever added noir. If you used ATF textures it simply wouldn't convert it. The noir only falls in the path of bitmap data.

@specular & ambient

I have no clue. All I know is ambient has no falloff, no radius and effects every single texture the light is applied to equally. Specular seems to be nothing more than ambient with falloff/radius. However, I have not actually used any of that stuff with normal/spec maps so maybe there is more to it.

FUN FACT: the ambience object in my descriptor is nothing but a point light. Technically, any value that point lights accept could be put in that object. It would be dumb though cause I didn't leave an interface in the object to determine it's position. So, technically this could double as a point light somewhere in the map but, god only knows where it's going to show up.

[Mugwump]

@noir If the guys in the jam had had access to such a simple tool, they would've been overjoyed. As it turned out, Shamblernaut had to create a custom palette, which he used to desaturate some wads. Your method would have made all that irrelevant. Man, I really wish you were coding for Quake!

I have no clue.

Oh, right, you're using some javascript thingy, you didn't code that.

All I know is ambient has no falloff, no radius and effects every single texture the light is applied to equally.

Sounds like _minlight.

I didn't leave an interface in the object to determine it's position.

If you did, I guess it could be used as a sun.

[MadGypsy]

Done, all unnecessary dependencies removed. It's so much nicer now.

[MadGypsy]

@BFG -

you are a little misunderstood. There is no "javascript thingy" anywhere in my entire engine. My descriptor is in JSON (javascript object notation) format and overall has nothing at all to do with my engine. I could completely eliminate descriptors and everything you have seen with my engine would still be possible. There just wouldn't be an external way to modify any of it.

Also, even though my descriptors are using the JSON format, there is still no javascript anything. To put this in perspective, it would be like if I used XML instead and people claimed there was an "HTML thingy" in my engine. JSON is nothing but a data structure and could be used in any language that has ever existed which has a JSON parser.

Maybe this would make more sense if we just called it Object Notation. The "javascript" part is entirely irrelevant. And to REALLY wrap your head around what the JSON is for... consider it a .cfg cause that's all it is even to the point where you will eventually set your controls in that file.