[Terrain specular slider]

No problem, with that.

Since I dont know if I do something wrong with the slider and this forum got other "possibe bugs" thread like "Why does the road go like this?" I thought it was ok to post here.

 

I never noticed that parts of the forums are protected because I have full access as long as I can remember.

 

I'll post in the Tracker then...

[Terrain specular slider]

The slider for adjusting the shineyness seems to be broken. It seems it does nothing if I adjust it.

 

Do I need something special?

[Attempting a Drag 'n' Drop Terrain Decal]

Nice, I'll try it out at home.

[more arch-vis, more questions ;)]

A guy posted icons for the camera and ai_node. So you see where they are.

 

I tried today to link the camera but had no luck.

[A few thoughts after playing Oblivion]

Wait wait. You're talking about MegaTexture. That tech is the precursor to the iD Tech 6 technology.

 

I wasnt aware of the fact theres id-tech6 already. No game has been relased with tech5 so it's a bit early to talk about tech6.

 

EDIT: Took a look at the .pdf from your wikipedia link and its refering to tech5. No tech6.

[Need one or two .lua scripts]

I tried myself and rewrote a script I found using the famous try and error method.

 

I can rotate my animals now and set frames I want to play. Now I could use the rest of the stuff.

 

--Include the base script for all classes
dofile("Scripts/base.lua")



function Spawn(model)
local entity=base_Spawn(model)



function entity:Update()

	local frame=AppTime()*0.02
	frame=math.mod(frame,0-500)

	if EntityCulled(model,fw.main.camera)==0 then
		self.model:Animate(frame,1,0,1)
	end
end


end

--Update function, called during every UpdateWorld()
function Update(world)
if world==world_main then
	local model,entity
	for model,entity in pairs(entitytable) do
		if model.world==world then
			entity:Update()
		end
	end
 end
end

[Need one or two .lua scripts]

You obviously don't understand that I was saying that your animation cycle is way too complex. You need a simple animation for the cow that has its legs or whatever move, but doesn't lead the cow to actually move 2-5 meters AWAY from its origin after 15 seconds.

 

Sorry missed the thread for some reasons...

 

I totally understand what you mean and it was a misunderstanding with the freelancer I hired.

However it's not a big problem because I can still use the models without walking along the spline.

 

Most of them will idle and stand still. A few can walk slowly in their cycle. I aggree it's not that nice as I intended in the first time but it won#t change the fact that I need a .lua containing the following stuff.

 

- ability to choose (1,2,3 or a checkbox, slider, whatever) the animation for the specific selected model in properties menu.

- choosing at which frame the animation start (or setting up a random start frame automatic). Otherwise all animals will start at frame "1" makeing them looking odd.

 

This is really important for me and has nothing to do with the splines. This woukd be needed for the next animals eventually.

[A few thoughts after playing Oblivion]

No the terrain has to be made at first.

It's a long process to even make the terrain if you want to have it looking good.

And you dont paint it like in Photoshop. It uses masking on common textures like grass and so on.

See there: http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/An_Advanced_Terrain_and_Megatexture - it#s an interesting read

 

This terrain also has tileing like any other: http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/Image:Simplemega_ingame.jpg

 

Here you see the texture selector: http://wiki.splashdamage.com/upload/e/ee/Simplemega_firstnode_preview.jpg

 

it's not that magic in my opinion, just some more options and of course the terrain offers the power of a 3dapp for doing nice shapes.

[A few thoughts after playing Oblivion]

I think some of theese unlimited and non repeatable texture discussion is overrated.

A lot of games use repeating textures. Lets take Crysis or Cod4. With some decals and good cover of the terrain it's not visible.

 

Using models for terrains entirely is a pain in the wonderful person if you need to do small changes. And you are limited in size. It depends on what you want to do. A fast paced shooter doesn't need mega texturing because all stuff pases by in a fast way. In a wide open level with only some vegetaion it would be nice to have such a tech. On the other hand if you do a open desert level you probably will have lots of stones to break it up. New Medal of Honor will take place in afgnahistan. Im curious how they will handle the "old texturing style" with their setting. First screenshots are very cool to look at.

 

So, yes, it would be nice to have more terrain layers especially in large scale levels with 4kx4k sizes so you can have several kinds of environment in one map like a transistion from desert to woodland.

For example Battlefield 2 is limited to 6 texture layers. And there are nice maps out there too.

 

First go and fill up a 4k level with all the stuff and then ask for (world)streaming. IT takes forever to walk through such a large level. Even if you do a RPG you can add different quests where the player has to cross parts of the level. Plus you can add vertical geometry and caves/dungeons. There are so many possibilites to keep the player busy in a non-world streaming world.

[What makes this terrain look good?]

Cliffs are a bit boring. Some models should be there too.

 

I remember CE2 has terrain ambient occlusion. Really good feature: http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/TerrainAmbientOcclusionIntro.html

 

Maybe this is what you meant while talking about the "dark" trees.

[What makes this terrain look good?]

I also noticed that AA brings a great deal of smoothness and integration, but that's supposed to be somewhere in 2010

Its just the sceenshot function. You render a 3500px screenshot and resize to 1500. THis is the effect you get. Crysis got not such an AA like on the shots by default.

 

For vegetation a "darkness" value can be set from 1 (default) to 0 (dark). Plus some Time of day settings here and the nice parallax mapping on terrain which makes it more looking good.

Thats all I think.

[Glow Shader]

For terrain: parallax makes a real difference.

If you set up Crysis to medium details it looks like LE.

 

You can do tests with same assets. Just use the vegetation from my site and throw it into CE2 /crysis. It is made for CE2 and similar.

Import some terrain texture from LE to CE2 and you hav 100% matching assets.

 

My final thought to the visuals are the post-processing stuff which is going to be enabled on very-high settings in CE2.

Furthermore variation is key! Most Crysis maps use 12 and up vegetation layers plus decals and over 30-50 vegetation types in one map.

 

I dont have all my assets ready to do a LE2 prototype because I had to do some portfolio stuff with Maxwell and needed to work on LE vegetation but I'll show some stuff soon.

[Glow Shader]

Yes. I've read about this ages ago in a aking off crysis or an interview. Dont remember. They talked about how they approached the visual quality they wanted to archieve in ce2.

It was very interesting to read/watch.

 

They used the same assets for the CG version and later on in their game demo. I think it's not difficult to have diffuse/spec/etc... maps with the models and hand them to a external CG company for using them in their video.

[Origins Development Video]

I really like the video. Go and add some sky, flowers/grass and an ambient light so the shadows aren't such dark.

 

The cape ofthe guy could swing a bit more. looks a bit stiff.

[Glow Shader]

Maybe it's because they did the assets first handed them to a CG company for doing the jungle movie, then sit down with their programmers and develop stuff port the CG visuals into Realtime. I think its an interesting approach. You see where you have to improve your stuff.

[Glow Shader]

Josh wrote in another forum entry he'll add back contrast, saturation and brightness back to the editor. The beta version had it already and you could do really nice effects with it. Its's fun too.

 

I'm glad he listened to the requests in this case. Most games use this stuff to let the artists free hands for creating special moods without having to change the color palette of his assets. Crysis Sandbox uses around 20 settings for post-processing as far as i remember. A lot of them are not used on a regular base as far as I can tell from my work with the engine.

 

I think contrast, saturation, brightness is a good start.

Having values for a sepia filter with free selectable colors, maybe sharpness filtering and levels would be enough. Leadwerks got a good amount of other settings which are coming with the editor. I miss some setting to adjust/change SSAO and HDR. This is an often used setting.

 

 

For the artistic possibilities you can take a look there: http://nathan.perilith.com/~vito/wtfpoland/wtfpoland3.htm?t=65805

This shot is definitly possible with LE too: http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/crysis_tod_art_339kdpl.jpg

 

A screenshot function to render out huge screenshots would be great for presentation. They could be resized in Photoshop and you will get crisp AA like on most of these shots from the thread above.

 

LE could be very enhanced with small additions based on already existing features.

[Interesting Powerpoint from CryTek]

CE2 got some unfinished features like dynamic occlusion maps. It's a function in the editor which is a bit hidden and not always working.

 

I'm curious if there will be the possibility some day to use some kind of dynamic/static lightmaps on a low end rig and have all the shader and dynamics on a high-end PC.

All these current gen engines are lacking of visual fidelity if it comes to setting others than medium.

[Need one or two .lua scripts]

Tyler unfortunatly can't do it because of the animation or whatever. But I still need this one done.

 

So I still appreciate help.

[Need one or two .lua scripts]

Thanks I will tomorrow. A bit busy at the moment.

[Need one or two .lua scripts]

I need a guy who is willing to help me out with some basic sripting stuff for my non-game releated projects.

Maybe it's not that difficult but I can do content only. :-7

Here's what I need:

 

I have an animated animal.

It has two animations: idle / walk

It is supposed to wander around in a level. Just along an AI spline. No interaction with the player needed.

 

My goal is to have several animals walking in a group along these splines.

 

So this is what I need:

 

Firstly a .lua script that makes my animal walking around.

Secondly a dialog in the properties menu for the animal which lets me check "Use walk anim" or "Use idle anim". Two checkboxes would be logically in my opinion.

 

That's it.

I will rename this script for using with other animals. They have the same setup.

 

 

I tried to adopt a crawler script but my animal walks through the terrain and does other strange stuff...I'm really untalented on such coding/scripting stuff.

[Elevated terrain brush]

Aggree. This would be nice. Missed it too.

[Batch Texture Converter]

Tried it yesterday and it fails too. Win7 X64 system here. I tried t oconvert three .tga to dds files.

 

It crashed while I've seen the message "waiting for two threads" - my CPU has four CPUs.

[Viewports]

I used your suggested setup a lot with brush based editors but since Bf2editor I never used it again. With drag,drop and snap to terrain its not used a lot anymore.

 

Only time I missed it is while I was working with rope setups for powerlines on my map.

[Dead Wake]

It looks funny. Maybe itÄs possbiel to place the dead people in different initial states. At the moment they look all the same while resting on the floor.

[tree[d]]

Yes they are quite heavy on triscount. But if you have a nice eye-candy spot in your level (like a clearing in a forest or such) it's likely you need some good looking unique trees. I think this app can support an artist. Some manual poly-reduction could done in a 3d app too.