Stuff with water

[Major Banter]

Personally I think the caustics only need a tweak. Games are all about enthused reality; making stuff hideously obvious. As designers we think 'nice, but could be better'. A playtester will think 'OOOOH PURTY'.

Drawing the line is important. Go get some gamer friends to give opinions, nub.

[Smurftyours]

Make the caustics less abrupt.

[nub]

I got it guys, caustics need work. It's duly noted.


Anyway, I'm taking a break on the mapping aspects until I can get some awesome pipe models...


....OHHHH ZIIIIIIP!

[nub]

Bump:












Total retexture to look more like Mirrors Edge. Still needs some work to bring out the colors a bit more, but it's slowly getting there. I just need to make some better fans for the vents that are more like Mirrors Edge (the 3-bladed fans).

[MáØ]

Damn that is really nice looking. Are you going to edit/replace the models at all? It seems like they don't match the rest of the level right now, too dirty.

[Terr]

Need more videos

[cz_squishy]

Team up with zip to make Pipe Dream not a dream, but a reality

[Zipfinator]

Actually Nub started the mod Pipe Dream. I took over though in August of last year. It's changed a lot now though (Even from the Map Battle art test) so this type of environment wouldn't fit too well into the mod anymore.

Anyway it's looking nice. The curvy geometry doesn't make much sense to me though mostly because of the the cinderblock material. It looks alright though. I would get rid of that little < shaped indent in the parts jutting out of the wall or at least lower the chamfer on the edges too.

[Chopium]

Amazing job mate. I like the yellow lighting. Are the godrays particle effects?

[nub]

Yeah the rounded corners are more than likely going to go since they're problematic anyway. They never shade correctly even if I assign the faces to the same smoothing group, and there wasn't many rounded corners in Mirrors Edge anyway.

The pieces jutting out of the wall are also going to be replaced with pipes eventually. They're just place holders as of now. I also managed to get a vent duct fan and housing prop from Mirrors Edge (that I'm REALLY glad I found) to replace the current stock models. I had to chop up the diffuse map to match the first UV set that umodel can only export.


PS: The "godrays" are just textures on flat planes. I used the block primitive and applied the texture to one side then put nodraw on the rest. It's a very simple gradient texture that works well with $additive to create a ray effect. You just gotta tie the brush to func_illusionary and make the color close to the light source.

[Terr]

PS: The "godrays" are just textures on flat planes. I used the block primitive and applied the texture to one side then put nodraw on the rest. It's a very simple gradient texture that works well with $additive to create a ray effect. You just gotta tie the brush to func_illusionary and make the color close to the light source.

I wonder what kind of performance implications there are to doing them as brushes rather than models.

[nub]

I'm not too worried about performance to be honest. So far I have no plans to make this a playable map. Like I said before, I'm just bored to shit and feel like making something.

If it does become a significant project, then I can always use propper on the brushes and make them in to a model. And all you propper naysayers can suck it since propper would do a perfectly fine job for such a simple thing.

So far the map runs like a charm though, but it is pretty small, and relatively simple. I think the most taxing thing in it is the water, but any newer card can handle that just fine. The smokevolume in the center is set to emissive, which makes it 4 times as taxing, so I'm narrowing down the use of that as much as possible. It's only in the center though, but if I expand this map then I might find other spots to use it in.

[Hollow]

Nub, i've followed every step you've taken into getting caustics into the game. But it does not work for me, neither as an overlay or a func_illusionary brush. I get this error repeated whilst compiling, if you can point out whats going wrong, I would be pretty grateful

Code: Select all

KeyValues Error: RecursiveLoadFromBuffer:  got } in key in file materials/FZTEXTURES/FZ_ANIMATED_LIGHT.vmt
LightmappedGeneric,
KeyValues Error: LoadFromBuffer: missing { in file materials/FZTEXTURES/FZ_ANIMATED_LIGHT.vmt
(*LightmappedGeneric*),

And here's the actual vmt:

Code: Select all

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "FZTextures/FZ_Animated_Light"
"$additive" 1
"$overlay" 1

"Proxies"
{
"AnimatedTexture"
{
   "animatedtexturevar" "$basetexture"
   "animatedtextureframenumvar" "$frame"
   "animatedtextureframerate" 30.00
   }
    }

[ErikKiller]

Total retexture to look more like Mirrors Edge. Still needs some work to bring out the colors a bit more, but it's slowly getting there. I just need to make some better fans for the vents that are more like Mirrors Edge (the 3-bladed fans).

Fucking AWESOME!
You like water dontcha?

[cypher543]

Nub, i've followed every step you've taken into getting caustics into the game. But it does not work for me, neither as an overlay or a func_illusionary brush. I get this error repeated whilst compiling, if you can point out whats going wrong, I would be pretty grateful

Code: Select all

KeyValues Error: RecursiveLoadFromBuffer:  got } in key in file materials/FZTEXTURES/FZ_ANIMATED_LIGHT.vmt
LightmappedGeneric,
KeyValues Error: LoadFromBuffer: missing { in file materials/FZTEXTURES/FZ_ANIMATED_LIGHT.vmt
(*LightmappedGeneric*),

And here's the actual vmt:

Code: Select all

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "FZTextures/FZ_Animated_Light"
"$additive" 1
"$overlay" 1

"Proxies"
{
"AnimatedTexture"
{
   "animatedtexturevar" "$basetexture"
   "animatedtextureframenumvar" "$frame"
   "animatedtextureframerate" 30.00
   }
    }

Looks like you need another } at the end. You're closing the Proxies and AnimatedTexture blocks, but not the LightmappedGeneric block.