Alternative To Overlay Textures
Evil_bOb1
Join Date: 2002-07-13 Member: 938Members, Squad Five Blue
Join Date: 2002-07-13 Member: 938Members, Squad Five Blue
<div class="IPBDescription">KFS spoke of this...</div> At some time or another KungFuSquirrel spoke of some sort of modifiaction to hlrad.exe making it "reed" a black and white overlay correctly lighting what used to be fullbright textures. Thus no more overlay entity, making the whole thing much easier abd better for server peformance...
I was very interested in this at the time and no news of it has been posted...Any got any word on this or has the project been abandonned?
KFS:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->That's how I did it, too. Works pretty well, but you have to be smart about how you set them up.
This will hopefully all be a thing of the past very soon, though. I don't want to go any more in-depth than that in case it doesn't work - don't want to get anyone's hopes up - but hopefully we'll be seeing lots more overlays in the near future.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Accidentally botched the Eclipse compile, unfortunately. Problems with the overlay tool resulted in some ugly after-effects. My own damn fault, though.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I was very interested in this at the time and no news of it has been posted...Any got any word on this or has the project been abandonned?
KFS:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->That's how I did it, too. Works pretty well, but you have to be smart about how you set them up.
This will hopefully all be a thing of the past very soon, though. I don't want to go any more in-depth than that in case it doesn't work - don't want to get anyone's hopes up - but hopefully we'll be seeing lots more overlays in the near future.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Accidentally botched the Eclipse compile, unfortunately. Problems with the overlay tool resulted in some ugly after-effects. My own damn fault, though.
<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
11th Hour is choking to death on it's overlay lighting. This could really help lighten the entity count if I can get my hands on it.
I've been meaning to post an update on this for a while. The big holdup is still the lightmap issue. The challenge is actually applying the overlay <i>over</i> the lightmap. Editing lightmaps as moultano suggested is likely possible, but it wouldn't do any good in this case because the problem is the lightmap going -over- the overlay file. The current functionality allows disabling of lightmaps on faces in the overlay.fx file and has the capability to set a static lightmap value on all instances of that texture. The big problem is that, since there's no immediate knowledge of any way to apply the overlay -over- the lightmaps, the only solution would involve creating a unique texture for each overlay face. This is simply not an option, unfortunately. Currently it works by combining the overlay texture and original texture into a single texture (so it even should be able to reduce texture memory usage <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo--> ) and then uses that new texture to define what areas are to be normal and what areas are to glow.
I've gotten permission from Zipster to put it into private testing within the Nightwatch and Natural Selection teams (so those of you with official NS maps can contact me if you want to give it a try) so we can test widespread use a little more. It may be that we'll just have to release it with the partial functionality and a guide on where to use it and where to use the traditional func_illusionary overlays.
Zipster and I have both been busy with a lot of other projects as well, so progress has slowed notably. If we can find a viable solution to the lightmap issue soon, we'll get in touch with Merl and/or XP-Cagey about integrating it into a new build of the custom tools and get it out as soon as we know it works properly. Otherwise, if it keeps dragging on, we'll make that partial functionality release I mentioned earlier - even as it is now, it's incredibly useful on light textures with minimal borders and whatnot. If anyone with compile tool coding experience wants to take a look at it, e-mail me and I'll get you in touch with Zipster ASAP. The value of a fully functional tool of this kind is... well, almost immeasurable, so we're definitely willing to hold off for a while until we know if there is a solution or not.