A new area for penumbra
Yamazaki
Join Date: 2002-01-24 Member: 21Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
Join Date: 2002-01-24 Member: 21Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
<div class="IPBDescription">The results of map doodling</div>I was throwing together some concept pieces for hallways when a little gem of an idea hit me. I'd seen a few open girder bridges for the game Duality (Phantom Crash, slated to be released for PC and Xbox), and it gave me some ideas of my own. Combining it with some modern train bridges and some industrial scaffolding, and voila. Before I knew it I had a nearly complete cargo relay area with a nifty lit bridge and lots of gameplay possibilities.
The final area will have vent accessways along the upper areas of the walls, so level 1's and level 3's can zip by unnoticed or ambush marines as they cross. The crates on the central platforms are just placeholders using standard HL textures, but they get the point across for now.
This area has a max of 350 r_speeds. After connecting it on either end it will probably be 450. This leaves me room for some brushwork along the ceiling, like pipes, tanks, and maybe even a crane. The ceiling is currently lit, but after adding in some fade values to the spotlights I can make it much darker, so that level 1's can crawl unnoticed.
The images use the proper gamma formula, so they look exactly as they do in-game.
Now I just need to find a place for it in my map. I will probably remove an old area or some hallways. Right now I am trying to remove some of the less interesting hallways and rooms and put in much larger areas with more gameplay possibilities. Not to mention it makes the map easier to navigate.
Oh, and falling off the bridge is instant death. A level 1 could crawl underneath it, and a level 3 could fly underneath as well, but touching the bottom will gib you.
The final area will have vent accessways along the upper areas of the walls, so level 1's and level 3's can zip by unnoticed or ambush marines as they cross. The crates on the central platforms are just placeholders using standard HL textures, but they get the point across for now.
This area has a max of 350 r_speeds. After connecting it on either end it will probably be 450. This leaves me room for some brushwork along the ceiling, like pipes, tanks, and maybe even a crane. The ceiling is currently lit, but after adding in some fade values to the spotlights I can make it much darker, so that level 1's can crawl unnoticed.
The images use the proper gamma formula, so they look exactly as they do in-game.
Now I just need to find a place for it in my map. I will probably remove an old area or some hallways. Right now I am trying to remove some of the less interesting hallways and rooms and put in much larger areas with more gameplay possibilities. Not to mention it makes the map easier to navigate.
Oh, and falling off the bridge is instant death. A level 1 could crawl underneath it, and a level 3 could fly underneath as well, but touching the bottom will gib you.
Comments
Looking across the bridge, from one end to the other.
Hovering just under the ceiling, looking down upon the bridge. You can see the two large doors that flank the bridge, each one is meant for massive container transit.
Standing at the center, looking across one of the loading platforms and towards the large door.
Lighting looks nice, althought the lights look a little strong for how muhc light is given off, but I absolutely love the look!
/waves paw in the air
The pitch blackness in the shots... is that actual ground? Or is it a pit of sorts? I'm assuming it's a pit considering this is a bridge. If not though, it's probably best not left that dark.
Otherwise wonderful lighting, architecture, etc. <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
I have some plans for adding red emergency lights along the girders of the bridge, so that container transports don't slam into the bridge by accident. These will probably pulse rather than flicker or flash, or just stay constant and have a few by the platform flashing instead. Otherwise I will not add anymore lights, since adding more would add just enough unwanted light to illuminate the corners and ceiling.
And if you tell me the bridge is too bright, I will spank you with a level 5 alien. Please remember this is a bridge, so there has to be enough light for people to navigate it... it would get really really annoying if people started falling off it by accident, not to mention it'd be stupid to have such a dangerous area unlit.
<!--EDIT|Yamazaki|June 04 2002,23:08-->
"Oh, and falling off the bridge is instant death. A level 1 could crawl underneath it, and a level 3 could fly underneath as well, but touching the bottom will gib you."
Anyways, Goody!
Yes, I agree that the lighting on the bridge should be bright. The darkness of the surrounding areas (mixed with the brighter bridge) provide the scene with more than enough contrasting light. And I'd definitely like to see those little red emergency lights... <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
<!--EDIT|ken20banks|June 04 2002,22:16-->
The guideline is 700 polygons for first-person mode, and 800 for the commander mode. So that would leave me 250 polygons for details, more than enough.
I've just added two robotic arm cranes mounted on tracks in the ceiling, they're hanging over each loading platform. There's also a large cylindrical tank running along the ceiling, right above the bridge, which offers some cover for crawling aliens. The crane tracks are also deep enough to provide cover as well. Five red emergency lights were added to each platform.
After all this, the polygon count reached 550, using up 200 of the 250 I had set aside for detail. Not bad.
My new plan is to cut away some of the symmetry of the room. Right now it's symmetrical along two axis. I will remove one loading door and loading platform on one side, and pull the wall on that side in much closer. There will be only one crane, platform, and loading door. I will then push out the opposite wall, allowing me to make a much larger loading platform with more detail and more room for crates.
yes
I'd really like to see more NS textures in here, these textures look nice but don't fit NS that well.
1. A simple corrugated metal texture for the doors (There is none in the NS wad)
2. A simple shiny/scratched metal texture for the walls/platform
3. A simple spotlight
4. A simple bluish plastic housing for the spotlight
5. The caution striping and lighting around the door
Everything else is an NS texture or HL texture. The girders for the bridge are VENT2, for example.
Sorry if my tone sounds snappy, but I'm a little frustrated. There isn't enough texture diversity within the NS wad, so I have to compensate by using what's there in different ways. I've yet to see anyone use VENT2 as a vent texture, for example. In addition I have to borrow HL textures on occasion to fill in the gaps. And when I can't do either, I have to make my own.
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AMEN BROTHER.
There's a lot of stuff in the NS.wad, for sure. But so much of it is specialty-use tech stuff that it really shouldn't even be counted; what's left is a mishmash: three of the pinkish metal walls, many of the same textures repeated under different names, or the same texture but a different size, et cetera.
There's very little choice BUT to use custom textures. Some folks (Fam, etc) have tried to expand the choices among texture subsets (witness the lab wall textures some of us cranked out recently), but the variety just isnt there for everything.
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I've yet to see anyone use VENT2 as a vent texture, for example.
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I did <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
<b>Personally,</b> I don't know what to think. For the most part, your level is textured fairly clean with greyish colored walls. That's not really the look NS is going for. Cleaner areas are obviously OK, judging from the official maps (and some of the actual textures themselves), but they're only used once and a while there. Both of the official maps somehow have a constant feel of NS grundginess. Bast has some wonderful clean areas, but is also fairly dirty for the most part.
But somehow I think that -once you are in your level- the theme is more convincing. I really don't know where I'd stand on this. The level has a wonderful atmosphere when you're actually playing in it. But when looking at screenshots (where you actually have time to look around at things) it comes out looking too clean, considering the theme is pretty much constant throughout the level.
I don't know though... this fits in perfectly with what you've already got. If you have to retexture this area because it doesn't fit the theme, then it's only realistic to think that the whole thing may be up for such treatment. :/
If it is necessary, would retexturing some areas be possible/realistic/O.K. in your eyes?
It's definitely not my decision, but I'd say that what you "feel" when playing in the level is what is most important. When I'm in the level, it feels very atmosheric. And that is a big part of NS. But on the other hand, it also doesn't feel very NS-Themed in visual appearence. That too is a big part of NS.
I'll leave it at that, I guess.
<!--EDIT|ken20banks|June 05 2002,16:17-->
I've always seen NS's look as 'sci-fi industrial', and that's what I aimed for with everything I did. But if NS's look is based solely upon a small collection of textures, then something's not right. The NS textures are not all dirty and rusty, some are surprisingly smooth and clean.
Not to mention I based a lot of my Penumbra textures off of Shaderlab's Majestic set, which is partially included within the standard NS wads, so... I'm kind've at a loss here.
But after giving it some more thought, I think this 'too clean' argument is not accurate. Looking at the textures in use in the wads, and in use within Bast, I've come to the conclusion that it has to do with how 'busy' the texture looks. There's lots of Bast textures that are clean, but are taken from photos of machinery and therefore have a lot of stuff in them (Pipes, hydrualics, buttons, switches, rivets, all packed into a small space). Mine are usually simpler in design, mostly interlocking panels.
So, I just gotta pack more details into the textures...
I made sure to point out the bast textures and other clean ones in my reply there... I should have been more clear in my stance that "I have no idea why these certain clean ones work somehow." I think you've nailed it. A texture can look very industrial with details over (or as opposed to) dirt. I agree.
I'm so glad you came to that conclusion, because I honestly couldn't figure it out. <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
It looks like it's built to support something immensely heavy, yet is just a walkway. Maybe if some of the supports were thinned down a bit, it wouldn't look quite that way.
Also, maybe have a few little lights on the walls of the bottomless pit - make it look <b>deep</b>. There's the red-dots-through-env_sprites trick for that, which has zero impact on r_speeds. <!--emo&:)--><img src="http://www.natural-selection.org/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'><!--endemo-->
The bridge is not a mere walkway, its for off-loading cargo, hence the huge doors on the side. I made the girders thinner originally, but it looked far too flimsy for the size of crate that I intend on putting on that platform, so I widened them.
Or would you still be getting the error regardless?
I just want to say, as I've said in the past, it is okay to use some custom textures in the maps. I freely admit that I ran out of time to flesh the current NS wad out to it's fullest, and I'm hoping when all the game art is done I will get a chance to go back and add tons more textures.
But, as has been stated, any custom textures created need to match the NS wad in look and feel. When I say a texture is too "clean" I'm not referring so much to the fact that it should have absurd amounts of rust and dirt splashed all over it. But if you look at a lot of halflife textures, they are too bland, too blurry, and lack detail. I tried to give all my textures a lot of detail, both in the fake geometry stuff like pipes and bolts, and gadgets, and also in the surface, such as a tactile grain to the metals, rather then just a flat grey color for example.
The other thing I try to do is get depth to the textures, by painting lots of dark shadows around girders an strips and corners to try and make the details on the textures pop out. I also zoom way in and paint with very small brush sizes to get some fine lines and details.
Another thing which leads to a texture looking too "clean" is for example when someone paints a panel using just a completely straight dark line and a white line next to it. This looks flat, and 2d. I try to paint more uneven highlights along the edges, and some irregularities in the dark edges as well, to pick up on the little imperfections that would be in the metal, and to make it look less like an obvious use of the line tool in photoshop or the emboss filter.
Finally, in addition to painting with lots of contrast, I also pump up the contrast at the end in Photoshop after I've flattened the texture. Then I run a sharpen filter on it, which pops out the surface details a lot more and crispens up the edges. Whether someone does these last 2 simple steps or not can lead to some of the biggest discrepancies I see between NS textures and other custom ones.
Primarily we are just trying to insure that people follow the look and feel of Ns which has been established by the current WAD and the official maps. Overly clean maps just aren't what NS is about.
It is like the difference between the "Aliens" universe and the "Star Trek" universe. Granted there are some clean areas in Aliens and some grungier areas that pop up every once in a while on Star Trek. But in general Star Trek is clean, sterile, and very bright, where as Aliens is darker, moodier, not as high tech, and very used feeling. And the latter is more the direction we want in NS.
I think this post is probably too long and rambly, so I better end it here. Hope I didn't jsut confuse things further.
On a slightly different note, another problem behind the confusion is the wording most of us use. "This is too clean" isn't quite descriptive or precise enough.
Perhaps the word to use... is "industrial". Or, as Comprox stated, an NS level should be "unperfect" in it's visual appearence. Worn, beaten, etc. That doesn't mean filthy.
There are, as cory said, also several exceptions. In ns_nothing, the space station itself is torn to hell... really beat. But you move onto the docked ship, and things appear a bit more "clean", or "perfect". I really think "cleaner" areas are good... but if limited in use (seems to work good in ns_bast...). Sorry for using my own level for an example, but it's what I'm most familiar with.
<!--EDIT|ken20banks|June 05 2002,23:54-->
I haven't tried fiddling with the contrast and sharpening options, but I'll run these textures through that and see the difference.
First half the image is the metal texture I made using the tutorial I posted. Second half is after I boosted the contrast in the cloud and galvanized layers, and then did some sharpening on the scratched layers.
This is just the base metal, I'd then have to run the some effects on to the details I add in addition to this.