id Tech Forums

Also the pacing you set in the beginning on my playthrough was spot on, the difficulty was also pretty good, something I found with 2 of the later encounters though is (again out of fear which is a good thing) I would start backing away from where the monsters started spawning and I'd be out of the woods for the most part. They didn't come in behind me so nothing was stopping me from turning tail, and once I'd goten around a corner, I could pick them off one by one.

Probably the best thing about your map was how well the scripted events went with your map design and also thier execution. As of late I have grown VERY tired of the use of scripted events to. most fps's, but here it works great.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

I started playing, wandering the map, taking in the surroundings (good work on the audio btw, nice to know someone out there thinks its important), and generally getting immersed in the setting (even with the textures as they are), when I decide to pull a somewhat unasuming lever. Music changes, ominous sounds start, and I get curb stomped by a mancubus and his mates. So then after taking them on again and winning, which allowed the game to progress.

Now what this whole ordeal did for all subsequent scripted events is
1. Search for, and be initially excited with a feeling of accomplishment when I get a scripted event, becuase your map design makes simply finding your way and progressing part of the challenge
2. Fear that has been legitimized from my previous experience from that pasty bastard mixed with the difficulty of overcoming the challenge even after I'm expecting it

Co.pare this to most fps's I've played recently where the entire map is stringed in one very obvious line, so progression is merely walking forward. The scripted events are usually triggered soley by your location, which again, due to linearity, is dead easy to come across. The events themselves, in gameverse many times are things you woulfnt have any control over, yet they are obviously being triggered by you, and to put the nail in the coffin, many times thehy aren't lethal, hard or even dangerous, so there is no fear on the part of the player. I find even a lot of indie horror games miss that last part hard, show you trippy imagry but forgt to have it hurt you, so u quickly stop fearing it

Well I was pleasantly suprised with how fun it was. I didn't get the blue key cause Im not that bright and I had to get to bed so I missed out on the content, but the level design and how things were orginised in that doom 1-2 style did bring some interesting things to light. The challenge of letting the player roam and figure things out on thier own without drifting into tedium is a tricky one and I think u mostly pulled it off. In order to make it mazelike, yet navigateable, especially without a map means you have to make rooms (and hopefully hallways if possible) unique so you can differentiate between rooms easily. You did a fine job of that when it came to room dimensions, ( your rooms weren't all simple boxes) and some of your hallways were well done ( really liked the room with the pouring lava and the large tipping vat with molten metal in it ) but say keeping certain assets in a room and not reusing them in many others could have helped. Now keep in kind I am pretty poor at mazes so take my getting lost with more then a grain of salt. I could let you know about the things I found really well done if u like, but this post is already very long

Was I supposed to try and find the blue key? Ended the game without it

etqw was alot of fun when i played the demo, (at the time, only like 2 servers with a reasonable ping ever had people on it because I found out about the demo VERY late), and it seems people forget the stuff they did with idtech4 in that game. The water in the game looks decent enough, its just that once I noticed this, I havnt been able to keep my eyes off of it.
As you can see, around the border of the rifle where it meets the water, the water is trying to reflect it even though it shouldn't. This can happen even when your very far away from the water. What makes this more puzzling is that the weapon on screen isn't in world space, just screen space, so the water reflection is purely a screen space thing? Also I thought this game only used shadow volumes, not shadow mapping, then baked the other stuff like shadows from foliage and other alpha stuff into the megatexture. Thing is, I saw a large trees leaves casting very feint and soft appearing real time shadow on the ground. Am I completely wrong and not making much sense? wouldn't be the first time.

At work, ill post a screenshot when I get home. And I wish people still played it, I only downloaded the demo. Tried to buy the full game a few months back so I could use thier sdk, but you can't even get a copy anymore

Btw, anyone know how the water reflection works in quake wars, and why your weapon incorrectly effects it? I understand if you don't feel like posting a complete answer, a hotlink to somewhere that does would be bce though

Ill probably come around on the ao thing once I have near the kind of experience map making that you have, but right now I don't and I still think its possible to pull off sufficiently lit scenes without having to use ao to keep it from looking washed out.

As far as tessalation goes, it is pretty cool and would be a great tool to have, but would you consider it a must for a game to look and run good? Would making higher poly meshes offline and just using a good LOD system to figure out at run time which one to use be sufficient enough for most situations? Or is it impractical to make meshes of that complexity?

Also thanks Zombie and Bladeghost for the well thought of replys, I'm learning a lot over here, uve been applauded

Also treb, did those Id guys give specific reasons why they think BFG edition engine is a dead end? It would b interesting to know what they think about it vs idtech 5. Also I never knew that prey had gloss maps, I don't have the game but that sounds pretty cool, ill have to check it out. After I get rbbfg to work, keeps failingvto make at 21%

I don't se why ssao would be of major importance in d3 as long as you keep the ambient light low and non shadow casting lights to a minimum then u shouldnt really need any type of ambient occlusion, am I right? I don't think tessalation is a huge must either. A robust LOD system can do a very good job. When it comes to PBR, I've been trying to get my head around it and gave up, according to treb it isn't just me so thanks. And as far as gi, have u guys tried out AMD's foward rendering + idea? As I'm sure u know I'm pretty noon at this stuff but they use a tiled approach to cull lights not contributing to specific tiles, anyways, they got bounce lighting in that.

How do u like the virtual textures compared to rage?

By spammers I hope ur not refering to me, also I have a new found respect for u gaming with amd on linux

Cool, thanks for the clarification. It all sounds simple enough, but I'm sure ill manage a way to make a mess of it. I'd try it out but I'm having trouble making rbdoom for some reason.

Thanks treb, would love to try it out but it seems linux and amd propriatary drivers don't mix well and is making getting rbdoom3 that much more difficult. So if make ur map using radiant, put the .map in the /base, make the assets in watever and put them in the appropriate subdirectory /base/generated, start BFG, console fs_buildresources 1, run map from console? So you can't just toss all the different assets in the generated and hope the game sorts them accordingly? You have to put custom textures in the textures subdirectory?

Sorry, I wasn't paying attention, and forgot, I don't think at any point I ended up packing the maps into those formats, they just ran without bring in .crc and .resources but things had to be generated. If someone can.correct me (cough motorsep cough) or better yet find my posts regarding map making for BFG in radiant right before d3w went down, please post