Doom3world

I think you're missing what I'm saying. The sharp edge ruins the illusion of brick depth due to the light hitting side A but not side B that's facing 90 degrees the other way. I'll take a screenshot when I take screenshots of the other stuff I was talking about.

We've come a long way.

Yeah, I caulked most of the interior of the embassy and disabled a few doors.

And, unless we remove all of the windows, there will be no way to visportal the embassy... you might be able to visportal the "back" rooms (the ones w/o any windows)... but that's about it.

Goliath

I know what you meant. However, rounded corners can make matters worse. JC talked about this on his QCon'04 speech. Basically, a curved normal mapped surface + binary light/shadow = teh suck.

On the windows of the embassy thing could youguys do this?

In the olden days in editors you made single sided polygons, thus one could inset a fake glass polygon that you could not see into the embassy with, however once in side you would be able to see thru the back side.

Thus the needs would be 1 chromish outside window, 1 inside window that was clear. Then a person could not see the geometry that would block the windows, and make a vis portal possible.

I know personally if I walk across a map and see the windows suddenly open I will think it is fairly ugly...

What we might need to do is turn the windows into func statics that are NOT see-through from the outside, but then hide them when you enter the embassy so you'll be able to see out while inside. Dunno who convincing that would be, though.

G

Good idea sxotty! I just tried it on my block and it works reasonably well. I put a brush with the NoDrawSolid material on all sides except one which had an opaque texture of a window facing towards the street. Then I put a visportal inside the room covering the window.

This doesn't stop the engine from rendering what's inside the room if you're facing the window directly but it does prevent rendering the room when you're off to the side or on the other side of the building, etc.

Sounds like a plan! There are so many windows all over the map, even if the engine did render the ones you were directly facing still means 90% of them won't be rendered. Plus, if the opaque glass texture has some nice chrome effect on it no-one will mind at all.

Talking of which, would it be possible to instead of just an image of a collection of white squares for the fake reflection used currently in glass, to use a the actual reflection it would cause. not real time, I mean take a screenshot of what you'd see through the window, and then apply that as the reflected image. Obviously moving entities wouldn't show up in it, but especially with big windows it would add a very pretty effect.

Yeah, Bauul... this can be done with cubemap reflections... in fact, it's how most of D3's windows get that semi-proper reflection look to them.

Hi people,

I have been watching this project from the time when it started and have been reading the forums here from time to time and checking back to see the progress you are making. I must say that this project, even though it obviously still requires more time until it is finished, is tuning up to be quite amazing! All the new blocks, objects and the physgun are nice additions to this build. Despite the fact that quite some mod teams have called quits (bah! "incompetent chickens"), you guys still keep together and keep on developing this mod. I guess I just want to say that you should be proud of what you have achieved so far. I'm looking forward to see the next additions to this project!

Apart from what people have been commenting on the current build in this topic, I think there is one important thing which will make the mod look more professional. After running around the map for some times I noticed that not all the doors are the same size. I know that some doors vary in size, but while most doors look normal and in size with the player models and the view of the player, a few of them looked like they were made for giants, and I noticed one which looked like it it was made for gnomes. Fixing this should not be a big priority right now, but fixing it would add to the professional look of the mod.

As a last note, I think your priority should be to optimize the next build furthermore. When walking around the map I noticed that since you have added so many objects to the map the lag has become quite intense at certain areas. I see that many of you are discussing how to use portals efficiently, so maybe you got this on your to-do list already.

Optimization so the map will run will on today's hardware will be the key goal of the next test-build. We might not get completely there, but there will definitely be a vast improvement in performance between now and then.

G

Honestly, I registered just for this project. This is fantastic work, minus the fact that performance is terrible . The subway area to me, interestingly enough, appears the most detailed.

My suggestions and comments are mostly obvious ones:

1) There appears to be a ton of overlapping lights, which reduces framerates and causes a sortof "glare" in spots of the map.

2) I noticed afew of what appeared to be "light leaks". You may want to check that out.

3) Turning the lights on and off seems like it may be causing problems, especially that given lights may not always be turned on or off properly. I'm sure this can be fixed up though.

4) Obviously, visportals need liberal use in this map. The biggest problem here involves building interiors. But you could modify the windows of buildings to have an environment map type reflection normally, and otherwise be opaque. As you get closer you could "fade" more transparent. This may work. The brush idea someone mentioned is another possible fix.

One thing I noticed is that this build appears more "washed out" than the previous one. Not sure why. Overall very nice though, despite the framerates. Even though I knew my machine couldn't handle it, at one point I knocked it up to 1024x768 with 4xAA, and it was quite stunning, even if I was getting 1fps. As I told a friend "It may have been a slideshow, but it was one of the prettiest slideshow's I've seen."

Oh, the other thing I noticed, I should mention, is sometimes objects get "stuck" for instance I was able to get a chair stuck on a window just by throwing it at one (in the embassy), and was able to repeat this afew times before it finally decided to fall normally. Also I tossed a ragdoll around and it actually got stuck on something in the air at one point. Then (yes another), in the subway I tossed a guy in with the janitor, killing them both, and one of them (I think the janitor) somehow ended up stuck with his arm in the wall by the stairs. He was not able to be removed from that spot (though I could flop him around a bit). These errors may denote leaks and other sorts of problems rather than actual physics bugs. Who knows.

Good job though guys. Can't wait to see more.

I have a huge problem! in the subway, it just runs good(expect some parts where i got almost 0 frames) and so it is from the 1st soldier on... the whole level runs at 1-2 frames (expect some indoor areas)
i can't imagine this is cause of the visportals...
my system:
P4 3.06
Geforce 6800 Ultra
1Gb RD-Ram

I'm normaly running d3 at 1280*1024 in ultraquality at permanent 60 frames. now when i'm running dcdit it doesent do the changings i do in the d3 options so i can't drop the resolution etc...

does anyone know why this happens?

Hmm... with those specs, you should never go below 18 FPS, I don't think... or at least, on my 6800GT and 6800 at work (both around 3GHz and 1GB RAM), I get those as my low-end FPS scores. Both are set at high quality, one is @ 1024x768 and the other is @ 1280x1024.

G

Just thought of an idea for the open windows wich might work for some situations considering the ceiling is pretty undetailed (wich ceilings usually are ) but when your POV is far away from the window it will open the visportal. Dont know if this helps much.

I have that exact same problem I see the same things like a min into the map, I have a 9800pro A64 3200+ and 1Gb of ram, weird thing is as soon as that has happened I tough about overheat so I ran a doom3 map and there was no problem there, so I dont know if is a map related problem or an Ati related problem, Ati has terrible OpenGL drives so maybe that's the problem I'm using catalyst version 5.2

Hey Radar911, Mblackwell and peter_86 welcome to the forum and enjoy your stay as much as you can

I have 9800 pro 128mb Powercolor with Arctic cooling.

Didnt notice any problems but a slow frame rate... Visually it was nice

I'd like to make a couple of requests to whomever creates these videos.

1. Play at a lower resolution to keep the framerate well above that of the final video (obviously keep the both the game and video resolutions equal)
2. Ditch all audio. The video is just a wander round the map, I don't need to listen to some old rocker, or hear the gun reload. I'd much rather have a smaller download.

Looking great guys.

Hmmm... that might help. We'll have to do some experiments to come up with more ideas like this.