What are you working on?

[r00k]

The mind works better after some physical exercise and when it's not actively bothered with thoughts.

Play Quake online intensively, listening to all the smack talk, etc... get pissed off then go to work!
it's the best method to get your blood pumped.

I have seen too often where developers do not (or simply cant) play the game they are working on in real-time, (example) WarZ devs...

[jim]

I know the focus in this thread is on those weapon shapes, but holy crap 8 Doom levels in 7 days. Is your last name perhaps Casali? Wow.

Heh, I was a bit sick and could do nothing else. Usually it takes 1 day to make a level, maybe a few gameplay tweaks next day, or some other minor fixes.

And some texturing for half the weapons.. I'll improve later. These were like 30 minutes per texture. UV mapping maybe 60 minutes per model.

[frag.machine]

I know the focus in this thread is on those weapon shapes, but holy crap 8 Doom levels in 7 days. Is your last name perhaps Casali? Wow.

Heh, I was a bit sick and could do nothing else. Usually it takes 1 day to make a level, maybe a few gameplay tweaks next day, or some other minor fixes.

And some texturing for half the weapons.. I'll improve later. These were like 30 minutes per texture. UV mapping maybe 60 minutes per model.

Wow, those models put on shame most of Quake 2 stock weapons.

[leileilol]

30 minutes?!! that's fast

[jim]

I was just checking some of the Created/Modified times on the image files.. the fastest done texture is 10 minutes, 2nd 25 minutes, 3rd 34 minutes (first save after 1 minute of editing maybe). The longest taking ones were around 1 hour. But eventually it becomes a bit impossible to know how long it's taken, like if I tweak some texture next day...

My workflow for the textures is something like this:

1) UV mapping
2) Bake AOs from Blender and xNormal
3) Pick some Colors from the game palette, usually grey + some color, draw/flood fill the different areas with the colors
4) AO from xNormal 77 opacity over the Blender AO in a group, set the AO group 100 Multiply over the Color layer
5) Draw some greyscale Details on a layer.. 50-100 Overlay (or sometimes off), maybe draw some detail colors into the Color layer
6) Duplicate/Merge the AO group, Texture Preserving Smooth (25) + Unsharp Mask (1,5rad, 150str, 0clip) on the merged AOs, 100 Overlay/Duplicate/Merge the Detail layer on it... the new merged layer 50 Overlay
7) Duplicate the AO+Detail layer, Local Tone Mapping (20str.. maybe this is a bit too much), Curves (set different brightness values to different colors), possibly Hue Shift after (cold or warm tone?), 50 Soft Light
8 ) Posterize adjustment layer with 24 Levels, 100 Overlay
9) Hue/Saturation adjustment layer -40 Saturation
10) Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer 32 Brightness, 25 contrast
11) Load the game palette / Tweak some of the above stuff to get the final paletted image have the right colors (sometimes add some extra color/noise blend layers to get better conversion)

xNormal Simple Ambient Occlusion Generator settings:
Rays: 128
Uniform
Bias: 0.1
Bright: 0.2
Intensity, Gamma and Contrast: 1.0

This creates a medium sharp worn edge look for them, although maybe some of my filtering settings make the edges a bit too strongly visible? But for now I'll just go with these settings... Only 3 weapons left to texture.

I'm hoping I'll get them done today, so tomorrow I could start adding them ingame and also make some projectile models or sprites for them. I think all the weapons will use visible projectiles. So, even bullets would look like some sort of energy bolts. Maybe on sunday I can record some video action with the weapons.

edit: And here's the other half of the weapons textured.. the preview image has a bit weird colors...

[ceriux]

you make your textures similar to me, i really like these guns here though.

[toneddu2000]

really good style jim and very professional approach, compliments!

[Barnes]

[jitspoe]

jim: Hm, honest feedback: they look a little flat to me. These would probably work if you had some kind of shader on top of them for more of a reflective/metallic look, but for pure diffuse textures, I think they'd look a lot better if you had stronger highlights, bits of wear, metal showing through on corners/edges, dirt/grime, and the like.

Of course, I can't seem to find any good examples of what I'm talking about right now, but sort of along the lines of this:
http://propweaponscoop.com/wp-content/u ... medium.jpg
http://cdn2.nerdapproved.com/wp-content ... /Gun1.jpeg
http://www.yourprops.com/movieprops/ori ... eapons.jpg
http://www.gamebreakers.co/wp-content/u ... dspace.jpg


As for me, I'm just beginning to delve into the world of genetic programming to see if there will be any applicable use in AI. I'm not super optimistic, but it's fun to play around with.

[ceriux]

i think his textures are fine. they match the rest of his game and really put out a nice clean retro feel to them. they're stylish and interesting to look at. some of them i couldnt really imagine what they do. but just looking at them makes me want to wonder.

[jim]

Maybe I will add some of that later, but for now they're good enough to let me do other stuff.

I recorded that video. Didn't have time to do projectile models during weekend, so they're just placeholder particle trails. But maybe this way I know better what kind of models or sprites they need. They all have sounds, but some may be.. bad. They'll also need some impact sounds. Some of the functionality is a bit placeholder as well.

http://www.moddb.com/games/blaze/videos ... onstration

[mankrip]

This is how lava should look in Quake.

And actually, looking at the pattern... It is based on Quake's lava texture, isn't it?

[Barnes]

diffuse from dp retexture pak if I remember correctly

[CocoT]

Jim: Very nice!

[toneddu2000]

very good projectiiles jim: only thing I don't understand is why, when you strafe, projectiles seem to "lose source" and they are not fired from the gun firehole