InsideQC Forums

3-step dithered lightmap rendering, on top of dithered texture rendering, using separated surface caches:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFAZbQrUIAAezKo.png:orig

This was done in the last two days. It's unfinished, blended textures and alphamasked textures are fullbright now, but that'll be easy to fix.

It has a significant impact on the framerate, but there still are many things that can be optimized to compensate for this, and I already get 72 fps at 1280*720 anyway.

Looks very sick mankrip, I like the small detail on the wall that the dithering causes as a side effect, has much more personality than just regular 16/32bit color depth and looks miles better than banded 8bit.

Wow, even better. Looks great.

toneddu2000 wrote:Put another video showing a subtle speckle effect that simulates car paint (that YouTube almost blurred ), and some fixes to reflections, background and lights to better visualize cubemaps

Thanks xaGe! The improvements on specular and reflection maps, plus darker environment make the reflections more intense

EDIT:@mankrip: the dither effect is interesting! All made in pure C?

toneddu2000 wrote:Perfect, as always! I wish I had the money to hire an artist like you for my game!

I know its going to sound odd, but I don't consider myself an artist. I believe I am retro style level designer, I mostly do gameplay, architecture and some textures, but this is often so difficult to convey in a screenshot and people just see the pixels.

Anyway more pixels for viewing pleasure ... Damn Guard Duty!

sock wrote:I know its going to sound odd, but I don't consider myself an artist. I believe I am retro style level designer

After some year traying to make a game, I noticed that level design is probably the more artistic part. Try to imagine a virtual space, usable by players, never the same, always rich of surprises in its shaped, well, I think it's a daunting task for those who don't have an artistic mind!

For me level design (and pretty much everything in a game) is more about the gameplay. And I feel like I don't get to do it enough because of having to do all the art too... I'm thinking that I could make a game with just some simple primitives, like cubes, pyramids, cylinders, etc.. some day maybe when I get my current stuff done.

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Here's some keys. Each key shape can have any of the 3 colors, or they could be fixed to these colors. Should have maybe switched the Gear and Skeleton key places for better contrast on the background.


And some wip of a boss monster called HammerHead. It's kinda like a Balrog. There could also be a non boss version with smaller wings, brighter texture, some different weapons.

jim wrote: For me level design (and pretty much everything in a game) is more about the gameplay. And I feel like I don't get to do it enough because of having to do all the art too... I'm thinking that I could make a game with just some simple primitives, like cubes, pyramids, cylinders, etc.. some day maybe when I get my current stuff done.

Completelty agree, but that part for me is the a key part I've never been able to accomplish, so I presume it needs some artistic or architectural skills (the vision of a 3d playable space) that I lack.

PS: I like the central key! The HammerHead room seems to prelude some real action! Good work man!

Sock, that modded ogre is quite awesome. That area looks a bit like E1M2.

Jim, I'd set the key's colors to "yellow, red, blue". That way they'd resemble a golden cog, a bloody skeleton and a blue crystal, which would reinforce the themes of each key. But they look very cool anyway. And the atmosphere in the Hammerhead room looks great.

Toneddu2000, that car is looking pretty good. Learning the right uses for each kind of effect makes a lot of difference.

toneddu2000 wrote:EDIT:@mankrip: the dither effect is interesting! All made in pure C?

Yes, with no hardware acceleration. It actually turned out better than I expected, but it's exactly the kind of look that I wanted.

And the "secret feature" I've hinted at in some recent posts is finally working, but my main laptop's PSU broke so it'll take a little longer for me to reveal. In the meantime, I'll fix some more stuff.

Yes, with no hardware acceleration.

Cool!

jim wrote:For me level design (and pretty much everything in a game) is more about the gameplay.

I think you need a balance between art, game/level design and reliable code. You need art to get people hooked with screenshots, level design to create encounters and flow, game play systems to keep a player having fun and code to keep them from crashing and losing all their data!

The AD MOD project is also designed to be a resource kit for mappers to play with and luckily mapper MFX is busy creating a new map for AD.

Great screenshot, sock.

On a side note, MFX's CleanCut map fooled me into thinking my engine was buggy.

My engine has individual r_water_blend_alpha, r_slime_blend_alpha, r_lava_blend_alpha and r_portal_blend_alpha cvars for the turbulent surfaces. The old r_wateralpha cvar is ignored on surfaces assigned to those new cvars, and vice-versa.

When playing CleanCut, many surfaces were seemingly displaying grey void, and changing r_maxsurfs and r_maxedges didn't help.

It was only when playing it with Baker's Mark V engine that I saw that those surfaces were supposed to be translucent. And then I saw that the old r_wateralpha in my engine was still set to 1, and realized that those surfaces were actually turbulent surfaces using a flat-colored texture to simulate glass, and the name of that texture didn't match any of the categories of my new cvars, so the value of the old r_wateralpha cvar was used for them instead.

Creating new standards can lead to funny situations...

Things...


(and yes, the engine is integrated into it.)

Working on day/night cycles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5xIq3a36u4