This is a map of my home & a part of the surrounding enviroment, which is a central bus / train station with some parking lots here and there, and a lot of trees.
There is one main building, Spoorloos, where I live. It's a squatted storage space / office complex, where a foodbank, giveaway store and music sessions are hosted, as well as providing living space.
The train station lies directly next to Spoorloos. There is a trainyard on the other end of Spoorloos where trains are driven to to be repaired or to wait for departure the next day.
There is a train station complex on the station grounds, where people can lunch in a cafe, take a dump for 20 eurocents and wait in a hall when they're too much of a pussy to wait outside. There is a bike shop directly underneath this building.
Next to the train station complex and on the other side of the rail are parking lots for train passengers. On the other side of the rail is also a row of houses, all along the street.
In front of the train station complex is the bus station. This is the place from where you can go anywhere in this city. There is lots of lightning in this area, so even at night everything looks as if it was day, except with that nightly gloom over it, you know.
In front of the bus station is a big construction yard where they are currently working on a 10 floor office or something. Next to that construction yard is a big yellow appartement flat, with another parking lot in front of that.
Beside that parking lot, next to the trainyard on the other side of the perimeter, are the supermarket & snackbar and some houses.
Overall the map is pretty huge and still needs to be worked a lot on, but Spoorloos is hard on its way to become digital!
Discussion
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 10:21pm
[Author]
yay, then I got nothing to fear :razz:
I've been experimenting with 3d skyboxes a bit...and I was wondering, could I make the skybox "connect" to the level? So that the surrounding architecture would be easy on the engine yet still looks like a part of the map?
Posted by Captain P on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 8:54pm
The number of lights isn't a problem, the number of different light styles can be. More lights only change the way the lightmap looks, it's still the same size. An animated light however, one that changes intensity, means a different version of the lightmap has to be built for every different intensity of that light (of course, only for the faces that are affected). When two animated lights are animated the same, the same amount of lightmaps would be generated than for one animated light. But imagine the two lights behave differently: the number of intensity combinations radically increases. That's why the number of light styles that hits the same face is so limited, filesize (and also memory) issues.
So it's not the color or brightness or such that makes you hit this limit, it's the animation. I think you don't need many animated lights there anyway so I wouldn't worry too much about it. :smile:
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 6:51pm
[Author]
Well - I haven't dared to run the vis process on the map yet but performance is becoming a bit sluggy on the far ends of the map...I was planning to use a 3d skybox but I think I am also going to use a night setting with some fog, if possible - night settings saved me from much framerate issues in the past, and if done right it looks really cool
Does anyone know how much different lights can be placed alongside eachother? I might need to make a row of yellow/green lights but I do remember that the hl1 rad process kept bugging me with "too many light styles on a face" messages for hours while compiling one of my previous maps...
Posted by Captain P on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 6:22pm
Looks pretty accurate for a real-life recreation. And it's nice to see yet another Dutch mapper, too. :smile:
While the map looks good so far, I'm a bit worried about the performance. The map looks very open and you're probably still going to add a lot of detail. How does the map run so far?
// Also, msn photo stuff is slow... :razz:
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 11:11am
[Author]
True, I am going to experiment with 3d skyboxes soon and much of the enviroment is to be put in a skybox in the near future.
The lightning sucks indeed, but I'm experimenting with that on-the-fly...the plan is to make the light come is such a way it creates sunlight on the terrain and hopefully a full vis+rad process will make the ambient lightning such way that it also lights up the insides of the storage complex.
I was also thinking on making the light setting more nightly due to the huge visible areas of the map, with a gloomy blue night sky lightning and maybe some fog on the terrain as well, and then put lights inside the storage and on the still-to-be planted light posts.
And for screenshots - the map is still in such a state that altough the screenshots look nice, those area's are not even close to finished yet. When I got more finished areas I shall post some decent screenies.
Posted by CrazyPunk on
Thu Jul 20th 2006 at 11:09am
[Author]
<html><head><link rel="stylesheet" href="themes/standard.css" type="text/css"></head><body topmargin=2 leftmargin=2>OOps...double post :S
Well, first off, I would like to say that I have never read such a detailed back story about a mapper in one of these posts, so congrats on that being a first.
I also took look at the screenies and my first impressions are all good so far. Nice lines, with attention to detail. Initially, i would say that the screens you posted are crying for a 3d skybox(something I must research on my own current project). I would recommend some lighting other than the env_sun above. The map has too many dark recesses in critical viewing areas. Other than that it's too early to comment much further. Keep up the good work.
Can I suggest you post screenshots that people can see in this topic
without having to click external links? It seems a silly idea, but
you'll get a lot more responses :smile:
