Contest Rules

Each player model is just the green cuboid that is used for info_player_start in hammer :smile:

You could grey shade them or somthing. make it look like a really harsh pencil drawing :smile:

Fullbright Boxwar!

I am with plain textures; but i'm against flatshading in general; u cannot understand space without proper lighting; without lights, u cannot understand the volume, the shadows; "l'architecture est le jeu savant et correct des volumes sous la lumiere" as would have said Le Corbusier (i'm too drunk to translate that). Anyway, if u wanna make flatshaded maps, please keep the shadow option on.

Cash Car Star said:
Fullbright killBox war!

pumps shotgun :biggrin:

I present to you:

Campaignjunkie Gone Insane, Symphony No. 2





No idea what the hell is going on? Don't worry, you're not alone. Didn't really turn out how I wanted it; going to retexture it so people can actually tell where they're going. Decided to do an abstract portion for fun, to contrast with the straight-mechanical areas.

Don't worry people, its actually quite navigatable in game, it really isn't as confusing as the screenshots lead you to believe :smile: I do think the entire map should be done with a third colour ala this section, helps give that little extra bit of depth to the scene and makes it less confusing.

What the f**k!!! lol. That makes me think of the Tron level when your inside the corupted server, a few minutes before taking on the Kernel.

I can imagine my eyes hurting after 2 minutes of playing that map lol

why not just have a normal competition, you guys can make flatshaded maps in your spare time and so can i if i ever feel the burning desire to gauge out my eyes.. :wink: Then once you guys have perfected your own styles, have a competition. Its like having a competition between "those people" who dont run VIS and RAD because they "take too long" if you run the flat shaded competition now, cos face it, youre all noobs! :biggrin:

-BB

Not really, its still the same old mapping we are perfectly familiar with, just with a slightly new approach. I wouldn't say I'm worse in flatshading than I am with fully textured levels...in fact I'd be tempted to say the opposite :smile:

You would? :biggrin:

esechre said:
why not just have a normal competition

Ahh but that is the point. there have been to many "normal" competitions. We want to try somthing different :smile:

Kain, you can have shadows and lights on a flat shaded map.Those who have posted examples simply chose not to have these things.

Well in that case ok, i'm in :smile: without shadows it would look like a johnny bravo episode

As far I know, flatshading with shadows looks terrible which presubamly is why Reno and Junkie aren't using them.

What is "Normal"?

I mean, think about it, we're playing a game with aliens, crazy guass guns, and the like. How could there be a "normal" :smile:

This is the [3rd?] mapping contest the snarkpit has had... hardly too many normal contests done on here :rolleyes:

I reckon the good 'ol go out with a bang is in order. See who can make the most complex small map on the planet thats so complex it almost kills the engine, but does run. The doom 3 effect :razz:

Alien_Sniper said:
As far I know, flatshading with shadows looks terrible which presubamly is why Reno and Junkie aren't using them.

A.S., your reasoning goes for 2d drawings, but not for 3d maps. Just try to render a map without Rad, u'll get lost in it. Worse, u'll think dark textures are "holes", while actually everything is flat. Of course, you could play on that, but I have a feeling a flatshaded contest would be too experimental; it's gonna give birth to unplayable maps.

Rendering my maps with RAD gives identical visuals to rendering without actually, and no, you don't get lost in it whatsoever, its feels just as logical to move around in as any maps I've ever played.



Does it really look that confusing to your eyes? No shadows, but perfectly playable.

My reluctant entry: The Ribcage. Like CJ's it looks much better ingame too. Though the r's are dangriss up/down where I screenshotted from, when you're in the 'playing' area it only hits 1000 once.

ReNo said:
Rendering my maps with RAD gives identical visuals to rendering without actually, and no, you don't get lost in it whatsoever, its feels just as logical to move around in as any maps I've ever played.



Does it really look that confusing to your eyes? No shadows, but perfectly playable.

No, this one's not; but Campaign Junkie's pic is confusing; nice but confusing. While i still think it's an interesting idea, i'm just expressing my doubts; i've drawn a hundred real architecture projects at univ, and when i don't have time to make the shadows, the 3d impression is f**ked, so... Anyway, i voted for "themed" coz i like stories, but if it's a flatshaded contest i'll still be glad to participate.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p>

I think all of the entries so far that are truly flatshaded (err... mine and CJ's) look confusing in pictures, but when you move around the level and see objects in 3D you begin to recognize and remember shapes and landmarks.

Reno's map is the best thing to come as a result of the Wind Waker

What's the r_speed limit for the contest?

To be honest, only mine is true to the real concept of flatshading. The real idea is using the surface normal of a polygon in relation to the directon of the light (or position of the light source) to determine how it is lit, and then lighting the entire surface uniformly based on this calculation. Only my map actually uses different colours based on the angle the polygon is facing, to give a sense of highlights and shadowing.

Of course I know what you mean though - the technical definition of flatshading, and the definition we tend to use in mapping, are really rather different. Yours, CJ's and Adam's are the only three that really fit in with that.

Oh and I didn't really comment on your map - is it really like a map, or more a single structure? It looks to me like a rather complex (and damned funky) piece of architecture, but not a series or rooms or even an environment you can use for fighting...but then these screenshots are really rather confusing :biggrin:

As for the contest, it isn't even officially decided if this is the theme, so the r_speeds haven't been discussed! Lep, hurry up and decide if there is gonna be a contest and what the theme is would you :razz:

Your map also uses fade textures and those clouds, making it not flat shaded in the same way as mine - doesn't make a real big difference though. I'm going to need to spice up my map if it's going to compete with yours.

Yeah you certainly have a point about the fades, they are a bit of a cheat :biggrin: I could have used a series of greys to fake one manually, but I felt it would be a waste of polys and probably look s**t. I guess even having the lighthouses on in the day time doesn't make sense, but I felt it added a little bit of interest to the scene.

The clouds are just part of the skybox...if the contest dictated the skybox had to be flatshaded, I'm not sure if it would be legal or not anyway! It is made up of flat blocks of colour only, so I guess it might be justifiable :smile:

Cassius said:
I'm going to need to spice up my map if it's going to compete with yours.

Oh, you're not worried about my map, eh? I'll show you! I'll show ALL of you!!

Heh, Cassius' map looks like a giant squid or something :eek:
I agree with ReNo that it could benefit from a 3rd colour to define it a little better, though like you said, it's probably much easier to find your way round in-game than it is in the screenshots :smile:

I've been busy shopping for furniture so I haven't had much of an opportunity to work on my map any more. I'm guessing mine is going to be quite simplistic compared to some of the maps so far as I don't have the time atm :sad:

ReNo: loving your map lots! I see you finally got round to making your Zelda map :wink:

Yup it took me a while! After my initial tinkering, I realised flatshading was really giving me a look that was comparable to the wind waker, so I decided to go all out for it.

If you scale a texture up loads, do the lightmaps (or whatever they are called) get scaled as well? If so, you could run RAD on the map, then in theory a given face would only have one light level on it (if it was scaled up loads so the texture didn't repeat at all over the face)?

I use 10x scale on all my textures, and then run RAD with the -notexscale option to make sure the lightmaps aren't scaled up with the textures. This means dynamic lighting effects such as the rocket trails and things don't look horrendous by being scaled up so much. I do run with a chop of 256 however, which makes RAD fly by pretty quick :smile:

Oh, I didn't realise that would affect dynamic things. What I was aiming for was making RAD use the same brightness for an entire face, without having that face emit light, and without putting a slightly different coloured texture on that face. Is this possible?

If you set a texture to be a texture light, then it will be rendered full bright, not be rendered a slightly different colour or anything (in other words, you could set a white texture to emit strong red light, but it would still look bright white). It will also not be effected by any surrounding lights, it will be fullbright and therefore appear much as it does in the editor (though the editor DOES have some degree of shading build in, which won't be present in the map). It will of course emit light, but then thats a good thing for the most part, as it means models passing by will always be lit. If you want to stop this happening, and manually place lights to effect the models (but not the world) then just set the texture lights intensity down to something extremely low.

OK, thanks for the explanation, but I was looking to have the face lit by point lights, or more precisely, a light_enviroment. So say you had a map that contained a red vertical 32-sided cylinder, and the only light source is a light_enviroment - what I want to achieve is to have the faces of the cylinder getting progressively darker as they face more and more away from the 'sun', but have the colour accross a given face totally uniform.

I did it manually through the use of differently shaded textures, but I realise that is a load of hassle for complex maps or ones which use more than one light source (in the case of doing manual shading, conceptual light sources).

Perhaps you could do it through the use of an extremely high chop value? This way there would most likely be only one or two patches per face, and this might result in a face being lit entirely evenly but different to the surrounding faces. This is just a guess though, I've not tested it so don't blame me if it doesn't work at all.

No no, that sounds great. Are there any horrible nasty effects of using a very very high chop value?

RAD will run obscenely fast? :smile:

Seriously though, I'm not sure, I guess it could also make dynamic lighting effects extremely dodgy, just run it and see I suppose. I'd be interested in knowing the results though, so let us know if you do test it.

Reno... Genius! Just what I was after. Here is my totally unimpressive screenshot to show what I'm on about.



That's a stretched texture not a flat one, but the effect is the same. One light source and two textures present in that shot. Using that kind of thing is what I had in mind. Also it looks cool firing a rocket past it, because all the panels light up seperately in quick succession. I'm not sure If I want to use this, but it's another idea...

Oh better mention, I used -chop 4096, but you only need to set it to be as high as the largest dimension of a single panel in the map that you want to be lit all one colour.

ReNo said:
Yeah you certainly have a point about the fades, they are a bit of a cheat :biggrin: I could have used a series of greys to fake one manually, but I felt it would be a waste of polys and probably look s**t. I guess even having the lighthouses on in the day time doesn't make sense, but I felt it added a little bit of interest to the scene.

Yer flatshaded maps do look very boring and plain, always need spicing up

Cheap shot myrk, you should be ashamed

Is anyone (who's doing a flatshade map) planning to have their's playable in a HLDM setting? I went to (fairly) reasonable lengths to make a layout and test it for VIS/r_speed purposes.

To a certain degree, yes, though I expect w_poly of around 1400-1600 :biggrin: There isn't much texture information there however, which is something that will have a positive effect on performance (my map seneca seemed to prove that rule). Also, its pretty much 100% horizontal gameplay, so it will most likely suck.

To be honest though, I'm not making this with a thought for gameplay, I just wanna make something that looks like it could fit into The Wind Waker!

All this flat-shading talk is tempting my to try and finish my Donkey Kong map too :biggrin: Damn you all!

Regarding gameplay - i'm going to try and keep a playable layout on my maps as I don't really see the point of maps if they're only to be looked at....that's going to come back and haunt me :razz:

I have a themed map in the works, can I just finish that map since I have other presiding projects that are moreimportant (ie: nightwatch..) or does the map have to be original?

Err, we don't even know if the contest is themed or flatshaded or whatever yet...but if your map adheres to the rules and hasn't yet been released, i dont see why you couldn't enter it.

bumps

contest rules just took first place in the polls for most votes

HAve you got an excell spreadhseet of how many votes in each poll or something? You seem overly interested in how many votes each poll gets :razz:

scary_jeff said:
HAve you got an excell spreadhseet of how many votes in each poll or something? You seem overly interested in how many votes each poll gets :razz:

http://www.snarkpit.com/users.php?page=stats

thwacks m0ng :razz:

Ah, ok.

scary_jeff said:
Ah, ok.

However, he does worship the stats page like a temple of Snark goodness :biggrin:

I think we shoul start a fundraiser for Orph to seek professional help