"city" terrain for Quake Wars (Mega Texture?)

(pazur) #1

I still work on my Quake Wars map and want to add a simple terrain to my map that basically has one large skyscraper building in the center (http://www.screencast.com/users/ypiotr/folders/Jing/media/6dbf0984-c099-4820-91f4-4382a3210542) I would like to take a satellite image and just map it to a flat plane and use it as a terrain (image like this: http://www.screencast.com/users/ypiotr/folders/Jing/media/b796e522-d398-46b7-9a32-f922c6ce919a). As you won’t be able to get down and walk on the ground I think that should work fine.

Here my questions:

#1 Do I really need to create a model based terrain for that or can I use just a brush? I guess model but I’m not entirely sure.

#2 How large (in pixels) can one large texture for the model be? Can I create the Mega Texture manually?

#3 Is the terrain used to define the boundaries of the map in Quake Wars?

I posted this also in the forum of Kat http://www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=210.0 but If you have any suggestions post here.

Paz

(Scrupus) #2

No, you can probably use a brush. I think you would need a model if you want to add it as megatexture, but you don’t really need a megatexture for this. Look at Chris “canal” map for a good example of a non megatexture city “terrain”. The roads in canal looks really good, and I think Chris just used brushes for it. I think megatextures are more useful for “nature” terrain, not cityscapes. And without megatexture you don’t have to worry about the missing megatexture extraction in vanilla engine, so it can be played easily on vanilla servers.

#2 How large (in pixels) can one large texture for the model be? Can I create the Mega Texture manually?

I’m not sure if there is a limit or where it is, but you can probably add pretty huge textures. And if you meet a limit, you can probably just cut it up in more brushes. Which could be useful in any case, unless you want a totally flat ground.

#3 Is the terrain used to define the boundaries of the map in Quake Wars?

No - the boundaries are set by caulk hull and playzone brush etc.

Looking forward to see this one in action :slight_smile:

(pazur) #3

Thanks Scrupus. I’m going to play around with the size of the texture for the ground first and see what the limit is and as you suggested cutting it is a good idea.

(pazur) #4

Placing a 4096x4096 texture has been no problem but I ran into trouble with the atmosphere fog (even when setting the distance to 100K the brush has been “fogged” too much) and the nofog keyword (http://wiki.splashdamage.com/index.php/Material_Reference#Global_Keywords_for_Regular_Materials) on the material didn’t help. I guess that’s just for real fog and not the one of the atmosphere.

(.Chris.) #5

Can you post a screen shot, I’m curious about the result of using just a large texture.

(Scrupus) #6

Have you tried to play with the “Height Offset” and related values in the atmosphere editor? I’m not quite sure how they work, but maybe they can be used to move fog layer up and down.

(pazur) #7

here is how it will look like for the player: http://www.screencast.com/users/ypiotr/folders/Jing/media/d7c34478-cab8-4211-98f1-e0488cf9bf5d

from the outside it looks like this: http://www.screencast.com/users/ypiotr/folders/Jing/media/ab84f68e-fad3-4fcf-81c7-e1f6b89cc133

my current plan is to have all the gameplay to be on the top of the building so you won’t never get down. I have to tweak the atmosphere a lot more to get the correct lightning, fog, haze and a smooth transition of the fog to the sky on the horizon + I want to go down with the size of the texture to 2560x2560 as I noticed that the game starts hanging sometimes. I also think about adding some ground fog that includes a cloud layer.

BTW: after compiling the nofog seems to work. it was only the editor that didn’t show it.

(Violator) #8

Sounds like it should be a skybox rather than a model or MT if the gameplay is purely in the tower? There’s problems with the ground plane in skyboxes though IIRC (hall of mirrors) :frowning:

(pazur) #9

Yes, exactly. ETQW skyboxes don’t have a ground. This is why I went for this kind of solution.