Dev Diary #5

(eiM) #21

long live teh radiant style :smiley:

(LaVaGoD) #22

Nice article BirdDawg!

(Prognar) #23

We changed his name to jRAD :slight_smile:

(LaVaGoD) #24

We changed his name to jRAD :)[/quote]

more like jAWESOME

(Salteh) #25

jbert is een slimme geit :smiley:

^^

very clevens he is, for sure!
!!!
:tapir:

(jRAD) #26

I’m glad you guys enjoyed the dev diary. I certainly enjoyed writing it. :slight_smile:

Projectors add diffuse and bump detail to the area they hit. We had planned to investigate terrain deformation in-editor, but it never went past the “wouldn’t it be cool” stage; it was just as easy to change the mesh in a modelling package and press the reloadModels button.

With improvements to the clipping tool and vertex editing (if you make a bad brush shape you can just turn its edges until it’s valid again) CSG subtract never really bubbled up to the top of my Todo list.

(]UBC[ McNite) #27

Ok so while this is all nice and neat, I doubt any server is going to host a 300megs custom map. So which ways are there to create decent maps without using those megatextures?

(iwound) #28
(jRAD) #29

Mappers certainly don’t have to use a MegaTexture (or make a terrain-based map at all.) If they do create a MegaTexture, they can control the compression of it. I’ve seen some good-looking MegaTextures clock in at 180MB or so, and they can certainly be compressed down from that (at a loss of visual quality, of course.)

(]UBC[ McNite) #30

Sure, but we r talking custom maps here… even with QW I d say the limit for custom maps is around 20 megs, since nobody really likes to sit and wait for hours to dl custom maps from a server.
So will there be a decent texture pack for terrain shipped with QW, like the terrain textures that came with ET?
And since I doubt its going to be fun to do alpha-blending for a terrain like island, what else is there?
I can’t really see maps the size that QW offers without terrain.

(LaVaGoD) #31

If a map is good enough people will download it. With the speeds of Cable and DSL a 200meg Maps is not that long of a wait.

Times are changing and you will adapt

(criminal) #32

well said.

(SCDS_reyalP) #33

I’d say that 5-10mbit connections are nearly as common now as .5 to 1 mbit was when ET was released.

(]UBC[ McNite) #34

I have to disagree.
200 meg files are no fun to download, since the bottleneck is not what i can theoretically download but what the upload of the server is. Even with 100kb/s a 200meg file would take more than 30 mins. Nobody wants to wait for 30 mins when he wanted to play instead.

(iwound) #35

I would quite happily wait 2 days for a map to download.
I would check the pics, read a review and decide on that.
I mean I’ve waited 2 years for quake wars, so whats another few hours, days.
“All good things come to those who wait.”

(zeh) #36

Times are changing and you will adapt

That pretty much sums it all.

Level designers don’t have to use MT if they don’t want to. If they do, they’ll cope with it.

With new features come new requirements. Expecting a lot for nothing doesn’t make much sense.

(M8DNanite) #37

The other problem is also to where to host the maps that handle the traffic or should we put some torrent like system to host them.

(zig-zag) #38

I forsee alot of indoor maps, not necessarely a bad thing for comp maps.

(Sauron|EFG) #39

But how do you know that it’s “good enough”? I love custom maps for ET, but tbh a lot of them are either buggy or unbalanced. It takes multiple beta versions that gets played before a map really is “good enough”, but will people really download and play those early versions if they are 200 MB?

It wasn’t actually easy for 20 MB ET maps to get accepted by the community only a couple of years ago, and I don’t think it will be easier for 200-300 MB ETQW custom maps (and yes, hosting will be a problem).