[QW] Could a mapper have some infos please?

(kamikazee) #21

Thanks for the attention. :wink:

(BrokenHeart) #22

Ok then, I’ll just wait and see what will happen. My first map is planned to be an urban type map, so terrain won’t be seriously needed… yet!

(MuffinMan) #23

I just wonder how many megatextured custom maps there will be - if I understand it right the megatexture is packed down to several hundred MB - still way too large for the usual map-pages, servers and for the occasional download …

I guess if there is no good way around megatexturing the terrain I will as well make city maps only

(kamikazee) #24

THey said it: the megatextures get compressed with a custom ratio. They thought that a ratio resulting in a 500 MB file is decent enough in quality. Custom maps could further reduce the quality till the file is way smaller at the cost of detail.

(Wils) #25

If you’re making a smaller map, you could also just use a smaller megatexture - they don’t have to be 32k pixels square.

(MuffinMan) #26

yeah well I will probably have to - anyway, being a server admin I know how difficult it is to get people to download a normal sized map, almost impossible for 30 mb - now with that size in et:qw…

@wils: how is the megatexture handled in radiant - does it show the (compressed…) version of the megatexture within the editor or is it just some colored “terrain” tiles?

many thanks for answering all that stuff wils and BirdDawg!

(carnage) #27

If anything using a 3D modelling package will mean terrain creation will be easier than doing the same thing from brushwork. Granted to get ‘good’ terrain you’ll need to spend time with the tools as with anything.

with the wide variety of reported suported formats its posible that a terrain editor could be developed for users with no real experience of maya or other suitable modeling packages. an adaptation on fate would be pretty cool to play with

(kat) #28

Not really… the point about brushwork terrain in the Doom 3 engine is that it doesn’t have polygon smoothing, only patch meshes and modelled objects have that so the developement of a terrain building tool that specifically used or made allowence for the use of brushwork would mean having to code ‘smoothing’ onto the resulting objects like Q3Map2 did when appling ‘phong’ shading.

From a development point of view you have to consider the resources required to do that versus the outcome… would you get better terrain as a result?. The answer is ‘no’ you wouldn’t, which means it’s not cost effective to impliment. It’s easier to use models as smoothing support for that has been there from day one.

(carnage) #29

kat read my post… suports a variety of formats. i said a veriation on FATE implying that there would be changes needed one of thoes being another export format of most likely ASE. i also belive that a mesh simplifiaction tool is being develpoed too allowing the terrain to be modeled in a relitevly high tris mesh then scale it down easily in needed areas to get decent count and increase performace. this of course would be very useful. and already suporting .map referances allowing you to scale ur map up in radient first giving you an easier job in the editor. with that in mind all that would be needed is finishing the mesh simplification and export then just select much higher grid size and triangle size in fate

(Hakuryu) #30

I understand if people are on dialup that downloading big maps would be a pain, but I’m hitting 400k download speeds on Comcast cable, and can dl a 30MB map in under 2 minutes.

The majority of players these days are on high speed connections aren’t they? I don’t think big file sizes will stop players from downloading maps, but map sites may become popular so players can see what they will play before they download, and may add the extra benefit of community map packs like UT.

(nUllSkillZ) #31

But as I get it right the mapsize would be 10 times bigger ~ 300 MB which would result in 20 minutes download.

(kamikazee) #32

There will probably be something to fix it. Maps can be made as large or small as wanted, I think it just needs some experimenting.

(MuffinMan) #33

I think customs will be forced to work without megatextures, maybe not as pretty but you will have problems with the size otherwise - just imagine pages like mapcenter, hosting gets cheaper and transfer limits higher but 10 times?
I had custom maps on our old et server with external downloads - alone the few customs on one 18 player server generated 60-100 gb traffic per month - that x10 ? I will still be able to host that - but I guess there won’t be many servers who can do that…

(carnage) #34

when i download its nothing to do with my download speed since my conection is plenty good enough its the upload speed of the provider

downloading maps when not waiting to join a game is a good idea but needs more advertisment to the player. and also some kind of filter to disalow server running with files you dont have

(Hakuryu) #35

Thats a good idea. Having a popup or something that says “You are missing X maps of this servers campaign, download at…”

(Wils) #36

If you’re not editing the surface tree for the megatexture directly, you’ll see a preview image based on the last full megatexture you generated. In render mode, you see that megatexture the same way you would in game.

If you are editing the surface tree you can generate a lower res preview on the fly, and it continues to use that until you update it.

It’s actually a little more complicated than that, but I can’t really explain it without showing you (and I’m not going to do that, before you ask :)).

(MuffinMan) #37

thanks wils - that’s all I needed to know - I guess this stuff will be covered by the documentation when the game is out anyway - I won’t start bugging you about details before ;o)

(Wils) #38

Just to satisfy my own curiousity, I made a few low resolution megatextures to see what they looked like with current media. The smallest I made was 19mb, and with the exception of one texture which was too noisy to compress well, it looked fine.

The next one up was 46mb, and at distances of beyond about 50 meters it looked more or less the same as the full resolution version we’ve been using the last few days. Up close it was about equivalent to the ground detail you get in BF2.

Bearing in mind that this was with textures made and used as part of a full size, full resolution megatexture. If you already knew you were going to make one at a lower resolution, you’d tailor your textures to suit, and use them differently. A good example of this would be replacing the noisy texture I mentioned above with a smoother one that sized down better.

To summise, I wouldn’t worry about the megatexture too much - the size of the other media has increased too, so custom maps are going to be bigger regardless. This happens with every new game, and isn’t really unusual. People were aghast when Quake 3 maps were over 5mb, and soon you’ll be downloading pk4s that are bigger than the whole of Quake 1 - that’s just the price of progress :slight_smile:

(ouroboro) #39

Wolf3D in it’s entirety is less than 3MB! :moo:

(kat) #40

i said a veriation on FATE

I have no idea what ‘fate’ is, I’ve never heard of it (outside of the usual grammatical use of the word) - I’m assuming now that it’s some 3rd party application - so the way you structured your post it read like you were talking in terms of "the chances are that… " SD would be doing something and that’s what I gathered you were meaning. You didn’t even apostrophise it for gawds sake - ‘fate’ ;o)

Using brushes to make a basic terrain is fine but if you need something more complex you’re best off using a 3D application. If you end up being able to make more complex objects in a 3rd party app than undulating trisouped meshes then you really in the realms of 3D apps anyway so you might as well learn to use one becasue in the long run you’re better off. Brushmonkeys and ‘brushes’ are an endangered species.