Sprite?

(Orange) #1

After a long time without even opening gtkRadiant I’ve decided to drop my first map (crash) and have a second try.

The situation is like this:
I have an area that I want to sorround with some sort of a clip brush but it’s a bit annoying when you have no idea where is the clipping.
I remember that in one of Operation Flashpoint levels I ran to a small forest and I was surprised to find out it wasn’t a real forest but a few tree models/sprites and a box with a forest texture.
I guess it worked fine back then because (a) You run a lot into forests and you don’t expect something like this. (b) The area was small enough. © It wasn’t a multiplayer level.
In my case, the area is much bigger and I’m afraid I’ll have to put a lot of tree rows along each of the “forest” boxes, and there are many of these too.
I was using the tree planter plugin but I didn’t want to continue until I was sure there’s on better solution.

Bottom line: Do you have any idea how can I make a box covered with forest texture fool the players? partially?

Thanks in advance,
Your me-and-my-friends-covered-each-other-with-orange-paintballs-yesterday
-Itzik

(nUllSkillZ) #2

You should search the forums.
I think Drakir has posted a little prefab with hedgerows.

(Orange) #3

That’s still complicated. I need it to border the whole map.
Oh well… it was a bad anyway. But I have no experience at this.
I have an island-shaped terrain, very steep on the edges, sorrounded with water at the bottom and then again side/edges of mountains.
The problem is that I don’t want people to fall (They have nothing to do down there and they can’t climb up again)
What sort of clipping would make me stop the players without making them really angry on the invisible walls?

(CptnTriscuit) #4

Im not sure if this would be what you want or not, I saw this done in half-life2 and stole it for my map.


I just cropped out some screenshots of the ET tree models to make sprite textures.

Each tree has it’s own brush and is placed ‘high and away’ from where the players would be. Hope it helps…

(Loffy) #5

Cool shot CptnTriscuit
But what do you mean by Sprites? They move, as the player move from side to side? (I.e. the trees always face the player?) How do you do that?
// Loffy

(Orange) #6

I must admit that I begin to like the whole sprites idea, but I don’t think it fits my purpose.
Now that I think about it, I think I’ll go back to scratch and start again from there.
I didn’t design the terrain good enough to make it possible to create enough routes and stuff like this (to have a good gameplay).
Thanks for your help anyway…

(Ifurita) #7

find the bulge_beta2 map from Menzel. He used layered alpha textures to front his structural hull and create the illlusion of forested areas

(CptnTriscuit) #8

Yep. ‘deformVertexes autosprite’ or ‘deformVertexes autosprite2’ will do the trick. Autosprite2 forces the orientation of the sprite to stay along the x/y axis…if I am remembering correctly. I always stuck with autosprite, heres the shader for those trees:



textures/cptnt_terrain/tree_01
{ 
        surfaceparm trans
	surfaceparm nonsolid
	surfaceparm nomarks
        surfaceparm nolightmap 
	cull disable
	nopicmip		
	qer_editorimage textures/cptnt_terrain/tree_01.tga
      	deformVertexes autosprite

        {
		clampmap textures/cptnt_terrain/tree_01.tga
                blendFunc GL_SRC_ALPHA GL_ONE_MINUS_SRC_ALPHA
		alphaGen vertex
                rgbGen identity
	}
}

Make sure the TGA has square proporations or it will funk up in-game.

(Loffy) #9

Cool! Thanks!
//L.