Digital Amusement Game Development
  
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Next, I made a new image for all to check out. I use it as my background right now. Lots of action there. The image also resides to the left in the pond. Other than those things, nothing more to say for now. Probably going to be at least a few days until another update rolls into the pond. See ya!
For one, you can adjust shader files and reload your map in q3a/urt without having to bsp/compile it. I suspected this before, but is confirmed now. I learned much more about the behaviour of texture passes in a shader. Plus I have a better feel for the behaviour of shaders. Their behaviour still sucks especially when something goes wrong. So here's what I leave you with, tonight's final compile: 
I'll talk more about what I'm doing soon.
First, I got my copy of F-Zero GX for the GameCube. There is no racing game out there that compares to the intensity that you'll find in this game. I'm quite pissed off at Electronic Gaming Monthly's review of the game. They gave it ratings of 9, 7, and 7 (out of 10). These guys that gave it a 7 were crying about how the game is soooo hard. They are the kind of mainstream gamer wannabe's who see "expert difficulty" and translate that too "I Can Win" (think Wolfenstien). Suckers are so used to watered down games... rewind to the days of the old when a hard game meant a HARD game. Mainstream. That's all I can say. Second, my friend Shanon picked up his copy of Soul Calibur 2 for the 'cube. We played that for a while. It really is a good game, and I actually came to liking Link as a character. I still don't agree with Soul Cal having non-melee attacks. It's a fast fighter, and looks good in the process. I've mentioned it before, I'll say it again. If you own a GameCube, buy Eternal Darkness. You will not be disappointed. The latest EGM also went through an article about console games being released with bugs in them. In the PC world, it has become accepted that you will almost always have to download a patch for a game. However, in the game console world as it always has been, releasing a game with bugs is an immediate failure. So what's up with new big title games with glaring bugs? Look back to an article I wrote about the X-Box before it's release. Basically I said, it has a hard drive and net connection, so developers can get away with releasing incomplete games. That's just wrong. Need to release a game in time for the movie release, and it's not complete? Don't do it. The industry is starting to pull another Atari (of the early 80's). I also mention this AGAIN. I predict the fall of video games in roughly less than 15 years. Games like Enter The Matrix and the new Tomb Raider are cutting paths into that direction. Few new games are coming out. I don't mean on the shelf new, I mean sequel after sequel... Super Destructo Sisters 4 - The Roughening! Listen up. The same games have been reprocessed for years now. Taking an old game and making something completely new out of it (i.e. Metroid Prime) is perfectly fine. But recycling the new formula to recreate the same game is the failure. That is where video games will fail. As you probably figured out a while ago, I'm both a PC gamer and console gamer, favoring Nintendo. Honestly, when the first screen in F-Zero GX popped up with both Nintendo and Sega's logo, I smiled the biggest smile and gave a round of applause. Fresh from reading The First Quarter (a book about the history of video games), this partnership really shows what can happen when two giants put aside their differences and work together. See ya in a couple weeks.
I still don't understand how a shader can work in one shader file, but will not work in another.
Now that I'm back, and mostly recovered, I can get back to business. Since Urban Terror 3 has been released, things have changed. It will be interesting to see what transition I will have to make for ut_superman to get into the urt3 groove. That's really all for now. I'll update the pond with more information as it comes up!
I have promised that I will release beta 2 before UrT3 comes out. That gives me less than a week. Not a problem.
As for QuakeCon, I still haven't made up my mind if I'm going or not. I'm less than 200 on the waiting list, which should be enough to get me in. It's still almost a 2 day drive, maybe 1 if I push it. We'll see what happens. I deleted tower 2 and have begun rebuilding it. Whereas tower 1 is a military building of a sort, tower 2 will be a hotel of a sort, probably with a resturant on the top or something. Yesterday I attempted building an experimental tower. See for yourself... pic 1 pic 2 pic 3 Tis all for now, lots of work to do.
Compiling with -bounce take a lot longer than without it. For looks, it's well worth it. Other options I use for fixing up lighting is: -thres .75 -patchshadows, as well as -super 2 -extra -filter. My q3map2 looks like this (with hints from |NV|S): ! C:/PROGRA~1/GTKRAD~1/q3map2 -v # -light -fast -filter -super 2 -extra -patchshadows -bounce 3 -thresh .75 $ This is a very detailed compile, and not necessary for most any test purpose. Actually it should only be saved until the last compile, or if you just have a lot of time to burn. :)
Ok smack me now. I've made tweaks and additions to gameplay, exploiting q3/urt physics, etc. Stuff you have to play to understand. Sorry for the vagueness, just keep reminding yourself b2 will be out soon enough. Trust me though, I'm having a hell of a lot of fun testing it. I've been updating the shaders. I had three different shader files to do everything, but I managed to get all shaders into one nice new clean file. I've been borrowing textures from the urt pak files, trying to make good environment matches with existing textures. I am a little concerned about the UrT beta 3 fiasco which will chuck out a bunch of textures to organize the pk3. Theoretically this means nothing changes to the end user, but for the mapper this could create unforseen problems. This is why I hope urt beta 3 comes out sooner than later. Since I'm on a roll, I'll mention a problem I had today. I took the generic glass texture with it's shader, and made a copy only adding cull none (so the tex is seen on both sides). I wanted to make skylight a single panel of glass per brush, rather than making a brush entirely glass. So I made the tops and sides of the skylight windows my glass tex, and the bottom caulk. This worked fine with the breakable windows behind the exec desk, sunlight shining through, all good. But the sun would not shine through and brighten the lightmap where it should, i.e. the skylight brushes were blocking the sunlight. I couldn't find a solution to this so I settled on using a whole brush as a big sheet of glass. Problem was resolved, did a little designing around it. The skylight turned out well. See for yourself... And one more thing, I'm done with the front of tower 1 for now. It's looking particularily nice: 
I had some problems with the skybox, particularily q3map_sun and it somehow causing a second shadow on tower 1. After playing around with this for hours, I gave up. Coming back later with a fresh mind, I decided to rip the skybox shader straight from the beta 1 pk3, which seems to have solved the problem for now. I'm beginning to think I don't like the tower 1 texture and may go back to something dark/ominous rather than synthetic building floor textures. I have some lighting work to do, on the executive floor, and I'm going to make first use of md3 models. Over at monkeyisms there's many free md3's and textures to download, which I will be making use of. Today's tip, how to drop a model into your map: create a misc_model entity and feed it the path to your md3. Simple as that. At this time I figure when I have tower 2 relatively done I'll prepare for a beta 2 release. How's that sound?
I went to a local 24 hour resturant last night with a pad and pencil, spent a bunch of time reworking the top of tower 1, including the executive floor. This effectively meant rebuilding the top of the tower from scratch. I've spent a few hours today actually doing the brushwork and texturing. Now that I think of it, I pretty much gutted the whole building from above the main lobby up and rebuilt it. This was a learning experience in PLANNING AHEAD. A lot of tedious brushwork could have been avoided. Now for a nice long -bsp -vis -light compile and I'll get to see the fruits of my labor! Spose that leads me to today's tip. Don't want to spend lots of time compiling after some changes, just to see if something you made worked out or not, then compile with BSP -meta. That will put the brushes together quick like, and in game the map will have equal lighting throughout. Since it takes me somewhere around 20-30 minutes to compile -light, I have better things to do than wait around for my machine to spit out a lightmap.
I've included a full screenshot from gtkradiant. The 2d window on the left is in top-down view right now. I've hidden the outer walls of the top and bottom of the elevator so you can see inside. The first thing you'll notice is the brushes I have selected. A few things are going on here. I've mitered the edges, meaning instead of three rectangular brushes with 5 exposed faces, there are 3 brushes with only 3 faces. This helps fps a little. The brush faces that no one sees have been caulked - meaning q3 will not draw them because there is no need to. At the elevator door on the right you see an orangish transparent brush, trigger_multiple. This brush triggers the doors to open. The doors have a func_door entity on each door. When a player walks into the trigger brush, the doors will open automatically. The brushes that are selected have different textures applied to their faces. On the sides, there is a regular texture. The insides have caulk. The top and bottom however use a texture with a shader. This shader specifies q3map_surfacelight which makes the texture emit light. In the middle of the elevator, there is an orange bar in the emergency trapdoor opening. This is an origin brush with a func_pendulum entity attached to it, and the same entity attatched to the door hanging below it. The trapdoor swings back and forth slowly ingame because of this. To the upper-right, there is a small brush made up of all caulk with a thin green line sticking out of it. This brush has a trigger_push entity, and on the other end of the green line there is a target_location entity. When a player walks into the trigger_push, they are thrown towards the target_location. In this case I have put the brush higher than the player stands, so the player has to jump up to touch the brush. In this way it appears that they can jump incredibly high at that location. The crates you see also have a shader applied to the box textures, surfaceparm nodamage. This allows the player to fall down the elevator shaft and land on the crates without killing themselves. Ok, other than these nifty tips, I've now added my first sound into the map. Combined with a trigger even! Walk through the metal detector in the front of the lobby, and it sounds off! Cool. I'll be adding additional environmental sounds as necessary. That's all for now, amd as always if you have questions I have answers.
I have finished the functionallity of the highway. You will be very pleased to play on it - it's a lot of fun.
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