|UR| Littlefoot More RedBull and doughnuts for the duck!!!!!
|U
choongsta yo whatup fellow map makerzzz
zimm BEER for duck
BugDave lub is in the air
Dierth wily is still pimptastical, w00t!
punkinseed looks very intersting. I look forward to seeing it
Karib I will begin my map :p
zimm you must make GREAT MAPS!! and you do. duck ROCKS
choongsta greetings
zimm where's this new map eh?
Karib I will try a map myself :)
FSK405M imma goin to quak con next year, i promise!
Havoc
[DiE]rth wily makes maps for the people!
FSK405M i will download an 80 Meg version on superman!!!
no-1 nintendo
nintendo the day after2
PowerRAV can i be a superman_beta tester? =P
FSK405M Kick Ass
Nonus I know I rock but I dont know about the others
FSK405 wily duck you all rock!
M yay
Nonus Someone just went for a pee in the pond
BugDave I Lub You
FSK405M brb going for another beer
FSK405M I sell maps for beer money
Hybridesque *squeek!* *BANG*, was that my shotgun?
el kabong ferget koth gimme Giant of the Valley
FSK405M beer = money
FSK405M money = beer
Soft2 Quack!
FSK405 KAG Pirate HAR HAR HAR Lighting-Of-Gonads
FSK405 SPIDER As usual ur maping skills is amazing me
Scotsman Holla
FSK405M ut_temple2...... mmmm
FSK405S Deer season is over, is it duck season yet?
[C-88]GO-GO Dam U...... Dam U all.
Dragonne{TRIAD} Try using EZGen for terrain.
BugDave FUCK YOU JOE BOO!
Tetrahydro awsome fun with 30 bots,head,head,head,head,head,h
FSK405E mushroom 2 pints of beer and half a duck please
Coinbird I want some coins
Marsupilami Do the Kirby dance <( ' ' )> <(' '<) (>' ')>
FSK405M YARRRRRR KAGG MANNN
Elmo The Sniper
Nonus Lord of Doom and Hatred a life lived is a life wasted
Nonus Lord of Chaos A blending we shall go
Nonus stop stealing my bah foof
FSK405N .:nugjar:. doh!
KAG Pirate HarHArHAR YAR Givey me, all be coins there mateee!!!!
FSK405 Earl Can't wait to play it man!
Packrat Ducks of a feather flock together!
foof add some softtrucks on the outside of the buildin!
FSK405|SPIDER Rock on man the map is looking cool!
Apoofoof this map pwns!
FSK405 Dubya oops ...
Apoofoof bah!
FSK405M
FSK405 a wily duck Shoutout to everyone at the pond!
2-20-2005
I'm deep in the process of moving right now, which affords me little time. The small amount of free time I've had
I'll burn playing some bots in unreal tournament 2004. Yesterday I did a teardown of my desk and rack, somehow
managing to move all my equipment without taking down the server. Mind you, the server runs open air, meaning there
is no case. Just sits there raw and exposed. Anyway no news for now, hopefully I get back on the maps asap.
1-31-2005
Started working on the second funmap, titled ut_deep. For this, I've made my first skybox. There's a rendering/shadering
problem that seems to have come up, but I'll get through it. Either way I'm looking to make yet another interesting
Urban Terror map.
Other news: r/l situation has me moving out from my current place. I'll be moving at the end of February which of
course means my time to map will be significantly reduced. However I intend to use what I've learned as quickly
as possible to do very low turnaround times on the funmaps and still produce quality, intensely fun maps. I'll keep
you posted.
1-22-2005
And here's your screenshot of the first funmap in my upcoming funmap mappack:
1-21-2005
I've got the next two funmaps in pre-production. My time got sliced away this week because I'm working again. This
is both good and bad. The obvious and very important Good Thing is Getting Paid. The bad, well that's more time from
now til the exciting release. In the meantime, Lt1 has made some slick-ass snowboards to use in ut_sled. Check em
here!
Not much else to report for now. I'm also studying for my next Cisco networking certificate (CCDA). Wish I had more
time, I mean really, plus an hour to get to work? So if I figured out a way to slow the earth's rotation, would
that really be a bad thing? ;)
1-14-2005
And finally, my first map for the funmap mappack is ready. The minor things like the levelshot and assigning surface
sounds will wait til packaging of the mappack. Yay!!! Next, FSK405U was a winner and I am contacting him to get the
next map underway.
I'll post a couple screenshots later, for now you can get an idea by checking out the latest screenies in "stuff"
to the left in the pond.
Man I'm glad I got that one done... after talking with some other mappers, I decided that I spend way too much time
micromanaging brushes, especially in very terrainy maps like this current one. There's a program called EzGen which
should make terrain much easier than my method of constantly crashing GtkRadiant because the Vertex Demons run amok
when I'm moving their little dot dominions around. It really pisses them off. I restarted gtk like 10 times last night.
No, I'm not kidding. Save save save save!! Every brush manipulation. Save! Ugh. It's done now though.
Let's see what happens with this next map. In other news, looks like wolfseye has a all out contest starting soon
too, with a radeon 9800 as first prize. Don't think I'll be participating as r/l isn't going to let me get much
more out of mapping than what I'm squeezing out of it currently. Right at this moment, I'm unemployed, being a
contractor for networking systems and such, and my last gig let up a week ago. Yeah it affords me more time, but
no $$ reaches my pocket in the intermediatary. So like the nocturnal bird I am, the quiet night stirs only for
this dark duck, mapping, computing, sociallizing, living in another world. There's some 2am wisdom for ya. Heh. :)
1-4-2005
First post of the year, yay! Ok, so the funmap contest is over. I'll be choosing whos' ideas will be used as the
next funmap by myself, wily duck. Not too many submissions, but I didn't expect many either. Once this mappack is
complete and released, I'm sure they'll be lots more anxious people next time. Also thanks to
map depot for posting news about the contest.
I've been working on my entry already as you see below. I've done more work on it tonight... widened the path,
fixed up the first curve, created the second, and did more brushwork all around, plus playerclips. In testing
I identified some gameplay problems, so I'll be addressing those at my next go. This contest will help improve
my mapping skills by allowing me to make mistakes and addressing them, which will shorten the turn-around time
on producing a map.
I'll announce the winners and map concept ideas soon.
12-28-2004
Here's my first entry I'm working for with my contest... called ut_sled. Fast downhill fighting! The first stage
of building resulted in a good looking but heavy fps killing map. I built the initial hill from all curves and
a single texture/shader. Wasn't sure what effect having all curves would have, but well, it ate my fps for lunch.
So I'm going back and redoing it with brushes. Anyway here's what it looks like with curves:
Nice eh? Ok back to the editor to make this thing work!
12-22-2004
It's holiday season and I'm feeling it... got sick from work, not quite done present shopping, monkey wrenches
falling into the machine. Ya know, I don't even know what a damn monkey wrench looks like. Anyway I've got a
contest brewing in FSK405's forums!
This is a very exciting contest, as anyone can enter and craft up a funmap idea! I'm keeping the maps straightforward,
as my technique to build them will be along the lines of speedmapping. Read the contest to get all the info, and
I encourage you to give it a shot!
12-20-2004
I've been playing around with more lighting, not too involved, but enough to get me thinking. Some of the lighting
effects I've come up with are pretty dramatic, but really wouldn't hold well in UrT. Dark areas are shunned, but
since when do I conform? ;) I got a few screenies of what I'm playing with. Lightmapscale is 0.1 I think, very small.
The light compile options are maxed. I think this is a neat look for lighting although way too inefficient. btw as
usual screenies are too dark so I photoshop them to get some brightness/contrast back.
Again, that's just some light testing I'm doing. Still figuring out how I'm going to do these rain shaders
well. I think I need to release a quick funmap soon, it's been too long.
12-10-2004
Yay! Got a nice little map done using a flourescent light shader to illuminate a dining room scene. The object
was to see 2 things, first how the light reacted with the wall shader using static bump mapping, and secondly
trying a low lightmapscale on all surfaces. The screenshots I took are not nearly as good looking as ingame, but
I can supply pics soon. The first room I made had overhead lighting, the next will use more directional lighting,
although with surfacelight shaders (rather than light entities).
I'll get some screenies up here soon. Good ones hopefully! Btw, been messing with GtkRadiant v1.5.0 a bit, had
some initial problems with a multi-monitor setup. I emailed the dev team, they got back to me pretty quickly
and let me know there was a workaround. Once in the editor though, I can't seem to manipulate a brush normally
so I let them know that too. I'll keep you posted.
12-09-2004
Tonight I begin work trying first the new gtkradiant 1.5.0, then doing some work with lighting. I'll post screenies
soon.
The wedding is over and christmas began right after, so updates have been scarce. Don't think I'm going anywhere...
11-15-2004
Nuthin new this week. You get the satisfaction knowing that I'm still alive and I'm under your bed stalking and
slinking in the dark corners your fear the most! No wait that's my cat. He's kinda creepy sometimes. Hey, what
would my cat have anything to do with gamedev? Well for some reason he loves when I game... gets this certain
look on his face and jumps into my lap. Bastard scared the hell out of me while I was playing doom3 in the dark
the other night. Oh btw I have now finally beaten doom3. Notes of interest (caution minor spoilers ahead):
What I didn't like - not enough variation in enemies (I say that nicely) and overscripted gameplay (and for this id sacrificed co-op mode, which after playing
the game I feel is a bad decision on their part). What I did like - learning to fight in the dark, hell, and the new
lighting and bumpmap technology used (still has work to be done, but gj in the meantime). That's all for now. Might
not get an update next week, as I have a wedding and thanksgiving. bbl!
11-06-2004
Wow, a month passed by... sorry about that. Had (keyword had) a new job that kept me pretty busy. I haven't
done anything new since the last update, except start playing Age of Empires 2 in my free time. :) Perhaps I'll
be able to map more now, but I have a wedding to attend to. I'm the best man for my best friend's wedding! Plus
my girlfriend and I's 1 year is coming up this week. I'll probably be able to start working in gtk in the beginning
of december. Until then, I'm working out a bunch of technicallities for my upcoming map in my mind. I'll still
update the site at least once a week - this was a fluke and I do apologize for it.
As an "I'm sorry about that" reconciliation prize to you, I give you an extention to superman_b3... the long
awaited bot file. Look to the left in the pond, you see superman_b3_extras.pk3... dl that to your q3ut3 dir
and tada! you have bot support for superman_b3! The bots aren't real good with handling the map's vastness, but
it's fun anyway. :)
-duck
10-03-2004
Update: I made the pk3 to demonstrate. Get it in the pond!
Good news. Today I have mapping info and screenshots! About time, hey?
Here's what I've been doing. I've been trying to figure out a method to make a texture have more 3d appearance, less
flat, like how bump mapping works - using standard Quake3 lightmapping of course, no fancy Doom3 technology for you!
When a light hits a real wall for instance, you get different light reflection from all the little surface bumps.
Quake3 has no bump map support. We're going to fake it by using a clever shader and texture mask combination.
After a few days of working out the details of how this could be done in my mind, I figured out how
to make it work. Here's what I came up with, the method and the results. :)
The Method
After lots of thinking, I made sure I didn't create a huge performance hit. That was top priority. Next was to
make a complex thing simple, so it's easily replicated. Here we have the example texture:
First we want to make a static bump mask. Yes I made that up, but that's what I'm calling the method.
I'm going to do this in photoshop so follow along. First copy the image to a new layer. Select the new layer,
and completely desaturate it so it becomes greyscale (image - adjust - hue/saturation, drop saturation to -100).
Then we need to adjust the brightness/contrast to make the lighting count. I added +25 brightness and +60 contrast
to the greyscale layer, which brings out the highlights nicely.
What we're doing here is creating a texture map of where we want light to catch and where we want shadows to remain.
A big problem with a 2d texture is when you apply light to it, the texture is treated as completely flat. Ok, next
step.
Select all on this layer, copy it. Go to your channels tab in the layer window. Hit the tiny arrow (upper right) and
select new channel. A channel options box appears, set it to "masked areas" and "100%". I like to use red as the color
here too. Hit ok. Now paste. Your greyscale layer copy is now the alpha channel in your texture. In the channels
tab again, click the box next to RGB to make all channels visible. Your texture now becomes all sorts of red and
weird looking. You've defined the static bump mask we need to create better textures!
Be sure to save this as a .tga in 32bits. If you save as 24bits you'll lose the alpha channel. I put this file in
q3ut3/textures/sbm_test and called it sbm_tex2.tga.
Next you'll need a shader. The idea is that the lightmap will utilize the alpha channel to appropriately light the correct
parts of the texture. This is the shader I came up with after some time of playing with q3ase.
Alright that's the guts of the method. What I then did was create a little room map (256x256x128). The brick texture
was applied to the 3 walls in front of spawn. However, I split the forward wall. The left side of the room has the
regular texture, and the right side uses the static bump mask shader. It may take some close looking, but you'll
begin to see the difference it makes.
Note!! I had to brighten/add contrast to the screenshots because taking screenies always results in a much darker
image than in-game. The images here are close to representing in-game.
I did 4 different light compiles so you could see the differences. The light comes from this shader:
//shader taken from realworld_light
textures/sbm_test/ceiling_light
{
qer_editorimage textures/superman/ceiling_light1.tga
surfaceparm nolightmap
q3map_lightimage textures/realworld_light/flouresc.tga
q3map_surfacelight 1500
{
map textures/superman/ceiling_light1.tga
}
}
Let's take a look at the differences between the walls up close:
I horizontally flipped the right image so you get the best comparison. See how the right image looks clearer, not so
desaturated or muddy, retaining it's color? See how light hits areas that are supposed to stick out more and
brightens those spots, leaving the recessed shadow parts or the texture alone?
Can you see how this can begin to make a difference on normal flat textures? There's
an extra shader layer on the texture, and the texture uses more kb due to having the extra alpha layer. Overall, it's
not a bad performance hit at all. In fact I'd call it quite tolerable.
If you have ideas as to improving the shader or method, let me know. Honestly the results didn't come out as
spectacular as I wanted, but maybe I've been playing Doom3 too long. :) Either way, I'm going to utilize this method
in my next map. If you can apply it, go right ahead. It's not too hard, and the results really do look great!
-duck
9-17-2004
Update before the weekend. DNS for the site was hosed all week. Thanks to individuals in the UrT community, with
a big thanks to 6th|HoosierDaddy, I'm now running dynamic dns through dnsexit.com. Since yesterday everything
has smoothed out, and things are normal again.
Ok now here's a subject I've been meaning to talk about for at least a month, and I will be talking about it
in future updates. The topic is:
Mapping is IN
Thanks to Id Software, they've restarted the Doom mapping era, the same that enticed many a novice to try building
maps or mods from Doom1 and Doom2. On the CD's for Doom3 come all .map source files for all levels plus some. All
tools. All content. It's a great time to be a wanna-be map-maker because the hard work has been done for you.
If this doesn't seem like a big deal to you, it is. This means you can easily customize a map to however you
want, be it from existing material, or from the ground up. If you've ever had a major urge to give mapping a try,
doom3 will supply. Making things even that much easier is the fact you get real-time lighting in the editor. Really,
it doesn't get much easier than this.
That's all for now, I'll get into more details later. Enjoy the weekend if you have one. :)
9-14-2004
Just doing a little weekly update here, since there's been no development going on. Well I suppose there has been
some, all mental. I've been scheming up how to do my next map. At this point I know it will be shader-intensive,
but the trick is to minimize the performance hit of course. That's pretty much it for mapping right now. The
map-depot contest is over, and there's been some really nice maps released. Definitely good for the UrT community.
9-08-2004
Yeah it's been a while, but really for me it's been a blink of an eye. Finally finished the ugly parts of moving
in. Still lots of stuff to take care around the house, but I finally feel like I can sit down and relax for a
moment. My girlfriend just bought Pikmin 2 for the gamecube, so I played that for a little while with her. Other
than that, there's been no gaming at all for me throughout this move. I fought with the domain moving IP's for
half a week, which resulted in no mail in or out, nor www incoming. That sucked ass. Well I'm going back to digging
through the trenches of my place, so I'll see you around.
