R.M.S. Titanic - AngelModder

[Xycaleth]

At the moment, performance is actually (a lot? depends on your graphics card I guess) worse in rend2 than in the vanilla renderer. And a lot of it is also subject to change, which is why I don't advise people to start using it properly for the moment. There's also no active work on it for the time being because of the lack of people working on it (I'm the only person who has been working on it so far, minor build fixes aside).

 

If you do still want to use it.. there's nothing different you need to do when compiling the map in q3map2. All of the changes needed are in your shaders (and possibly textures). There's a few new shader keywords which let you use normal maps, parallax maps, gloss maps and specular maps (I explain the more basic usage here: http://jkhub.org/topic/5059-rend2-beta/?p=74638), and a list of the new cvars can be found in this readme For r_specularMapping and r_normalMapping, I've changed it to only 0 or 1. I think that gives a rough overview to get you started.

[AngelModder]

I understand mate this is a use with caution sort of thing. Although I do have to admit I am anxious to see my project with actual specular mapping and height mapping. As you've seen in the photo's theirs a lot of wood and carving's every where. It would look quiet grand to build it compatible (as an option of course) for those using the rend2. I do wish I knew a bit about JKA's Q3 coding I'd offer to lend a hand, but perhaps just showing folks what it can do on some thing like this will peak some interest?!

On that note to address those watching this topic with anticapation of it's topic name, I've been going through the last few days and doing a bit of fake baking. This means I am loading the carving textures etc up into Bitmap2material and pre rendering the the normal maps into them. While not as effective of course as true height mapping it does give a deeper feeling to the textures. However sadly my computer can not handle doing this to some of the bigger textures. So any that I've used that are in the 4096 range I won't be able to do this. Not only that it works best on the smaller one's as I have to print screen the texture bump mapped then convert that back into a texture.

Tonight was a busy one. Starting at the upper most deck (te boat Deck), I've begun final detailing, this means the celing texture's the floor, the windows and wall panelings are finally being fitted in. A small but worthy sacrifice I've had to make is to make the windows on the Boat and A Deck none transparent for the sake of area portaling it away from the exterior of the ship. these areas view out to the decks beyond and I couldn't handle hearing complaints about the lagg of this effect this go around.
However on the B - D Deck's, the portholes are built into the hull of the ship, here you WILL be able to sea out to the sky and sea with no fps draw either way. A simple thing I know but one for a moment I wasn't sure would work effectively fps wise.

[Xycaleth]

I do wish I knew a bit about JKA's Q3 coding I'd offer to lend a hand, but perhaps just showing folks what it can do on some thing like this will peak some interest?!

I completely agree, but I think it's too early in the development to do this. Imagine you released your map early, knowing full well that there's problems with this and that, FPS is poor, but you know it's possible to improve on all of it. You then get a lot of people contacting you, as a result of releasing your map early, saying that they found problem X, problem Y, over and over, and you know full-well about all of the problems they've mentioned. This is exactly what I want to avoid with rend2. There's still a lot of work I want to do on it, but I want to get it to a point where it's in a better state than it's currently in.

 

Anyhow, great work on your Titanic map so far! I'm loving the screenshots you've posted.

[AngelModder]

Alright well I figured it being the 1rst of the month I would show you folk's what progress has been made and what is yet to come. So i broke it down using the ships floor plans. Allot of it is at 50% but do take into account that 20 days ago, none of this was even here or was about 15% at the time, it was just a blank Hull and a few hallways. ! So in 20-25 days i'll be starting a closed beta and then of course April 10th is open beta, FULL release will probably be the end of April, I do apologize but the work load and research is immense. And doing this by myself takes a while XD. I do promise though that Open beta will not disappoint It may just be shy some finishing touches and a few other planned interiors I want to include like some bedrooms etc.

 

 

 

 

 

Theirs also a shot of a VERY early wip water shader. I decided since this go around the exterior would draw about a 1/rd of the tris the original did it might be safe to do what I always wanted and add a mirror shader to the water. Now for those of you with low end machine or just have problems with mirror's I will be including a few VIS friendly buttons in the ships bridge, they will allow you to turn on and off certain thing's. Things like the furniture, the mirror water, and a few other effects to help further optimize it for personal or server use.
As I said though this water is highly subject to change appearance wise, mostly I just wanted to get it working first before fine tuning. An interesting note is that if you're on the ship say on the deck, unless you can physically see the ships reflection, it doesn't draw it. So the only time you'll have it drawing will be in spectator as you're flying around the ship. Luckily Mirror portals follow the rules of vis work.

 

 

 

 

So a few notes on this last picture. I know it's very very dark, do some research you'll learn that on the night of April 10th 1912 it was extremely dark not like Cameron showed it in his highly inaccurate film. The sea was calm (although I'll be making it look like real water asap), with no moon, but more stars than many had ever seen, the horizon seemed to just fade in to a black mass only broken by the stars above. As such I have busted my ass throught the entire map to make sure that the lighting is correctly done, the right tone the right wattage, hell lights even make an electrical humming sound when you're near them. I want YOU, to see and understand that night and what they were up against as you undoubtedly blow each other and my beautiful interior to bits.
While I want every one to of course have fun wit the end result, I want you to remember this is above all my own form of a memorial, and to once in a while stop and read the names on the walls. 1,500 some odd souls names will be carved into the oak paneling surrounding the grand staircase. Read them, read the ages next to each name, theirs a lot of children, a lot of folks no older than us whose lives were tragically cut short. So as your having fun, remember them once in a while.

~AngelModder™

[AngelModder]

Well daily update time today we'll be discussing lights and bright ideas. First this is not exactly a new method but perhaps this will give others some ideas. I needed a realistic light so for me this screamed one thing that I've never seen any one d in JKA. Filament and realistic shadowing.
Step one of course was to build a giant light and light bulb as I would need them, then compile the entire thing with a _lightmapscale of 0.125 (the sharpest one can get without frying q3map2's little brain. Step 2 was to acctually look at how it said the lighting would work, one of the reasons for the light needing to be build on a larger scale, was not only for the models detail sake (and my sanity during building it), but also so that the light entity itself could be placed within the actual bulb and ergo show me what would really happen.

The result looked some thing like this...

 

 

 

Tisk Tisk q3map2, you have yet again completely disappointed me... While this result is highly disappointing and has the downward effect of hurting our light compile it does show me one thing I need, what the shadows roughly should look like So now we move on to step 3.

Step 3 involves a little Photoshop™ work and this little shader here complements of @@Oobah

Texture

 

-

 

 

 

Shader -

textures/titanic/lightbloom2
{
    qer_editorimage    textures/titanic/lightbloom2
    polygonOffset
    q3map_nolightmap
    q3map_onlyvertexlighting
    {
        map textures/titanic/lightbloom2
        blendFunc GL_ONE GL_ONE
        glow
    }
}

Now, we compile again only this time everything that is the light fixture has been set to a func_group with _cs set to 0 a, This makes is so the light fixture itself not longer casts shadows ergo only my decal shadow/bloom will be the visible effect.
This time around we got this, and a much faster compile since Q3Map2 needed to compute nothing all while getting a better result then it ever could have given us.

 

 

 

WOW! now thats how we all want our lights to look right? Now all that was left was to turn it into an ase (with the decal as part of it) and wallah end result is this beautiful light that snipers will love zooming in on! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regards... AngelModder™