AngelModder

Caulk_nonsolid will always do that unless you set it to detail. Although thats useless as you'll get the same result as the nodraw idea.
You might try setting it as a world fog rather then using brushes. This also all depends on the actual gof shader it's self. The cull twosided one's tend to have this issue when doing your fogging with brushes.

Ok so these two questions may or may not be related however both oddities and issues started around the same time. In this shot you can see pretty much the maps essential information, brush count so far is faily low, the geometry of the brush work fairly simple. also the overall entity count, around 430 of them are lights.
Now oddity one is the weird result of unescesarry portals outside the actual map its self. Now of course these are not causing any vis compile issues, happily despite this maps size now that I've gotten the hinting technique down goes incredibly fast, less than a minute for a very large map. However I am wondering if this is an indicator of a smaller/potentially bigger problem. I also am wondering if this is also hurting the next stage of compile my lighting as oddly enough I compile light fine without a vis compile, but if I do a vis compile I get safe malloc during it. Even with giving it a couple of minutes break in between compiles.

I looked through my compile logs and theirs no indication of any leaks or what not so I cant seem to figure this one out...

Yea I've put together a dark grey skybox with a a cloud layer over top for those areas where you "might" see it, however the over head canopy is pretty thick so thats not many spots. I did give my lighting a blue touch as well, I saw this in many of the original movies shots. Right now Im still in testing phase building all the assets, trees, textures,The environmental basically. Ill post some pictures once I have that all together, then I can begin working on the actual map.

Well the trick is taking advantage of the conditions on degobah, rather foggy, dark and mirky. I've already designed about 6 different trees, the trick is atm figuring out what it's sky should look like. Ill Be focusing on Yodas hovel, lukes crash down spot and the cave. wont exactly be a giant ffa map but a smaller ffa map good for rp and a good jedi trial. I've wanted for a long time to mess with some ones mind via some thing like a jedi trial. You'll find I'm unusually cruel, and will make you face your fears.

I'll be sure to do it credit, I was acctualy talking to a buddy on skype today about how I'd never seen a Degobah map for jka, so I started working on a few trees and decided to see if any one had ever done this one. turns out a few big mod projects had tried it, however as they died, there maps went with them due to lack of release. Gimme a few weeks to cook up the trees and terrain!

Already working on this...

Such a shame the project died, Ill keep this safe just in case !

 Ok so I've tried a few different thing's so far, and nothing has worked. This texture/shader just hates me. So i've come to you guys for advice, figured I'd get some sleep and see if any one had some idea's. I'll post the texture/shader that way you know what i have it as so far. And I've included a in game screenshot to give you an example.
This is the ships aft wakes (WIP) what I need them to do is fade away, I've even tried laying them underneath a black to transparent layer and it just acts like it's not even there. This texture ofcourse scrolls to give the effect the ship is moving. Again any help and or ideas are/is appreciated.


Shader in use atm ( Simple I know )

textures/water/aftwakes
{
      qer_editorimage textures/water/aftwakes
    surfaceparm noimpact
    surfaceparm nomarks
    surfaceparm nonsolid
    cull disable
    nomipmaps
    {
        map textures/water/aftwakes
        blendfunc add

        rgbGen identity
        tcMod scroll 0 -0.25
    }
}
 

Texture

And here is what it looks like atm in game.... I don't like this... At all..

Yea the blue stone, what I meant was like take a 64 X 64 X 64 unit brush and texture it with ur blue stone, then scale it on there at say .5 or 1 or 2, w/e looks best to you. This brush will become your sample brush. if you're using GTk 1.5 a useful trick to align all other brushes using that texture to that scaling is as follows. Select the surfaces you wish to scale, then select the sample brushes surface LAST, now press S (duh) and press the adjust up or down each once so up 1 down one, this SHOULD align all the others to w/e scaling/alignment te sample brush is set to.
The bricks bug me on one note, they cut off at the top halfway through. you've got brick then BAM halfway trough it another texture. the flow of textures is highly important in a map, it can be a make or break point as much as lighting and shaders. Any ways hope this helped, good looking map btw!

AngelModder™

FIrst thing I'd suggest create a texture sample brush. What this means is create a block say 64 units in each direction, tile thing's like your stone texture that you use allot on it at w/e density you want the rest of the map using that texture to follow, then grab all the surfaces with that texture on it in your map and align then to the texture sample brush. This way they are not overly stretched. I notice that allot of the basic stone texture you are using looks very over scaled as I am guessing you used the axial option. Axial is fine if the texture it's self is scaled appropriately and is HD. However base one's often look sloppy at there original scaling, dents and dings and pot holes that are way to big.
A good example of this would be the grass texture used in the base sp Yavin maps, the texture is over  scaled making blades of grass on the ground lying flat twice the size of a person and makes them look blurry. It in the end avoids an eye sore. Almost as much as repeating textures can as well. The main problem I see is your textures all around are over stretched and this causes them to look the way they do "blurry".

Another thing I wonder is how are those tall thin brazers standing with no legs to hold it stable? As for a banner waving effect a theirs a few base shaders and quiet a few maps out there using this effect, id start looking in your base shaders though. If you have any further questions feel free to Pm me on here.

~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 -

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™

Never mention the shame that is swtor ! I do agree though this would make a sick model for jka.

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™

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.

Rend2 isn't publicised more because it's nowhere near finished and pretty unusable in its current state. It's not worth the time to use it unless you're willing to go through an extraordinary amount of extra work and headaches.

I'd give it a try, I mean the more folks involved imo the better overall image the developers get of whats really needed. My question would really be how does the q3map2 handle compiling such implementations, and weather or not the new effects hit the fps. I understand it's a new render so it's possible it could be better fps then vanilla jka, but I wonder if it limits the map size more due to compile struggle.

I am hoping I'll have some things ready for screenshots tonight, I've had some problems the last few days that I'm finally weeding out the last of. I'm so far behind right now it's insane, if I could just get a break from these damn little error here and there.

well do you remember that kid from your childhood, that used to get everything?  -that's rend2

LOL That'd be my cousin then eh? I know from the little I could understand it's basically a new renderer for the game, in a sense making JKA use what you might consider quake 3.5 LOL. Still have no idea how you get it or how it effects mapping, I don't know if I'd really trust suc a thing, these sorts are usually riddled with bugs and unstable, JKA runs like crap as it is much less would I wanna add a bunch of FPS consuming effects. Just my opinion of course.

Well firstly I don't even know what rend2 is tbh, I keep hearing folk's mention it, but I have no real idea what it is even, must be some horrible publicizing on some one hands... Any ways, no the released version will not sink like you would think, it will have two static points (2 separate maps) for the sinking, one at around 1:25 Am just as the bow was starting to slip under, and a second at 2:18, just before she broke. Theirs sadly no FPS friendly way to sink her and not drive people's computers crazy using the q3 engine. Not at this level of detail any ways.
That having been said, the static moments she will be in however will be very detailed. for FPS reasons and functionality the first variant at 1:25 AM will have angled water brushes, at different levels for the interior and exterior.

I wish it worked that easy @Zefilus. A new shot of the re worked D Deck landing of the forward grand staircase, theirs two textures I want to replace on it but it's good enough to show a preview of! Enjoy

Oh and yea... So, I made a booboo, I hired a cheap contractor to do my plumbing, click the spoiler to see what happened !

Here is a sample of the 1rst class dining saloon ceiling texture. This texture is super HD, the actual in game texture is 4096 X 4096 while my Photoshop™ PSD is a resolution of 8192 X 8192. I found that any small of a working platform cut the sharpness of the details. If your going to spend 6 hours on a texture you sure as hell don't want it to look like crap.

This texture is not to be used without my express written consent. ~ AngelModder

 

 

 

This :3

 

Oh yea yea I did use this is idea for the lights shadowing and bloom effect.

Is is just the perspective or have you made the staircase more narrow? Fantastic job by they way.

 

It is actually more narrow just like the original thing. Every aspect of this is map is measured out down to the inch. One of the first thing's I did was to establish a set of scales that I could agree on. At the top one person can pass through on each side, most pictures you see of replicas or even the film, greatly widen it to emphasize it's scale. But in truth it was fairly narrow at the top with just about 3 feet on either side of the center banister at the top.

Every room, every pillar in this even tables will be measured.

Seriously out of 50 views not one person can help? :/

Technique looks familiar! Nice application

What do you mean XD?

You could also try using the q3map2gui, it's a good program all around for compiling and converting.