DescentBB

no, sorry, just some posters at other boards are giving me and a few other female posters some grief over it. So I was just simply tired of it. As for my specs:
AMD Sempron 3000+ Processor
1024 MB RAM
Windows XP OS
Geforce 4 video card NVidia
I think, generic Audio card.

But regardless, won't render the dang game properly.

DarkFlameWolf wrote:no, sorry, just some posters at other boards are giving me and a few other female posters some grief over it.

Really? Well, idiocy is the most common human disease, and there's no known cure to it.

DarkFlameWolf wrote:As for my specs:
AMD Sempron 3000+ Processor
1024 MB RAM
Windows XP OS
Geforce 4 video card NVidia
I think, generic Audio card.

But regardless, won't render the dang game properly.

That's a decent machine and should handle D2X-W32 like a breeze.

Are your chipset, audio and video drivers up to date? All OS service packs installed?

Mind telling me as precisely as possible what goes wrong? CTD on start? Distorted menus? Distorted in-level 3D rendering? Whatever?

if someone is willing to provide me a PM with information where I can upload some images (EDIT: for FREE btw), I'd be glad to show you what exactly the program is doing.

PM sent.

Holy shizzle, I downloaded your LATEST version and it works! The only thing that seems.....off to me are sometimes the doors and the colored weapon lighting. First off the doors, sometimes they 'stick.' Like on certain door animations, the door is OPEN (I can fly through it) but it looks closed. It doesn't always happen, but enough to make it an issue. And colored lighting, maybe its just me or maybe its just cube-based lighting, but it really does look weird to have colored light travel across the cubes in that fashion, and no colored lighting from enemy lasers? But other than that, looks like your latest version has fixed most problems I've had.

Hehe.

Colored lighting goes per vertex and interpolates the color + intensity between two vertices. So the more 'optimized' a level is cube count wise, the worse colored lighting will look. The more cubes, the better.

I think enemy fire is colorized too ... this is definitely true for multiplayer at least (but I think for bots too).

I'd need you to name a level and a location therein where I can see the door problem.

Would it kill performance to do point-lighting for rooms as well as weapons fire? You could base the intensity off the luminescence of a texture at the corners. Take the average luminescence and hue of the upper-left quadrant of a face and create a point light at the upper-left corner.

Not sure if this would give good results for weird-shaped faces, but I think for a majority of faces this would give pretty good results. Plus for textures like lava which have high average luminescence it would really make it seem like the lava is glowing.

Where's the difference to static lighting?

Btw, if you turn on lightmaps you should have that kind of lighting. If you use colored lights in DLE-XP and turn that on in D2X-W32, too.

Well in addition to generating the lightmaps for the textures it would also cast light on objects.

Per point lighting for moving objects? That would mean I'd need to keep track of all light sources and compute light in real time. Nothing I can implement.

But this discussion doesn't belong here. It belongs in the D2X-W32 suggestions thread.

Okay, time to resurrect this thread again. Mainly to show I haven't been doing entirely nothing...



Even at that resolution you can't really see much, but it's something. Currently about 650 cubes in that segment, and I have another 180-cube segment waiting to be stitched in (although it's a while removed from what you see there).

This will be a D2X-XL level; it has to be since my guess for the final cube count is somewhere between 2000 and 3000 cubes. So it's going to take some time to finish also (you're only looking at about a quarter of the level there).

Reason I'm building it is just to show what the raised cube limit can let you do.

Sirius wrote:my guess for the final cube count is somewhere between 2000 and 3000 cubes

WOOAAAH!

Coolio, Sirus, keep up the good work!

love that higher wall limit. i couldn't have finished my previous level wo it. new level will be d2x-xl and every new feature i can get to work.

also boys and girls, take a tip from my experience; align and light your level AS you build. going back later is sometimes impossible because other parts are now in the way. make breaks between textures so that if you hit "align on child sides" things you don't want changed won't.

jakee,

an alignment preservation trick is to use the intended texture as secondary texture and put varying primary textures below it. Alignment always looks for the primary texture, so you can have several areas showing the same texture, but aligning independantly from each other. You can even mark the areas and use the replace texture feature to replace the targetted primary textures of each area with a prim+sec texture combo.

hmm thanks for the tip.

one thing though, i tried using a primary texture with flowing water as secondary texture. problem was the alignment arrows went away.

no performance hit with all those secondary textures?

as you may be able to guess, i traced my problem of misalignments to my accidentally hitting the "align on child sides" button. although the texture i was looking at didn't move, apparently textures further away did. i had to go back after posting it a 2nd time. sigh. so i'm taking a break from frustration by starting the beginning of a new all d2x-xl level. i'm a little discouraged though after seeing the examples on your website. i don't think i'm creative enough to be so orginal. i try for "immersion" as much as i can. to make one believe they're in a real place.

Probably the last screenshot before I convert the level format. It's at 862 cubes now, and quite a while to go.

The end of the first phase is in sight, but that leaves a couple more to go.

Yay @ Sirius!

900.

Sweet! How can I take screenshots like that?

Dynamite wrote:
Sweet! How can I take screenshots like that?

you need a real computer Tankie cough I mean Dynamite

Dynamite wrote:Sweet! How can I take screenshots like that?

Assuming you're running Windows of some sort...

Download and install something like IrfanView (an image tool, free and easy), then with your level map showing on your screen press "Prt Scrn", run IrfanView (or what you use), Paste, do whatever you want to remove unwanted things around the edges, save, upload the saved file to some place like imageshack, link to it in your post.

Piece of cake

That's a digitally altered automap view.

so when this is done it will take you approximately one weak to get from one end to the other?

looks very cool.

Give or take.

It'll probably take about two hours to play the level, depending of course on player skill, difficulty level, prior experience with the level, playing style and of course exactly what the level turns out like.

so how long 'til it's done!!!

Wish I could say.

Over the break I have from work over Christmas - two weeks - I want to get some major work done on it, but I can't tell whether it's enough considering I have programming projects I need to attend to also.

I have a mission that is about 70 to 80% done.
I just need to modify a few rooms. Add a couple more triggers and then more robots.
Then it'll be all done!
The funny thing is I've had this mission unfinished since 1998!


I'll try and finish it one day!

Wow - big!

Keep in mind that this mission is done with the DMB2. Not the DLE-XP. I can't remember off the top of my head, but I've used the max number of cubes with DMB2. At this point. I want to leave it old school. I might make 2 versions though. The second being D2x-XL with high res textures. Now that would rock!

I'd love to see levels taking full advantage of all new d2x-xl features.

How about this one, Diedel? It's got object triggers and colored lights.
It's called RIG Satellite. I'm mostly done with it. I built it in early September.

Problem is, I can't get the colored lights to work!
HELP!!!

me neither!

For colored lights convert the level to type "D2X-W32" (convert in file menu and check type in status bar).

To add a color to a light, make the side bearing a light color current, then click into the color dialog.

I know that part, it's just that I put colored lights on those sides, saved, and, when I opened up DLE-XP again, they didn't show up. They were just the regular white lights.
HELP!!!!

Then it probably wasn't a d2x-xl (-w32) type level. You can send the level to karx11erx at hotmail dot com, and I'll take a look at it.

*** Just an Update on my mission ***

I'm now 90% done!

Mission Name:


Finished adding triggers and fixed a few rooms up.

I have about 10% of robots, wepons, ammo and power-ups to add.

Then do some test playing to see how it all balances out.

If all works out. I may release this one before or by the New Year!
Fingers crossed.

Finished!!

Mission Name:

Here are some screenies.




You can download it HERE.

Have fun!

Should be ready to post an updated screenshot of that level soon... funny thing is it doesn't look that big on paper, but I have a fair appreciation from my exhaustion that it actually is...

I doubt I'll run out of cubes, but it'll run closer than I thought it would. Besides which, Diedel would probably tweak it if more were needed anyway...

It's really funny how much a level like this slows down the editor, too... never realised just how essential the render distance would become.

Sirius wrote:Besides which, Diedel would probably tweak it if more were needed anyway...

That might easily happen ...

First half done. 2337 cubes so far.