I'm dropping this out here as a conversation piece for devs mainly. I don't have the answer but I'm curious to know why game items are rendering the way they are. The more I've delved in to model making and painting the more Empires seems to be missing something in the realm of rendering that maybe it should have. I'm posting a couple pictures as an example, I hope they show up well enough for the explanation. I took a new model and gave it a very exaggerated $bumpmap (normal map) and some unusual specular attributes via the vmt file to highlight the differences. Here's the result as viewed in the half-life model viewer util (HLMV). Hopefully the picture shows the very lumpy, shiney gloss covered surface with orange areas and the tire treads concaved. However, put the same model in to the game and Empires seems to ignore the bumpmap, specular and vmt file configuration information. Is Empire not implementing parts of the steam render engine capabilities? And a shot of the full model for the curious....
Looks like your testing map is running in fullbright, isn't lighting needed to affect the specular lighting of the model? (Just guessing here as map maker)
lol, dunno. Been doing a lot of reading about it but nothing helpful to me so far. But here's another thing.... there are many existing model that have normal maps, but show no signs of recognizing the details in our current maps, not just my test. Is there something about how maps are compiled? Or something deeper in Empires code?
It's hard to debug something like this through screenshots. Can you send me a zip with the vmf, model, material and texture files? (bumpmaps are supposed to work, we're not different than other source engine games unless you use weird shaders)
Sure..... https://www.dropbox.com/s/3u8yl89qvb74pil/Artillery_3h.zip?dl=0 This one has a "normal" normal map. not the crazy one used in the first shot.
HLMV doesnt render correctly in the first place. Don't rely on that since cubemaps and stuff differ. Make sure your convars are right too, dont play on low settings :/ Mat_bumpmaps 1 Mat_specular 1
For curiosity I plopped the same model in to UE4 Barrel and tires are a bit closer to what I'd originally created. You have more control over textures in the UE4 editor, but that could be good or bad depending how much work ultimately has to go in. I find most don't even notice details in the steam engine so great looks != great game.
May I suggest making carriage thinner/smaller and barrel aiming higher? Because it looks like a medium artillery piece. Also this bullet shield is pure sex, love it
If anything, I'd eventually like the barrel to be it's own model so I can manually adjust it myself to make it a field gun/artillery piece. Edit: Could even probably rig up some cool entity work to it to make it "fire" and use Bloodwipers cool entity based rocket launcher.