I'd love to but I don't have the file any more. However I have grudgingly agreed to do some modelling for the team, as long as we can agree beforehand on what I need to model. I don't really like modelling much but as long as it'll get used, I'll do it.
Personally, I loved your comm constructable radars-camera hybrids. To the point I still would love to see them implemented.
Don't have those any more either I'm afraid. Besides trickster wasn't too fond of them, and I am kinda meh on the idea myself now, think the issue got very noisy when it was new and comm targets were just removed, now I think everyone's pretty used to it. If I had to put anything like that in. I'd probably stick it on the armory, going to ask if we can redo armories into more like bunkers, they get used a lot as just general cover for infantry on the frontlines, so I'd like to expand that role if I can, formalise it a bit, give them a strong side and a weak side, maybe stick a little mini radar on them too. Dunno, it depends what everyone wants of course, doesn't make much difference to me what I model, I do want to do some cool stuff with the buildings though if I can, empires has had the same buildings for ages, but the game itself has changed quite a lot, so maybe the buildings could do with a change too, to make them work better. Make them a bit better designed from a gameplay standpoint. I suppose in a sense I am qualified to do that being a level designer rather than a modeller, so while they might not look particularly nice they might play a lot better, a building is essentially a room in a level after all.
If trickster anoys me enough I could add some details to those buildings you make, if you dont mind of course.
Heh, if you want to do the horrible legwork of LODing everything be my guest. As long as you do it intelligently and don't, say, pile so many crates around it that about 50% of the polgyon budget goes into them, you can add whatever you like. I think I can make them look fairly nice, they'll just look nice in a mapping sense rather than a modelling sense. So big, bold strokes, interesting to look at from a distance, and very functional close up, but not too much geometric detail, which I think is kinda what you need in empires as the buildings really are much closer to being level geometry than actual props. It just means I need to stick to things like walls, solid railings, pillars, ventilation ducts, that sort of thing rather than chairs, consoles, detailed crates and barrels, and suchlike for adding detail. Anything you can make out of a single large polgyon and repeating texture to cover a wide area. Of course ideally it'd be cool if we could spawn the building as one prop, then spawn another prop on top of it which is just the details, which you could then distance fade rather than having to LOD it which would be easier and look nicer. You could also maybe make several variations of details, and spawn one at random with each instance of the building, so each building could have a slightly different interior clutter layout.
Just as a very shitty mockup: -open the sides of NF armory -add a layer of different height walls to the front end -maybe open the roof some more -put ammocrates over to the middle or the side of the old entrance where the empy shelves are -remove empty shelves -change building base accordingly
I was actually thinking something basically like that. Tough on one side but open on the other, should let you use it for general cover against arty and cannon fire, as well as shooting cover, but make it easy to crowd around in and get at the health/ammo boxes.
yay there should be room for a whole bunch of people to find cover but NOT shelter (like now). I mean: Let's keep it easy to storm (open-ish) but also defensive bunker-like. (This starts to sound contradictory as I am writing this :eek: )
I know what you mean, there's different kinds of cover. I'd actually use the words the other way. They should be sheltered from the outside in general, being safe enough to catch a breath, but not really protected from a direct close attack. Make it impractical to pick them off as a passing tank, but if you get close to the bunker you can storm it without getting bottlenecked, especially if you flank it first.
That layout actually looks pretty nice, although the walls might make it impractical for placement, maybe sand bags for lower protection while having a metallic awning for top protection against indirect attacks.
If the LOD is possible to do without breaking the texture I can help, but dont ask me to make a new texture for each LOD cause that just pure masochism. I personaly really dislike the crates on the current buildings. It destroyes my suspension of disbelief because it looks akward if for example a HE tank shells a rax and those tiny crates dont even move... I think detail should be part of the building itself like I did on the pole and base of that model.
Ehh it should be ok without needing to re-unwrap every time. I don't expect you to bake detail down onto the lower LODs because yes that is a huge pain in the ass.
I'm not hugely knowledgeable in this area, but is it possible to just get MORE LoDs? Currently, things just seem to instantly appear around buildings and it just looks stupid. By more, I mean, could we have a more gradual build-up of detail. Or have some shit fade in rather than just appear?
Yes you could, but it requires us to do three or four times as much work just to put LODs in, and that's for what we have now. If you want smooth LOD transitions on something the size of a building? it's going to take a ridiculous amount of time, and require us to be much better modellers than we are. Ideally speaking, we would use another system, LODs are an imperfect solution at best and certainly don't work for something the size of a building, you need to treat them like level geometry, which means you really should be using lots of smaller models to make them and add detail. It requires more code work, but if it takes a week solid to code, it'd still be less work than doing good LODs for all the buildings. It takes me an afternoon to make an OK-ish model, it'd take me days to make a fully LOD'd and finished model. I'm really not planning on making LODs, I'm just going to use textures to provide detail and use extremely efficient modelling to keep the polycount down. Honestly if you got rid of the stupid boxes around everything you wouldn't need LODs, the interior of the buildings don't have much detail in them, and with things like the VF doors it'll always look retarded. I think I can make the buildings look fine without LODs, and I also think you'd notice the LOD popping more than you'd notice that your buildings have very simple interiors.
correct me if im wrong but, if you had more lod's doesn't that mean it needs more gfx memory to keep all the different things ready?
Oh yes that's the other thing, the game does need to load all the different LODs so while you might save on rendering you are losing on disk space and memory.
