The Shores of Nis

Just a wireframe shot. :)

Just goofing around with low level light groupings following along from my previous tests with fake GI skylight.

Unfortunately, I’m not good enough to hack in some runtime light array generation into light.exe, but I got around that by just placing 24 lights in a roughly spherical shape in the center of the room, all with a brightness of 5.

The accumulated shadows give a little more depth than a single light would, even with aguirre’s -soft option.  I think there could be something really cool in this.  Say, an editor keyval that tells light.exe to replace the single light with an array of lights to make effects similar to mental ray area lights.  You would have to account for dividing the light brightness across the replacement array and you could also factor a sort of ‘internal attenuation’ for each of the lights in the array such that array lights that were closer to the original light had more brightness, and those farther away less.

Note this was compiled with -fast, hence the jagged edges on the shadows.  Still, you can see that the shadow cast by the top most bridge is much fuzzier than what you’d normally get with -soft because -soft is limited to a certain sized based on lightmaps themselves. (I don’t really understand all the technical aspects of it, but this is what I recall aguirre telling me about it).

[nt]

I always hated the implementation of those things in the Rogue mission pack (Dissolution of Eternity).  For one, the stock UI does not have room for the extra ammo counters and Rogue didn’t add the spaces in properly, instead, opting for a weird and hack-like method where the counters swap between ammo types depending on selected weapon.

And second, it basically adds even more redundant weapons into the game.  It’s bad enough the SNG is nothing more than a DPS increase over the NG, but now we have the LNG (lava Nail Gun) and the LSNG which are nearly functionally equivalent, but with higher damage.  (It should be noted that lava nails do have a proper benefit for MP which is that the damage completely bypasses armor, but since I only ever discuss SP, i don’t count this as anything important.)

Even worse, the LNG sits in this strange place between the NG, SNG and LSNG.

So, why not just replace the NG and SNG with lava versions permanently (at least for the duration of the map)?  No need for any UI changes, simplifies weapon selection and doesn’t make yet another ammo to keep track of.

But why stop there?  In ne_ruins, i added the QBS (quad barrel shotgun) as a way of increasing the damage potential of the player to allow for more powerful monsters.

Bumping up shotgun damage via a ‘lava ammo artifact’ would have been a little more elegant solution.

The next iteration of my mod will definitely have something like this implemented.  At the moment, i’ve got it as a flat 50% damage increase on both bullets and nails.  Works out nice in testing and really speeds things up to maintain fast paced gameplay with more powerful monsters and makes combinations of QBS + lava ammo + Quad psychotic.  A little reminiscent of nail guns + Trinity + Quad in quoth.

Some other ideas are to allow lava ammo shots to pass through initial targets to damage other monsters behind or possibly giving a small chance per lava hit of lighting a monster on fire.  High shot counts of shotguns would mean greater chances of igniting targets vs single nails.  Will need to experiment with this…

There are text files included with ne_dynamic that explain how to use the entities and such, but it’s probably easier to read with this blog’s nice formatting…

More

And now we come to the meat of the QExpo releases from myself.

ne_ruins is a two map mod from Quake.  It features, among the maps themselves, some newish monsters and bosses and a new weapon, as well as a few other modified things.

More info at func_

Visit the main QExpo site. You can also visit my QExpo Booth here.

To start things off, I’ve released a small, unfinished mod I started way back during the last QExpo.

It’s a sort of diablo-style RPG with World of Warcraft gameplay.  Kill guys, get XP, level up, get more spells…  More info at thebooth and in the zip archive.

Anyway, besides this pathetic release (I’ll release better stuff later!), there are already a bunch of other booths up that you can check out.  Whee!

QExpo is starting this weekend.  Looking forward to see what everyone else is bringing.

Good news, is this map is done so it’ll definitely make it’s appearance next week… some time. ^_^

See you next week!

In case you somehow missed it, QExpo 2011 will be starting this month, and run from the 19th to the 25th.  Get over there and make a booth to show off your Quake related projects!  They don’t have to be finished, just show off screenshots and such.

There will also be some Multiplayer competitions as well as speed mapping and speed modding, as usual.

I have a map ready as well as a mod with the possibility of another mod for release during the event.  I’ll probably also do some reviews (read: dissections) of stuff released during the event too which i’ll later put up here.