08 May 2012 No Comments

A little on Model Precaches

So, what are model precaches exactly?

Essentially, model precaches are the way Quake loads, stores in memory and then gets models.  The engine has a limited number of slots for these; 255.  This may seem low, but under normal circumstances, it’s actually pretty generous, relative to some of the other limits in the engine.

This is because a precache ‘slot’ is only used up for unique models, so multiple uses of the same model do not require additional precaches (eg: 500 shell boxes are still just 1 model precache).

The one that ends up biting people on the ass the most is bmodels (doors, triggers, walls, illusionaries… basically any time you attach a brush(es) to an entity).
Each bmodel counts as a precache slot, even if they look exactly the same (or don’t show up at all, as in triggers).
Iif you have 20 doors that look the same, that is 20 precaches.  func_illusionary, func_wall are the same thing.  The one people may not realize is that trigger_once/multiple count as well.  In fact, trigger_relay and _count can be made into point entities without affecting anything to avoid wasting bmodels on them.  Be warned that some older entity defs floating around on the internet may still have them as brush models (they were originally defined this way for whatever reason).

However, I would only worry about precache slots if you are intent of having the map work in glquake.exe.  if you are aiming at modern engines, then this isn’t a problem.  all modern ones can handle much more precaches: FitzQuake085, Quakespasm, RMQengine, DarkPlaces, QBism’s Super8 (software), Aguirre’s GLQuake.

by necros in mapping / level design

24 Apr 2012 No Comments

Thought this looked cool…

Wireframe image of some mappageShould hopefully have some stuff in a few weeks, depending on how testing goes.

by necros in Uncategorized

18 Feb 2012 No Comments

Not a clay render

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).

by necros in Uncategorized

17 Aug 2011 No Comments

the enviro suit should have lasted until the next map.

[n\t]

by necros in Uncategorized

08 Aug 2011 No Comments

So… Lava Nails…

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…

by necros in Uncategorized

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