by date
Cave Construction Pack - Sneak Peak
Cave Construction Pack - Sneak Peak
| Name: | Syllus |  |
|---|---|---|
| Date Posted: | Jul 10, 2008 | |
| Rating: |  4.5 out of 5 | |
| Public: | YES | |
| Comments: | YES | |
| RSS Feed: |  or Subscribe with  . | |
| Profile Page: | View profile page for Syllus |
Blog post
Just a quick sneak peak at our next content pack. All screenshots were taken in TGEA 1.7.1. We do not have a solid release date yet but development is coming along very well and we will be beginning thorough testing very soon. You can keep an eye on www.blackskullstudios.com if you want to keep track of progress. Enjoy!
Recent Blog Posts
| List: | 07/18/08 - Community Appreciation Discount 07/11/08 - What do you want next? 07/10/08 - Cave Construction Pack - Sneak Peak 07/10/08 - Rustic Furnishings Content Pack - Update 07/01/08 - "Rustic Furnishings Content Pack" Released 05/16/08 - Loving TGEA 1.7 (Screens) |
|---|
Submit your own resources!| Gareth Fouche (Jul 10, 2008 at 07:17 GMT) |
| Konrad Kiss (Jul 10, 2008 at 08:57 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
| Leslie Young (Jul 10, 2008 at 10:41 GMT) |
Fine.. I'll stand 3rd in line ;)
This cave looks really good.
Keep em medieval and fantasy stuff comming :D
| Leathel Grody (Jul 10, 2008 at 13:47 GMT) |
| Maxwell Marsh (Jul 10, 2008 at 15:51 GMT) |
If it is .dts, I'll buy it as soon as I buy TGEA.
| Syllus (Jul 10, 2008 at 18:36 GMT) |
The Pack is currently .dts meshes, you would be very hard pressed to get this kind of detail in a bsp model and would end up using multiple .dts objects to add some of the lost detail back in anyhow. The cave system will make use of extensive LOD's to ensure the ability to maintain good performance even in very large cave and tunnel systems. We have not yet seen the need to try and reproduce the system as .dif as we are showing almost no performance loss in our testing using .dts meshes so far.
We did see considerable performance loss in the early stages of development but extensive testing showed that the loss of framerate was due to oddities in the engines terrain system and not from using .dts meshes. We are now running cave systems that span more than a half mile in length (per scale) with no noticable framerate loss and we have not even begun to optimize the pack for performance yet. We will be entering a rigerous testing and optimization phase soon, and will keep the community updated on it's progression and our findings.
The cave construction pack will come with thorough doumentation detailing how to implement it without the performance loss that previous cave attempts have so often suffered (with no engine code changes needed I might add).
| Konrad Kiss (Jul 10, 2008 at 19:45 GMT) Resource Rating: 5 |
I'm curious about large caves, I know it brings in a number of problems concerning visibility, LOD, etc...
I can't wait to see what it will be like! Oh and just to balance things.. make it less medieval and fantasy and more sci-fi. :)
| Mikael Pettersson (Jul 10, 2008 at 22:11 GMT) |
| Syllus (Jul 10, 2008 at 22:33 GMT) |
Quote:
how noticeable are the seams?
They aren't!
We looked to the real world to decide how best to "snap" our pieces together and we decided on plumbing as our model. Basically you have your cave and tunnel tiles/segments, and you have a coupler piece. The openings on the tiles are designed so that any piece will match up with any other piece... and then you drop a coupler on it and it performs an instant seal at the seem... no light leaks, no noticable seem of any sort from within. The entire stretch of caves and tunnels in the screenshot above was put together in less then 10 minutes, and as you can see from the screenshots, the lighting is smooth with no light leaks or visible seems.
Add in the normal and specular maps and even if there might have been a noticable seem (if you were searching for it) it makes it near impossible to discern from the inside.
And if you have concerns about performance using .dts... the layout in the screenshot above was tested on a mediocre laptop using a 128mb "integrated" video card... aka P.O.S. and it ran with no noticable frame rate loss. And the awesome thing about that is... that we do not have any LOD's or optimization efforts at all into it yet. As for the lighting and shadowing quality... well the screenshots of the inside of the cave were taken in TGEA...
We still have a lot of work and testing to do with this pack but it is looking and performing very well so far. We are very optimistic about where it will end up based on the results we have gotten so far.
| Chris \"C2\" Byars (Jul 10, 2008 at 23:57 GMT) |
| Jaimi McEntire (Jul 11, 2008 at 13:44 GMT) |
You must be a member and be logged in to either append comments or rate this resource.
