Here's a neat article I found about HL2 mapping and all the new features and stuff about HL2 Mapping. Interesting read and cool information. Enjoy, http://www.joshbeeler.com/ramses/vhe2.html

-Plato

Anyone looked at that 20-minute, 500MB video recorded at E3. Amazing. I just kept looking at it and thinking what DoD would look and play like . . . .

looks great!!!

I'm looking forward to the 'orange mode' I think it will make life easier for a mapper in terms of texturing vs. brushbuilding.

I hope there's an import function for old RMF's
but then again... who wants to import old limited HL maps if you know how kicka** maps you can make with this baby!!

The dynamic terrain deformation looked interesting - how about shell craters created on triggered events like an arty barrage?

It'll be a lot of fun, though it might be kinda time consuming setting up all those entities and such, I'm wondering if prefabs will take a bigger role this time.

man, i bet compile times will go waaayyy up, especially with all this fancy animation stuff and terrain modifiers. I dont think my comp will run HL2 anyways. So ill have to create a whole map without running it :(. But i'm still excited...

Originally posted by Winnebago
man, i bet compile times will go waaayyy up, especially with all this fancy animation stuff and terrain modifiers. I dont think my comp will run HL2 anyways. So ill have to create a whole map without running it :(. But i'm still excited...

that is a very good question.

i'm planning on a massive upgrade in early september in time for HL2. I'm hoping for an AMD 2800 or 3 ghz P4. :/

also...
If you have the means, get yourself into an ATI 9700 or GF4 4XXX or above (assuming you are on a 8XXX or GF3 platform). (my opinion here people, as i do not know official recommeded specs.)

i say this after watching the AI and physics in the HL2 tech demo. Gonna take a lot of horsepower to play with all options set to high.

Originally posted by Cheeto
It'll be a lot of fun, though it might be kinda time consuming setting up all those entities and such, I'm wondering if prefabs will take a bigger role this time.

They said they got an external program that is like a warehouse of prefabs. You know that one car commercial where the guy is in a white room, says I want a suv, green, used, under 20 miles. I bet it will be like that.

My bet is that the compile times will only be a few minutes because it does alot of realtime compiling in the editor

Just look at ut2003 where it takes less then 5 minutes to compile a huge map because of realtime proccesses

The new hammer editor will be a full development environment and the new prefab inventory system is sweet looking i love the realtime preiew screen of it

Originally posted by Kamikazi!
They said they got an external program that is like a warehouse of prefabs. You know that one car commercial where the guy is in a white room, says I want a suv, green, used, under 20 miles. I bet it will be like that.

Ahhh....the future of mapping

"Yes, I'd like it to be at night with bridges and cool buildings. And while you at it, go ahead and add some bunkers"

Omlett Bar Mapping :p

P.S. 10 points to Kami for the great analogy (www.carfax.com)

-Plato

Originally posted by Kamikazi!
They said they got an external program that is like a warehouse of prefabs. You know that one car commercial where the guy is in a white room, says I want a suv, green, used, under 20 miles. I bet it will be like that.

/me bites his tounge hard

/me tapes his mouth

/me tries to not say it

'Prefabs. Lots of prefabs'

*Rows of prefabs zoom by me and my trenchcoat before stopping instantly on what I want*

Sorry, I lost...
:D

Originally posted by Plato
Ahhh....the future of mapping

"Yes, I'd like it to be at night with bridges and cool buildings. And while you at it, go ahead and add some bunkers"

Omlett Bar Mapping :p

P.S. 10 points to Kami for the great analogy (www.carfax.com)

-Plato

Or the Matrix.. 'Guns... Lost of them'

hehe:p

I should be getting a monster pc b4 the end of the year.

Im just so glad that has the same layout as the current Hammer, so we dont have to "Re-learn" how to map.

Edit* Looking at those screenshots of hammer vs 4 u would hardly think the engine has changed at all lol

Originally posted by DimitriPopov
Or the Matrix.. 'Guns... Lost of them'

I beat you to it! :p

[i]Originally posted be Izuno[i]
i'm planning on a massive upgrade in early september in time for HL2. I'm hoping for an AMD 2800 or 3 ghz P4. :/

definalte go with the amd, intel's extra 'power' is a compromise for testing and quality. they get it up that fast, and just throw it out on the market. personally, in my opinion, AMD is a far superior chip than what intel puts out because of all the testing and time they put into their products.

secondly, i am thinking about wrighting a mapping editor, but i need to finish up some classes at school before i get the know how to do it. one of my main objectives is to get it simmilar to MS paint, mainly where you can make a line, then you can go back and click and hold part of the line and make it bend, just my ideas. but thats at least 6 months off....

I think that compile times won't be that huge.

1. considering HL2 can run on a low-end pc: this is without details like dynamic lighting, detailed models, etc. Brushworks and stuff can't be altered by such an option. Look at the how-to-turn-off-the-dod_charlie-explosions threads. You just can't, but you can turn off the particle effects.

2. We're five years further, this is a whole new engine and a lot of things can now be rendered real-time because of the horse-power.

3. I think the way memory is managed is also worked up to the max. So compiling will be done most efficiently. I want to now if they still use bsptrees and visleafs.

4. a kick-ass pc nowadays is pretty cheap.

I think we just have wait and see, but the future looks bright for mappers.

PS: AMD rulez!! :D

looks WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE SUPER FUN HAAPPY YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but I think they got some info wrong. model animating in hammer. I dont think so...

I think the "create keyframe" button is more likely to be for movers. if any of you map for UT and UT2K3 you'll know exactly what I mean.

yeah, VALVE is using Softimage|XSI editor stuff themselves to make HL2 models, so clearly HL2Hammer does not do models.

nor does it do textures - HL textures are supposedly much improved, although the Q3 textures at E3 looked even better, according to a reporter there.

nor does HL2VHE do wavs. but HL2 sounds were very nice, that same reporter said - athough that might have been the sound system they had there. anyway, Valve seems to have abandoned the 8bitMono Wav standard, but what the new one is is not known yet.

on the other hand, info i have gotten from here and there is that the world is deformable during play in the Source engine. no need to carve a crater and fill it with a breakable, in the Source supposedly you can set up 2 states for the ground terrain, and then run the Animation between them. actually to me this sounds almost harder....we will see.

anyway it should be an interesting summer and fall as we learn more!

-"Normandy, france, earth, June 6th, 1944, dawn."

-"Program complete. Enter when ready..."

:rolleyes:

General Chang: "We need breathing room!"

Captain Kirk: "Earth. Hitler. 1938."


Ya one day xerent. :)

"DoD needs more bimbo's and chicks"

/me presses random button :D

PS: where are my RTCW nazi high-heel leather bimbo models for dod?? :p

Originally posted by tommy14
nor does it do textures - HL textures are supposedly much improved, although the Q3 textures at E3 looked even better, according to a reporter there.
Q3 was at E3? and it looked better than HL?

Suspect Tommy meant Doom 3 :-)

*shifts eyes, looks embarrassed* um, yeah.

Textures may be indeed worse than Doom3, but all of D3 I have seen till now are demos of almost the same indoor level. You can pack then many details. Comparing HL2 open levels to D3 demos I think HL2 looks better overall,; indeed it lacks a bit of details, but there were said that HL2 uses shaders and displacement maps so probably there is nothing to worry about.

Hm, I really don't know how they can optimize engine for such different hardware (from DX6 to DX8-9). DX6 games used multitexturing, pre-calculated lighting. DX8-like games use less multi-texturing and depend more on shaders (dynamic lighting and other effects.). If you watched some HL2 demo there is shown very realistic water. in 500MB demo there is part with hanging pictures created from different materials: glass, water, stained glass. On pre DX8 hardware it will not look so good. On such card you probably will see something like Unreal water at best and none of these neat effects of pixels behind.

About HL2 compiling. If Source is complete new engine (nothing Quakelike) created with outdoors in mind too with dynamic LOD; so compiling may be very fast (well, lighting may still take some time). Quake-type engine uses dumb vis algorithm for speeding/optimizing BSP.

OMGOMOG that is so leet. I am so excited for HL2. The new rule will be "keep above 800 w_poly, in fact, keep above 3000 w_poly"

hopefully...

Originally posted by Craftos
...but all of D3 I have seen till now are demos of almost the same indoor level. You can pack then many details. Comparing HL2 open levels to D3 demos I think HL2 looks better overall...


indeed i would agree, however we don't yet know the full capabilities of the Doom3 engine. it is possible it can do large outdoor areas with more detail than HL2 for all we know, perhaps capable of Xray and Crytek engine proportions. Then again, it may not.



the point is, we really don't know what the engines can do yet. i would guess that carmack and co probably have figured out the large environment technology, and while it may or may not be available to doom3 mod teams, i would guess that doom3 engine licensees would probably be able to use it if they wanted (meaning payed for it).

If D3 didnt intend for outdoor areas the likely hood is that the engine wont handel it well. You need to engineer a game engine specifacly to do certain things for decent outdoor areas. for indoor areas you can use mostly standard stuff and rely on raw power.

Basically I wokr out how good a game is on 3 things

1- Gameplay
2- Genral look and feel of the game. we can only speculate at this but D3 dosnt seem that far ahead of HL2
3- Sys requirments. this is where HL2 PWNS D3

understood.


all i'm saying is that we don't know what that engine can really do.

September 30 we find out, I guess. But the scenes in that 500MB movie set outdoors certainly look promising, especially for a mod like DOD.

Originally posted by izuno
indeed i would agree, however we don't yet know the full capabilities of the Doom3 engine. it is possible it can do large outdoor areas with more detail than HL2 for all we know, perhaps capable of Xray and Crytek engine proportions. Then again, it may not. [/speculation] If you saw that doom alpha leaked demo you can turn some debugging settings on. One draws you something like gl_wireframe but also draws portals (!!). I was a little shocked, cause this is sign of no-open-area-friendly engine. UT'03 engine hasn't looked too open at first sight but watch UT2004 movie floating on the internet. It looks like Tribes 2 with much riched details (including wheeled/flying vehicles). So HL2 engine may work more like BF'42 (both have Dynamic LOD).