Anyone working on a map that has the Donner 1.3 feeling to it? God I miss that feeling.

My next map will most likely be a para marshland map with a doom n gloom atmosphere and some rain

Originally posted by Someth|ngW|cked
My next map will most likely be a para marshland map with a doom n gloom atmosphere and some rain Rain!!:D

Originally posted by Formologic23
Anyone working on a map that has the Donner 1.3 feeling to it? God I miss that feeling.
I've played the source donner so much I can hardly remember the old one. But I do remember dod_thunder, that map was so good. I miss the huge axis banners in the middle and the dark sky... brilliant

When they released the new source donner, i was soo saddened that they dropped the old rundown village theme, and removed the gloominess and the rain and the random bunker which is now the field. oh the good ol' days

Yeah, the maps in the hl1 DOD were far superior gameplay and atmosphere wise

I am trying to keep my upcoming projects closer to the style of the good ol' maps

I really wish that the sdk had more stuff in it for the community though, the hl1 version of dod's sdk had a really cool particle system and entities to control it, i think the entities were much better than what we get with source, you could set actual physical attributes to create more dynamic effects like fountains, fire and smoke arching out of windows, also the weather system in the hl1 version was FAR superior, it allowed the level designer to set the type of weather and density in a point entity and the engine would figure out which part of the map was covered and it would create rain splashes on the surface it hit with the current sdk we are stuck with having to place brush volumes which create some really weak looking rain and just so so snow, i also really miss the mortar field entity

Not sure whats up with the that but i hope to see some really nice enhancements to the sdk after development is done on EP2, TF2 and Portal

Originally posted by Someth|ngW|cked
Yeah, the maps in the hl1 DOD were far superior gameplay and atmosphere wise

I am trying to keep my upcoming projects closer to the style of the good ol' maps

I really wish that the sdk had more stuff in it for the community though, the hl1 version of dod's sdk had a really cool particle system and entities to control it, i think the entities were much better than what we get with source, you could set actual physical attributes to create more dynamic effects like fountains, fire and smoke arching out of windows, also the weather system in the hl1 version was FAR superior, it allowed the level designer to set the type of weather and density in a point entity and the engine would figure out which part of the map was covered and it would create rain splashes on the surface it hit with the current sdk we are stuck with having to place brush volumes which create some really weak looking rain and just so so snow, i also really miss the mortar field entity

Not sure whats up with the that but i hope to see some really nice enhancements to the sdk after development is done on EP2, TF2 and Portal

Don't take this too personal and I really do respect your dedication to DoD and all things but your statment is...well...bunk. The entities contained in Source far outstrip what was available to do in previous versions of the HL engine. By factors of 20 or more. You can do fire and and smoke and weather...I can make a firestorm tornado in Source that Moses would be proud of...I can take smoke and have it curl around a room and have it come out the side window. Don't misjudge the engine because we don't have fake "rain splashes".

Oh...BTW...dark and stormy maps do one thing...empty servers. That's the primary reason why most map makers tend to light their maps well. And...on another point...damage in maps today is much more realistic than the black, crappy, jurassic-park styled sloppy and blurry textures we used to have. Damage in a DoD 1.X map was a massive triangular-shaped world brush with one texture on the side and another on the edge..OHhhhhhh...beautiful....NOT.

You guys need to take your rose-colored glasses off and pick up Hammer and start to really learn what you can do w/the engine. Sure...map making now is very difficult compared to the old days...it takes days and days and days to get enough skill to make a passable map...but I'll take that over four-walls-and-a-door map any day. I suspect your nostalgic longing for the old maps has more to do with the game mechanics (CoF, etc) than anything else.

If you try and make a map close to the "good old style" prepare for it to languish in the bin of too-high expectations.

By the way, I might be able to present you a real decent looking rain effect soon.

I don't know how it will affect performance though. Actually, I'm going to use a very simple trick I refined after some guidance from a fellow mapper back in the days of DoD Beta 2.0.

It used to deliver exceptionally beautiful results back then...

We'll see.

Cheers,

Albatros

I honestly don't know how you could say that dod:s entities for particles and weather even come close to the robustness of 1.3's, the precipitation volume is a joke plain and simple and the emmitter entities are stale at best

I am sure you can create the same effects with some tinkering and multiple entities but the fact that source's sdk does not allow for physically simulated particles, arching trajectories and path optioning just annoys me personally, it is also fairly lame that you can not do material blending within a single particle system

I still believe that UED's particle and terrain texturing systems and creation methods are far superior to anything else on the market, i can not wait to get my hands on the UED for the unreal 3 powered games, valve still makes the simplest creation tools out there which is why their engines are so great to work with

I am not trying to diss the engine or the sdk but i really do miss the robustness of the old entity set

RO has that kind of feeling to it, I think. It feels gritty to the extreme, but it doesn't have the high paced action DoD:S does to me.

Originally posted by Someth|ngW|cked
I am not trying to diss the engine or the sdk but i really do miss the robustness of the old entity set Just one thing to add, the DoD 1.3 or lower has had more development time that the source sdk. But.....anyways.

I am/was working on a CSS map called de_methlab that was taking place here in Washington, and it got a lot of great compliments with the rain and dark sky. But it was the whole effect that really made it cool.

So, just outta curiousity, why is it that dark maps clear servers?

Originally posted by Formologic23




So, just outta curiousity, why is it that dark maps clear servers? Low visibility is my guess, I always liked the dark atmospheric maps myself. Zafod, Thunder and the like.

...ya dark maps like my dod_pier are proof that dark maps are not popular.

Heed this warning. :p


Solution: Next version will be daylit !


:)

nobody likes to be shot by someone they cant see hiding in a dark corner. It's just not fun.

Also, everyone keeps saying the older games look much grittier (dod:1, RO), but all I see are pixelated textures and dated graphics. Do they just appear grittier because graphics technology wasnt up to snuff yet? low-res textures and simple models - I think these things give the illusion that it was darker and gloomier and whatever else, but really I think it's just lousy graphics.

A map does not have to be dark do be gloomy, i am talking about a mid day impending thunderstorm type of atmosphere with normal visibility, sort of like the atmosphere in saving private ryan when they entered the town while it was raining, before that guy got sniped

Yeah, I would definately be up for a project with this old donner/ saving private ryan like atmosphere once I finish my Juno Beach map.

3 things:

Jagd is nice and gloomy. maybe i'm crazy, but it looks pretty cool.

I wouldnt be suprised if the first official maps were all sunny like they are to show off the HDR lighting that DOD was showcasing for the source engine.

and one time i had a problem with a smoke entity, where the trajectory was arched. I had to delete it and make another. It looked funny when the steam out of a kubelwagon's engine was arching around and blowing in a doorway. hah.



PS. the source engine is not worse than the hl1 engine. gameplay might be arguable, but not the engine.

That was one robust PS.

I don't know why people like the 1.3 maps so much, to me they look very random. Source offers so much more to play with and has bumped the whole realism level so much that 1.3 maps don't even impress me...
I think some of the first source maps were clear/sunny just to be safe on the performance side. Rain, dustmotes, and clouds aren't effects that are very cheap on some lower end systems out there.

Hi Dash,

I think I can't agree there.

Usually a gloomy athmosphere brings along some fog, which can be used to increase performance greatly - you could even say that indeed those maps with a large view distance are the brightest ones, for instance Anzio or Argentan.

I would actually recommend every mapper to take a look at well done WW2-movies. The people who made those normally had the same problem of finding a matching athmosphere, and they made some huge efforts to find a good solution on this.

Full-bright sunny maps don't really give me any war-feeling while playing them - maybe the average "fresh" DoD:S player just doesn't feel the need for things like athmosphere, historically demanding settings or simply a ww2-setting, but rather just want a CS-Clone with funny bolt-action or recoilless guns.

Sometimes I feel that I have to fight very hard to remember the fascinating points of DoD. And I'm afraid, by substracting maps like ramelle, schwetz, thunder or heutau from my mind, there's not much left that fascinates me. :)

"ramelle, schwetz, thunder or heutau from my mind, there's not much left that fascinates me"


True.


You can create a dark, gloomy atmosphere without making pitch dark areas where players are impossible to see. Those maps would be popular I would imagine.

I loved zafod. I also love pier. A mix of maps is always nice.

I dunno, the source game just dont have that "COOL" factor like the old dod maps did, now all of the maps seem like cookie cutters, they look and play really well but they dont have that same "feeling" that the maps of old had, redundant architecture, redundant texturing, redundant model placement

I guess the fact that the old dod was a lot more mature had a great deal to do with the amount of content available to mappers at the end of it's cycle

Originally posted by McJewels
3 things:

Jagd is nice and gloomy. maybe i'm crazy, but it looks pretty cool.

II agree with you there, but I want some rain, I want some puddles to splash my toes in, I want to be dirty!

Originally posted by Colonel_Krust
You can create a dark, gloomy atmosphere without making pitch dark areas where players are impossible to see. Those maps would be popular I would imagine.
I agree with you here. I think that if you make a map that is gloomy, you need to add lighting to those areas that would be extremely dark, but you have to do it right. You wouldn't just be able to throw the map together, and it would probably need some extensive testing. But I am not saying make a map dark, just rainy and windy!

Fure, fog is a good way to optimize with clipping, but it only gets so far. You can't expect to have a nice atmosphere with fog jacked tp to 256 distance. There's the rain, the splashes on the ground from the raindrops (i've seen it simulated with entity fog) and so on.

And as far as I know, WW2 spanned over more than 5 years and it wasn't constant rain and sorrow during all that time... Basing thw WW2 feeling on movies is also very biased since movies try to recreate a feeling and have a nice image, and sometimes may sacrifice logical continuity or more realistic places just so it looks better. There were battles all over the place, not always in the prettiest places, and not always during rain, or during sunsets, after storms and all that "atmospherical" stuff. To me, a good atmosphere can be set any time of the day, it just depends how it's done and some maps, especially Jags, Argentan (yes, argentan, inspect it closely and you'll see the nice atmo work on it) and Colmar have a nice touch to them and they're in three different settings.

On a side note, i'll still have to agree with something that was said earlier that the textures in 1.3 were so pixelatted and dull that it almost faked the whole "feeling" of the game. To me it looked more trashy than realistic/

Hey guys,

good news.

My rain-experiment does seem to work... not quite bad, though I have to tweak it more.

But it's a start.

http://www.albatros44.de/lbgrau/video03.AVI

http://www.albatros44.de/lbgrau/video02.AVI

http://www.albatros44.de/lbgrau/video04.AVI

http://www.albatros44.de/lbgrau/video01.AVI

Big thanks to piu piu once again for helping me with the animated ground texture :)

hehe, the quality of the videos is so bad, now my animation looks like a lasershield protecting the ground :cool:

Hey again,

piu piu just pointed out how godawful bad the quality of my videos is and devastatingly insulted my digi-cam so it committed suicide ;/.

Therefore here's a bsp file zipped for you to test. Please let me have some feedback!

http://www.albatros44.de/lbgrau/mapzip.zip

dear samsung digicam, rest in peace. i won't miss you :p


i think the rain is quite nice. maybe it should be a little more thin, but i'm not sure about that.
the ground animation is quite okay, but i think i should do another one for normal grounds with less waves, becuz the current one looks like rain falling on a deep lake or something.

anyway, i think albatros has surely earned the title "dod:s rainman" :carrot:

Good lord, 17 fps?

The rain itself looks a tad better than the stock source rain but still a bit to slow and thick, the only way this system would work is to set each of the brushes with the animated rain texture to func_lods and a pretty short fade out distance, like 200-300 maybe and use overlays for the rain hitting the ground or your maps will be unplayable

I am not to intrigued to leave this alone, i am going to see what i can come up with

17 fps?

Now that's strange - I get about 90 as an average on that tester, and my system is pretty average aswell.

I implemented this system on one of my maps, and it affected the fps only up to 6 fps all in all.

Well, the rain can be made faster, slower, look thinner, look thicker...

About the overlays - well, I only needed two func_illusionary brushes for the entire testmap animated ground, which is affecting the performance by almost zero percent (and offers a couple of necessary settings).

Oh well ^^...

I find the stock rain pretty horrible, so this is definitely a huge leap in the right direction.

Few things I thought was a bit iffy:

- Looking up you could see the pattern of the rain pretty easily. I think this kinda ruins the immersion the rain tries to create. You can tell it's coming down on a plane, with boxes in the middle.

- Loved the sounds. Could probably do with a touch of thunder in the background, but the actual rain sound was perfect. It didn't sound repetitive and I could definitely see myself crouching on some tree-line, rain pouring down hard, looking at a little town, and more listening for anything ontop of the rain. Great atmosphere!

The only thing I can really suggest (though I don't know how it would work) is a system similar to the one a map in medal of honor uses. If anyone has the spearhead expansion pack, there's a map called Gewitter, which does it flawlessy. The rain (for whatever reason) doesn't seem to affect the framerate, as it's used with a nice combination of fog. The sounds are perfect, thunder here and there, but what's more is the rain seems to be random, yet thicker than Sources (which looks thin, long and fake).

I might fraps it later to show what I mean, as it's really how games should be in terms of a rainy environment.

The func_precip snow was really crappy before they released Colmar.

Maybe the rain will be tweaked in the future as well? (hint hint cough cough)

Ok I decided to get into fraps and quickly whip something up - this is from a MP map called Gewitter, in MOHSH. It, to me, creates the perfect environment and ambience...just has such a good feeling to it.

Video (http://summit.outervoid.net/pub/gewitter.mpg)

From what I can tell it just uses a water image and throws them down randomly, but I haven't looked into it enough. Oh and also this doesn't damage my framerate noticeably (if at all). Not sure whether it's just a cheap illusion but it does the job.

Originally posted by summit
Video (http://summit.outervoid.net/pub/gewitter.mpg)
i have never seen raindrops going into so many different directions at the same time, plus they are quite long and way to fast (gravity² ? ;) ). but all in all, not bad!

Yeah, but from memory (might have to test again) they're all slanting in one direction...it just adds a greater variant to the way they fall.

Plus they're a lot thicker; I really hate the stock-Source rain that's thin...really kills the atmosphere.

There are a few really cool things about it: the fog (makes the rain feel like it's more dense), the sounds, and the flashes of lightning.

The map is very cool with the sounds alone - they just sound so damn good!

Originally posted by FuzzDad
Oh...BTW...dark and stormy maps do one thing...empty servers.

Not always. Zaphod, Thunder and Ramelle weren't necessarily maps that caused a server to empty. Aside from Zaphod, they weren't really that dark, but they had a bit of a grey feel to the lighting, which is something that would be a nice reprieve from the consistant "High Noon" feel of most DoD:S maps. Also, there's a high number of daylight maps that empty servers, so I don't think it all has to do with the lighting. I think it comes down to the quality of the map and the gameplay much more so than the lighting.

Originally posted by Dash
And as far as I know, WW2 spanned over more than 5 years and it wasn't constant rain and sorrow during all that time...

True. But neither was it perpetually noon. That's the best way I can find to describe the lighting of most of the stock maps. A little variety wouldn't kill anyone.

Bleh, it's a moot point, you'll all have dod_rive to test :) Then we can see how gloomy maps fair in this day and age...

PS: the above sentence was a shameless plug on my part :)

Originally posted by Furyo
PS: the above sentence was a shameless plug on my part :) It works though!:p

Anyone know if the rain in the video I posted above is feasible?

I used to love old dark maps like dod_thunder, zafod, etc. But when I tried the gamma controls of the video card, I noticed why people dont enjoy dark maps anymore. If its dark... in 20 seconds you change that. You can even save profiles.

The challenge actually is to make a dark atmosphere, but not a dark map. Like someone said here, its a good time to study hollywood decisions.

A good dark map has just the right ambient lighting to make it seem lighter then it is and gets rid of alot of the really dark corners you can't see those pesky campers in.

The mod team I'm working on atm has one really well lit night map, theres not to many extremely dark corners (My monitors brightness is crapping out and it's still fine on it). It all comes down to how the mapper lights his map and the layout helps on keeping people around aswell.

Well, 20 posts later.... just for the record.

dod_pier_b1 is AWESOME. I love that map.