A8hm's Requests

[TVR]

I've been playing Nexuiz for a little while and need some help in finding the type of map I like which are castle maps.

What are all the castle or medeval maps that have been made for Nexuiz by people or are in progress of being made. Is anyone here working on such maps. If you have any of those maps or have seen some could you post a screen shot and a download link if it's complete. Also could you write what your opinions of that map are.

Finally, could we have a build a castle map making competition (only requirement is that the map be a castle or medeval?)

Thank you.

Most games have egyptian textures because people enjoy making egyptian maps from time to time. I have seen some maps with egyptian textures. I don't know what the copyright on them is. Can they be included with nexuiz (and modified) or are they not of the same license of nexuiz? If not could we create some egyptian textures that can be bundled with nexuiz and should I try?

I think Nexuiz needs to come with tree models. You cannot really create trees that look good in the editor so you must use a model. I have seen tree models in other extra maps but I think it would be good if trees came with Nexuiz because it is unknown how those other trees may be used by license.

If Nexuiz bundled high quality trees of various types and other plant life then this would increase the gamut of map types that could be created using nexuiz media without worrying about ambiguous copyrights on community created maps and models. We could have "lush" maps as other games do. Right now such maps are few and far between.

Func_door_rotating is needed as an engine improvement so we can have normal doors in some places and drawbridges and things like that which swing. There are some other functions that may be useful for some (like medeval maps) such as func_pendulum for various types of traps authors of those kinds of maps like to put in their maps.

It may also be nice to include fire in nexuiz so fireplaces and torches could be made. I think Toen had some somewhat primitive fire so if that map got into Nexuiz, and it is a very good map, we would have something more. Toen also had whimiscal models of torches and brasaiers. It also had organic undulating shaders. All these would be useful and wonderful to have in the release.

Other models which might be nice are skeletons in diffrent poses [straight, shackled with hands above head, impaled, etc), skulls, bones; ones that have no blood on them.
If need be there are probably some opensource projects which allready have made some of these.

It is good to make and bundle these things with this opensource game because it gives more material in the hands of mapmakers who build upon it.

With the mirrors is it possible to make hall of mirrors (please say yes!). Will the amount of times a mirror is allowed to reflect another mirror be set in a c_var so that people with slower rigs could set it to maybe 1 or 2 and people with great rigs could set it to 100 and get the true hall of mirror effect?
Will the creation of semi-mirror surfaces be possible like polished marble?

Also will you also create a way to make camaras and videoscreen (render to texture) this release? That will assist in modern and techno maps.

I had to consolidate the threads, because it was redundant to see 4 separate threads, when 1 would have been enough.

[divVerent]

Mirrors can never reflect other mirrors, and one mirror already halves fps. The engine could be changed to allow more - it simply is slow enough ALREADY.

[A8hm]

Mirrors can never reflect other mirrors, and one mirror already halves fps. The engine could be changed to allow more - it simply is slow enough ALREADY.

Could this be a C_var _please_!
[Number of times a mirror is allowed to reflect another mirror]

I remeber old unreal engine defaulted at three, Darkplaces can be more nimble and allow a choice.

[divVerent]

Nope.

DP is not a portal based engine like UT. It realizes mirrors by rendering multiple times. This, for each reflection, the number of scenes to render increases, which gets fps down quite much.

Portal based mirrors can't distort the image as DP's texture based ones can, but are much faster to implement (like in Unreal). However, they are not possible with the map formats the engine currently supports (which are Quake, Halflife and Quake 3 map formats). If anyone would ever implement an Unreal-style map format in the engine, portals, mirrors and multiple reflections can become possible - but with Quake-style map formats, they won't come.

[A8hm]

You stated that it could be done here:
"The engine could be changed to allow more -"

But it was slow. So why can't you make it a cvar for number of reflections that defaults to 1 and then us with better computers can increase that cvar in our configs to 2 or 8 or whatever we want. Is there a reason other then you don't have a good enough computer and therefor no one should beable to enable this eye-candy feature?

[divVerent]

Because it would be AWFULLY slow. In other words: forget it. It gets exponentially slower. We can't even default reflections to on. The rigs to allow even 2 do not exist yet.

With this multi-render approach, it simply IS that slow.

[A8hm]

If you put the cvar in now, when the rigs exist that can push enough triangles to do so, no modification will be needed to enable the hall of mirrors. There's no reason not to have the ability if it's easy enough. If it's hard to code that's diffrent.

What about the various func_xyz DP doesn't have yet [door_rotating _pendulum and a few others, aswell as settings for deathboxes /diffrent types of deaths and render to texture for cameras.

(Also: don't quake maps use thousands of portals, or is the meaning of portal diffrent between the two types)

[divVerent]

It doesn't require JUST a cvar, it also means converting a static data structure into a dynamic one (like a stack). It could be done at any time, but it isn't worth the effort. If such rigs ever appear, it would be done.

Trust me: it is AWFULLY slow. You wouldn't ask this question if you had actually tried it.

And yes, the meaning of portal is different in BSP and reality in BSP and Unreal maps.

And the engine does not need to have these func_s. Implement them in the game code (nexuizsource...zip) and send them to us, and we would accept them. I don't want to implement them because I do not know how exactly they SHOULD work... someone who mapped for a game that supports them should do so so that they work right for experienced mappers.