Preach are u the aerowalk maker? 

Got this name before I knew about Preacher, the author of that map, otherwise I wouldn't have gone for something so confusing : - ). 

hehe thks ;) 

and yeah, that uv thing is disappointing. do split edges show with obvious horror in-game, like with sparklies and etc?

I bet if you were smart about your character design (and exported a base frame that was terrifically mangled) you could make the id method work pretty well. Maybe I'll go with that instead of trying to fight it. 

but lighting doesn't get interpolated smoothly over the edges like it normally does. it's not really bad though. if you look for it, you see it, but it's not 'zomg, wtf ugly!' bad. 

It's not a big problem, it's just something that's fixable in theory, and shouldn't be too hard to put into the utility I'm writing anyway. Sometimes it might even be a desirable effect, for instance if you have two materials on a mesh that's all one piece to keep the poly count down. You can split the UV's along a polygon, get a nice solid edge between the two objects, and they get shaded differently to distinguish them. Of course, you can achieve the same thing by just building them as two seperate objects in the first place... 

The lack of vertex smoothing can be easily hidden by just placing the seams in intelligent places. Developers before us have already established a nice canon of tricks like shoulder pads and thigh bracers to mask such things. The details and elements you paint into the skin can cover up such things as well.

Is the 320x200 skin size limit imposed only by modelgen/lbm, or by software quake? I'm planning on rolling targalib into the modelgen code at some point merely for my own sanity. 

I've certainly had models with 256x256 skins load ing in winquake with no trouble, and I don't see anything bar memory being an upper limit. Best in fact to stick with power of 2 skinsizes for the sake of GL engines, as they'll get resampled to the nearest size anyway. 

I was thinking a 128x256 or a 256x512 for ease of acceptance with the half-shift thing.

Ok, this is going to be fun methinks. :) 

You're a fucking weirdo :)

The scary thing is, I am on MSNger a lot... 

"Left for dead"

Its a 4 player survival co-op game with 4 human players vs a city of zombie hordes, sounds pretty cool, also humans can play as the zombies as well if they like.

Some (not so legal) scans are here:

http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page1.jpg
http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page2.jpg
http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page3.jpg
http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page4.jpg
http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page5.jpg
http://www.refugeecamp.co.uk/Files/l4d/page6.jpg 

That looks to have plenty of badass potential... 

 

will see... 

I do remember quite a buzz around here for a multi-player coop game and it seems that is what valve is doing, it sounds really interesting anyways! 

Looks interesting, looking forward to seeing how that plays... Only thing I regret, is that those shots don't seem to be showing any real anti-zombie weapons, like old vinyl discs, golf clubs, and lawnmowers, seems to be only fire arms at the moment, and for me any good zombie film needs to feature more... interesting, weapons (I think this is what Dead Rising did? haven't tried that). 

Here we go: http://shub-hub.quaddicted.com
The password is ilovetheshubhub
Let's see how it works :) 

Anyway, quake's modelgen requires skinmap imports as .LBM images. Having at first no clue what a .LBM image was, I set about trying to moosh the free Targa library into modelgen so I could just load those instead. Of course, being open source it has to go to extra lengths to be useless, and the targa code is mostly uncommented and the part that I'd have to deal with in particular is some arcane batch of bit-twiddling operations on variables with names like 'temp.' thanks, guys.

Deciding not to waste any more time on that I set about finding out what an LBM was, and quickly discovered that it's more or less synonymous with the Amiga .IFF format. Well, perfect, I thought. I can write IFF's.

But no, of course, it can't be perfect. I'm using the only version of photoshop (7) in which Adobe left out IFF support. Furthermore, searches for plugins turn up nothing useful because Alias decided to include their own proprietary image format in Maya and also name it IFF, so of course that's all anyone wants to concern themselves with these days, and the information for those plugins is always something to the effect of "You're going to have to get rid of your existing Amiga IFF plugin to make this one work, unless you're lunaran and you use PS7 in which case ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you." 

can be used with Id's modelgen instead of lmps.

http://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/utils/graphics_edit/id_utils/util3d.txt 

Is the source available for those? the tools source I have off id's ftp supports only lbm. 

is that I'm altering modelgen to let me import from maya, because otherwise I'd have to go through the stupid chain of hackery like export to obj and then use lightwave to convert obj to lwo, for every frame, or something equally unwieldy.

I've already got the import-from-maya changes I made to modelgen proven out and functional, but I can't test them for sure until I can import a skin. otherwise modelgen refuses to write the model. 

On Inside3d there has been talking about making an all purpose Quake modeler to address the current problems common to every one who works with Quake's mdls. It might be worth emailing Frik to see if he has any suggestions (don't know if Maya import is part of what he is addressing thought). 

My maya import is sort of just a good-enough-to-suit-me thing. I can easily write to an ascii format of my design from maya, and easily modify modelgen to parse ascii and fill in the appropriate MDL data, so that works for me. True importing from an actual .MA or .MB would be considerably harder for reasons I think I touched on in one of the other threads (the q1sp sequels one I think).

Although if I can find a good bmplib it might be simpler to work with than .tga. 

any 8-bit uncompressed format should be really easy to add support for and it's not really hard to find info about them either. 

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php