A walk in a desert Thread - ID Tech 4 Modders

Sometimes it feels like a walk in a desert modding games.
I wonder why the id-tech4 developers especially from doom3 and quake4 projects don't work together, they could help each other with little things. There are some talents which try to do all alone and lose valuable time with that.

At last on some older engines ppl got enlighten enough to use work and help of others. I would wish it could happen here so all these doom3 and quake4 projects would come to quick releases which are focused more on originality than on getting it work some how.

You have a good point but...
back in the day "we" 've started the Creative Commons, which is basicly a small starter pack for multiplayer mods.
Containing brightskins and Weaponskins... sadly it wasnt widely used. Also because basicly there havnt't been more than 3-4 mp mods for Q4.

But why SP Mods dont to such a thing? Well, i think if everyone would share their assets, you would end up seeing the same monsters over and over again.

My 2 cents..

I've got lot of problems with Doom 3... but I've got something big WIP. it's just a plain pain on the ass with the animations and models... Had to redo all the assets again
Btw, is there anyway to reduce the size of the textures? All of them are .tga and all of these have at least per file 12 mbs...
maybe .DDS?
I tell you this because it takes like 200 mbs of textures in-game and that takes some FPS

Edited by: =FF=Sturm

DDS would save space but it would also disable the Ultra Quality feature as it uses .tga files.

You can turn some not so big/often used textures into .jpg. Might work out.

@mnemjc
DDS is not a bad quality, it's scalable in quality, it's a compressed texture with many features, it makes sure everyone can run the game perfectly smooth with it's technology, using tga for a release version would be unwise unless you can't comply to the power of two principe of dds.
To bad wikipedia has virtually no information about dds En.wikipedia.org

@mnemjc
The problem is that the most of the textures are 512x512, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048
Now with the dds it works like a charm. It has reduced the size from +200 mbs to 56 mbs

Edited by: =FF=Sturm

To make my point clear, without .tga files, the Ultra Quality setting would be useless, as its going to use the dds instead. And as u said, dds are there for mipmapping.

Is your whole mod 200mb or just your "texture archive"?

texture in-game (r_showprimitives 1). the mod size is a secret rofl (like 700 mbs)

Edited by: =FF=Sturm

@mnemjc
I'm not quite sure how you mean that.
I'm not much into doom3 modding but I know most of the engine.
I don't think they use much tga in doom3, I looked into some pk4s and I didn't find any tga so far.
In which pk4 are they exactly ?

pak004 is the texture pack, but there are more. Also, i am using them already uncompressed (from outside, you know, textures folder at mod base)

Edited by: =FF=Sturm

@chrissstrahl
Never looked into d3...i am mapping for quake4 and 97% of the textures there are .tga files. barely any .dds.
But yeah might be different in d3.

Seeing as you both are more d3 mappers/modders, i will stop here.. cause my knowledge about idtech4 is based solely on quake4.
Might be that there isnt any Ultra Quality Setting at all.... never played d3.

@mnemjc. I found ultra quality settings kinda stupid in all id tech 4 games... Seriously, prey doesnt even have it (talking about the GUI), but you can do it via console. Quake 4 sems better at performance talking, maybe i will move my mod to it or to the new wolf. Another thing is that, I don't see really differences between ULTRA and HIGH quality... other than use .tga instead of .dds... which takes lot of FPS.
------
image_anisotropy 8,16 or 32
image_lodbias -0.5
Now, these are useful, but i dont like lodbias :I
Also, ambient light is wrong in doom 3... even if the people has "fixed" it, you cant use your own GL_PROGS since it changes the interaction.vfp
Now The dark mod, is another story lol
And yes, there are a lot of .dds in doom3

Edited by: =FF=Sturm

@=FF=Sturm
TGA is 100% loss less, DDS, is not as far as I know DDS has always some loss.
TGA does not use the power of two Principe, this means that textures can use special sizes as for example 300*64 for Door.
In such a case TGA can look significant better as a DDS, since DDS needs to be streched down and saved as 256*64 pixel size.
And there was one more thing special about tga, but I forgot what it was again ...

And yes, Quake4 is incredible smooth for a id-Tech4 engine, I like it better than UT3 engine,
but I like UT3 engine better than doom3 stock engine, doom3 lags all the time and plays like
being on drugs and holding a sponge in the hand instead of a mouse, Horrible!!!!
And the sad thing is prey is even worse due to the huge levels.

I think that the 'problem' is the unified lighting and dynamic shadows because it takes to much resources. But I don't think that its the major problem.
The major problem is with the textures... I think that it is posible to do the same thing as ETQW (you know, texture sets), and you align it via surface inspector. That takes a lot of less resources
Other problem usually is the map design. Some people usually use lot of polys (to make rounded walls and stuff). There are other techniques to make 'rounded walls' or non-edge looking rooms. For example, making a decal at the edges with a blended texture. It will give the ilusion of non-blocky edges. Very good for performance.
I think that some of the new wolf maps use this last technique...

Edited by: =FF=Sturm