I've had time to play and enjoy SOMA and also had time to study HPL3.
HPL3 is vastly more demanding on power and time than HPL2. Texturing requires more demanding formats ( 2048x2048 standard UV resolutions .dds DXT1 to DXT5 for diffuse and specular materials depending on what you think looks best and 3dc .dds normals.) If you want things to look good in the engine you really have to knuckle down and work hard, otherwise you will get a half-arsed result for half-arsed work. Which means baking AO and blending it in with the diffuse texture - I'd bake normals but it's not really necessary for my low-poly modles.
The coding seems to be a hell of a lot more flexible and resembles more of C++ with some Angel script mixed in for simplicity. I believe I have made sense of the code which is very promising and quite relieving too.
I've spent the past week or so working on something - it's not Hollow I regret to say. It is something I had in mind for far longer than Hollow and now that I have the experience behind me I think I will be able to take on its artistic demands. The premise to what I have in mind is going to be very much like hollow so this could perhaps be a more advanced version of Hollow.
It has a long way to go and no specific date to completion - if ever there will be one - it does have a name but I'll keep it a secret until I think it's fitting enough and I have a screenshot. Bare in mind that this is only the beginnings of a room and there is so much more to come of it.
As I'm putting a lot of time and effort into this, updates here should become a bit more consistent.
Here are some development screenies too.
This window asset consists of 3 modular assets: a frame, the window frame, and the window itself.
This is the window and window frame alone.
The UV for the window frame - hand painted textures with some blending methods from some textures I get from CGTextures.
That is all for now, I'm glad I finally got around to writing this, I don't know how many people come and look at this page but hopefully there are some people that are interested in what I'm making.
