The Titanic Mod brings people at one of the most detailed and accurate free 3D recreations of the Titanic ever made. It puts the player in a whole new storyline for the game Mafia.
Here we go, the metal framing I posted earlier is a mail bag rack used inside the mail hold. These kinds of racks were generally found in any area where mail duty was executed such as post offices, but also trains and in this case steamers. All opened bags were hung inside this frame for filling. By tilting the frame it was easier to add or remove any bags behind the front row. Little tags could be inserted above each bag. I assume these would display it's destination.
A guiderail in the front could be used for a wooden tray where the designated mail was laid onto.
Awesome! These models are getting better and better. And now imagine working with a recent engine - you can have 4x the polycount and it won't as much as cough.
I like the individual detail and that you made more than 1 bag model to keep the diversity. Aren't you sometimes afraid to lose track with all the models and textures you create? I am working on a spacestation, interior and exterior and already get so many textures. And that is despite using Master Materials in Unreal 4 and having many shared Texture Atlases (is that the right word?). I imagine if you switched to Unreal or Unity, you would have no problem getting to work and feeling right at home. But the amount of assets and textures you have for a project this size must be overwhelming, sometimes.
Also: I like your little guessing games in the updates. Cool feature :)!
Why are so many people desperate to get them to move to some crap modern engine. Theres nothing wrong with LS3D, I would much rather it stayed using this engine.
Thank you!
There are indeed thousands of textures and hundreds of models involved in the making. I usually keep the textures for a certain area separate until it's finished, and then move them together with the rest once the area is done and ready to be merged with the entire scene. To separate individual textures from the gigantic collection I add acronyms in each texture name. For example, all textures for the mail hold are named MH..., all textures for the cargo hold are CH... etc. This makes it easier to find them back. But it's still a big mess sometimes :P
I like the new engines, but i really loved the way Mafia looked and felt when playing. So it will be a real treat to play something new again in Mafia, like this great new game(mod).
i don't always comment, but, am tracking for a very long time now and do read each new news update that you place Mr Robville!!!
Keep up the great work!
(and you will indeed have a HUGE library with models, textures, souds, etc)
Leon
LS3D does indeed have some sort of unique feel to it. Maybe it's the diffuse lighting, maybe it's the instant response walking controls, I don't know. It's just fun to mod especially with all modding tools that are out today. Besides, seeing my favourite ship in my favourite game is what no other game engine can accomplish. :P
I am curious though how all of these objects look with advanced lighting and shading and such.
I never suggested using another engine, I just meant it from a 3d Modeler's standpoint. I know when I started using Unreal 3 and then UDK (ten years ago???), I was frustrated at having to work so low-res and tried to shave off polygons wherever necessary. That coined me very deeply and now that I work with Unreal 4 it doesn't really matter any more. What matters now is the material and UV-Otimisation in order to get fewer materials and more instanced materials.
So, I just meant to say that you can go pretty wild with the models these days, bevel every edge on a hardsurface and bake a normal map on top of that. It makes our models look nicer, even though they looked nice already on those engines that didn't have the performance of the current generation of Engines.
Absolutely. I've attempted some high polygon models in Unreal 4 as well. It runs without a hitch, plus it looks marvelous. You can definitely see that Epic has gained a lot of experience among the years with engine building. From user interface to performance to graphics, it all works like a charm. I guess for a future project I could include the Titanic just for the heck of seeing it next-gen rendered.
To be fair you didn't actually really say you should move to another engine. I think it's just the fact pretty much all the mods and indie games i watch are all for old engines, and the "Why don't you move to Unreal 4 (or whatever) like...some other game" questions always come up. I personally much prefer old game engines and very rarely play games newer than the early 2000s.
I think most people that actually request a different engine to be used (it has happened with this mod a few times as well) aren't aware of the whole purpose of a mod: being a modification. If I would stop using LS3D and switch to -let's say- Unreal 4, then there is no point in calling it a mod anymore, let alone calling it the "Mafia Titanic Mod".
Just in case, I'm not speaking of you SinKing, I was aware you simply mentioned the engine. ;)
That is not good advice, you should always optimize your models no matter if the engine is new or not, now a days hardly the limiting factor for the number of polygons a model can have falls on the engine, that was only true on older (2000/2001) engines, the true limiting factor now is the user hardware (GPU, CPU and RAM), so if you don't want your game to be playable only by the greatest and latest PC's hardware, then you should always optimize your models the most you can, without sacrificing visual fidelity of course, use the polys where they matter the most.
Of course. Keeping your models optimized is a golden rule.
A poorly optimized (Sketchup) model will both run bad in LS3D as in U4. However, an engine such as U4 is programmed differently and features way more optimization tricks than LS3D. It will therefore be easier to include high-poly models without turning into a slideshow.
That is right but i bet that LS3D does have some nice optimization tricks of its own, if not how was it able to render a large city full with AI cars and people without almost no loading screens. ;)