Verrah: Valley (UPDATED v0.6 3/23/14)

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Jigen
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Re: Verrah: Valley

Post by Jigen »

Eaol wrote:
Jigen wrote:Unfortunately I'm having problems with two specific textures. Both "yav2_bldg_details" and "pol1_prop_barrel_crate10" seem to have multiple layers, but according to gimp there's only one. So I'm only able to edit part of the texture. Not sure why that is. The Yavin columns and Polis Massa crates uses these textures so they're still a little out of place at the moment.
Ok. These might be some props with alpha channels used to give the prop specular. What I do is open the texture in GIMP, go to Colors>Components>Decompose>RGBA. I usually redo specular in the way DarthD.U.C.K. (however you spell it) mentioned in one of his tutorials. When you decompose it to layers, you get a red, green, and blue layer. Now you hit Colors>Components>Compose>RGB and you get the texture in RGB format. Edit it to your liking. When done, you can either use the alpha channel in the RGBA or you can create a new alpha channel to make it shinier (I'll usually duplicate the layer in the RGB-compose (whatever the name) and then I'll desaturate the new layer and increase brightness and contrast if it's metal, then I'll copy this; then I'll add a layer mask to the original layer and then paste the modified layer in, and apply the layer mask; this results in an image very similar to how it looked when you first opened the file, the more opaque parts being shinier in-game than the less opaque).

Yeeah.

Also, try getting the lights on your map to give off specular, it's a neat effect.
YES, thanks for the info I will get right on that. :D
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Re: Verrah: Valley

Post by Eaol »

Correction: When I said you'll get a Red, Blue, and Green layer, from RGBA, I forgot to mention you also get Alpha, but you'd notice that right away. All else I said I think is correct.
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Re: Verrah: Valley

Post by Jigen »

Eaol wrote:Correction: When I said you'll get a Red, Blue, and Green layer, from RGBA, I forgot to mention you also get Alpha, but you'd notice that right away. All else I said I think is correct.
Much appreciated, all of the props match together now. I think I'm just going to wait on editing the specular for the moment since I'm very close at this point with only planning, barriers and hint nodes left and I don't want to start anything in between just yet.

EDIT:
The planning, barriers and hint nodes are going really well. I placed down a basic plan for now and I'll smooth it out tomorrow. Barriers are definitely time consuming, but I started to pick up speed the more I put in. One question though regarding connections, would small, medium and huge be referring to vehicles? I know huge does and assumed medium, but would small be for say the AT-RT or likely the speederbikes? I just want to make sure I don't edit the connections incorrectly.

Hopefully I'll have these done tomorrow so I can send it out finally, but I won't rush this part so we'll see. Very soon though. :D
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Re: Verrah: Valley

Post by GAB »

Jigen wrote:One question though regarding connections, would small, medium and huge be referring to vehicles? I know huge does and assumed medium, but would small be for say the AT-RT or likely the speederbikes? I just want to make sure I don't edit the connections incorrectly.
You can check which class a vehicle falls into (Hover, medium, huge) by opening the .odf corresponding to that vehicle in the Sides folder. There's a line in the file that determines that.

Also, I don't know whether you have tried this or not, but have you considered playing around with the HDR and Blur effects in your map's .fx file? Maybe your new rainy environment can greatly benefit from the results you might get.

And great work so far! I'm looking forward to this one.
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Re: Verrah: Valley

Post by Jigen »

I can finally breathe a sigh of relief, v0.6 is out! I've updated the first post with all of the new information, screenshots and download link. Have a look and let me know what you think!

Also, I'd like to sincerely thank all of you who have replied here with advice and compliments. It was all very, very helpful and I'm extremely happy with the turnout. I'll be sure to give proper credit in the readme I eventually make. :D
GAB wrote:You can check which class a vehicle falls into (Hover, medium, huge) by opening the .odf corresponding to that vehicle in the Sides folder. There's a line in the file that determines that.

Also, I don't know whether you have tried this or not, but have you considered playing around with the HDR and Blur effects in your map's .fx file? Maybe your new rainy environment can greatly benefit from the results you might get.

And great work so far! I'm looking forward to this one.
Thanks GAB, turned out every vehicle was medium sized. I actually dug through Kamino and Felucia's FX files for more weather effects and copied over the HDR line located in Felucia's. So it's there in my FX file but I wasn't sure if I needed to edit anything else. I looked through the documentation but it only described what each line does. I also tried to add the Blur line from Kamino, but after I munged the screen was black and I couldn't spawn in.
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Re: Verrah: Valley (UPDATED v0.6 3/23/14)

Post by Eaol »

A few suggestions. I noticed the rain and lightning was silent; I'm sure you can do something through the lua and the Kamino sound .lvl to resolve this. Also, for some reason, when I spawned in, I had 750 reinforcements while the enemy (CIS) had 1500, and more command posts than I did. I don't know if this was intentional, so I thought I'd mention it just in case.

The props were reskinned, but I still think they're too much like Mygeeto and Yavin and (Kashyyyk?). I'd probably add a lot of specular to them through hex editing if necessary, and then change their textures to be more metallic and change the character of the buildings in that way (or something - it's just an idea - shiny but dirty buildings and destroyed structures in a forest, the thunder rolling in the background). It's a neat looking map though.
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Re: Verrah: Valley (UPDATED v0.6 3/23/14)

Post by Jigen »

Eaol wrote:A few suggestions. I noticed the rain and lightning was silent; I'm sure you can do something through the lua and the Kamino sound .lvl to resolve this. Also, for some reason, when I spawned in, I had 750 reinforcements while the enemy (CIS) had 1500, and more command posts than I did. I don't know if this was intentional, so I thought I'd mention it just in case.

The props were reskinned, but I still think they're too much like Mygeeto and Yavin and (Kashyyyk?). I'd probably add a lot of specular to them through hex editing if necessary, and then change their textures to be more metallic and change the character of the buildings in that way (or something - it's just an idea - shiny but dirty buildings and destroyed structures in a forest, the thunder rolling in the background). It's a neat looking map though.
Yep, I designed it for Empire/Clones to start with one control point because early on I felt they were advancing faster than I wanted with two control points. I also added 150 more reinforcements as an experiment hoping to add to the overall feeling of being outnumbered. I started high and can dial it down if it turns out to be too unfair.

As for the lightning and rain, that's probably because I'm using Utapu (CW) and Kashyyyk's (GCW) .lvl in my lua. I did this because I've been having issues getting my own sound .lvl to work properly and these covered my vehicle sounds. Is it possible to add in the proper lines from Kamino or would I need my own sound .lvl? That's been the biggest struggle for me throughout this, but if it's necessary then I'll see what I can do. I did actually have it working at one point, but something went wrong as soon as I had it.

I did the best I could manage with reskinning, but I understand that in the end they're still what they are. I'll try to keep touching it up though.
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Re: Verrah: Valley (UPDATED v0.6 3/23/14)

Post by Eaol »

I added the sounds for the moisture vaporators in my Mos Nytram map (new version, nobody's seen it yet) just by having it load in the tatooine sound .lvl file. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure if I had Mygeeto buildings I'd be able to get the Mygeeto building sounds just by adding in that .lvl to the .lua.

EDIT:
Jigen wrote:I did the best I could manage with reskinning, but I understand that in the end they're still what they are. I'll try to keep touching it up though.
If you want, I might be able to try something if you can let me know which files you need to change.
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Re: Verrah: Valley (UPDATED v0.6 3/23/14)

Post by Jigen »

Eaol wrote:I added the sounds for the moisture vaporators in my Mos Nytram map (new version, nobody's seen it yet) just by having it load in the tatooine sound .lvl file. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure if I had Mygeeto buildings I'd be able to get the Mygeeto building sounds just by adding in that .lvl to the .lua.

EDIT:
If you want, I might be able to try something if you can let me know which files you need to change.
Sure, the mygeeto tga's I'm using are these:
Hidden/Spoiler:
myg1_bldg_stump
myg1_bldg_spiral_small01_lowrez
myg1_bldg_spiral_small01
myg1_bldg_lowrez
myg1_bldg_energy_outpost01
myg1_bldg_energy_outpost02
myg1_bldg_energy_collector01
myg1_bldg_energy_collector02
myg1_bldg_energy_collector07
If you'd like to try something out I'm cool with that. :)

As for my missing sounds, I've decided that I'm just going to get my own sound .lvl working again. At the moment I'm using Kashyyyk (GCW) and Utapau (CW), and these cover all of my vehicle and turret sounds. However, I would like to use Yavin for CW and Endor for GCW so I'll have more appropriate footstep sounds.

So, this is the situation I'm looking at then. If I use Endor for GCW, that will cover the ATST. So I'll need sounds for the Rebel combatspeeder, particle cannon turrets, IFT-T, and beam turrets (which I believe use the same sfx as the IFT). For CW, Yavin will cover the IFT-X, beam turrets, and particle cannon turrets. I would only need to fill in for the AT- RT's and AAT's.

That just leaves the rain and lightning. I dug around in Kamino's .sfx and found this which I believe is what I'm looking for:
Hidden/Spoiler:
// Ambient Environment ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
effects\emt_kamRainGutter_01.wav -resample ps2 11025 xbox 22050 pc 22050
effects\emt_kamRainGutter_02.wav -resample ps2 11025 xbox 22050 pc 22050
#ifplatform xbox pc
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_clap_01.wav -resample xbox 16000 pc 22050
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_clap_02.wav -resample xbox 16000 pc 22050
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_clap_03.wav -resample xbox 16000 pc 22050
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_roll_01.wav -resample xbox 11025 pc 22050
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_roll_02.wav -resample xbox 11025 pc 22050
..\..\global\effects\emt_thunder_roll_03.wav -resample xbox 11025 pc 22050
#endifplatform xbox pc
#ifplatform ps2
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_clap_01.wav emt_thunder_clap_01 -resample ps2 11025
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_clap_02.wav emt_thunder_clap_02 -resample ps2 11025
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_clap_03.wav emt_thunder_clap_03 -resample ps2 11025
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_roll_01.wav emt_thunder_roll_01 -resample ps2 6000
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_roll_02.wav emt_thunder_roll_02 -resample ps2 6000
..\..\global\effects\em2_thunder_roll_03.wav emt_thunder_roll_03 -resample ps2 6000
#endifplatform ps2
Can anyone confirm this?

Not to make this post too long, but I should point out what went wrong in the first place. Before I posted this thread, I was able to recently get my sound .lvl working with AT-RT and AAT sounds. After that, I wanted to add in STAP's and barc speeders as well. I used Kashyyyk's .lvl to fill those in for me, but in game they were silent. Eventually I figured out that it was a memory issue after removing my own created sound .lvl from the CW lua. So I removed the STAP's and barc speeders, put vrh.lvl back into my lua, cleaned sound and munged. Once I did this I noticed that the global.lvl and shell.lvl were gone from my LVL_PC/sound folder, and vrh.lvl was only 1kb. Went in game and they were now silent. That was when I decided to use Utapu for now so I could move on, but since I'll need rain and lightning sounds I'm gonna try to figure this out again.

EDIT
I think I realize what's happening regarding the above. When I pulled the .sfx file for the AAT and ATRT from Utapua and Felucia respectively, these blocks didn't actually contain everything. I first noticed this when comparing the Hailfire/Snail Tank .sfx located in Utapu (where they are NOT playable) and Felucia (where they ARE playable). I opened up the AAT's .snd file and while comparing that with what was in my .sfx, sure enough there were indeed missing .wav's. This one for example:

Code: Select all

..\..\cw\effects\wpn_droideka_blaster_fire.wav  -resample xbox 20000 pc 44100
cis_hover_aat.snd
Hidden/Spoiler:
[code]#ifplatform pc
SoundProperties()
{
Name("cis_weap_hover_aat_cannon_fire");
Group("weapons");
Inherit("veh_weapon_template");
Pitch(0.75);
SampleList()
{
Sample("wpn_droideka_blaster_fire", 1.0);

}
}
#endifplatform pc[/code]
I'm confident the rest of my files were setup properly, so once I begin moving on the next version soon, this will be the first thing I look into.

EDIT:
Just wanted to post a quick update. The map is still progressing, I've got a good sized list of things I'm going through, and finally some great news on sounds. It appears the munge.bat I was using was actually outdated, because just now I was able to get the sounds for the AT-RT to munge perfectly. Now, I'm locating the other .wav's that are missing for the vehicles I need and with any luck I can get those sorted out soon. Definitely feeling a lot more confident that's for sure!

EDIT:
Actually, I've decided to stick with Kashyyyk for GCW as every vehicle is covered already. So instead the rest of my focus will be on adding in the sounds for lightning and rain.
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