Kothlis: Sea Haven [Final Version Released]

[willinator]

The moons look great! However, they are a little too purple. On Kashyyyk: Islands, where I presume those are from, there is a sunset throwing purple lights on the clouds and atmosphere in front of the moons. On your map they don't appear until night, so there shouldn't be any color distortion on them. On a similar vein, AQT is right about the night sky. The Coruscant sky isn't unnatural, it's just wrong for this environment. In cities, the night sky is not its natural color because of the millions of lights shining into it, hence the purple-ish sky. For an island resort in the middle of the ocean, the sky would probably be a lot cleaner.

[PRECISION]

YOU BETTER RELEASE THIS!!! I have benn waiting for someone to do a resort!

EDIT: You are doing normal sides right?

[thelegend]

For the night sky. As willinator said it should be clean. So it might has the same color as the ocean because they mirror themself. or completly black with a few clouds and a few stars.

[GAB]

Ok. I made the sky texture much darker, removed the purple from the moons, modified their texture's alpha channel to prevent the stars behind it from appearing, tweaked the world lighting to match the changes and got this (screenshots are from the same angle and position as the previous night ones):

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I guess we've made an improvement .

Also, you may have noticed that now some palm trees have a light coming from below. They call it uplighting and is basically putting a light at the feet of something to give some nice visuals. I did it in ZeroEditor and I think it looks satisfactory:

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Not every single palm tree I put the light had the light rendered ingame. I think it might have something to do with the position of the light and I'm fairly sure Zero Engine/Battlefront are starting to throw in the towel too, so some optimizations and cuts will probably have to be made.

EDIT: You are doing normal sides right?

Yes, units will be the stock ones. BFX and DT2 might be added as well.

[thelegend]

This is

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AMAZING

It looks so awesome. I love all the lights, the sky, the atmosphere...I can not wait playing on this maps. Good job.

[PRECISION]

BFX will be a nice add. I'm in love with this map already. I want to play it right NOW.

[AQT]

The new nighttime looks spectacular!

The different color uplightings are a really nice touch. That second screenshot would work great for a Christmas card from the tropics. :d

[PRECISION]

Can I beta test?

[GAB]

There will be no beta testing for now. I'll let everyone know when it is about to begin.

[PRECISION]

Awwwwww ok

[Anakin]

Wow that is great. Dt2 would be awesome

[THEWULFMAN]

It all looks fantastic. I don't have anything to add that AQT, Marth or anyone else has said before. My only suggestion would be to just forgo the "fx" stars and use a skydome with stars on it and a glow flag. I'm sure I experimented with that a few years ago and it looked good. If you need a good starscape texture I can hit you up, just let me know.

[PRECISION]

Im so excitied for this! Im so happy someone FINALLY is making a resort

[Generalfacu]

Night looks awesome

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I love the three moons

[GAB]

New minor update. The statues also got uplit!

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To be honest, if fairly surprised Battlefront/ZeroEngine are able to output this kind of thing. On the other hand, I'm also extremely frustrated that it is also not being able to handle all this beauty it can output . Some of my palm trees uplight disappeared after this update and the Kashyyyk light pillars' light is also not affecting the walkway properly sometimes.

I looked around for methods to circumvent this problem. One that I saw was vertex painting, which seemed like baking the lighting into the model. I've never done it and I'm very clueless about this, so if anyone could explain this for me it would be more than welcome.

Another problem I'm having is the object count. Some objects flicker quickly between the hirez model and the lowrez one. It happens only with smaller, low poly models. If this problem is related to object count (objects placed in the editor) I believe that merging objects would remedy this. If the issue is caused by polygon count then polygon reduction would be needed, specially in the palms which are fairly high poly.

Nonetheless, I'd like to hear the community's thought and solutions on these problems. They are the only two issues I'm currently having and any input from anyone will be really welcome.

Let GT make Battlefront/ZeroEngine out put their full potential. I'm counting on you guys.

[Locutus]

Beautiful screenshots once again!

Regrading the flickering, you could try tempering with the skyfile (although I'd consider it difficult finding better values).
It might also help to increase the bounding box of the affected models. This way the lowpoly appears later.

[Kingpin]

When I made my sketchup models, they always flickered like that, but I did not have a LowRez, so they just went *poof*. I am not sure what causes this, but if you find out, let me know

[GAB]

Well, I've been investigating this flickering problem for a while. It follows me since I added the dawn/dusk/night variants to the 2.0 version of my Alzoc 3 map.

Here are some e-mails from a talk I had with psych0fred about this issue:

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[quote="GAB"]Hello Again Fred, GAB here.

I'm contacting you again because I'd like to have your inputs regarding a problem that I'm frequently having when making maps for SWBF2. Some objects keep constantly flickering between the hirez model and the lowrez model.

I'd like to know why it happens and how to solve this problem. Some guys on Gametoast also had this problem but managed to solve it by adding a lowrez model to their object, but in my case there is already a lowrez and the objects still flicker.

Also, I tried tweaking the NearSceneRange settings in the.sky file to see if it solved the problem and to my surprise, it did (the framerate even increased substatially and the map felt much more stable). But then I added a set of new objects and all that stability went away and now I'm here emailing you.

I'd just like to understand why the objects flicker and what each of the four values in NearSceneRange do. Also, if you could give me overall tips on how to make a map more stable are very welcome. My map has a lot of water and objects by the way. Maybe your knowledge could come handy in that as well.

Anyway, thanks for the attention.[/quote]
He replied:
[quote="psych0fred"]NearSceneRange (start min, start max, end min, end max)
The nearscenerange is the distance from the observer that the hirez models display at. The reason there are four values is so the transitions between hirez and lowrez is smooth and not sudden so all objects don’t pop on the screen as hi-rez as you move about. Think of it as a visual fade. The more objects you have on screen the more are using up memory and that causes flickering as the game tries to display as many objects in hirez as possible. This can happen because it’s out of memory or because you are standing on the edge of a hard Nearscenerange line.

The most you can do to stabilize maps is use fewer objects and make sure your settings are right. Tight close spaces versus outdoor maps allow you to manage memory best, but when you are outdoors and can see to the horizon the game engine has to track and display all of those visible objects. The fewer visible objects or lower-rez objects the better it will perform. Fewer units helps too. Always use low-rez and hi-rez models, be strict in following the model polygon count, minimize the amount of foliage - those bushes are all objects. [/quote]

From what I understood, the object count seems to be the issue. The engine seemingly just can't handle the amount of individual object placed in the world. What bugs me is that some stock maps also seem to feature lots of objects but they perform fine.

[Marth8880]

I had the exact same issue when I revamped PIO. The issue was the trees, which were all rather high-poly. Try lowering the poly count of your trees and see what happens.

[Kingpin]

Well, generally, Sketchup models have a VERY low poly count, as just a rule of thumb.