AC-Map Design/Clipping etc.

[3XIX]

Hehe, sounds like you got it now. Welcome to cube mapping! :)

You usually will always try to build the majority of your map with geometry and only use mapmodels when geometry isn't sufficient to resemble what you want to create. Mostly when things need to be fine and detailed rather than bulky and square-ish.

Actually, for the most time mapmodels used to be the only way to get higher resolutions. I guess that's what you still had in mind. But with v1.3 we've finally put that constraint to history and even can edit all the assets of a map on the fly in the editor now. One of my favourite new features.

It's quite a joy to use custom assets now, especially mapmodels which can be attributed and automatically added to the editor menus. Great stuff. All in all there's plenty of new possibilities when it comes to mapping and 'high' fidelity visuals are actually feasible these days, except for lighting though.

Talking about lighting. I guess what you experience with the different values is caused by light entities. As far as I understand light entities require the impacted faces to be subdivided and thus raise the amount of world quads. That's where /ambient comes into play. Using a sensible ambient light value allows to keep the amount of light entities low, which results in better performance.

Thinking about it, it would be nice if we could exclude areas from the ambient effect using tags, just like the clip tags. This way you could have indoor areas lit differently, darker that is. Those areas usually would be concealed by solids anyway. Maybe worth a feature request...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to your map, but don't feel hurried, I'm a patient person.

----- Edit -----

There's something I somehow kept forgetting to mention in my previous posts. AC has an auto download feature for custom content, as you may know, which however is limited to 2MB max per package. Package meaning:

• Textures: single image file
  
• Sounds: single sound file
  
• Mapmodels: the 'lowest' object folder containing all skins, config and the md3 file
  

You should keep an eye on that, so players won't need to manually download the files somewhere. Unfortunately we have no frontend-service for the package server at the moment, so you will have to reach out to XRD (pm, discord) and ask to upload your contents to packages.cubers.net.

So, things became even worse as before.
While we would safe diskspace with geometry (not less than models, explain later) we will have the problem of having less variation, when making a wall with geometry and applying a texture onto it, it would display a container (in my case 8 cubes high) and after that it would "redo" the same, leading to same color containers in height, i found a way around that by just putting 2 containers colors on top in a 1024x1024 texture, still that reduces the quality more and isnt really the solution aswell.

Then there is the thing which will become an issue for further steps, when a texture is asigned to a wall, it well also asign it to the left and right face of the first cube, technically it wasnt a problem when i made the first containers, i just made them so that they fit seamless like the container would have 4 exact same corners, why thats a problem now, well it all isnt when graphic doesnt matter, but for the project and the detail i had in mind when starting this its not possible this way. I looked at my first screenshot i posted in here and no matter if yours or my versions which came later, all been worse in graphic, not because of lower textures, mainly due to having less variation due to less different container faces/color and probably the biggest part of all shadows, which represent that there is lighting in the scene, obviously the first screenshot with shadows we came across the shadow problem which appiers with models over "head/camera" position but for me thats not a reason to not have shadows, cause high res textures but no shadows...then we wont have to start updating graphics.

Now lets see what i´ve had done, and remember i sometimes searching for hours to find container textures, adding them, then finding out their shit and wouldnt fit into the theme (the more you change colors with photoshop the more unrealistic it gets) basicly the yellow container is best example, that was grey first same as some others like the red container which was pinkish, so things often look simple and i understand...containers what could take so long...well besides color even the container build in reality makes a difference if doesnt fit to the others placed. And yea, i also have a job and not that much time to spend on it. Following screenshots should be seen as more tests, this engine causing alot of trouble, you might also noticed.

The clean "neutral" container where i tought it could fit, lacks huge detail in colors, specificly for a map based of containers.



Now we have containers back with more color differences and it already gives a much better feeling but however you quickly notice the different red containers with shiny red stripes, thats an example of having not fitting ones for the scene. But what else is missing, or what does the brain say...containers but no door face? If door face, no back face? left and ride side looking same? And the overall feeling that the light itself might fit to the skymaps but not having darker spots or in other words shadows...and obviously all containers seem to be in line way to perfect.




Also the geometry issue happens without any entity placed, no light whatsoever, technically i dont know what happens anyway if the choosen walls getting merged, cubes s 8 verts each, lets say selecting 1x8 line if it would keep the verts then it would be 8x8 verts, so basicly 64verts only for that wall-line (maybe only 8 but with triangles) but again dunno the code for that.

To the part of having ambient lights excluded from specific parts would help for some "indoor" maps but i believe turning it the other way around could be better performance wise, meaning not using light entitys only ambient light and darken the spots where you wouldnt have light in reality, pretty much like shadows, since its basicly that in reality

I also dont know if shadows could be fixed for a map like this, besides that it would always double vertices, leading to higher gpu usage (scales with hardware).

Stencil shadows, you notice some container faces are darker others light


Now my idea, which might would lead to around double diskspace needed, but still not doubled vertices
And yea might be a pain to do it for a full map, but we sadly cant bake lighting/shadows in here (you should see some baked exr´s from some games, they eat up 200MB for a map)



But as you see i would need all container faces seperate to add fake shadow to it, for models you could simply render the model and using its oppacity and placing it on the specific surface/ground.

My plan now is to combine my first method with your method, i believe thats the only way to get shadows, obviously 4k was never needed, scaling it down to 2k will do a big difference and im pretty sure even with fake shadows we max end up with 10 MB, single files obviously wont reach 2MB (i think only some 4k textures with 100% detail level could) or if they´re not jpg, but for things like skymap we can "trick", there it obviously makes a difference having 512x512 vs 1024x1024 but 2048x2048 should be the way to go there (we can cut the bottom of to effectivly have 2048x1024 as ive stated before and you can check, if you have an 2048x2048 color texture and you make 50% of it black it also will shrink in diskspace while still beeing 2k. Skymap was around 5MB down to 900kb.

So if someone thinks that 3 or 4th version? is good...and you wouldnt want shadows, just write it...but for me its not how it should be [funny when created by yourself^^] 

It been a learning process so far, next version should be better

Edit:

Here is why fake shadows would be a problem when using geometry to display containers, wont be able to only overlay a shadow to the "face" or side