Off Topic Productions

Not a golden era until somethings playable.

Those animated textures make a huge difference. The first one looks stupid and 1990's, while the new one looks like something is actually happening. Reminds me of a rendered EKG. Also reminds me of those awful 3-frame TV screens in Deus Ex "Risiaarahara wara. Risiaarahara wara. Risiaarahara wara..."

New textures still looking awesome. Word textures remake the game world. I like the "Made in India" touch.

nerdenstein wrote:Jesus, how do you make these textures?!

I'm playing around with the Unity Engine and that doesn't include any usable textures so I'm a little stuck at the moment.

3DSMax and Photoshop! I was actually planning on releasing all the textures in case people wanted to use them for their own indie projects etc.

The animated textures are shaping up well, although I've only seen them in After Effects so far because they're very difficult to import (I have to rename each frame to make it fit with Unreal naming conventions). But they should look very cool ingame:



I've also been going through some textures and grunging them up some more, especially Hong Kong which I think should be particularly dirty to really sell it. I'm thinking for the "NV Map Pack" of adding some slight smog to the canal level.

Holy crap that's a high-quality carpet texture right there under Nicolette.

justanotherfan wrote:Also reminds me of those awful 3-frame TV screens in Deus Ex "Risiaarahara wara. Risiaarahara wara. Risiaarahara wara..."

"Take all the fat and ugly people and move them up-state."

I think one of them says something like that, just about distorted enough that it's really hard to make out.

DaveW wrote:I'm thinking for the "NV Map Pack" of adding some slight smog to the canal level.

While that is a pretty neat idea, fog in Deus Ex is complete and utter balls. It's tied into the lighting, so if you want to add fog you have to place lights all over the level and put the fog effect on them. It's hell to set up and it really ruins the ambience of the level if you're not extremely careful. Not saying it can't be done and made to look good, but if anything's likely to fuck up the performance of a level, smog is it.

OMG! I'll have to look in the thesaurus for other words I can use instead of wow. Jonas is on the money about the carpet, it's more like a tapestry. The "Made in India" on the cover is barely readable in vanilla DX... so kudos for that too.

Definitely like the idea of adding grunge since if I've had one thing that's made me uneasy it's that a lot of the new textures seem very clean.

That said, please release the ungrunged (pregrunged?) versions with the rest of the stuff so that if someone should decide to create a mod where a clean version would make sense they don't have to try to create what you've already created.

I was going to say more, but I keep on veering wildly off topic. Everything looks wonderful.

DaveW is a wizard.

Salk wrote:Now I just need to find those chains...

oh baby

chris the cynic wrote:That said, please release the ungrunged (pregrunged?) versions with the rest of the stuff so that if someone should decide to create a mod where a clean version would make sense they don't have to try to create what you've already created.

Or so you can arrive as JC in a dirty, grimy Hong Kong and announce in a deep, masculine voice: I'm here to clean up this city

Then proceed to deal with MJ12 and the triads, whereupon you switch the default NV texture files out for the clean version and admire the results of your handiwork.

Work looks incredible. I'm really excited to see these examples of the amazing work that you've done. Just wanted to let you know that this looks incredibly impressive: I'm really looking forwards to wandering around in the new Deus Ex, post NV. Sterling work.

Screenshots like DaveW's last posts make me wonder what the game will look like. There's lots of ugly for HDTP to fix, but that canal screenshot seems like it's well beyond HalfLife2 and EP2, the only metrics I can think of now. It's hard to imagine.

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I am also in favour of releasing the art openly in reusable states (unflattened TIFF layers? dunno, whatever you've got). Partly because DX is a grungy game, when the low-quality original art could make some NV players initially concerned with all the extra pixels. Also, this is texture art, so other excellent open games which look assier than DX did could benefit hugely from high-quality textures.

Well I was thinking of releasing the PSD's for the textures, seeing as most people will probably be using Photoshop. Not quite sure I agree with the HL2/EP2 quality though - perhaps if we could get static mesh's into the maps to replace the complete flat-ness of the textures we could try and rival Source

Clean/unclean versions of the textures would probably be a problem because I no longer have the source for a lot of them, so I just have a grungy version of the texture. Didn't really think as far ahead as to keep a clean version of textures.

Heh, whatever you have. And I just use TIFF for workflow since PSD is lossy, but there's no point in reencoding

DeusEx.exe will never rival Source, but HL2's developers had the same time pressures. Textures appear pretty blah. Maybe it's the desaturated HL2 look that's making HongKong and ParisChateau look so much better.

Since when is PSD lossy? It's a lossless format that stores raw pixels, hence the huge filesize?

I keep all my texturing work in PSD format, or PNG format if it has no layers.

Yeah, I wasn't aware PSD was lossy. That said, given the quality of the textures ingame with DXT compression it's not like any slight compression in the source files will have much visual impact.

Supposedly the original spec for PSD used the simplest lossless compression (Photoshop 3 Macintosh anyway), but it's changed a hell of a lot since then. Adobe never mentions its compression quality, and won't publish format specifications, so nobody ever seems to actually know. In any case, so many graphic designers use it without issue that loss couldn't be very noticeable. I could be wrong, but I'm willing to learn. 32bit PNG is definitely lossless. Here's a list of the lossless graphics formats.
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I love lossless, and even use Lagarith video, but lossy doesn't really matter. Maintaining whatever layers are left certainly does, as does the licence. So many games look so awful just because the textures are awful (and OpenArena is a great game, but look at the screenshots if you haven't. Look at the wood floor!). DaveW is modest about the quality, but just look at the far-right sign in the HongKongCanal screenshot, or any of the material textures. It's a big deal.

Really really cool Dave! Good to see you're back on it