Off Topic Productions

justanotherfan wrote:Thanks for fixing the tire. It's oddly been a big issue for me. DX's ugly "tire" is a flawed representation of an inaccurate interpretation of how a tire looks. Even octagonal tires wouldn't look that crap. Immersion can snap like a twig when game renderings casually violate reality, like a square sun. Before this, the "What are you trying to show me?" object was the buckyball basketball, which was at least aspirational, and would be way more fun in real life.
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I'm hoping the maps don't change much, that an NV player or DX player will stand in the same spot. Still, that's talk, not work, and I'm enjoying the progress.

They actually thought the same as you for the PS2 version and modeled a very round tyre for it. The worst example of this kind of thing was a basket ball in the game Boiling Point: Road to Hell. It wasn't even a low poly sphere - it was a box.

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Decided to put a thin border around the top of the wall in the shootrange room in Tong's Lab.
Got to the final wall and noticed it's slanted.
And I can't get the brush to line up properly. This just went from a simple job to an OCD nightmare.

Btw, I wouldn't have just added the brush as is, I would have deinterected it. I made it bigger in the hope i would be able to line it up correctly.

What? What the hell are you trying to do? That slanted wall lines up perfectly with the grid! Just use vertex editing

I've never been able to get Vertex editing to work for me so I didn't even consider that as an option.
I guess now's the time to have another crack at it.

Well what's the problem? I'm sorry to say but everything you make in UnrealEd is going to be shit if you don't know how to edit vertices.

It's really simple, say you want to edit your build brush (as it looks like from that picture) - just make sure it's selected (bright red, not dark red), then right click on one of the tiny squares at each corner, this should put a small cross on it. Then you hold down ALT and the right mouse button and drag your mouse around to move the vertex. It'll snap to the grid. All of this is from memory mind, I don't have UnrealEd installed and working right now, so I can't check to see if I got it right.

Make sure you do this in one of the 2D windows, and if you're just making shapes up, be careful not to accidentally create something that couldn't physically exist in the real world, as this creates BSP errors.

I definately made that out more difficult than I thought.
Cheers Jonas.

It was the ALT key bit I was missing, no wonder it's never worked.

I tried to mix the original Deus Ex BSP model with what real New York payphones look like. Hopefully this is a decent compromise:

Looks great Dave ,

i hope it also fits (appropriate) in game .

Sweet. Can some graffiti be thrown on? Maybe a little rust? Just ideas, looks good already.

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nerdenstein wrote:

tongslabineditor1.gif (753 Bytes) Viewed 11399 times

Got to the final wall and noticed it's slanted.
I made it bigger in the hope i would be able to line it up correctly.

Quit posting porn, nerdenstein.

I was going to add graffiti but with how common these are, it'd quickly get repetitive. Not that the graffiti in New York isn't already extremely repetitive, but I'd like to avoid adding to it

Oh, good point. Yeah, the same graffiti tag showing up across the world's payphones would be stupid.

Great work dave. I really like the new light posts.

DaveW wrote:I was going to add graffiti but with how common these are, it'd quickly get repetitive. Not that the graffiti in New York isn't already extremely repetitive, but I'd like to avoid adding to it

Is this a mesh or a brush? If its a mesh you could have a second texture for graffiti. Either way, great work. Don't see how it wouldn't fit into the game. I have not played in a while, but don't some of the public phones have an "Out of order" sign on them or am I thinking of something else?

I'll be away for the next two or three days, hopefully I'll have most of Hong Kong to upload soon after that, although this coming week might be somewhat strange for me.

I have a tendency to get side tracked, and the whole canal street thing has been bugging me more than a little. It's not that they don't fit or that they involve tardis like geometries (that's pretty much standard), it's that they're so damned close to fitting it feels like a tweak or two here and there and they'd make perfect sense. I think I finally figured out (litterally minutes ago) why that is: I don't think they were originally different maps.

Not that this makes any difference to anyone, but it looks to me like what happened is that originally you were supposed to be able to walk right from the canal onto the street. There was no building between the two, you didn't have to walk through a tunnel. And, obviously, no map transition. Then, whenever it was decided that they should be different maps, the little building that separates the two was added. We get a taste of what the map would have looked like at that point in the Versalife skybox. After that the maps were separated and went their separate ways which, among other things, resulted in different additions being made to the building in each of the canal and street maps.

If the building separating the maps was never intended to be there in the first place everything lines up quite nicely and it all makes sense (assuming some changes took place after the maps were separated.) It doesn't line up nicely enough that they could be combined again without the use of teleporters or warp zones, but you can see why things are the way they are.

So anyway, getting side tracked trying to figure out what the hell was up with that is part of the reason that I don't have Hong Kong done right here right now. The other part has to do with depression, and since any discussion of that is itself depressing (and because I doubt anyone here is all that interested in my mental health) it's probably not worth talking about.

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Quick clarification, is it correct that there are no changes requested for the canal? Or am I missing something? (There's obviously that place where a brush sticks out farther than it should and a BSP hole, so I'll fix those if I can.)

On the subject of BSP Holes, there's some weirdness in the maps some of which clearly serves no purpose (because, for example, it is impossible to see) I'm going to try to cut down on some of that in hopes that that will cause the game to be less breaky.

Have not checked the whole thread, but while we are on fixing the stoneage coffee maker, what about replacing the cooker to stop it looking flat on top and making microwave look like you can use it instead of being a block that looks if the front is painted on? I can't remember if you only see the top of the cooker (hob) or all of it as textures (front with doors I mean)