Forum Decline

The Dark Elf said:
* Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
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Oh momma, this is similar to lightmaps + dynamic lights together? The Doom 3 engine should've really had that, but it didn't, which was pretty annoying.
 
I suggest either reseting the post counts or removing them completely.

And crazy facist mods. Mods are sleeping too much nowadays.
 
The Dark Elf said:
# 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
# Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
# Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for three shadow techniques:

* Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
* Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers.
* Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.

# All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
# Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by Maya.
# The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.
# Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
# Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.
# Volumetric environmental effects including height fog and physically accurate distance fog.
# Extensible particle system with visual editor, supporting particle physics and environmental effects.

# Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game object, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.
# All renderable materials have physical properties such as friction.
# Physics-driven sound.
# Fully integrated support for physics-based vehicles, including player control, AI, and networking.
# Visual physics modeling tool built into UnrealEd, supporting creation of optimized collision primitives for models and skeletal animated meshes; constraint editing; and interactive physics simulation and tweaking in-editor.

# Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons.
# Animation is driven by a tree of animation objects including:

* Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
* Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
* Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
* Procedural animation controllers, implemented in C++ or UnrealScript, for game features such as having an NPC's head and eyes track a player walking through the level, or having a character animate differently based on health level and fatigue.

# Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.

# An object-oriented gameplay framework is provided supporting common game objects such as players, NPC's, inventory, weapons, and triggers.
# Rich multi-level AI system supporting path-finding, complex level navigation, individual decision making, and team-based AI.

* Pathfinding framework with full awareness of common game objects such as triggers, doors and elevators, allowing for complex navigation scenarios where an NPC will press switches, open doors, and navigate around temporary obstructions in order to reach its destination.
* Navigation framework with support for short-term tactical combat, cover, and navigation off the path network.
* Team-based AI framework suitable for first-person shooters, third-person shooters, and tactical combat games. The team-based AI framework provides support for team coordination, objective management, and long-term goals.

# AI paths are viewable and editable by level designers in UnrealEd, allowing customization and hinting.
# Visual AI Scripting Tool enabling designers to create complex interactive in-game scenarios, such as player objectives, versatile triggering of game events, and interactive cinematics.
# “UnrealMatinee", a timeline-based visual sequencing, animation, and spline path tool. Designers use this to create in-game cinematics, both interactive and non-interactive by sequencing animations, moving objects including cameras, controlling sounds and visual special effects, and triggering gameplay and AI events.

# Support for all major output formats of each platform, including 5.1 surround sound and certification-quality Dolby Digital.
# 3D sound positioning, spatialization, Doppler shift.
# Visual Sound Tool in UnrealEd gives sound designers complete control over sounds, sound levels, sequencing, looping, filtering, modulation, pitch shift, and randomization. Sounds parameters are separated from code to an extent that sound designers can control all sounds associated with gameplay, cinematics and animation sequences.
# Supports all major sound formats of each platform, including PCM, ADPCM, console-specific proprietary sound compression formats, and Ogg Vorbis.
# Support for sound streaming on consoles.

# Internet and LAN play has been a hallmark of Epic's past competitive games such as Unreal Tournament 2004. The Unreal Engine has long provided a flexible and high-level network architecture suitable to many genres of games.
# Internet and LAN play is fully supported on PC and all console platforms.
# Unreal Engine gameplay network programming is high-level and data-driven, allowing UnrealScript game code to specify variables and functions to be replicated between client and server to maintain a consistent approximation of game state. The low-level game networking transport is UDP-based and combines reliable and unreliable transmission schemes to optimize gameplay, even in low-bandwidth and high-latency scenarios.
# Client-server model supporting up to 64 players as provided. Also supports non-dedicated server (peer-to-peer mode) with up to 16 players.
# Supports network play between different platforms (i.e. dedicated PC serving console clients; Windows, MacOS and Linux clients playing together.)
# All gameplay features are supported in network play, enabling vehicle-based multiplayer games, competitive team games with NPC's or bots, cooperative play in a single player focused game, and so on. Support for auto-downloading and caching content, including cross-platform compatible UnrealScript code. This feature enables everything from user-create maps, to bonus packs, to complete game mods to be downloaded on the fly. In-game server browser GUI for finding and querying servers, keeping track of favorites, in-game chat, etc.
# A “master server” component is provided for tracking worldwide servers, providing filtered server lists to players, etc. Worldwide game stats tracking system.
# Please note that we don't provide a server or networking framework suitable for massive multiplayer games. Though such a task is a multi man-year engineering effort, several teams using the Unreal Engine have done so (including Sigil Games Online for Vanguard and NCSoft for Lineage II), demonstrating the feasibility of using the Unreal Engine as a MMORPG game client and tools pipeline, integrated with a proprietary server component.

# The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
# Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPC's, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources -- with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing. Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.
# realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.
# Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
# A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
# Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
# In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
# Every Unreal Engine license includes the right to redistribute UnrealEd publicly, enabling teams to release the content creation tools along with their game to the mod community. Mod support has been a major factor behind the success of many prominent PC games today, and we anticipate that support for PC-based mod development may be a significant factor in future console games as well.
# We provide plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.
# All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste, customizable key and color configuration, viewport management.

Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool
Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering. The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time.

# Unreal Engine 3 includes example content and 100% of the source code for the engine, editor, Max/Maya exporters, and the game-specific code for our internally-developed games.
# Extensible, object-oriented C++ engine with software framework for persistence, dynamic loading of code and content, portability, debugging.
# UnrealScript gameplay scripting language provides automatic support for metadata; persistence with very flexible file format backwards-compatibility; support for exposing script properties to level designers in UnrealEd; a GUI-based script debugger; and native language support for many concepts important in gameplay programming, such as dynamically scoped state machines and time-based (latent) execution of code.
# Modular material component interface for extending visual tool and adding new shader components usable by artists in the visual shader GUI.
# Source control friendly software architecture, scalable to large teams and multi-platform projects.
# Unreal Engine 3 is provided as one unified codebase that compiles on PC and all supported next-generation console platforms. All game content and data files are compatible across all supported platforms, for fast turnaround time between code and content development on PC, and playtesting on console or PC.
# Seek-free DVD loading optimization pass for consoles, able to load levels at >80% of DVD's physical transfer rate.
# Extensible content-streaming framework suitable for multithreaded background DVD streaming of resources and predefined groups of resources based on LOD or programmatic control.
# Unreal Engine 3 content and code are localization-aware, with a simple framework for externalizing all game text, sounds, images, and videos. Unreal Engine 3 is based on the Unicode character set, and has full support for 16-bit Unicode fonts and text input, including importing TrueType fonts into renderable bitmap fonts. Our games have shipped in 9 languages including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Typical Content Specifications
Here are the guidelines we're using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game. Different genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than hard requirements for all.

Characters

For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.

* Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
* Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
* Bones: Our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

Normal Maps & Texture maps
We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.

Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 200,000 to 1,200,000 visible triangles.

Lights
There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.

PWNED!.JPG
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Now this is quality posting right here..information filled and to the point!!

damn UE3 looks like its some kind of monster...
 
The R&S held out quite well, exept for a new visitor.
 
StardogChampion said:
Oh momma, this is similar to lightmaps + dynamic lights together? The Doom 3 engine should've really had that, but it didn't, which was pretty annoying.
Click to expand...

yup, purdy soft shadows, characters casting them onto the world, each other, self shadowing and recieving them and world casting, without it looking weird.

You seen those four short video's that were around a while back? It's more like pre-rendered lighting effects than realtime :):):)
 
ACLeroK212 said:
LOL, oh sweet irony. A thread about the decline of thread quality eventually turns into a debate about UE3 and Source.
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QFT (And, well, it made me literally laugh out loud) SIGGED.

Stop with the arguments in this thread about things that don't matter! Atleast not yet!
 
vegeta897 said:
QFT (And, well, it made me literally laugh out loud) SIGGED.

Stop with the arguments in this thread about things that don't matter! Atleast not yet!
Click to expand...

We're not arguing in this thread, we're arguing in that LRP thread in off-topic, the monkey wanted to know what was so good about UE3. so we showed him (yeah it was a copy/paste.. im not about to type all that up.. started to, remembered the site and thought meh screw doing it by hand) :p
 
Well this thread in summary.

You're all shits, we're all ashamed of you and you should use the report button more!

Psychic mods = not!

And a class piccy from invasion of the body snatchers \o.
 
Well, essentially it's all just that we've discussed all of Half-Life 2 to death by now, so the forums have slowed down and we're just relaxing until we have more stuff to talk about.
 
its good, we can discuss anything on here!

its like a virtual village :p
 
We still need a weekly thread though.. that way we would have a tidier forum since people would chat about all the stupid things in there instead.
 
OMG after reading that long list, the "pwned!" pic made my day. I laughed for 5 min straight.
 
Well, I'm still relatively new to the wonderful forums, but I think a lot of it has to do with the general excitement level that was here when I joined. I joined just as we were waiting for the official "Gold" announcement and everybody was at a fever pitch, posting tons of speculation, the slightest bit of info gleaned from the haphazard comments of those within the Valve community, and a general feeling of manic anticipation from all the post-ers. It was fun and interesting and, yes, sometimes infuriating, but everyone was having a f**king good time. Now, there is little that is on our HL horizons and sometimes we have to struggle with quality posts; sometimes just posting for the sheer holy hell out of it because we like the people who first whetted our passion with tidbits of info long ago. We just want conversation and prefer that conversation to be about Half-Life. If we're not in the mood, then we pop over to the general off topic chat thread, and chill for bit and see what some of us are really like (much as it sometimes frightens me).

In summation, I think most of us are trying our damnedest but we are trying to wring blood from an e-stone (we ARE on the internet). We are who we are and have not changed much, but sometimes we try a bit too hard. Ah well. God's in his heaven and all's well with the world.
 
We still dont see HL3 screen and I sure hope Valve will have some cool tricks up their sleeves. It's the natural process of things, like DOOM3:RoE that *cough*invented*cough* the "Grabber" gun. Sooner or later, everybody will up their graphic standards to be as kewl as UE3 :D (and my PC would looked like an amiga ;()
 
CREMATOR666 said:
We still dont see HL3 screen and I sure hope Valve will have some cool tricks up their sleeves. It's the natural process of things, like DOOM3:RoE that *cough*invented*cough* the "Grabber" gun. Sooner or later, everybody will up their graphic standards to be as kewl as UE3 :D (and my PC would looked like an amiga ;()
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what, Valve having cool tricks is a natural process?
 
15357 said:
what, Valve having cool tricks is a natural process?
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Yes, every games have a cool thing ot two....that's what makes games interesting :|
 
CREMATOR666 said:
We still dont see HL3 screen and I sure hope Valve will have some cool tricks up their sleeves. It's the natural process of things, like DOOM3:RoE that *cough*invented*cough* the "Grabber" gun. Sooner or later, everybody will up their graphic standards to be as kewl as UE3 :D (and my PC would looked like an amiga ;()
Click to expand...

It's not as easy as just flipping a few switches to turn one engine into looking as good as another. Source isn't optimised for dynamic lighting/shadow, it only has the basics in there. So that will need pretty much adding from scratch. Then there is bound to be problems they came across when they were building it, that needed tricks to make it work right, which will no doubt conflict with a different lighting method.

Then there's the whole shadowing part of it. self shadowing models, sounds easy but you have to have the shadow recognising the normal map not just the base object, otherwise you get weird shadows over everything. all the time working out what is and isn't being blocked and in shadow. where the light is going.. bleah its complex. All this is going to add to the map sizes, making them even larger than before, slower loading times unless the base of that is pretty much re-written to take all that extra data into account.

Just adding HDR lighting to the game is taking them months, and it was already in there to some extent.. So doing everything else is going to take a long long time I would imagine.
 
The Dark Elf said:
It's not as easy as just flipping a few switches to turn one engine into looking as good as another. Source isn't optimised for dynamic lighting/shadow, it only has the basics in there. So that will need pretty much adding from scratch. Then there is bound to be problems they came across when they were building it, that needed tricks to make it work right, which will no doubt conflict with a different lighting method.

Then there's the whole shadowing part of it. self shadowing models, sounds easy but you have to have the shadow recognising the normal map not just the base object, otherwise you get weird shadows over everything. all the time working out what is and isn't being blocked and in shadow. where the light is going.. bleah its complex. All this is going to add to the map sizes, making them even larger than before, slower loading times unless the base of that is pretty much re-written to take all that extra data into account.

Just adding HDR lighting to the game is taking them months, and it was already in there to some extent.. So doing everything else is going to take a long long time I would imagine.
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Just like HL2, what have it been...5 years? :eek:
 
CREMATOR666 said:
Just like HL2, what have it been...5 years? :eek:
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They might be better off just buying a licence to UE3, and working on the ready made base for HL3 rather than do it on Source. With all the leaking and setbacks and all that I don't think their gonna make much more from that engine now. Might aswell use UE. Though im not entirely sure I would want a UE3 anything near something like Steam *shudders* :p
 
To be fair though, I can't see Valve using another engine. They developed Source themselves from scratch and I don't think they'd just want to effectively scrap it for their own games for something else, at least for a while. It's a shame really...
 
I think its funny how the mods (or ex-mods) turned the thread into a source v u3e thread instead of discussing the forums problems ... Isn't that classed as hijacking?

Do we really need so many threads on masturbation and bullshit about geeks' crappy love lifes? Maybe if you mods left the decent threads open instead of closing them to make yourselves seem powerful, we might actually get back to some sort of decent discussion on the boards.

[/rant]
 
Define 'decent threads' ?

And to be honest, we're just going through a rough patch - no need for handbags :O
 
this has nothing to do with the mods, if you think the forum's on a decline...make a good thread or shut the hell up.
 
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=81318&page=2

Using that as an example - I read the thread, have something to contribute, and *bam* it's closed. Why? I don't know. Do you? Maybe if it involved more masturbation and kids screaming "OMG LOL WTF" it would remain open.

GonzoBabbleshit said:
this has nothing to do with the mods, if you think the forum's on a decline...make a good thread or shut the hell up.
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Your name is very accurate.
 
I can't see why that one was closed to be fair, but the 'decline' isn't the mods fault. get over yourselves
 
Gonzo, with all due respect, i'm giving my feedback on the site in the apropriate place. If you don't want to hear feedback on the site, maybe the 'Site Feedback' thread isn't the best place for you.

My issue here is with what threads are getting closed and what threads are allowed to remain open. Kids talking about masturbation or gurlz or how much weed they smoke is expected in counter-strike or the steampowered forums - so I stay out of there. I consider myself a regular of the halflife2.net forums and enjoy most of the discussions here, but recently its been in decline and I hate to see it happen, hence why I started this thread.

Atleast now you know why I leave the community instead of me just disappearing and you not knowing why.
 
You're complaining on the wrong thread then. simple as. Make a thread about your issue with the mods closing threads inappropriately, this is about the forum's 'decline'.
 
Hey, why don't we all flame each other?
 
GonzoBabbleshit said:
You're complaining on the wrong thread then. simple as. Make a thread about your issue with the mods closing threads inappropriately, this is about the forum's 'decline'.
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Since this is the cause of the forums decline, I thought this would be the best place for it.

What is wrong with people like you, being argumentative with no cause or reason ... Is it flaming season, or are the steampowered regulars visiting?
 
GonzoBabbleshit said:
You're complaining on the wrong thread then. simple as. Make a thread about your issue with the mods closing threads inappropriately, this is about the forum's 'decline'.
Click to expand...

No, he's not to be honest. Threads being incorrectly closed or left open is one of the reasons for what lePobz believes is the decline of the forums. This is the correct thread, and the correct forum in which to raise these issues.

Personally, I'll be keeping a closer eye on the off-topic section, and I urge people to make more use of the "Report Post" button. I know there are a lot of members that use it already, there can always be more. Also, if you have a problem with a certain thread being closed (or not, as the case may be), please don't hesitate to send me a quick PM and I'll look into it.
 
I still can't get over the fact that Zerimski is a red cat with the ability to type
 
xLostx said:
I still can't get over the fact that Zerimski is a red cat with the ability to type
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Same.

Maybe he's just a mutated cat...
 
I'm not being arguementative, I was stating my opinion that I didn't think it was the Mods fault that the forum was in 'decline'. I even agreed with you about the thread you brought up.

You were the one making stupid remarks like 'your name is very accurate'. ouch.

Do we really need so many threads on masturbation and bullshit about geeks' crappy love lifes?
Click to expand...

How could you make that an issue with Mods? I don't understand how you complain about 'people like me' who are 'arguementative' for basically disagreeing with you, there's an opinion-line you can draw here. **** it, I'm gonna leave it at this...
 
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