movable light-enity´s in hl2?

[Sorze]

Well yeah I already said you could do that with shooting lights out. If your not fussed about DIII style then yeah HL is perfectly capable of doing that, could do it in HL1. So yeah, you'll be glad to know your splinter cell type mod will work

JIPIII!

Now.. If I could just get my hands on a SDK... :afro:

Anyways, thax for the posts Fenric, been real nice talking to you.. Infact, you're one of the guys that made me start posting here.. I've just hovered around reading for a few months now..

your quote owns me, although if i made the movie i would have used Sally

Yup, the quote pwns all! Come on! Betty is perfect.. Sally is so unoriginal

 

[The Dark Elf]

heh thanks Sorze


Btw, you wont need the SDK to do that part of what your wanting.. You can do it very easily in Hammer.. and from what I hear HL2 in Hammer has a lot of improvements so you'll probably find you can do even better effects

The basic shoot a light and it goes out though, thats entirely possible.. Now.. if you want the NPC's to not see you in the dark it might be a little more difficult and will require the SDK and some coding. But its still entirely possible to do.. Also in HL1 it was quite possible in the same way as shooting lights out, to have lights you could switch on and off.. Which would give your mod some more stealth abilities. turning lights off quietly instead of shooting them out and attracting the bad guys. Just a thought but you probably thought of it already

 

[Epsi]

From what I've learnt the Source engine is pretty bloody advanced. But I've also heard it has entity limits (I'm hoping thats just a rumor that got started from some twat with the stolen files who doesn't know what their doing) Otherwise Stalker and Farcry will end up having the last laugh come detail in a map. Otherwise it should be good

Just thought I'd say that entity limits aren't inherently a bad thing. What if the entity limit is a standard int? That's a 32-bit number, meaning there would be 2^32 possible entities, which is 4,294,967,296. Enough for anyone I would say.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Just thought I'd say that entity limits aren't inherently a bad thing. What if the entity limit is a standard int? That's a 32-bit number, meaning there would be 2^32 possible entities, which is 4,294,967,296. Enough for anyone I would say.

Well I've been hearing the limit is closer to 500 or less.. Though I pray to any god listening that your number is more accurate.. That would make me a very happy person indeed :E

 

[Sorze]

Thx for all the info Fenric, and indeed you're ideas as well..

stay tuned for my thread with the background idea, concept art and maybe some renders...
Be sure to chime in and give some constructive criticism.

 

[nc17]

It has already been stated that hl2 will have a dynamic light entity that will act just like the flashlight and muzzleflash and will only cast realtime shadows on normal maped surfaces

 

[Arno]

Well I've been hearing the limit is closer to 500 or less.. Though I pray to any god listening that your number is more accurate.. That would make me a very happy person indeed :E

I believe the Quake games have an entity limit of 1024. If HL2 has something similar, then it should be sufficient. Besides, a huge valley with 500 entities wouldn't run with a decent framerate anyway. You always have to block the view on some areas of a map and when that's the case you can simply split the map up.

I don't believe Valve will use a 32 bit integer for entity numbers. That would burden the network traffic too much.

 

[The Dark Elf]

I believe the Quake games have an entity limit of 1024. If HL2 has something similar, then it should be sufficient. Besides, a huge valley with 500 entities wouldn't run with a decent framerate anyway. You always have to block the view on some areas of a map and when that's the case you can simply split the map up.

I don't believe Valve will use a 32 bit integer for entity numbers. That would burden the network traffic too much.

Well I'm gonna need a heck of a lot more than 1024 even


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Sidewinder, you might get your wish of seeing this on .................... afterall

 

[Arno]

Well I'm gonna need a heck of a lot more than 1024 even

That sounds quite ambitious. :smoking:

I don't know the specifics of your map idea, but here's a rough estimate of what I think a very large map could contain:
100 monsters
100 ammo and health items
500 waypoints and other stuff for scripted sequences
200 physical objects like boxes and doors
100 decorative objects and other small stuff
That makes one thousand entities and that's a seriously large map. 500 entities is a bit on the low side, but not impossible to work with if you split your map up carefully.
I can understand that you want the maximum number of entities to be as large as possible, but Valve has to consider optimal network bandwidth usage as well. It's a trade off. Personally, as a mapper, I feel pretty comfortable with 1000 entities to work with. I hope it doesn't get any less then that, though.

 

[MooCow]

Arno, only problem with that is you'd better like using the flashlight as your map is pitch back as lights are entities, as are likely to be anything that uses the physics system so add another couple of hundered to your estimate.

Oh and remeber the maps in hl2 have the ability to be a damn sight physically larger than in hl1.

[The reason you can seem to get away with no explicit light entites are because you can use texture lights but they end up counting in the end and there no gaurenty they'll even be in hl2].

 

[mrchimp]

heh both Doom 3 and HL2 don't even stand up to this: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=17073

Thats the same as Doom3's lighting except with soft shadows, Hl2 will be the same as Unreal2 and stalker will have both. Unless of course source supports volumetric shadows like Doom3. Currently it only seams to support... I'v forgotten the name. Anyway Fenric pretty much explained it although in a slightly vague way.

 

[Arno]

In reply to MooCow:
Yeah, I was assuming that a ton of light entities can be dismissed once the lightmaps are compiled. But I don't know that for sure. It could be that some light entities need to be saved to get the normal maps to light up correctly. If that's the case then a total of 500 entities for the whole maps seems to be way too little. But something like 2000 should be sufficient.