So, one of the biggest hurdles with making a mod like Dear Esther in Source is the rather clumsy displacement system which is used to create terrain and smooth surfaces. To have pixel-perfect seamless and smooth terrain in Source I had to build my maps in a very unique, complicated and time-consuming manner. Everything has to align with each other and be built from adjoining quad faced brushes, if that doesn’t make any sense then maybe this image will:
By building the map in this way (previously mentioned here) it will allow me to have one large smoothly subdivided displacement which I’m sure you’ll agree is a lot more easier on the eye and simpler to manage. So far 90% of my preparation work has gone into this but hopefully it will be worth it! I want to get all of the tedious work out of the way before I move back to the UK so I can then concentrate solely on the art (and fun!) side of things.
As a side note some of you may be thinking all these displacements will be a crazy fps killer, well, to Valve credit one thing I will say is that displacements handle very well in Source. I recently purchased this nifty laptop so that I could benchmark on what is the equivalent of a mid-range gfx card (based on Valve’s Hardware Survey) and I got 250fps without any optimisation – very promising! My only hurdle could be vertex memory, but I’ll keep an eye on that as things develop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cI9cVDVGBL8
How long did that take to subdivide, and do you know how manny brush faces that was?
I can’t get it to work right no either. And yeah just like Problems i would like to get the link fixed too
I’m a quite new source mapper (Bit under a year), and I enjoy displacements and such. Could you please fix the link? It’s dead.
By aligning, do you mean to say that you create all of the geometry using brushes, get it to some what approximately the right height etc and then create it?
I personally do this and use squared brushes, which at then end means when you create the displacement at everything sews nicely and reduces the stretched texture effect.
How ever this is numerous displacements sewn together, you seem to say you use only one?
As stated above, your maps look excellent (Big fan of the caves in Dear Esther and De_Forest) and I’m keen on any info I can get my hands on.
I found this tutorial really good for understanding how subdividing terrain works: http://halflifestorm.com/?page_id=225 Hopefully it will help you out.
This makes me so excited to see a better, incredibly more attractive way to do terrain in Source. I’m running into a problem when trying myself however, and I was wondering if you would mind giving me some advice. What exactly are you doing to make this work? Whenever I subdivide I seem to get these strange “artifact” looking things sticking out from my displacements. Or faces disappear. Really weird stuff. If you wouldn’t mind explaining just a little more, I’d love to hear about how you aligned things and such. Source has so much potential and I LOVE your screenshots of your current progress.
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