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So, how many here have passed by machf's "Autumnal.zip" file in the Downloads section? Personally, I pass it a lot and using its contents has been in the back of my mind for years. Well, I'm pleased to announce that I have decided to not give up my laptop (which I've been carrying around with me) and continue modding Trespasser with the rest of you lot. My next project has a principle autumn theme, and will reimagine the PH post-start terrain area in a Fall-time idyllic farm setting. The version of PH we have, as a level, is in my opinion far too unpopulated with environmental assets. Wide open spaces stand mostly empty, and the lack of guns means you are pretty much wandering around running from the occasional dinosaur the whole time. FL will explore what PH's set-up can be turned into.

Minor note - I did not realize when beginning this project that machf's autumnal trees are all billboard objects. I intend to use them and am not interested in creating a whole new slew of autumn-colored, 3D foliage. It might be slightly jarring as such but consider it from the perspective of experiencing high-detailed autumn foliage imagery in the Trespasser engine.

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EDIT: LEVEL RELEASED, PAGE 3

---LEADERBOARDS---

HIGH HUNT POINTS SCORE: 795
HIGH HEADSHOTS: 127
HIGH SHOTS FIRED: 0
HIGH PUMPKINS SMASHED: 2

SCOREBOARDS FOR HIGHEST HUNT POINTS
HP - 795
HS - 127
SF - 0
PS - 2

(no screenshot available)

Was wondering what you were up to all this time...

I really like it, and the autumnal scenery is both in season and looks really fresh. I'm excited to see how this turns out...I do wonder what this "lodge" will be like.

Minor note - I did not realize when beginning this project that machf's autumnal trees are all billboard objects. I intend to use them and am not interested in creating a whole new slew of autumn-colored, 3D foliage. It might be slightly jarring as such but consider it from the perspective of experiencing high-detailed autumn foliage imagery in the Trespasser engine.

That's sadly the reason I think nobody has made use of those plants yet, with is rather unfortunate. I wonder if perhaps those textures could be utilized in conjunction with some other models, perhaps from The Greenhouse, to create 3D plants instead?

Also, one thing I noticed in that screenshot and not sure if you're planning on covering this or not, but I think you should add some more terrain textures than just the single autumnal leaf texture (which looks quite nice, by the way). At the moment it feels too flat and repetitive to be realistic.

Maybe I'll have to whip up some deciduous trees at some point for use in levels such as this...

TheIdiot wrote:That's sadly the reason I think nobody has made use of those plants yet, with is rather unfortunate. I wonder if perhaps those textures could be utilized in conjunction with some other models, perhaps from The Greenhouse, to create 3D plants instead?

Funny thing, I posted the above image on facebook and Rolf Mohr himself commented saying "Very nice trees!" Sort of bolstering my inner insistence on using the machf-autumn-trees which have been sitting there forever. At any rate, these billboard trees are definitely going to be everywhere. What benefit would there be to mingling them with 3D ones? Not quite sure. I'm not 100% above doing that, tho. Some of machf's greenhouse trees look a bit fall-ish..

Also, one thing I noticed in that screenshot and not sure if you're planning on covering this or not, but I think you should add some more terrain textures than just the single autumnal leaf texture (which looks quite nice, by the way). At the moment it feels too flat and repetitive to be realistic.

Well, it is the base texture. The level also contains the full complement of MegaJungle trnobjs; the scene depicted above is literally the ONLY thing to be seen in the level besides the basement, player, and terrain itself.

Maybe I'll have to whip up some deciduous trees at some point for use in levels such as this...

Sounds fun..

Funny thing, I posted the above image on facebook and Rolf Mohr himself commented saying "Very nice trees!"

Not sure who Rolf Mohr is...a Trespasser developer?

Sort of bolstering my inner insistence on using the machf-autumn-trees which have been sitting there forever. At any rate, these billboard trees are definitely going to be everywhere. What benefit would there be to mingling them with 3D ones? Not quite sure. I'm not 100% above doing that, tho. Some of machf's greenhouse trees look a bit fall-ish..

That could work nicely. What I meant was more to try editing some of the 2D tree textures onto the 3D trees, that way you would have similar looking leaves but with 3D trunks to make it look much nicer than flat 2D trees would.

Well, it is the base texture. The level also contains the full complement of MegaJungle trnobjs; the scene depicted above is literally the ONLY thing to be seen in the level besides the basement, player, and terrain itself.

Aaaah, okay, gotcha. Not sure if the MegaJungle terrain is really the best choice for a deciduous fall scene (it IS MegaJUNGLE), but I'm sure you'll come up with something. That reminds me, should release a new version of MegaJungle soon with the redwoods and a couple of other new things...

TheIdiot wrote:

Funny thing, I posted the above image on facebook and Rolf Mohr himself commented saying "Very nice trees!"

Not sure who Rolf Mohr is...a Trespasser developer?

Yep.

Sort of bolstering my inner insistence on using the machf-autumn-trees which have been sitting there forever. At any rate, these billboard trees are definitely going to be everywhere. What benefit would there be to mingling them with 3D ones? Not quite sure. I'm not 100% above doing that, tho. Some of machf's greenhouse trees look a bit fall-ish..

That could work nicely. What I meant was more to try editing some of the 2D tree textures onto the 3D trees, that way you would have similar looking leaves but with 3D trunks to make it look much nicer than flat 2D trees would.

That's a good idea.
BTW, be careful with those billboard trees - they take up a LOT of texture space in the .SWP file!
Why didn't I port more of those sets? Well, first, because it's not so simple a task to split the original textures and apply them to custom arrays of triangles, and second, because once CE came out, it's more practical to make a simple billboard with a standard resolution texture (256*256) and have the high resolution texture loaded externally...

RE: making the billboards 3D
Thinking about this... Without MAX, I am imagining the best case would be taking trunks from various Tres content, hiding their leaf textures, and quad- or hex-arraying the billboard meshes around them. Still, my mental image of this is not promising. There's a voice around suggesting that I leave out machf's autumn billboards entirely and use the fall-looking trees from Greenhouse... I quite hope I don't follow that route.

RE: texture space
Gah I know! The initial import exploded the SWP file. I gave all 128 color textures a single, new palette and brought the SWP size to 20. It is a bit too bad that these were gathered pre-CE.. At any rate I expect the level to be quite eye-provoking.

Draconisaurus wrote: RE: texture space
Gah I know! The initial import exploded the SWP file. I gave all 128 color textures a single, new palette and brought the SWP size to 20. It is a bit too bad that these were gathered pre-CE.. At any rate I expect the level to be quite eye-provoking.

Well, the 8 different billboard trees only use 5 different palettes... the problem isn't that, it's just the sheer amount of individual textures.

Here you can find the originals, BTW:

https://www.rfactorcentral.com/detail.c ... ure%20Pack

Got a Privacy Error on the other side of that link...

Draconisaurus wrote:Got a Privacy Error on the other side of that link...

Same, it is only because the HTTPS might have old certificate and stuff. No danger usually.

Well, going to leave them the way they are for now. And damn, the PH terrain seems huge when there are no models populating it...

Draconisaurus wrote:Well, going to leave them the way they are for now. And damn, the PH terrain seems huge when there are no models populating it...

Funny, since PH is one of the smaller levels in the original game... Strip the objects from JR and you'll see what a true monstrosity that level is.

Lol yes, especially the older builds we have of it...

Alright, so.. Progress has been slightly slow but steady. Foliage placement is now more or less final besides the requisite heightfix step. However the mod has run into a serious snag; while importing CAnimals to be hunted in the mod, I have once again been told by GeomAdd that the SWP has run out of space. Recreating the SWP does not seem to free up any space; I went and turned the muzzle flashes into their b96 8-bit versions and it freed up only enough space for one raptor. I might make 8-bit versions of the animated fire texture as well but this is not going to give the needed space for the textures of a certain House to be fully imported... Might have to make said House unexplorable, or else find a way to give it a very small number of repeating textures (Tatu, might need your help on this one; the situation is different).

Derm... Just realized that I could go the route of turning all the millions of 256^2 tree textures into tiny ones to be upgraded by Tres CE textures at load time. Glad I thought of this while posting!

At any rate... The forest looks amazing, especially notable for the way it actually hides surroundings, unlike regular Tres in which you can see right through the jungle even when object population is dense (with the exception of recent ground foliage models introduced by TI).

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Draconisaurus wrote:Alright, so.. Progress has been slightly slow but steady. Foliage placement is now more or less final besides the requisite heightfix step. However the mod has run into a serious snag; while importing CAnimals to be hunted in the mod, I have once again been told by GeomAdd that the SWP has run out of space.

I did warn you...

Recreating the SWP does not seem to free up any space; I went and turned the muzzle flashes into their b96 8-bit versions and it freed up only enough space for one raptor.

What you should make sure of is using "bool MipMap = false" on the bilboards when importing them... but even then...

I might make 8-bit versions of the animated fire texture as well but this is not going to give the needed space for the textures of a certain House to be fully imported... Might have to make said House unexplorable, or else find a way to give it a very small number of repeating textures (Tatu, might need your help on this one; the situation is different).

Derm... Just realized that I could go the route of turning all the millions of 256^2 tree textures into tiny ones to be upgraded by Tres CE textures at load time. Glad I thought of this while posting!

Duh... I told you it was more practical nowadays to just use simple billboards with a single texture and let CE take care of the high resolution textures... I even linked to the original ones.

Well I figured it out and atm it looks like the HD texture route will work fine. A note for future modders (which I believe was mentioned by Lee), Tres CE does not seem to care about opacity maps for HD textures and simply computes pure black as opacity. Am in the process of recoloring the all-black areas in the tree textures which are not meant to be transparent.