TresCom Forums

It certainly looks interesting. I'm not a massive fan of the somewhat unnatural blend on some of the shadows further back around the less-steep slopes, since the edges of the shadows are so rough. It does look quite nice on those pillars in the foreground, though. I think the natural shadowing that Tres applies to the terrain does the job better on shallow slopes. Perhaps using only this method on steeper slopes would be the best option?

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Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Interesting work. Not a fan of the rough edges, but I guess that can easily be fixed.

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

We're pretty much thinking the same thing. I just wish I knew how to adjust the darkness of the natural shading. It's too light compared to the object shadows. I'll keep working at this but I don't think its gonna be very useful. I just like playing with tech, trying to add new features. I've never gotten very good at mapping(in 25 years...) but I have to make maps to test out my features hehe. If you can tell my maps are kind of "generic" or plain looking compared to the creativity of good mappers. I don't know how to describe it, maybe utilitarian? Not as artistically organic or something.

Some of the best levels I've played are simpler in their design, and that extends outside of Trespasser even (the original Doom levels come to mind - the Doom 2 levels by comparison while technically superior are nowhere near as fun to play). I like the way your levels look myself, they feel very natural, even if the placement of objects isn't extremely dense or detailed.

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Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Well my pc died again lol... That's why no updates. I think its getting pretty long in the tooth these days. I found a 16 core Xeon for $600 that I'm gonna buy soon. My brother is bringing over some parts soon to fix it. So ill be back at it soon. Have fun with trespasser you all.

I'm back! lol. Got a 12 core bare bones for $360. Not too shabby. It's a 2016 workstation model. Seems stable through benchmarks so far. Can't wait to get back to mapping. Talk to you all later.

I'm still not sure of an easy way to get around the misaligned shadows. I know the terrain shadows aren't that big of a deal but I'd still like to get it working so I'll mess around with it in my spare time. It's low priority.

For now I'm working on test maps and wanna work on a new single player map for the community. I've been wanting to try baked lighting on the buildings for a long time now and see how that works. So maybe that'll get included. I don't see terrain shadows working so that provably won't be included. Too much work to get them aligned properly. I'm trying to get better at making playable landscapes that are more like the ones in the game. They tell a better story than my "hills and cliffs that all look the same" map I made, in my opinion.
And again, if anyone wants to draw out a map idea on paper or in ms-paint I could try turning it into a landscape for them to build upon... No one seems game lol

Take care you all.

Sounds good. It is still cool that you still experiment about the shadows.
I personally don't think I've ever noticed or bothered how the shadows looks

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

If I could figure out a way to darken the shadows on the terrain, the ones built into the game. I could make the ray traced ones match better.

I was thinking... In order to bake the shadows to the terrain... What if you just baked high res textures for the player space and low res for the outside player space sections. And kept the player space relatively "small". Big enough to be fun but not huge. Wouldn't work on large explorative maps, which everyone seems to like. But alas...

Would save a ton on texture memory usage, both in game and with the swp file.

You would scale the textures with the distance from the playable area. Lower res at it goes outwards.


I'm gonna have to test this. Still may use too many textures though, idk. Anyway, I'll give it a go and see what happens. If it works I'll release a test map, I promise. hehe

You can use high resolution textures outside of the player area without any performance issues. Unless you have a really old computer or very little RAM, it won't be noticeable.
I don't think low resolution textures would look good on the terrain, far away they even look worse.

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

Well I have to explain it like this.
You have regular resolution textures up close. Low res farther away. The ones farther away have to be low detail because there would just be so many of them to cover up all the non-playable space that it would get out of hand quickly. The swp file would be huge, I would have to add thousands of textures to the landscape layer, it wouldn't look better imo. Maybe a tiny bit better, but not by much. Now if you exit the player space you will notice how blurry it is. But in game its hard to tell.

The problem I've found is that you have to use a certain resolution(per scale) that is high enough to hide the pixelation. It doesnt blur the pixels together very well on large scaled layers/textures.

I'm doing this on my map from the other thread (beginnings of a new map) and it looks very nice in game at 1080p. You can't really tell where it transitions from high to low detail.

So for my test map for this idea I'm going to make the textures lower and lower resolution by distance. So really far away they will be very largely scaled.

Maybe you took it to mean i'm using smaller textures, for instance 64x64 at a distance? Sorry about that, I need to work on my language explaining skills lol. I meant I'm using 256x256 for everything. It just gets scaled up at distances. I account for scale during pre-rendering of the textures. So they just are larger in scale at distances, but still at the max resolution the engine allows. I sure wish those CE high res textures worked on landscapes hehe Would save a lot of work.

If you look closely at this screenshot you will notice the terrain in the distance looks less tiled than normal. I used 9 256x256 textures on a 3x3 tessellated terrain layer, enlarged to a large draw scale in the world. Tiling isn't very noticeable imo. Looks pretty in game. I tested some of the Trespasser default levels and they look very tiled at distances. I'm just seeing what I can do with the engine to enhance it.


I'm working on a small landscape and getting the textures ready for import right now. When it's ready I'll post a link for testing.

The final test map should have baked shadows on the landscape and dynamic and blended on the objects. Assuming it all works out lol. I'm not going to go overkill on texture variety or anything since it's just at test.

For a final map I would add all my terrain layers in TresEd to get a nice appearance, then export them to a modeling program and render them all as one large image and add the baked lighting to them. Then split them up into 256x256 textures for the playable space. But that involves a lot of extra work. So I'm gonna skip that step. It should still be a nice representation of what I'm trying to accomplish though.

I also have to put out there to anyone on the forum that makes a map in the future that if you need a landscape generated, or detailed with textures and lighting let me know and maybe we can work on something together. It's for our community after all. Of note, I really need to do the baking before you add a lot of objects/buildings as when I convert the landscape for editing you will loose some height alignment and would have to re-align every object afterwards. Not a big deal though. It's all do-able. Have fun everyone.

Oh I see, now I get it yes! My native language is not English so sometimes it is how I type.



Cool. Worth remembering in cases like this is that usually only the author notice the stuff. Most player won't care or notice. With that said, I am the same. I want perfection, even if I am the only one seeing it!

I really like what you are doing. If anything, it is very interesting, and I do like deep detail in levels!

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

Those terrain textures look excellent, very nice work. I'll have to take an in-depth look at them and see whether they're practical for my style of level design.

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Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

Welp... power supply died a few days ago
I'm getting tired of pc failures lol. I can't wait to finish my projects.

I know why it keeps failing and am doing work to prevent it in the future...