So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

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Commando
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Commando »

I believe a lot of the ODF additions have been untested to GSH so some may not even work. We haven't had an abundance of modding activity so who knows what all has been tested, and confirmed working.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by General BlackDragon »

I know the most out of any active BZ2 modder, I think i'm the last extremely active one aside from RD.

They work, they just have to be under the correct [ header ]
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by coxxon »

Well the solution to my gtow/spire problem had been staring me in the face for several months. Since my custom explosion was working but not the custom crash explosion, I just put the custom crash into the explosionName variable and made calls to the particles in the explosion file into the crash file, and viola ... explody chunk gtows/spires.

I still haven't been able to scavs or servs to work, so I'm reverting to the odf 5-chunk-method.

I also can't get custom explosions or custom chunk explosions to work with deployed scavs/scups so I'm afraid they're just going to have to be the old version.

It seems that there are alot of things GSH put in to help the BZClassic mod or BZ1 style effects. And since BZ1 didn't have deploying scavs, servs, and some other things, those objects didn't get modified (or need additional work (dll?) to get to operate) - at least that's my guess.

See screens below for new apc/bomber trails and chunk explosions (they're not the best shots, but it's kinda hard to get good photos when stuff's blow'n up in yur face :D ).

Image

Image

Image
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Red Devil »

very nicely done, coxxon. maybe i can get one of those pics made into a mural to put on the tailgate :-)
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Commando »

If there are things that aren't working, they can always be bugged so they get looked at.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by General BlackDragon »

Ah, figured out Coxxon's issue, maybe.

Draw_geom does not render multi-piece objects. The model must be a single frame, only, or it won't render.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Nielk1 »

Honestly...

I really don't like them.

They're too bright, they're too round, and many of them are far too big of a departure from the base designs. It just doesn't feel like Battlezone to me. It feels cartoony and just clashes with the entire ascetic. I had much the same issue with BBB's HD models, but my aversion is significantly stronger here.

It feels like the entire nature of the designs have changed. The only model I really like is the scion Warrior. The ISDF Griffin has some interesting changes to it's design, but really everything just clashes so hard. It's cool to see and I hope you can get this released and workable and looking how you want, but it's just not Battlezone to me. The way particles are just pouring off of shiny curvy models and everything, it looks like the stuff I'd see in a random Unity game.

I do see the influences that date all the way back to Uler, but that stuff felt way more grounded; muted to fit in the game's existing ascetic ecosystem.

I might take a few ideas, if that's ok with you, but it would be for something entirely different than the stock factions and would only be in the manner of shapes (such as the extractor's pylon like appearance).
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Shadow Knight »

Bout time I weighed in: I don't like them very much. Post with some harsh but well-intentioned criticism incoming.

The first thing that strikes me is that they look like they're being rendered at 100% brightness, even when they're not. It's particularly noticeable in the dark maps because it looks like they're covered in neon. As much as I'm a fan of everyone in FPSs being in fullbright glowskins, it really doesn't fit with Battlezone 2.

The second thing I notice when looking at them which is especially noticeable in the screenshot bazooka01_zpsgqoai2iq.jpg is that the full custom textures really don't blend in well with the (presumably retouched) vanilla textures. Look at how the sabre on the left looks so much more beautiful than anything else in the shot, it's because you don't need strong contrasts, a zillion pixels of noise or greebles or anything to make something that looks good. It has nuance and it has weight, the same can't be said for most other designs in the screenshots (even the other pictures of the sabre, which have the ugly fullbright look).

The buildings are particularly guilty, the ISDF building models aren't terrible but their textures need some work, specifically less work. The bright yellow/orange, i dunno, circuitry in bomber01_zpss79iwomi.jpg looks hideous and very fake. It seems like a minor thing to pick on, but you could literally make that texture some orange-tinted brushed metal and it would look more appealing than it currently does. The grey suffers from this too in a smaller degree, but when you dial back the orange it's going to look very noticeable so you'll have to fiddle with it too. It looks wrong and sticky-outy when next to the very nice mesh used for the pad. Sticky-outy is bad.
Also if that building behind the factory in bazooka01 is a power plant I'll have your head (figuratively).

The scion buildings look like change for the sake of change. Their designs are a lot less intimidating than the vanilla ones and go for "Curves because alien!" instead of the spikes and spheres that the vanilla scions use. The forge is particularly offensive to my tastes. They also don't give any clear indication of their function in how they've been textured. Going back to the forge, the vanilla one has clear colouring for its build area and some details here and there but nothing screaming "LOOK AT ME!" like the smoke stacks or wings or yellow arrows on the base. There's all sorts of pointless visual noise that fills neither a functional nor aesthetic look (though the yellows are probably intended to be functional). Which brings me to colours.

I touched on them a little bit earlier in the post, but it's worth devoting a section to them. You've gone way overboard with the colours. ISDF in vanilla are primarily grey with orange highlights (utility units are yellow + black). Yours are mostly orange with some grey and teal. It pushes the colour balance of the scenes way off and clashes with the environment. Meanwhile your scions are flourishing a large amount of yellow which was previously used very sparingly: vanilla scions are mostly blue and black with flecks of yellow for effect. With the increased brightness of the blue and silver it makes the whole faction look very samey and the colour loses a lot of its impact. Other than the forge which I've already complained about, the dower is also unappealing. I can only see it from a distance in scibase02_zpsm2rgoanr.jpg, but a big yellow pad? You could have done so much with that which would have looked appealing. Look at the combination of orange hull and dark blue beam on the vanilla Healer, or even go with something completely different, ISDF service bay style.

All that said, I do like some things in the screenshots. The warriors and lancers are very well done, as are the guardians and scion scavengers. The sabres look like they'll be good once the fullbright is under control, but my favourite out of all the screenshots are your thunderbolts. They look like damn sleek weapons of war.

It's a shame to deliver this so far into your work, because what you've got so far looks like it was time consuming to make and I disagree with a large amount of the aesthetics. (re)Designing the art of a whole faction is always tricky because you have to balance playability, recognition and aesthetics not just for one thing by itself, but how it looks all together because it's very easy to turn into a highly detailed mess.
At the end of the day it's your mod so you can choose to ignore this feedback, but it really has to be said.

EDIT: After re-reading the thread I noticed the lighting had been pointed out very early on. I really think it would be worth spending an hour or two going through and rejiggering the ambient lighting to make the other lighting method look good on your units. It will alleviate a lot of the colour balance issues I have with your texturing.

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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by General BlackDragon »

I think the lighting is partly due to the Alpha Glow maps (Team colors glowing?) and the EMBM bump maps.

IMO, Teamcolor a0 skins can go byebye, and use the a0 skins for glowing lights only. Also BZ2's EMBM maps are so hard to make look good, and also cause unnecessary brightness, they can probably also go.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by MrTwosheds »

I think EBM bumps should be considered obsolete, maybe they once looked good on an 800x600 3dfx voodoo or whatever, but without exception they just look awful on my current rig, they don't look like bumps at all, they look like someone's tried to wipe white gloss paint off the textures with a wet rag.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Nielk1 »

Using glowskins to test team masks is a good idea as then we can keep trying to push that team color mask feature request :3
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by bigbadbogie »

I absolutely love the new models and the aesthetic changes that they bring.

When this mod is released, I intend to spend a lot of time playing it.

It reminds me of the Starfleet mod.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by Progressor »

Here I am absolutely agree with Shadow Knight. The suggested textures look like somewhat a cartoon. The whole Battlezone series is charming because it is (was) close to reality, like, for example, the Wing Commander I and II was.

Creating the BZ Universe is a real art and it is obviously more difficult than creating movies. With the modern hardware and software, we wish the BZ virtual reality to be as much close to the real world as possible. I am ready to sacrifice the texture quality to the overall picture reality. You know: most of the modern movies about 60's are a bit ridiculous because their tone and colours are just like on your digital camera, not like in the original 60's film. The questions are:
- What makes the picture [in this game] close to reality?
- What makes this game is so attractive?
- What the Community can do to make the game better?
- What does mean "better"?
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by MrTwosheds »

not like in the original 60's film
The film actually looked much better in the 60's, Film is a medium that degrades over time. Presenting the past in a deliberately degraded form is both ridiculous and unrealistic. Reality was never silent or in black and white.
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Re: So Coxxon, how have you spent 2015?

Post by coxxon »

It doesn’t matter whether they love you or hate you, as long as they’re not ignoring you.
-- some smart person whose name fails me at the moment

Thanks for the responses throughout this thread, but especially the recent ones from Nielk1 and Shadow Knight. I believe those are the most detailed responses I’ve ever received from anything I’ve posted on the internet. And SK, while I disagree with most of it, that was the most cogent defense of “vanilla” I’ve ever read. Seriously, well done.

Now here I go with my longwinded *general* response to a number of comments and concerns.

First off, keep in mind that these screenshots are of a work in progress, and that static images are never going to give the viewer as accurate of a view as much as the real thing – which hasn’t been released yet.

On the lighting –
BZII + the 1.365 patach comes with bumpmaps, specular highlights, four different lighting settings, and a0 glow textures. Because I want to at least maintain what BZII has in terms of options, I’ve made it a big point to maintain all of these things. Therefore, while building and testing each model, I’ve kept bumpmaps on, specular highlights on, all lights on, and am using rebuilt a0 textures. This is a big part of where the shininess and neon comes from that some have had (a personally unexpected) negative reaction to.

On a sidenote, yes, yes, yes I know, I’ve known ever since BZII came out that it has poor bumpmaps. The tech was new when this game was developed, and for that reason or some other, Pandi couldn’t quite get it right. But that’s not a reason for me not to attempt my own. Yeah, they don’t look like bumpmaps are “supposed to look,” but on a number of the things in my mod, they make for nice highlights.

But keep in mind, you as the player have the ability to turn bumps on or off, turn spec highlight on or off, turn the lights on, off, or in-between, and raise or lower the overall brightness. How this mod will appear on your computer, should you choose to try it, is going to in some part, be up to you and your preferences – which may differ from mine and others.

Alas, (Alas? Who writes like that?) I’m one guy, and don’t have a social media consultant or a screenshot taker. Nor do I have time to constantly reset settings, or guess at what people are going to like the most, and then setup the perfect in-game image, so my screens may not do justice to the graphical options available.

On aesthetics/design/color –
BZII looked awesome in 1999. It looks dated in 2015. My hope is to at least get it up to between 2005-2010 visual quality. Actually, I semi-started this mod in 2005 with my initial version of the 1024px textures. After finishing the main isdf/scion textures, I filed them away and moved on to other things. Then last fall after a multi-year absence I came back to the game b/c I had gotten an itch to play it. I installed the latest patch, fired it up and …

… oh my God, this game is ugly!

Baby, what happened? You were once hot and sexy, and now look at you. You’re all … all … wait it can’t be this bad. Here, let me turn on your bumps and specular-- oh my … I think I’m going to vomit …


While I can still see the uniqueness and creativity behind many of the base shapes/designs (and to those who made the game, you really did an awesome job at the time) they’re just too blocky, too low-poly, too blurry, and too dull-colored for my tastes today. So, rather than complain to myself - or on the internet - I decided to do something about it. First was my pass through all the textures. Which resulted in the hi-res texture mod back in Jan. But I still wasn’t satisfied with a new layer of makeup. Nope, this was going to require a complete make-over. Some nipping, tucking, filling-out, taking-in, some time spent in the gym … I mean 3dsMax.

My guiding question all along has been: If the guys at Pandi were building this game now, what would they have done differently assuming they had more polys, time, and testing to work with the visuals?

Now they were/are professionals with great ability, and I’m not. I’m just a self-taught modeler, and ex-graphic designer, who’s developed a short-term obsessive-compulsive disorder to update the game’s appearance. Part of that update is to round-off objects that were clearly intended to be rounded, but couldn’t because of poly-limits, make both armies more consistent in their aesthetic style and coloring, which they are not, and to take the time to reconfigure some things that just never looked right to me such as the cockpits that are too small to fit even the misshapen pilot models and the low-poly, empty, black canopies.

Another one of the things I liked best about BZ1 and was happy to see carried over into BZII were all the vehicle animations. It helped give each vehicle a little personality – which was/is important since they are the characters of the game. The Sabre tank was the first model I worked on because it had no animations – why not? So I gave it some. I also carried over that same animated concept/design to the buildings. The stock buildings are just very simple, static shapes. Fine for 1999, dull for 2015. So I’ve added animations, and effects to most of them.

I’ve also added bumps and specular highlights, and completely new textures over modified versions of the meshes. At least one response in this thread to this was a criticism/critique of trying too hard to say “LOOK AT ME.”

In response …

“Yes, LOOK AT ME! Don’t drive by on the way to something else. I’m an effing tech center with spinning radar dishes, a new paintjob, sleek curves and windows. Not some 15-year old set of low-poly, octagonal blocks, in dull, dark, grey-and-pumpkin-orange, with fuzzy, barely noticeable texture details. LOOK AT ME!”

So yeah, I want the buildings to be noticeable. Building, using, and destroying them is one of the main points of the game’s existence. They’re characters just as much as the vehicles are. And I want colors that stand out. Step away from your computer. Go outside (assuming it’s daytime). Look around. The real world (natural, urban, and man-made) is full of so many colors and shades, and there are lots of things that reflect light, even with cloud cover. Honestly, I just don’t understand why so many people these days want everything to be in dark drab tones, or to have their visual entertainment so color-coded (dark).

And for goodness sakes, we’re playing a game about flying orange tanks, and flying tanks with decorative yellow wedges that transform into a different tank, and pumping biological-metal out of the ground(!) to build an instant army. But my optional, free, and still unreleased mod with its higher-pixel textures and object remodeling with higher polycounts is the problem?

Really?

Folks, some of you don’t realize that you are not playing the game you think you are.

Which goes to the real core of the concerns, critiques, and criticisms. This game’s been out long enough that a lot of its appeal is nostalgia – even for those who still continuously play, and especially since there’s never been another game like it. And woe to he (Really, can’t he just write regular English?) who suggests you try something different with it. I get that. But I would still say, relax.

None of the issues brought up are nearly as bad as you think they are just by looking at screenshots. I should know, I’ve spent over eight months(!) and counting with the original models and textures, and with the new. Possibly some of the problem is that it’s a bit jarring to see this so quickly where as I have been building up from that first ivtank xsi I imported into Max to now over 300 rebuilt/modified .msh files, and 800+ textures. But I suspect most people’s worries will be put to rest after they spend a little time with the mod once it comes out.

In closing (Thank God, what a windbag this Coxxon guy is) … I can’t make the game look either like my or your idea of perfect. I have my limitations, and the game has its. But I firmly believe the visuals need a mod like mine, just as much as the gameplay and code have needed the patches. And since it didn’t look like anyone was going to do it for me (or anyone else), I decided to do it myself. If you don’t like what you’ve seen, do better. No really, do what I did and try your hand at it. Try to raise the bar for all of us who mod and love this game. That’s the attitude that I took, and for the hundreds of hours I’ve spent on this I’ve had a great time and will consider it a success even if no one else does. Though granted, all of you will have to judge for yourselves whether or not an overall improvement has occurred.


But it’s not finished yet, so if you’ll excuse me, I have get back to reworking the a0 textures so there’s actually some color to units in multiplayer – and when I take screenshots I’ll try to remember to turn off some of the graphical features so it doesn’t freak people out so bad.

Ps - At the risk of rubbing it in, which I’m really not trying to do … more screenshots. This time ‘a before and after’ with spec highlights on and bumpmaps off.

Before Original
Image

After Remodeled
Image

I gotta say, I really like the after.

Pps - I don’t know if the below will help or not, but it tries to show some of the differences between old and new with different graphical settings.

Full size version available here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6O8f ... mIyRlNJZUk

Image
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