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Enigma wrote:Personally I'd rather see the BfNP maps released in all their originally envisioned glory using the tech I started developing, rather than being cut down, but obviously the mappers in question should have the final say.

Your tech... would you consider offering it up to RD?

(We're talking about a somewhat revolutionary new OpenGL renderer, which performed a triple heart bypass on the engine. IIRC there was a proposal to provide a solution for higher radius lights, too.)

Enigma, I forgot to ask before and since you're here, would you be interested in repurposing and releasing BFNPDepends as a general Unreal map file dependency checker? It could be very helpful.

In principle I don't mind offering the "my tech" (if that's what we're going to call it) to RD, but there is considerable work required to complete any of it to a useable state so available time and any deadlines for RD are a factor. The various bits of tech I was thinking about were the renderer, the node/verts/size limit work and the improved bsp generation I touched on briefly.

Mman - Yes, I probably should release that, but I'd like to clean up the UI a bit first and I'd have to rework it slightly due to the BfNP specific working environment it was based on. I'll put it on my to-do list.

Enigma wrote:In principle I don't mind offering the "my tech" (if that's what we're going to call it)

I didn't mean to sound condescending / dismissive... sorry if that's how it sounded. I wouldn't dream of undervaluing such nifty code!

I thought of calling it "our tech", but I didn't want to take the credit for it.

Enigma wrote:In principle I don't mind offering the "my tech" (if that's what we're going to call it) to RD, but there is considerable work required to complete any of it to a useable state so available time and any deadlines for RD are a factor. The various bits of tech I was thinking about were the renderer, the node/verts/size limit work and the improved bsp generation I touched on briefly.

Hi Enigma, glad to hear from you. This would depend entirely on Raven (our current RD coder) and how this content might compare to the content already done (there's quite a lot of engine expansions for RD already and the poor guy is wearing himself thin with the amount of stuff he's cramming into it all Everytime I speak to him he's got something else added to the game, like just today we have a functional method to build level out of solids only in UED that matches the one in UT3's editor). The best way to see about this would be to get Raven a version of your renderer for BFNP and everything else, if that's fine, just so he can see for himself the differences and what we could use/finish from the BFNP side. I'll turn him on to the thread.

Hellscrag wrote:Prophet - It seems that the obvious thing to do next is for me to get all this content to you somehow, so that you can check it all out. I would suggest the team FTP, but IIRC you can't access that.

There are file size issues. Uncompressed, I have about 205MB of maps, 591MB of textures and 95MB of music. Surprised

Perhaps I should post you a CD, lol...

EDIT: Actually, that's not such a dumb idea...

It's not dumb idea , though I think we could hear from a few more people before we see about getting it all to me. I could at least take a look at the stuff approved already, such as your maps for instance. In particular the coastal fortress is something I'd be curious to see (as I've never actually seen it beyond a screenshot or two). That would be a smaller sized load that you could upload or email to me even. I'd even suggest an irc session some day this week where we could transer files. I do not have access to the old-FTP.

The Coastal Fortress could use a few surgical deletions before I send it to you... there are a lot of invisible movers at present, a side effect of having too many vertices (I resorted to using movers for decorations to get around the node limit issue, but then I ran into the vertex limit, because every mover has 8 keyframes stored in memory even if they're all the same).

Perhaps I'd better get back to you when I've had a chance to look at it.

Okay.

Mister_Prophet wrote:Okay.

Hopefully this weekend!

About Coastal Fortress and other maps with poly overrun - how many props can be converted to meshes? I suppose there are a lot of unreachable small stuff like lanterns and torches which are the first candidates for conversion. Even being small, such props might hold a substantial portion of nodes and polys.

Looks like Prophet is about to adapt RD storyline to engage new maps. Can you and Scrag make RD storyline intersecting with BfNP? Doing so you can save maps for BfNP without gifting them to RD completely.

diamond wrote:Looks like Prophet is about to adapt RD storyline to engage new maps. Can you and Scrag make RD storyline intersecting with BfNP? Doing so you can save maps for BfNP without gifting them to RD completely.

It's a bit early to expect answers to that don't you think? Give the guys an opportunity to actually see what's available first.

I think we should help finishing RD instead of waiting forever with BFNP. I checked my maps I got all the files needed to run them as well. One needs some tweaks and some texture alignement, the other one is a good start for a really huge explorable area.

diamond wrote:About Coastal Fortress and other maps with poly overrun - how many props can be converted to meshes? I suppose there are a lot of unreachable small stuff like lanterns and torches which are the first candidates for conversion. Even being small, such props might hold a substantial portion of nodes and polys.

There are some elaborate torches that could certainly be converted, but then they wouldn't cast the right kind of shadows. It's certainly an option and might help to some extent (but a lot of the nodes come from stuff that can't really be resolved satisfactorily with a mesh, whether that be for reasons of collision, clipping or lighting).

The most recent discussions of tech have been split to the private forum.

I thought that BfNP would have a 'fix' for the nodecount.. so that you could build beyond that... what's gonna happen with that? Or does RD have something similar?
And what about the light effects.. (saw that in a leaked vid..afaik I only saw that one besides the BfNP team).. I mean, will just the maps, sounds, music, textures be "moved" to RD, or also some technology? (just curious.. may not be the only person curious about this)