Hey, I'm looking for some good urban JK levels with skyscrapers and the like(Looking for inspiration), any ideas?

ReT

Phoenix Suburban City, but that level is very unrealistic

There really just aren't. Morpheus tried. That's the only one I can think of with skyscrapers.

Is the reason there aren't too many city levels Thing and Adjoin limits?

City levels are hard to do in JK, You can hit the adjoin limit quickly if you don't plan ahead (not that it's a problem anymore, but then there's framerate loss).
Negative space engines are not the easiest thing to construct anything outdoors with a decent amount of detail.

I think a city level came with the dark fist mod (I think) It's called Oak Street or something like that.

I actually have no idea, or it could possibly be the lack of realistic textures.

[edit] P.S.

You can actually turn of adjoins via cog. The LEC doors do it all the time. If you could rig yourself a system to turn off the adjoins where the player wont be able to see anything behind(like the adjoins above a building into the sky, closed doors), you'd be set.

I actually don't know what adjoins are. Any tips on creating a large building that I should know? I'll do 3do furniture, create a massive "outdoor" building, and spend a lot of time dividing up the inside with walls and shafts and other cool stuff.

Check out Zindel. It's not perfect, but it's clever.

This idea is executed rather well with "Drazen Isle" - it's called "viewsave.cog" if I recall correctly...

To answer your question however, Stormtrooper hit the nail on the head, so I'm not going to repeat it - it's just a limitation we have to live with/work around (depending on how "creative" you are ;)). As far as levels are concerned "Phoenix Suburban City" (available for download) and Z@nardi's city level (WIP - take a look at the showcase forum) are some of the better levels I've seen (in my humble opinion ;)).

Hope this info helps

-Jackpot

[EDIT: fixed typos ;)]

ORJ_JoS beat me to it... but Zindel is worth a look in.

Thanks guys, I'll be sure to check these out.

I don't mind using the thing patches though, it seems like if I wanted to make a really big building requiring the thing limit patch would make it a lot easier.

The viewsave.cog is a good solution, but it still needs a lot of planning. There are cases where distance alone is not a good key to base adjoin turn off on (I don't really know if it's based on distance...just an assumption).
The best way to optimize it is to create a special texture for each adjoin to be turned off. This texture would be created by taking a screenshot of the scenery behind the adjoin. It's a lot of work, but if done properly, it will be very hard to notice the trick at all (it obviously doesnt work with vast sceneries like miles of a highway, since the slightest angle to the adjoin would reveal the trick)...

:>

It actually kind of sucks, though.

Yeah I hate 2d buildings...

I would imagine that the combination of a fog effect to fade distant buildings/objects and that viewsave principle would allow you to create a massive level in a city format. Of course, the fog would sort of take away some of the awe aspect of a massive city at the same time...by not allow the player to see it all at once. But I think we're all familar with the concept of our design being limited or perhaps just guided, by the game engine by now.

There is no decent fog effect in JK. Only the possibilities of sector tint, coloreffect (altering the whole displayed image) and the rather adventurous project of attaching translucent "fog spheres" to the player object. None of them is very convincing. The fog sphere would probably be the only solution anyway, because you want to have distance fog.

I experimented with mist in Haven of Shadows. A simple sector cleave around the walkplayer's knee-level, a reflagging for translucency, a decent mist mat, and an elementary scrolling cog arranged for the effect of mist.

With a scrolling/rotating/animated mat, with some of those nifty reactor sprites trailing behind at a close distance, I think fog could be achieved. A sector cleave would no longer be a possibility, however. If there were a way to set a layer of translucent fog as a thing or a sprite in itself, however...
At the scale of a city level, maybe not. For a small, closed in forest, I don't see why not.

He means a fog technique to block away parts of the level to save on FPS.

I'm going to divulge one of Friend14's secrets right here and right now:

Load up all of your maps, apply 3 different levels of gray to each, getting darker each time. Think fog.

Do the same with an all black texture. Think more fog. Transluscency until the 3rd texture which should be nontransluscent. [Fake transluscency of alternating black and fog]

Make new textures and use the grays as mip-maps for their corisponding texture.

Cleave midway between buildings. Set the black texture with gray mip-maps onto this surface.

Play with your mip-map levels.

TADA. Fake fog that also saves FPS on lower end machines, or supports a very large city level without overloading a PC.

This can be done on small inclosed maps for some REALLY neat darkness effects allowing for enemies to sneak right up on the player. I've also used it for a puzzle back in the Episode 1 TC where Anikin was searching himself for the force [a test in front of yoda] and had to find his way through the "Dark." I made a dark room where you could hear his mother saying his name and it'd get louder the closer you got to the edge of the cliff in the room, and a glowy noise towards the force. I also put random obsticals and moving things that'd kill you that would sneak up on you because of the 'dream haze' done by this technique.

JediKirby

Couldn't you just take the fog from this tutorial ( http://www.massassi.net/tutorials/superfog/ ) and set up 4 ghosts around the player that stay in position from the player as he moves around via cog? That would prevent the fog thickness from changing, because you won't ever get too close to it, but at the same time it will shroud everything in front of, behind, and to the sides of the player at a user specified distance.

It's not the exact same effect. The coloreffect just "tints" the display with a defined color. It creates the illusion of the player being IN the fog. But what's needed here is distance fog. The player is outside the fog, can see clearly, but things beyond a set distance are fogged out.

Nah, I think they are trying to simulate volumetric fog. Fog that gets thicker and more opaque farther away from the camera. That kind of fog is just a screen tint.

But the main poitn here is just to make the level a certain distance away from the player "fade away" isn't it? Note, this is more singleplayer than MP oriented.

A screen tint wont make things at a distance fade away, it will just tint the entire screen.

Sector tint only works when you're inside the sector.

Yeah do what kirby suggested, mip-maps and LOD are the way to go (Although I'm not sure if he is suggesting this but I just saw the word "mip-map" in his post so I hope he is). Although I don't think mat16 does custom mip-maps (it generates them but you can't customize em).

Slaw wrote a good LOD cog for faking 3do fog.

The effect is pretty groovy.

(BTW, don't mind me I was just skimming the thread when I read something about fog effects so blah. In fact I don't even know what the initial post was about!)

Wow, I'd never thought of using lods. Well, I sort of did, but I haven't seen enough fog to think of how you'd do it.

JediKirby

Hi ReT.

Tho not the best city levels...

A large city level I made years ago:
http://home.neo.rr.com/jaspalidori/JAS/img/Skycity.jpg
http://home.neo.rr.com/jaspalidori/Skycity.zip

( mostly 8-bit textures )

It was a city level, with skycrapers 'so high that you could look down and see clouds below you' and look up to see the night sky above you.
It might inspire you? -shrugs-


And over at the JKhub.net project pages, I am actually in the process of making a more 'realistic' City Level ( CITY ON FIRE ) intended to be used with the MOD ss3 ( version 9.0 ).

Project link (which includes specs, info and screenshots; as well as the beta-downloads):
http://jkhub.massassi.net/project/show.php?projid=85

( converting to more 16-bit textures )

I am not sure if you have the textures you want or not yet...
..but there are some good textures at this link:

http://www.planetquake.com/berneyboy/textures.htm

There is a file there that you can download which is like 125 megs - zipped. But contains Alot of textures
( from vegetation, to bricks, to city buildings, to graffitti, etc-etc , legos? lol)


Planning ahead is definately the key to avoiding adjoin-limit / HOM problems in a large city level. Making Building 3dos is a good idea (so long as they are simple 3dos without alot of surfaces....like a long/tall 6-sided rectangular building works nice; even if u add a rook edge around the top, and add vent 3do's to the top of it). If you want to enter the building tho, I would stick with sectors and cleaving.

And on a side note: Fog
Friend14, Spiral and myself - all have used the idea of mipmap fog with some decent results
( the only problem I noticed on my old computer is that when in JED- F6, and change the 'MIPMAP Distances' and '3DO LOD Distances', it does "look better and more real", but lowers the framerate noticeably )

Hope some of this helps?


ps> Money*bie: What urban city level is that in your screenshot w/ police car ?
( pretty good job of texturing I would say ) =D

Good luck.

Phoenix Suburban City - Cool but on a much smaller scale than I am thinking of. Also a little hard on the eyes, not very good textures.

Zindel - Sorry, this level struck me as being pretty crappy. The skybox is clever though.

SkyCity - Alright Pali but a bit too much like Nar Shaddaa, y'know? I'm thinking ground level. Thanks though.

I love those textures you linked to, I'm definitely gonna have to use some of them. I'm gonna try to do 16-bit as much as possible, I want it to be as high of quality as possible, like Z@NARDI's City level(I'm gonna go more urban than his though).

I checked out your City on Fire level - Nice! Best city level I've seen yet. Can't wait to play SS3 at the final version.

Fog - This seems like a cool idea, but I'm not sure yet if I would do multiple huge buildings or not...but if I do I think I'll go with that option. Sniping out of windows with fog would rock...hehe.

Thank you everyone for your input.

ReT

Fog sphere's don't sound particularly difficult...but I'm probably forgeting some issue with 3dos and transparency.