I believe this is a true JK first. A real horizon, without a skybox, that doesn't look like complete crap.



I just need to blend it a bit more. I'm also going to try progressively blurring the textures of the water to better fade it and simulate what good hardware mipmapping would look like. It's tedious but in the end it should look like a smooth haze. It's better than a skybox in that I can have it actually connect to the rest of the world. There's going to be a waterfall at the end of the canyon that pours out into a sea, where you'll look out to something like this.

Anyone have a good, high resolution tiling water texture? Really hard to make water look good by today's standards without a shader.

JK is **** with slanted water surfaces, as you move along it you constantly pop in and out, causing repeated splashes... I tried to fix this by editing kyle.cog and only creating a splash if the player was falling fast enough, but there are still terrible animation problems. Probably removing the slant and making it a series of flat surfaces and waterfalls.

Some interesting results trying to make a waterfall effect with particles and the additive blending changes in the later JKUP tests. It only looks this good in slowmo mode and when it isn't flickering like crazy. Probably won't work out.



This was an attempt to cover up texture coordinate issues on these little waterfall things because JK's scrolling textures are buggy. Even if I got it working it would look so much better than everything else it would look terribly out of place. JK is awful.

Snappy!

Damn it Emon. You're basically building what the start of my level is supposed to be.

Canyons are completely obligatory in JK. If canyons got popular in other video games, I submit it's because of JK.

Oh and yay real horizons!

Well it's the only kind of outdoor architecture that's remotely easy to make, works well with regular vertex lighting, and 10-15 years ago didn't cause massive performance hits (canyon walls do a good job occluding the rest of the level) or make you run into the adjoin limit.

The waterfall has potential but, as you mention, looks totally out-of-place in context with dated other resources.

My challenge is also to find custom textures/other resources that don't make all of the stock or retro-era resources I'm using look jarring in comparison. I want my level to look "consistently dated."

google for Quake 2, Half-Life, etc textures

Never stopped me

Great stuff!

Emon can keep his 'horizon'. I'm just going to use a skybox.

Doesn't look like much in JED



But thanks to a cog from GBK it looks great in-game.

Nice skybox edges

That's how you can tell it's a skybox.

Are there visible distortions from perspective on the edges? It looks like you should have to make it much, much bigger to simulate real sky distance

Why would there be distortions?

Perspective. The edges of the skybox are further away from you than the sides, and you can notice the effect if it's not large enough to make the ratio of distance between points on the skybox small enough.

Uh no; it's a skybox. The textures are the result of spherical projection onto the cube. It looks like a sphere; that's the point of a skybox. The size of the skybox is irrelevant.

At any rate, the ratio between the distance from the center of the box to the center of one face and the distance from the center to the corner is always going to be 1/sqrt(3) no matter how big the box is.

Nevermind, I'm not really sure where I thought I was going with that.

My windows are all flickery. God damnit JK.

When they get rendered over top of each other?

Yep.

So anyway, the 'build the whole facility and then carve a level out of it' approach didn't work out.

Some more screenies

Looking good! Keep the screenshots coming!

Emon, I wouldn't mind knowing how you did the horizon, though I suspect it won't mix with the skybox very well.

Make a really huge sector, (height doesn't matter much for parallax sky, except that projectiles will disappear early) like this:



I'm at work so excuse the ****ty visualization. But the bottom line is the sea, top is the sky. The wall is all flagged as sky, too. But closer to the bottom, it's a different texture that fades color to match the sea. I just overlaid the sea texture and put the opacity to 25%, 50%, 75%. I figure if you do about 16 it should look pretty good. Lines on the left indicate the cleaves where you'd change the texture.

I also want to try something like:



Where A, B, C and D are textures that mimic mipmaps of E, getting blurrier (and more like the sky in color) further off, smoothing it even more. It's laborious but the net effect is basically the same as if JK didn't suck so bad. It looks OK in my image above because the camera is close to the ground, but as you go higher up, it looks worse and worse, and the more you need things to lose visual definition correctly.

If you really wanted to you could curve the whole thing to mimic the curvature of the planet. If you did all the subdivision in a proper 3D modeling program it would get substantially simpler.

I was right. It wouldn't work with the skybox at all. However, a single-color blend should work.

That's because your skybox is some dark joojoo, man.

stay away from the voodoo

first post ever here :p
But i have a map to show!! it's jk2 and not really done yet though :p

The theme of the map is Alice in wonderland.
The map has teleports from the drink on the shelf to the room where everything is small. And if you "eat" from the cake you go back to the room where everything is large.

Like hen alice drank and got big? Then in a desperate attempt ate the cake to graw back.

Should have made your own thread.

Anyway.

I'm ****ed.

My bad, thought this was a showcase thread.

It is, but it's a remake of a since deleted thread collectively showcasing user designed maps from the original Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 game for the Massassi level pack contest. Your level is for Jedi Outcast/Academy, and can have it's own thread as to not be confused with JK, or be confused for a contest level.

This isn't explicitly stated because, at this point, we are a hive mind collective that can read eachother's bathroom urges, among other thoughts. Ew FastGamerR.

JediKirby is the dirty part of the hive mind.

JM's level looks cool as ****.

I need two or three early play testers.

This level is completely impossible without the adjoin limit patch.

fyi JK can load 4096x4096 mats

With or without mipmaps?