gamophyte on 18/11/2014 at 16:26
While there is a lot of good starter documentation, peeves list, and a good release practices info, there isn't much in the way of style and design. I'm inspired by the great brushing artists in the community, and bewildered by how they pulled off some of the eye candy I've seen.
This thread may not take off but I would like you, a pro FM builder to post at least one nugget that has been most useful to your FM endeavors. You can be as detailed as you want to the point of a tut, or just a quick suggestion, and send us in the right direction.
Any nugget would be appreciated greatly by myself and other new builders. Examples could be things like; clever scripting, time saving lesson, tricks with light, real world architecture emulation tips for interior and exterior places, newdark tricks, or any suggestion to new people.
gamophyte on 18/11/2014 at 17:14
Thank you Tanner, I actually forgot about that being a section. Even still, there's something very current about Drk's levels I am not sure is in that section. It would be great to see what he does, using brush object combos, to make something look like a modern game. Also this post could be a place to post single little morsels of such. Like, "this is how I make light cone from a square opening shining moonlight down into a torch lit sewer, so that it shows, dust particles and all" or "this is how you can trick the engine to have a different sky", or even "this is how I make dust particles appear in the whole volume of a room". Biggest one "I saved a lot of time once I found out....".
Just a thought, but I will definitely look back into the design section you pointed out. :thumb:
Xorak on 20/11/2014 at 10:24
Not that I want this to turn into another addition/subraction method argument, but building a large airbrush that represents your world space, then filling it with solid brushes, then filling those solids with the airbrushes that represent the rooms is the biggest waste of resources you can possibly ever imagine. I can't believe I used to build like that. That's three levels you're forcing Dromed to keep track of. You're total cells will start going through the roof as it tries to build those layers within one another. Then when the player plays the level, it's trying to render those three levels as well. Where if you build mainly with airbrushes, it's only one level the Dromed has to worry about.
For instance, in one mission I was working on, I built the solids in a giant aircube and reached a point where I had only 650 brushes and over 10,000 cells, which is just an insane number and complete waste. And I hadn't even started building the details to the interiors where the cell count would really start to become bloated. I had to abandon it because I knew I couldn't build what I wanted. Conversely, in the mission I'm working on right now, I have 2100 brushes and only 17,000 cells because I've planned it better and carved everything out of airbrushes so far. The cell level is important because you'll hit it before anything else in the mission.
The above doesn't really apply if you're building a small or medium sized mission, but if you want to go big and extract everything that Dromed can give you, it's fairly decent advice.
PinkDot on 20/11/2014 at 11:13
The substractive method is prefarable for Dromed, but it depends really on your architecture. Some shapes are impossible to achieve with air brushes only. I tried to build a cathedral with the inside and outside using substractive method for the outside but it just became an utter mess and I got stuck. When I come back to this map, I will build the volume of the cathedral out of solid brushes in a giant air brush.
But again - it all depends on the actual shapes you're trying to get. You can also mix these techniques in one mission.
Quote Posted by "Xorak"
Then when the player plays the level, it's trying to render those three levels as well.
There's no 'levels' during rendering. Everything is represented with a 'flat' array of cells having certain number of polygons, no matter what technique had been used.
What really matters is what way your cells and polygons get split, during portalization. Just have a habit of pressing ALT+9 from time to time to observe and analyze it.
