Sunspire Village Remake (UT3 Engine)

[Blu3Haz3]

Remake of Vortex 2 I did...

[hunoghun]

Thats pretty cool. Got a very ut3 look tho, not a big fan of that. Still nice anyway

[Sly.]

w
Question to both Sly and Wisebeardiness.
From my understanding both are using UDK, and both are remaking levels. Are you remaking the u1 feel also? weapons, chars, speed and whatnot. I am looking around researching to see if its even possible to remake u1.

We are allowed to remake Unreal but only in UT3 as a mod.

I will do my best to recreate the feel in my version, but for this any help is welcome. Character models are the least important thing at the moment (except for a decent Skaarj model which we found someone for -only if you count monsters as character models that is). First the basic levels, then the monsters, then the weapons and weapon models. That's how I see it.

And before I spark too much hope in the average Unreal fan's heart: I will only remake the first few levels from Vortex Rikers to Sacred Passage (maybe including Sacred Passage) as practise in several areas:
I intend to remake one weapon model myself (until then all models will be UT3 models) and animate it myself, try to code one monster (probably the Manta) and remake the levels with that one special Unreal feel. That's it.

I'm doing it for the experience in UE3 and because I wanted to make some Unreal fans happy I chose to remake some Unreal levels.

Later when I'll be done with the planned amount of levels I might see if I will still have the motivation to continue.

Of course my remake will take longer because I try to get the right feel and because I need to get the right scale of the levels.
But I have an idea how to make it easier:
Use UT3 Importer/Exporter (or whatever it was called to import Ny Leve and make the terrain around the BSP terrain of the original. This would be a great help to get the right scale. Afterwards I would delete the BSP and recreate the rest. Indoor levels are easier to handle for me for some reason.

[Blu3Haz3]

w
Question to both Sly and Wisebeardiness.
From my understanding both are using UDK, and both are remaking levels. Are you remaking the u1 feel also? weapons, chars, speed and whatnot. I am looking around researching to see if its even possible to remake u1.

We are allowed to remake Unreal but only in UT3 as a mod.

I will do my best to recreate the feel in my version, but for this any help is welcome. Character models are the least important thing at the moment (except for a decent Skaarj model which we found someone for -only if you count monsters as character models that is). First the basic levels, then the monsters, then the weapons and weapon models. That's how I see it.

And before I spark too much hope in the average Unreal fan's heart: I will only remake the first few levels from Vortex Rikers to Sacred Passage (maybe including Sacred Passage) as practise in several areas:
I intend to remake one weapon model myself (until then all models will be UT3 models) and animate it myself, try to code one monster (probably the Manta) and remake the levels with that one special Unreal feel. That's it.

I'm doing it for the experience in UE3 and because I wanted to make some Unreal fans happy I chose to remake some Unreal levels.

Later when I'll be done with the planned amount of levels I might see if I will still have the motivation to continue.

Of course my remake will take longer because I try to get the right feel and because I need to get the right scale of the levels.
But I have an idea how to make it easier:
Use UT3 Importer/Exporter (or whatever it was called to import Ny Leve and make the terrain around the BSP terrain of the original. This would be a great help to get the right scale. Afterwards I would delete the BSP and recreate the rest. Indoor levels are easier to handle for me for some reason.

I'd love to help, however I need to take some tutorials on terrain first. If we did remake Unreal Singleplayer then it would also be really nice to import and make static meshes and new terrain over the original. I am a good texture designer for objects and materials... btw, I can't remember the difference between the UDK and UT3 Editor... I think it was partly the geometry tools >.

[hunoghun]

@sly, that sounds pretty neat. From my "mod" experience, mods can be different in chars, weps and look, but not the "feel". As in the movement, the delay on the dodge forexample, the bob feel and so on. I might be mistaken. From my understanding of UDK, one can change EVERYTHING.

If you ever decide to go big with this, announce it, cause id love to help in anyway. Both in the cost and the work. Could be something of this sort: http://blackmesasource.com/

Keep up the awesome work. =)

[iLikeTheUDK]

The main changes that you could easily see were in the editor. But there were also other ones: It had a radiosity and Global Illumination solver, a bit like id Tech 3's and Source's technique, called Lightmass, which also enables specular lighting on lightmapped objects and surfaces. It also supports many DirectX 11 features, such as hardware tessellation and displacement mapping (one mode of tessellation called PNTriangles does something similar to UE1's old curved meshes support), multi-threaded rendering, and also other features which can only be seen in DX11 mode but I'm not sure if they're core DX11 features, such as screen space subsurface scattering (in short: SSSSS ) and billboard reflections\image-based specular, all of which UT3 doesn't support. More features are APEX clothing and destruction, a different, yet better, terrain engine called Unreal Landscape, a Fluid Surface actor like the one in Unreal Engine 2 and in Unreal 227, support for procedural vertex distortion like in id Tech engines, a screen-space ambient occlusion effect, better LightEnvironments, support for anisotropic lighting mode for certain materials, support for iOS and Mac OSX, and more technical stuff that I'd rather not go into or this post will be tiringly long...

[Blu3Haz3]

The main changes that you could easily see were in the editor. But there were also other ones: It had a radiosity and Global Illumination solver, a bit like id Tech 3's and Source's technique, called Lightmass, which also enables specular lighting on lightmapped objects and surfaces. It also supports many DirectX 11 features, such as hardware tessellation and displacement mapping (one mode of tessellation called PNTriangles does something similar to UE1's old curved meshes support), multi-threaded rendering, and also other features which can only be seen in DX11 mode but I'm not sure if they're core DX11 features, such as screen space subsurface scattering (in short: SSSSS ) and billboard reflections\image-based specular, all of which UT3 doesn't support. More features are APEX clothing and destruction, a different, yet better, terrain engine called Unreal Landscape, a Fluid Surface actor like the one in Unreal Engine 2 and in Unreal 227, support for procedural vertex distortion like in id Tech engines, a screen-space ambient occlusion effect, better LightEnvironments, support for anisotropic lighting mode for certain materials, support for iOS and Mac OSX, and more technical stuff that I'd rather not go into or this post will be tiringly long...

I'd say the main issue for any UDK developer is making fluent-less deathmatchy or unreal animations. Lets just you wanted to make a game like Battlefield 3. Smooth animations could mean 500 total animations with each animation possibly 30+ frames... And then programming the AI to use it properly. I've noticed that the AI in Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 was the closest to perfect I've seen out of Unreal. I've seen such good looking projects, but only one or two projects total that have make games that the AI are not running around in circles and things of that nature... The Counter Strike Source AI is really good, but if they had more animations and more attributes, such as using walls as cover... sliding to cover... it would be more like paintball but with real guns.

I'm getting off topic, but I was trying to just compare the engines together. You guys should see the Cryengine 3.0 Custom Flowgraph...

[Wisebeardiness]

@hunoghun, everything I've done is in UT3 I've messed with UDK in the past but didn't really make anything substantial whatsoever. While I'm constantly making changes to the levels I have, my main goal is to build experience by creating the ISV-Kran series of levels, perfect the village, and then hopefully get the time/skill to start working on the actual sunspire level itself I think indoor levels are a little more easy to maintain like Sly said in my opinion, so I'm mostly working on Kran. Don't really have experience in texturing or modeling but if someone else builds some cool stuff and is willing to share to heighten the experience of any of my levels, I'm always willing to colllaborate!

[Skaarj Master]

You guys rock! I can't wait to see how this turns out.

[Wisebeardiness]

Just finished the 1st part of ISV-Kran! Adding the final touches and details but I will post some images soon for feedback. Hope you are all well

[Sly.]

Looking forward to see it!

[Lord_Porksword]

+1!

[Wisebeardiness]

Also, do you guys know of some good cloud or atmospheric effects in the UT3 libraries? I think the sky is a bit dull in the sunspire village and I really want to fix it. But I did add some purple hues per your advice, Sly! Thanks

[Sly.]

The only thing I can think of is heightfog.

[Lord_Porksword]

As a suggestion.
In UN_simplemeshes there's a sphere.  Chuck a bunch in the sky and set a fog material on them(or control them via a fog volume).  Then randomly increase the x, y or z size to stretch them out to break the sphere shape.
Maybe use clusters of them to give a more 'cloudy' shape.