[WIP] Ultima Underworld level conversion

[Ozymandias81]

Torches put like that (I know, placeholders) reminds to me of Unreal engine light entities icons ahah... Very very hyped to see how the whole Intro will be done.
Meanwhile managed to set a nice easy code for weapons, I can now swing them between left/right/forward/backward , because I don't plan to put l/r handedness and it might be a real headache with graphics offsets and such.

[Sir Robin]

Torches put like that (I know, placeholders) reminds to me of Unreal engine light entities icons ahah... Very very hyped to see how the whole Intro will be done.
Meanwhile managed to set a nice easy code for weapons, I can now swing them between left/right/forward/backward , because I don't plan to put l/r handedness and it might be a real headache with graphics offsets and such.

I wish I had some good wall-mounted torches or lanterns I could use. UW1 has none of that. In fact UW1 has very little lighting that is not carried by the player. If you think about it, some critters have campfires but the rest are literally just waiting around in the darkness. UW2 had fireplaces and sometimes they'd put a shelf on the wall with a lit candle on it, but neither of those fits for my abyss entrance. I'll probably dig through that U8 rip you posted, so if I can find something useful in there.

I've got my weapons coded, they're functional but not UW1 accurate. I need to adjust charge speeds and damage modifiers and all that stuff. But the animations are in and the charging system is in, so they're functional. When you hold fire it just picks a random attack of the 3 and starts charging it, then release to attack, pretty close to how UW functioned. Except I didn't use the stab for axe and mace - I always thought it looked dumb to try to stab something with those weapons. I did put them in as the altfire though. They don't do any damage, but can be used to push buttons too far away for the normal "use". That's also in the tutorial - there is a fighting arena you can only get to by pushing a button that is too far away to reach so you have to pick up a weapon and press it with that.

Anyway, I've been working a lot on the materials and lighting, about to drop a video of that.

[Sir Robin]

I've been working on adding normal and specular maps to the UW1 textures. Here's a video showing the differences between material shaders and no material shaders.



I'd like to make the water reflective or translucent but those effects can't be applied to slopes and UW1 has lots of sloped water. I might do it for small water bodies that don't have slopes.

[Ozymandias81]

Freakin' cool Sir! Definitely getting the "remaster" feeling with these new materials, but btw why bother with software mode? You could simply put materials shaders in a separate .pk3 so it's up to players to decide to use them or not. Regarding torches, have a look to this super pack or decorations for Hexen, there are several kind of torches that might help (and somewhere else you might also find voxels based ones as well)

[Sir Robin]

Freakin' cool Sir! Definitely getting the "remaster" feeling with these new materials, but btw why bother with software mode? You could simply put materials shaders in a separate .pk3 so it's up to players to decide to use them or not. Regarding torches, have a look to this super pack or decorations for Hexen, there are several kind of torches that might help (and somewhere else you might also find voxels based ones as well)

I'm not actually supporting software mode at all, I just used that in the video to quickly show the differences between materials and plain textures. The other way to do it would be to record a demo, then do a video recording of the demo with and without the materials loaded, then use a video editor to swap back and forth between the two. That just seemed like more more than I wanted to do.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out

[Sir Robin]

Playing with reflections. They look nice but if I can't apply them to slopes then I can't apply them universally and they won't look right. Maybe put them in only a few places where there are no connecting slopes

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[Sir Robin]

Regarding torches, have a look to this super pack or decorations for Hexen, there are several kind of torches that might help (and somewhere else you might also find voxels based ones as well)

Very nice, lots to look at. Specifically torches, I see 3 wall mount types and several different floor lamps and braziers.
I also see a bunch of chests and that's something I haven't approached yet - I need to put chests and other containers in my maps. I've coded basic containers but haven't yet put locks on or have a mechanism for attaching contents to them.
Also, there is a suit of armor, if your strike it the armor all falls apart. Kind of like my training dummies.

[Kzer-Za]

Is it just me or did the NPCs in that video look lower than in UUW? (But overall, it looks fantastic!)

[Sir Robin]

Is it just me or did the NPCs in that video look lower than in UUW? (But overall, it looks fantastic!)

Well, you're not wrong:

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On mine his head is right at the level of the third row of bricks. And that is consistent no matter where in the room I'm standing, so he must be right at my view height. I know my view height is correct because if I stick my face into a wall in both games, I see the exact same pixels, so it's spot-on.
In true UW his height is just past half way up the forth row of bricks. And he gets taller when he gets closer, so he's definitely higher than my view height there. Not sure if he's stretched a little taller, or offset a little higher, or what.

[Enjay]

I like how your materials are reasonably subtle in most cases. Most of yours are just a little shine and a hint of 3D-ness. Very nice. Much better IMO, much more professional and natural looking than the whole "OMG I must make everything stand out like the world was carved using a chainsaw on wax" that it is very easy to accidentally create.

[Kzer-Za]

I like how your materials are reasonably subtle in most cases. Most of yours are just a little shine and a hint of 3D-ness. Very nice. Much better IMO, much more professional and natural looking than the whole "OMG I must make everything stand out like the world was carved using a chainsaw on wax" that it is very easy to accidentally create.

I totally second that!

[Sir Robin]

I like how your materials are reasonably subtle in most cases. Most of yours are just a little shine and a hint of 3D-ness. Very nice. Much better IMO, much more professional and natural looking than the whole "OMG I must make everything stand out like the world was carved using a chainsaw on wax" that it is very easy to accidentally create.

Thanks! I went looking for tutorials on making materials and found lots of stuff for making guns - examples for metal, plastic, rubber, glass, etc, but very little for things like brick and stone and dirt. And lot of examples are for photorealistic textures, very very few are for pixel art. So I just tried different things on my own. Like any noob, I went through a few phases. At first I was really pushing the 3d thing, lots of sharp angles, baked my speculars with much more shine at the brick edges than the faces to highlight the 3d-ness. Made them really pop out but looked fake.
For a while I tried adding noise to the normal maps, trying to add a "grittiness" to the dungeon feel.
Then I tried the smoother look and just liked that better.
Here's a few textures I made gritty and haven't redone smooth yet:

Maybe I'll leave a few textures gritty for the look in certain areas, I'm not sure yet.
Overall I use very little specular. Other than the marble and the water I don't think many materials in a dungeon should be shiny. The river rocks I left a little more shiny, I wanted them to look a little damp. And the gold veins in the mines:

When I was looking at other peoples posts, one person said they used shine to make certain walls look damp. Somebody else thought they overdid it, commented something about "they don't look damp, they like they're coated in jello".
So now "coated in jello" and "carved using a chainsaw on wax" are my favorite quotes now, so thank you for that!

[Sir Robin]

Some areas might look good a little bit gritty?

[Gez]

The problem when the effect isn't subtle enough is that it makes the surfaces too detailed to fit with the geometry. Contrast the 3D grittiness of the walls with the razor sharp border of these walls with the floor and the ceiling.

[Ozymandias81]

Love how new materials look, but specially how did you place action icons around the compass, neat idea! I guess applying User# buttons might work, you'll just need to include a fifth custom one and it should do the trick (as shortuts). What I still didn't imagine how to implement, but because I am still setting my resources and such offset/sprite wise (also working on Cyclops, since my mod should have outskirts/forest/mountain places I think), are runes and the runebag... My approach will be more arcadey, so quite sure might be as normal scrollable inventory bar where runes are usable objects... or mmh like Quest objects to collect, important to solve puzzles.
Regarding training dummies thing, must be cool to see them in movement