I'd like to do a small example map on the Doom3 engine as a proof of concept. I've been working in a variety of game engines in the last couple of months, from CryEngine to UDK, to Torque. However, I still like the structure and feel of idTech engines. With the BFG release hopefully fixing the networking bugs I'd like to try to get a nice outdoor map going as a proof of concept for a later game. My one problem with idTech games is they always seem to be rather drab and gloomy, so I'd like to try doing a map that looks exactly the opposite as kind of a study. The question is, what do I need to do this, engine and mods wise? When I've tried to fake outdoor lighting with ambient lights it seems to fail.

The goals for this map:

Detailed outdoor terrain using Worldmachine and sculpting/mesh painting. This will probably be on the order of 20k polys (At least) and with split large textures (4096 x 4 or something).
Grass and Trees.
Water.
Bright, cheery sunshine. The ability to fake ambient light.

To make it more complicated, I'd rather not use radiant. Rather, I'd like to import everything using .ase as static models. The question is, how should I construct things for efficiency? Do I use separate collision models? Also, I think some of Sikkmod's shaders can make this map work, like the HDR shader.

So, I'm throwing this to you, the Doom3 modding community, hopefully you can help. If anyone's interested in collaborating that would be great too.

No time to look up the details right now but Sikkpin has come up with some better light shaders (which give you the ability to use a cubemap for ambient lighting) and that combined with soft shadows and color grading would help. The Doom 3 engines lighting system really isn't good for outdoor stuff though.

After the War did some cool stuff, check out a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSacLrc5BA

A few years ago AO put together some tools to get the Megatexture functionality in Doom 3 working, and we put together a testmap showing it in action (forgive the poor quality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB9Nq9w-5Yc

It's a cool tech demo but there are much better options in newer engines.

Yeah, this is more of a proof of concept thing than anything. Realistically I'd be building this game on jmarshall's fork with the virtual texturing and baked lighting.

Dashiva wrote:

Yeah, this is more of a proof of concept thing than anything. Realistically I'd be building this game on jmarshall's fork with the virtual texturing and baked lighting.

I've added a lot of new features to idtech 4 cdk, I'm hoping to get a new build out sometime next month, it's still a slow(er) pipeline compared to UDK(mostly because your painting a world) but I've cut the iteration time by almost 3/4th of what it originally was.

One thing you might want to look at depending on what you want to do, but our previewer now uses sampler2DArray's which actually work very nicely with terrain.

Sampler2DArray Slice Layout:

<diffuse image(tiled)>
<normal image with specular alpha>
<mask/title orientation>

You can have like 9 of those section per tmu with comes out to like 72 terrain layers in a single pass, without baking everything. This might be a decent option for you to look into. As far as painting terrain just jack the code from the vt tool I released

.

I'm also just about done with the next MegaTexture tutorial, which will have lighting/bump mapping, and a huge quality boost.

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

Mr.Spline wrote:

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

In the last public build I released I included a in-editor paint tool http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8odj6S3rmg&feature=plcp you haven't had to use mudbox in a long time, and every area is virtual textured you can choose not to use vt when you place things in the editor but internally it's still rendered as a vt.

Back on topic as far as I know the original megatexture v2 mod, my virtual texturing code, and the megatexture tutorial I put up are the only outdoor work that has been done in Doom 3 outside of id and id's licensee's.

Mr.Spline wrote:

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

I think you'll still be able to use brush based modeling techniques with this particular mod, as its tools are based on the old D3 level editor.

jmarshall23 wrote:

In the last public build I released I included a in-editor paint tool http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8odj6S3rmg&feature=plcp you haven't had to use mudbox in a long time, and every area is virtual textured you can choose not to use vt when you place things in the editor but internally it's still rendered as a vt.

Back on topic as far as I know the original megatexture v2 mod, my virtual texturing code, and the megatexture tutorial I put up are the only outdoor work that has been done in Doom 3 outside of id and id's licensee's.

Yeah, I'm waiting for a working code drop on the cdk as I'm not a coder. This is more of a proof of concept with the current D3 code and any easily applicable mods. Same goes with megatexture, it's just too complicated for me to handle.

What I'm more concerned about now is the lighting with the current D3 code, the ambient looks bad for outdoor stuff.

But as far as your mod is concerned my workflow will probably be using World Machine or something like that to generate a 32k (or so) texture and using it as the terrain cover, then importing models and using the texture paint/VT tool to cover the gaps between the terrain and models.

The following scenes below all include some form of outdoor scene integration, so if you like something, feel free to private message me and I can fill you into details of what was involved in getting those scenes built...

... I actually got many more showcases but I am currently away from my dev environment and shall return back to it in about 2 weeks.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

Scene 9

Scene 10

I'm going to get the megatexture tutorial 2 up in a few hours, that will get you megatexturing with lighting a bumpmapping.

Quote:

The following scenes below all include some form of outdoor scene integration, so if you like something, feel free to private message me and I can fill you into details of what was involved in getting those scenes built...

... I actually got many more showcases but I am currently away from my dev environment and shall return back to it in about 2 weeks.

I'm assuming each layer in your terrain is a new pass right? Or are you doing something different?

Actually no one told me that most of the videos I posted were set to "private" and therefore not access-able ... just fixed it but setting them to "public"...

Oneofthe8devilz wrote:

Actually no one told me that most of the videos I posted were set to "private" and therefore not access-able ... just fixed it but setting them to "public"...

Conventional texturing only gets you so far with terrain unfortunetly, the bloom shader your using is nice and the terrain works for most of your scenes, but to pull off terrain properly you need to have a good variety of textures to make it feel right. Did you make any engine side changes?

Actually as resolution and framerate indicate, most of the videos were created around the year 2004... so no, there were no engine changes made back then...

For me personally megatexturing is not much of interest unless it features dynamic specular and normalmapping... and even then it costs way more hdd space if you want to achieve the same level of pixel density compared to a traditional multi vertex blending method...

Unless you have gameplay that frequently switches between 1ps/3ps and birdseye/isometric view I don't see any justification for porting over to megatextures... especially since that raises the minimum gpu requirements to PS 4.0...

But those are just my 2 cents and I might be wrong here...

It certainly is tempting to compare an outdoor scenario completely done with dynamic light/shadows & megatextures versus the same content done with traditional texturing, but the times of baking lights, shadows or texture information are a thing of the past ( at least for me).

Quote:

For me personally megatexturing is not much of interest unless it features dynamic specular and normalmapping... and even then it costs way more hdd space if you want to achieve the same level of pixel density compared to a traditional multi vertex blending method...

I got megatexturing done with normal and spec mapping and works on older hardware(the normal map is a 8192 texture, but can be scaled down if the hardware doesn't support that high of a resoultion). I plan on knocking out the tutorial today and release tomarrow, that mixed with DXT compression, and the massive speed boosts I put in the megatexture code its pretty close to being practical for production use.

I made some changes just now actually that might allow for a megatexture to have the same size normal map, I might try to get that in before release, but that double the space requirement. As it is each megatexture will only take up 682mb a piece.

I'd like to do a small example map on the Doom3 engine as a proof of concept. I've been working in a variety of game engines in the last couple of months, from CryEngine to UDK, to Torque. However, I still like the structure and feel of idTech engines. With the BFG release hopefully fixing the networking bugs I'd like to try to get a nice outdoor map going as a proof of concept for a later game. My one problem with idTech games is they always seem to be rather drab and gloomy, so I'd like to try doing a map that looks exactly the opposite as kind of a study. The question is, what do I need to do this, engine and mods wise? When I've tried to fake outdoor lighting with ambient lights it seems to fail.

The goals for this map:

Detailed outdoor terrain using Worldmachine and sculpting/mesh painting. This will probably be on the order of 20k polys (At least) and with split large textures (4096 x 4 or something).
Grass and Trees.
Water.
Bright, cheery sunshine. The ability to fake ambient light.

To make it more complicated, I'd rather not use radiant. Rather, I'd like to import everything using .ase as static models. The question is, how should I construct things for efficiency? Do I use separate collision models? Also, I think some of Sikkmod's shaders can make this map work, like the HDR shader.

So, I'm throwing this to you, the Doom3 modding community, hopefully you can help. If anyone's interested in collaborating that would be great too.

No time to look up the details right now but Sikkpin has come up with some better light shaders (which give you the ability to use a cubemap for ambient lighting) and that combined with soft shadows and color grading would help. The Doom 3 engines lighting system really isn't good for outdoor stuff though.

After the War did some cool stuff, check out a video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoSacLrc5BA

A few years ago AO put together some tools to get the Megatexture functionality in Doom 3 working, and we put together a testmap showing it in action (forgive the poor quality) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB9Nq9w-5Yc

It's a cool tech demo but there are much better options in newer engines.

Yeah, this is more of a proof of concept thing than anything. Realistically I'd be building this game on jmarshall's fork with the virtual texturing and baked lighting.

Dashiva wrote:

Yeah, this is more of a proof of concept thing than anything. Realistically I'd be building this game on jmarshall's fork with the virtual texturing and baked lighting.

I've added a lot of new features to idtech 4 cdk, I'm hoping to get a new build out sometime next month, it's still a slow(er) pipeline compared to UDK(mostly because your painting a world) but I've cut the iteration time by almost 3/4th of what it originally was.

One thing you might want to look at depending on what you want to do, but our previewer now uses sampler2DArray's which actually work very nicely with terrain.

Sampler2DArray Slice Layout:

<diffuse image(tiled)>
<normal image with specular alpha>
<mask/title orientation>

You can have like 9 of those section per tmu with comes out to like 72 terrain layers in a single pass, without baking everything. This might be a decent option for you to look into. As far as painting terrain just jack the code from the vt tool I released

.

I'm also just about done with the next MegaTexture tutorial, which will have lighting/bump mapping, and a huge quality boost.

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

Mr.Spline wrote:

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

In the last public build I released I included a in-editor paint tool http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8odj6S3rmg&feature=plcp you haven't had to use mudbox in a long time, and every area is virtual textured you can choose not to use vt when you place things in the editor but internally it's still rendered as a vt.

Back on topic as far as I know the original megatexture v2 mod, my virtual texturing code, and the megatexture tutorial I put up are the only outdoor work that has been done in Doom 3 outside of id and id's licensee's.

Mr.Spline wrote:

Don't mean to derail your thread but it's sort of relevant regarding CDK and mapping: will development still include the use of brushwork and models or will everything have to be done in an external app and then pieced together in world studio? Also will the vt and 'lightmapping' work over everything or just anything specific to terrain/whatever I say uses vt? I'm thinking in terms of complex interiors and/or underground areas that may exit into large exteriors and back again in the same map. Maybe this is a dumb question (already answered?), sorry it's late.

I think you'll still be able to use brush based modeling techniques with this particular mod, as its tools are based on the old D3 level editor.

jmarshall23 wrote:

In the last public build I released I included a in-editor paint tool http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8odj6S3rmg&feature=plcp you haven't had to use mudbox in a long time, and every area is virtual textured you can choose not to use vt when you place things in the editor but internally it's still rendered as a vt.

Back on topic as far as I know the original megatexture v2 mod, my virtual texturing code, and the megatexture tutorial I put up are the only outdoor work that has been done in Doom 3 outside of id and id's licensee's.

Yeah, I'm waiting for a working code drop on the cdk as I'm not a coder. This is more of a proof of concept with the current D3 code and any easily applicable mods. Same goes with megatexture, it's just too complicated for me to handle.

What I'm more concerned about now is the lighting with the current D3 code, the ambient looks bad for outdoor stuff.

But as far as your mod is concerned my workflow will probably be using World Machine or something like that to generate a 32k (or so) texture and using it as the terrain cover, then importing models and using the texture paint/VT tool to cover the gaps between the terrain and models.

The following scenes below all include some form of outdoor scene integration, so if you like something, feel free to private message me and I can fill you into details of what was involved in getting those scenes built...

... I actually got many more showcases but I am currently away from my dev environment and shall return back to it in about 2 weeks.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

Scene 9

Scene 10

I'm going to get the megatexture tutorial 2 up in a few hours, that will get you megatexturing with lighting a bumpmapping.

Quote:

The following scenes below all include some form of outdoor scene integration, so if you like something, feel free to private message me and I can fill you into details of what was involved in getting those scenes built...

... I actually got many more showcases but I am currently away from my dev environment and shall return back to it in about 2 weeks.

I'm assuming each layer in your terrain is a new pass right? Or are you doing something different?

Actually no one told me that most of the videos I posted were set to "private" and therefore not access-able ... just fixed it but setting them to "public"...

Oneofthe8devilz wrote:

Actually no one told me that most of the videos I posted were set to "private" and therefore not access-able ... just fixed it but setting them to "public"...

Conventional texturing only gets you so far with terrain unfortunetly, the bloom shader your using is nice and the terrain works for most of your scenes, but to pull off terrain properly you need to have a good variety of textures to make it feel right. Did you make any engine side changes?

Actually as resolution and framerate indicate, most of the videos were created around the year 2004... so no, there were no engine changes made back then...

For me personally megatexturing is not much of interest unless it features dynamic specular and normalmapping... and even then it costs way more hdd space if you want to achieve the same level of pixel density compared to a traditional multi vertex blending method...

Unless you have gameplay that frequently switches between 1ps/3ps and birdseye/isometric view I don't see any justification for porting over to megatextures... especially since that raises the minimum gpu requirements to PS 4.0...

But those are just my 2 cents and I might be wrong here...

It certainly is tempting to compare an outdoor scenario completely done with dynamic light/shadows & megatextures versus the same content done with traditional texturing, but the times of baking lights, shadows or texture information are a thing of the past ( at least for me).

Quote:

For me personally megatexturing is not much of interest unless it features dynamic specular and normalmapping... and even then it costs way more hdd space if you want to achieve the same level of pixel density compared to a traditional multi vertex blending method...

I got megatexturing done with normal and spec mapping and works on older hardware(the normal map is a 8192 texture, but can be scaled down if the hardware doesn't support that high of a resoultion). I plan on knocking out the tutorial today and release tomarrow, that mixed with DXT compression, and the massive speed boosts I put in the megatexture code its pretty close to being practical for production use.

I made some changes just now actually that might allow for a megatexture to have the same size normal map, I might try to get that in before release, but that double the space requirement. As it is each megatexture will only take up 682mb a piece.