I am happy to report that I’ve gotten a good number of the pieces constructed for the Saucer map! In fact I think I’ve got nearly everything, other than a staircase and some detail meshes for the lab room, but structural pieces are getting pretty close to finished. Probably will do one more wall set. For better or worse, I’m committed to creating the art 100% by myself. This is really a fun creative outlet for me.
Thus far the palette has remained fairly consistent with “industrial” pastel colors for the most part, red/orange/yellow with some blue and purple lighting sprinkled about. I’ve stuck with the worn/peeled paint style as well. Here’s a glimpse of the “lab” room – the largest room in the map (in the Blender editor):
This room wound up being vastly larger than I had anticipated, but the other rooms should be less spacious. There are three more to go – the power core, helm, and giant robot rooms(two or three of them). Currently I’m at around 150 map entities, I would expect that number to be around 300 when finished. For comparison’s sake, Alien Arena had a limit of 256 map entities which was hit on both Deathray and Dismal. I will probably set Saucermen’s limit to 500 or so, this map will be a good test. So far the game still renders at max framerates with no issues. One of the main reasons it renders so fast is that it uses vertex buffer objects, so unlike a BSP style map, it’s re-using much of it’s geometry in each pass. I still have yet to optimize some of the culling too, so it’s potentially going to be even more efficient.
I have now gotten the lighting system using targets and fully integrated into the map editor. This is really useful to see how the lights interact when moving things around, or adding. Thus far I’m finding that things look best when making sure each area has a light source, at least in this map being made with so many integrated parts. There are definitely some artifacts I need to address, but it’s not too bad actually. I am going to focus a lot on the main “lab” area, and adding some very interesting detail to that. At the moment it’s pretty wide open, and bland.
Shader-wise, I tweaked a few things, and have some more things to consider. I do want to add parallax mapping, and probably do some more level calculations for diffuse light based on proximity and brightness of light sources.
There is a decent chance that I combine a number of these pieces such as the hallway sections into one model, with separate meshes, that will allow me to also potentially flag certain pieces for casting of shadows. Currently the dilemma is that I really want the pipes and ribs of the halls to cast shadows, but the wall pieces create nasty artifacts. Also this will allow me to use one entity instead of 3 for each hallway section, also a savings in that regard, as well as making placement vastly easier.