Star Wars: Republic Commando RTX

[dry shoal]

Oh I'll have to get back to you on that one

Wait I just remembered something

At least for the clone Commandos, bits of their body are actually static meshes with stable hashes

So in theory I could make a 20k tri clone commando mesh, then cut off the helmet + backpack to implement those through remix

That would save a ton on tris

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

Is that not galaxy brain?

I can't think of reasons why it wouldn't be possible

[royal sonnet]

If you get decent perf without doing that, I wouldn't bother. If you start running into CPU perf bottlenecks, I'd recommend experimenting with it to see how much extra overhead you can get out of it

[dusk trail]

Fair enough, I was more or less thinking worse case anyways

I mean if it can run fine without doing all that then by all means it would save so much time

[royal sonnet]

It'd likely be quite a bit of manual work to do all the modding and replacing

[dusk trail]

Uh it might, altho the issue would be more related to the mesh calculations that a skinned mesh has to do not the tri count itself

So idk

You could try

[dusk trail]

Yeah definitely, and either way this is gonna be a long but hopefully fun thing to achieve if we can

And I'm all for it

[dry shoal]

An experienced modder in the RC community believes we shouldn't run into many issues

[dusk trail]

Hmm

Well all we can really do is push the limits of the engine and define a good point to be at

[dry shoal]

I'm relatively confident we could manage. Between the overall suggestion that it should work well enough, there's also the potential aspects of doing a partial replacement (body only, not the helmet or backpack)

Oh and the fact that I know much more about what the hell I'm doing since the last time I worked on the clone mesh

The difference in knowledge between now and then is enormous

[dusk trail]

Always is

Best part about learning new stuff is looking at what you did before and cringing hard

Lol

But that's how you know you've come a long way since

[dry shoal]

It's funny you say that because I don't really process it that way. I judge my previous stuff relative to the time I made it. I think for someone who had never touched 3D modeling software before I got a surprisingly good looking model back then

But it was essentially through brute force and I lacked the information needed for many different aspects

There were actually some guys who came in here a while back giving me shit for that very clone mesh. "That's a piece of shit. Delete it, open up blender and-" insert demands for me to do it again by hand

Even back then, I knew it was a piece of shit but it was my piece of shit. I will always be proud of it

[modern isle]

they did mention setting up LODs, which is something you absolutely should do btw! And this is not a suggestion...

[dry shoal]

Yep, it made sense the instant he said it. In the distance the animations won't be as hard on the CPU using power LOD models

I would never run full quality on such meshes at all times

When I responded I said I should probably do the lower LOD versions myself, but he said the UE2 auto LOD isn't too bad?

I used it with the 20k tri mesh and it did do the job I suppose

[modern isle]

there's a littel software called InstaLOD

coindicentally implemented into InstaMAT, weird how that works :P

almost like it's made by the same team or something

[dry shoal]

TRUEEEE

Maybe I should try that

[dusk trail]

Fair enough, might just be me

[dry shoal]

It's okay brother. Take pride in where you came from, the journey, and the destination altogether

Just had a convo with a modder seems to know a good deal about graphics rendering, and from what he described it sounds like the CPU performance cost shouldn't be any different than how it is now. I know it's single threaded but the single thread perf jump since 2005 is probably significant enough for that to be a non issue, right?

You said Remix also has to track them via the CPU. Does Remix calculate those related things on the same thread as the game?

[dusk trail]

That's a good question actually

My own guess until Mark responds is that it probably does, since to my understanding Remix is more or less a wrapper, so it'd be limited by the game it's running on

But I'm only speculating I have no clue how Remix works under the hood

I could be the very big dumb about it rn

[modern isle]

I could be wrong but I think that the bridge is just forwarding everything to remix so that it can run in 64 bit address space.

[dusk trail]

Time for Mark to explain everything

We are but simple folk, we know not of the magik ways of the Remix

[royal sonnet]

I believe we only block the game thread until we can copy the data, then return control to the game and do our processing on a worker thread (or multiple threads in some cases).

[dry shoal]

Wait a sec that's our guy‼️

[modern isle]

yes?

[dry shoal]

Let me have my fun rune

[royal sonnet]

umm, yes I do manage to sneak some actual coding work in between chatting on the discord

[modern isle]

no, I'm from the magical land of being serious all the time... I will now proceed with my favorite pasttime, taxes taxes taxes!

[dusk trail]

Taxes suck

So much

[wind briar]

That's the germans for you!

[dusk trail]

Lmao

True tho

[wind briar]

So productive

[modern isle]

germany sucks

[dusk trail]

[modern isle]

no for real... so many stupid things...ESPECIALLY THE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WHICH IS NEVER ON TIME OR RELIABLE AT ALL.

at least postal service works perfectly fine, unless it's hermes...

[dry shoal]

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this

So remix hijacks the game thread and straight up pauses it to grab everything?

Every frame?

[royal sonnet]

Game calls a D3D9 API function
we copy the data into our own data structures
we return from the D3D9 API function

--in a separate thread--
we process the data we copied from the game into ray traceable data

[modern isle]

think of it like an office, the game runs in one cubicle, then when it says it's ready to submit the report, the bridge comes by, collects all the papers and then heads down to the next cubicle which is remix.

[dry shoal]

This i understand. It's just the interaction of it stopping the game momentarily that confuses me

It's hard to wrap my head around such a process happening that fast

[royal sonnet]

in normal rendering, the game will tell d3d9 to do something, d3d9 does it, then returns control to the game. that happens thousands of times per frame

Remix intercepts those commands and just copies the data into our own stuff, then returns

[dry shoal]

So remix grabs them before the game renderer does

[wind briar]

But then there are these hoops right, followed by the waterlogs.

Kinda like Takeshis castle.

ANd who ever makes it to the end wins 40 K yen

Wait...

[modern isle]

the reason stalls are necessary is so that it gets executed in order, else race conditions (literally a race to the finish line, where one function that got called later MIGHT finish before an earlier one) can happen which is very bad.

if the game submits data (geometry, textures, whatever) to the API then it needs to wait until it gets the response that everything is being handled. Else it would just continue sending data, something that is also problematic because you cannot read and write to the same byte in the same clock cycle.

[dry shoal]

That makes sense it's kind of mind-blowing how fast computer hardware is to do such complex things at such a low level with ease

[modern isle]

decades of research, refinement and technological advancement tend to improve things... except printers.

[royal sonnet]

On a single threaded computer, only one bit of code can be running at a time. When the game tells d3d9 to do something, d3d9 actually needs to run code to do that thing. So the game code runs for a bit, then invokes the d3d9 code. when the d3d9 code is done running, it returns control to the game code, which continues from where it left off.

that happens every time the game wants to send any data to the GPU - usually multiple times per draw call, since d3d9 uses separate commands for setting the texture, setting the vertices, then actually drawing.

[dry shoal]

Which all happens in less than a millisecond

[royal sonnet]

way less

[dry shoal]

Whoa

Technology

[dusk trail]

So fast you basically can't calculate it, I mean you can but only be so accurate at that point

[royal sonnet]

CPU's run in gigahertz, which means billions of operations per second. so millions of operations per millisecond.

each operation is very simple, like one multiplication

handing off control between the game code and the d3d9 code is actually trivial - the CPU is just executing instructions in one place, then jumping to another place and executing instructions there, then jumping back.

so a given call into d3d9 may take 10's, 100's, 1000's, or even 10,000's of operations, and still take less than 0.01 milliseconds to run

of course, when you have 1000 calls that all need 10,000+ operations, suddenly you're at 10 ms

[dusk trail]

Haha yeah that's why modern UE runs at about 8-12ms no matter what by default

10 being the average, and that's just so the engine can run a blank level

[dry shoal]

Just goes to show you how much we take what we have today for granted. Happens with everything, it's so normalized we don't think twice but we're using tech made on the other side of the planet, that went through multiple processes and quality checks, went to a shipping company that took the half-planet journey, to then get unpacked by a guy just doing his job, which then gets handed to the inventory person, etc. every little thing went through tons of little interactions, and through dozens if not hundreds of people to reach the store shelves we casually grab stuff from

Humanity is cool

[dusk trail]

When we're not trying to kill each other yeah lmao

Just in general I mean, nothing to do with any conflicts rn

[dry shoal]

Cool doesn't mean not filled with flaws! Still, it's crazy how complicated every little system working together to create a functional society is. But it just works

[modern isle]

the base cost of deferred rendering is a decent chunk, scales a lot better than forward though and games and engines are designed around this base cost in mind.

[royal sonnet]

Most people don't realize how large the actual engineering effort behind basically any modern program is. Like discord has something like 40 engineers directly working on it, but they're probably using a ton of libraries, compilers, and tools build by tens of thousands of other engineers

[dusk trail]

Very true, so much combined effort it's just inconceivable

[dusk trail]

True true, it's why I'm really waiting for things like CDR and stuff to come to UE

If it does, I really hope so

[modern isle]

oh absolutely, discord runs on electron iirc, the mobile apps have their own framework that are all maintained by a bunch of people themselves, relying on libraries and system features that themselves are maintained by hundreds of people.

[dusk trail]

Crazy how it all works

[dry shoal]

Exactly the thing I keep in mind when hearing different announcements/controversies. A design decision might seem arbitrary to the end consumer, but there were many different variables that led to X thing being how it is at the end of the supply chain

[dusk trail]

And then most of them run on things like AWS and Cloudflair

[royal sonnet]

I remember one time when someone deleted some tiny javascript library for adding whitespace padding, and it broke the entire internet because everyone had been indirectly depending on it.

https://qz.com/646467/how-one-programmer-broke-the-internet-by-deleting-a-tiny-piece-of-code

[modern isle]

oh I remember that 🤣

[royal sonnet]

It was definitely a shitshow. I was only on the sidelines, but I was working adjacent to a bunch of web devs.

really made it starkly clear to me just how many people were actually contributing to the code we were working on, when you follow that web of dependencies all the way down.

[modern isle]

and people wonder why windows has so many legacy "baggage"...

[dry shoal]

The butterfly effect is super interesting on that regard

[dusk trail]

The really crazy thing to think about is if it's this complex now just think about the future, like how many people will actually be involved in the amazing stuff we do day to day both with web and tech in general, it's utterly nuts the shear amount of effort, creativity, and man power that hasn't even happened yet, from people that aren't even born yet

[dusk trail]

Oh god... don't even start lmao

[dry shoal]

From people who aren't even born yet, using the tools we're making today. And we might not even know it

[dusk trail]

With how many people and how things spread even at the top you couldn't know all the people who'll use our creations

[dry shoal]

Hate to get all philosophical but all this stuff amazes me. We're all doing our own thing but the world is so much bigger, millions of people rely on millions of other people in ways that can't be seen. Billions of people rely on billions of people, all so the little things daily can happen

It's beautiful

[dusk trail]

Indeed it is

[sinful niche]

I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you that many of us are following what you're doing, and admiring everything you're doing to bring RC back to life

[dry shoal]

Forgot to throw this in here the other day. Slowly but surely making progress

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

Also learned an important lesson the other day related to texel density

The takeaway: don't use the same texel density across the board. That's not good

It should scale based on proximity to the player. Such that tiling doesn't look nearly as repetitive

[dry shoal]

Well I was hoping to make some progress today but I got sidetracked trying to get an easy install process up and running to test the potential user experience and the very recent performance increases on AMD GPUs specifically. Wasn't able to finish that either due to unforseen factors

Turns out it'll take quite a bit more work to make it relatively seamless. I know what to look out for now though

[smoky condor]

Was scrolling through chat but the helmet is able to be 32:9 compatible in the native engine so likely in remix too

[dry shoal]

For sure. But it's likely gonna be implemented in a very different way. So in this instance they were asking for 32:9 support with the worldspace helmet overlay. To do that I'd need to test and make sure it looks good and is fully visible at such wide aspect ratios, while still keeping the 4:3 HUD which allows for no stretching of helmet UI elements

So basically I need to make the helmet very wide

[modern isle]

shouldn't be a problem because the helmet goes off screen at the top and bottom even at 16:9 already

[dry shoal]

The problem is the FOV scaling. The install process requires Republic Commando Fix which has an automatic FOV setting by default. Instead of being hor+ which is more predictable, it literally just increases the fov with wider aspect ratios

So on default settings you'd see the edges of the helmet most likely at 32:9

[modern isle]

okay? but why do you need to make the helmet wider?

[dry shoal]

Because if the fov is wider you'd see the cut off point

[modern isle]

the z-near plane?

[dry shoal]

My brain's not functioning atm can u use different words

:)

[modern isle]

the camera is a frustum, with a near and far plane, it only renders everything within the range, so a z-near is the closest a model can get before it "clips" into the camera.

[dry shoal]

It's not in the Z near plane then

If I'm understanding right

It's very close but it exists within the world. So with a higher FOV you'd physically see the sides of the helmet since your view is much wider than the physical width of the helmet

[modern isle]

then I think you got something wrong

there are no other "cut off points" then

[dry shoal]

I don't understand

[dry shoal]

Crude visual of what it would look like

[modern isle]

your drawing is incorrect unless your helmet is a plane

[dry shoal]

The helmet is a mesh

How could it be incorrect

It's in worldspace and doesn't scale on its own

Keep in mind the helmet doesn't function in worldspace in the vanilla game

This is a hacky setup but one worth pursuing

[modern isle]

I don't see any parallel lines here, everything is cylindrically distorted.

or is your helmet a plane?

[dry shoal]

The way you're scaling it isn't how it functions

[dry shoal]

It's like this

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/confused-gif-25596223

I don't get why you'd use a plane.

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/385459532282855434/1226374429953622086/helmetReplaceFOV.mp4?ex=66248931&is=66121431&hm=5436dc6320b6ff60124f87a2a3fc6430c5f7ade10ae170b8158c1f9465129e9e&

This is a video I recorded, suggested by someone in the RC modding community

[modern isle]

the video you just posted shows EXACTLY that it works that way though?

[dry shoal]

Am I high right now? when I change the FOV the helmet doesn't move with it

In the video I show the perspective correction from remix, but that breaks the 4:3 helmet overlay

And you just get stretched UI again

[modern isle]

wdym MOVE? fov changes never move anything?

they change perspective distortion

[dry shoal]

In the vanilla game, the helmet is slapped onto the viewport. It's a 3D mesh but always stretches to accommodate fov and aspect ratio. This one does not

[dusk trail]

Yeah FOV is only camara perspective related, never changes mesh or world stuff, just not how FOV works

[dry shoal]

Right. And if you change your perspective to see more then you see the floating helmet that's in front of you

[dusk trail]

Yes that's how it'll work in any game

[dry shoal]

Yes but rune is disagreeing with me lol

[dusk trail]

How?

[dry shoal]

It's why they don't use a floating helmet in the vanilla game

[dry shoal]

.

[dusk trail]

I'm confused now

[dry shoal]

.

Unless there's miscommunication, the way I described it is accurate and I need to change the mesh itself to support all aspects ratios

Making it physically larger such that an increase in fov is accounted for

[modern isle]

no, I did not disagree with that, you made an incorrect assumption

[dusk trail]

Nvm I'm staying out of this, I don't have a fix for it I just know that FOV is purely camera related and changes nothing in the world

[dry shoal]

What was the assumption

[modern isle]

this

[dusk trail]

[modern isle]

if the sides are beyond your sides you will NEVER EVER see them

not even at 180° fov

[dry shoal]

My brother in Christ the sides are not beyond the FOV that would be used at 32:9

This is 21:9 where it works at all fov levels for the most part

(I'm open to being wrong I'm just not seeing it)

YOU CAN EVEN SEE IT IN THE VIDEO AT THE BOTTOM

[modern isle]

see what exactly? That the mesh is more and less visible depending on FOV? Yes? Never argued against that, what I said is that if you shouldn't worry about making your helmet wider because anything that passes behind the front viewplane will never ever come into view, no matter the FOV.

[dry shoal]

I must be misunderstanding, we might be talking about different things

[modern isle]

here's your camera and your helmet. Is this how you did it?

[dry shoal]

I didn't say anything behind the helmet would become visible, I'm saying you would see that the helmet is a floating object

Sorry I typed that out but it delayed sending

[dry shoal]

No, it doesn't wrap around

[modern isle]

so it's just a half or a quarter of the helmet?

[dry shoal]

If the helmet was a sphere, someone took the knife tool and cut a square* out

[modern isle]

okay but where is the edge of the visor, is it in front or behind the camera?

[dry shoal]

Non representative drawing but close enough to use for reference

It's in front of the camera that's what I'm trying to say

[modern isle]

so the hole is like this?

[modern isle]

what cut off point do you mean, the edges of the visor on the left and right?

because to fix this all you have to do is move the helmet closer to the camera so that the visor moves past the positive viewplane and no matter what aspect ratio. 1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 420:69, it will never show the sides of the visor.

I genuinely do not understand what the problem with ultrawide would be.

[dry shoal]

The problem is the location of the helmet mesh isn't arbitrary. It has to be there if it's gonna line up with the helmet UI

I guess I could change the mesh such that he UI could still look good/natural but that seems like more manual work than just bringing out the sides and/or wrapping it around the head

This goofy MF also wouldn't work in super giga omega ultrawide (32:9)

[modern isle]

you can just make it an elipsoid

[dry shoal]

I'd still have to make the visor itself wider unless I want the functional equivalent to black bars for 32:9

But even then it just means I wasn't high af at first which is good to know lol

[modern isle]

you want to make the cutout wider, yes.

[dry shoal]

Which requires altering the width of the existing mesh, yes

[modern isle]

does it? You can't just remove more faces on your sphere? Why?

[dry shoal]

Because if I make a unique texture for the mesh it would stretch if I only made the faces wider

Hmm actually

[modern isle]

what?

[dry shoal]

That implies id make the texture first which I'm not sure of

[modern isle]

I don't even understand what you're trying to achieve now.

wider faces, what?

[dry shoal]

I misread remove as move

[dry shoal]

It then this just brings the same problem. If the helmet itself isn't scaled enough then at the highest FOVs you'll see that it's floating which is a hit to immersion

[modern isle]

???????????

[dry shoal]

I love you rune but I don't think this is especially confusing

Ok tldr -> helmet mesh needs to be bigger, because if the FOV is too high you see the boundary of the helmet model. You see it's visibly floating and it sucks. If I wrap a sphere/ellipsoid around the player, I still have to make the helmet mesh wider because otherwise you'd see the equivalent of black bars. I can't just remove the faces of the sphere because then it goes back to the previous issue of seeing the boundary of the floating helmet mesh

Fairly long TLDR but the original was longer I suppose lol

I hope that makes more sense

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

Just a misunderstanding I think

[dusk trail]

Are mom and dad done fighting

Lmao I joke

Misunderstanding and not having enough info on how RC handles it seems to be the case yeah

[dry shoal]

I think the info was there, I just might've poorly communicated it due to my lack of technical experience

So when someone who actually knows things reads it's like

Also since I need to start documenting things properly, I'm starting to get that going

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

All this stuff is easy thankfully

With one exception the graphics have fully worked in my setup. As in no major visual anomalies that makes the game unplayable. In the briefing cutscene/mission thing at the start there's flickering of the whole scene where I only see the skybox. After a few seconds it resolves itself

[modern isle]

if you can see it floating
does that mean that the geometry cuts off at the sides when it shouldn't?
I still have to make the helmet mesh wider because otherwise you'd see the equivalent of black bars.
Black bars on the top or the sides?

[dry shoal]

This was a fun one I left for myself

[dry shoal]

The geometry is finite and floating ahead of the camera. It's essentially a square. And black bars on the sides, since any space where you would see outside the boundary of the mesh would be filled in by helmet sphere thing instead

[modern isle]

so to get this right, your helmet part that is visible in the video is just a flat seperate thing and ends somewhere midair and you just put another mesh (the sphere) around it and cut a hole in it?

[dry shoal]

That's exactly what it is

Lol

[burnt light]

@dry shoal could you share your latest rtx.conf?

[dry shoal]

Definitely can. Gonna be a few hours longer till I'm on my PC though

Are you gonna try your hand at implementing the model results?

[burnt light]

yeah, namely on the stormtrooper

[dusk trail]

Stormtrooper?

[burnt light]

did i mess up the name or something? lol

[dusk trail]

They're all Clone Troopers

Lmao

It's a common mistake don't worry

I'm just a nerd is all

[dry shoal]

Storm troopers are from the original trilogy, episodes 4-6. They're the bad guys. In the prequel trilogy they're clone troopers and are good guys fighting for the Republic

[burnt light]

i don't really pay attention to star wars 😛

[dry shoal]

They're super similar aesthetically but very different in behaviors

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

Lol you're good. Sometimes the cool bright swords hitting eachother is enough

[dusk trail]

SW is love, SW is life

[dry shoal]

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

LOL

[dusk trail]

Haha

Idk

[dry shoal]

I really love Star Wars, just not as much of a super fan as I was growing up

Not to say it's gotten worse (well maybe the sequel trilogy) I've just been occupied with other things

The fandom does some really amazing things that I'm consistently impressed with

[burnt light]

i had a mild interest growing up, but the modern state of Star Wars has put me off almost entirely

still like the older movies though

[dusk trail]

I still am, can't even count the amount of money I've spent on art books over the years on SW stuff

[dry shoal]

Y'know, I have a new appreciation for art books after starting this project

This detail with the two screws is inspired by the concept art rather than the model used in the vanilla version

I think it's much more visually pleasing

Unfortunately there isn't a ton of RC concept art which h makes some things pretty damn tough to work on

[dusk trail]

I could get some renders for the commando rifles we have in GC if you want, might give you better refs then what you can find online

@dry shoal

[dry shoal]

That would be awesome if you could. There aren't many good models available online and yeah, concept art is limited

Just seeing a high quality interpretation would be really helpful

[dusk trail]

The source references we used for ours were a mix of RC, BF2, and some stuff like Bad Batch/TCW iirc

So our model is fairly accurate

[dusk trail]

Alright I asked if one of our devs could send me a few renders of it, don't know when I'll get a response tho

I'll let you know when I do

[dry shoal]

Thanks a ton

I totally forgot it was in bf2 honestly

[dusk trail]

Yep

[dusk trail]

@dry shoal Got a response, the dev who made it doesn't have any good renders of it on hand so he's gonna make some new ones when he can

Censored since this is a public server

But yeah some custom renders should be done soonish, hopefully

[dry shoal]

Awesome, thanks

Should help a good bit

[dusk trail]

Ye

[dry shoal]

@burnt light you still need the rtxconf?

[burnt light]

yes

[dry shoal]

@burnt light disclaimer: I'm not sure what I may have tweaked with the expectation of having my mesh replacements

I doubt you should have issues but it's a heads up

also the front of the helmet has a blinding spot light, so I'd recommend turning the translation of those off

[dry shoal]

no big progress but it looks cool

[urban turtle]

Wait, blaster shot has shadow? Isn't that thing supposed to be emissive (texture should cast light = no shadows from object itself)

[dry shoal]

Funny thing is that's not a shadow of the object, it's just that the object itself is flat. So making it emissive only has light coming from the sides, not the top or bottom

This isn't noticeable in game however, only in the editor

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1196836285545971712/1227816088809771078/image.png?ex=6629c7d7&is=661752d7&hm=11c06e3393e176e6e5968b251eb103e56b3042d837a80e1d9d9c4891b77d5ef1&

Forgot to share here. Began work on the explosive barrel and am restarting work on the grenade ammo box

Tools like Boxcutter make this dramatically easier to do with 0 bs

Cut the general shape, connected a couple edges caused by two separate cutters (which in hindsight I could've just made a custom cutter) with auto merge and everything was perfectly clean

Mirroring is also super seamless with HardOps. These add-ons are absolutely coming in handy for basic workflow. Alt+X -> click the side to mirror from. Done

[modern isle]

those hexagons are rotated differently :P

[dry shoal]

And I did it on purpose

It's just a personal touch yk and not just a 15° simple rotation that takes no effort

[modern isle]

deviating from the source material? oh mondieu! 🤣

[dry shoal]

Yeah I'm definitely deviating in some ways but I do think the original looks better with the tap top edges

So I'll change it to match

I need lots and lots of practice. I've stayed on easy stuff/low effort stuff for too long

And I need to get assets I made myself in-game. I don't recall seeing a single one of my models implemented in practice. Not a good sign

The vast majority of issues I have with modeling just come down to what damn button/menu to go into for a given function. Like extruding from normals is hugely beneficial but I never actually figured that out. Gotta get studying more

[static mason]

Is it just me or do the bolts have shadows in this image? Very cool remix!

[dry shoal]

Lol yes. Not exactly intentional and more like a byproduct of it being flat

But in-game they're flying everywhere so it's not something you can notice very much in motion

[static mason]

Fair

[dry shoal]

It's also technically inaccurate to how the bolts are supposed to look like. So while the shadow looks pretty damn cool it's better that it isn't seen

[static mason]

I can't wait to see the finished product 🔥

[royal sonnet]

Just as a heads up (and this is entirely up to artistic preference), but these sorts of small surface features are often better done in texture / normal mapping, or even a bit of POM. That can free up a ton of triangles to use in other areas that can't be done that way, like making a round part look actually round.

[dusk trail]

Could also just bake them down

[dry shoal]

Yeah that makes sense. Just the model is still very WIP maybe one day I'll actually finish it so I couldn't bake it into a normal for the time being

And depending on the end tri count, Remix handles high poly meshes quite well doesn't it

This model would be added via remix replacement

[royal sonnet]

It does, and this is probably completely fine - I doubt this gun is going to need nearly as many triangles as organic curved surfaces do.

But if you wanted to have dozens of screw holes across the entire mesh, those could add up quickly - especially when you can almost the exact same visual result using only a texture and normal map

[dry shoal]

There are few organic/curvy surfaces to begin with so shouldn't be too bad

[dry shoal]

I'm only adding detail where it's part of the original model/texture, there's very little in the way of screws so this one stood out to add

[royal sonnet]

imagine trying to make this gun using actual modeled detail for all of the hexagons:

that's the level where it goes from artistic preference to "be sane with your triangle coutns"

[dry shoal]

Forgot if you saw but fun fact, that test mesh I made for the helmet replacement was over 100K tris (no I won't use even close to that many)

[royal sonnet]

lol

[dry shoal]

Oh yeah, definitely a no-go

[dusk trail]

Actually question for you Mark, I asked in here before but no one had much of a clear answer but could someone take the final mod file and get the source files of the Remix mod from that?

[royal sonnet]

Once you get in the habit of thinking "does this require geometry, or can I just do it in texture space", you start doing things in texture space even when it isn't strictly necessary, since it is still slightly cheaper. Like buying a $10.40 thing instead of a $10.50 thing.

[dusk trail]

Not sure if you'd know or not but worth an ask

[royal sonnet]

yes, but...

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

TLDR there's someone(or people) we could get extremely high quality assets from but they're worried about them being easily accessible as they sell them normally @royal sonnet

[royal sonnet]

there are a few level of assets:

1. Art source files - these are like PSD files, maya / blender project files with quad meshes, etc.
2. pre-ingestion files - these are the pngs, the triangulated FBX or USD meshes, etc
3. ingested files - these are USD and DDS files that are usable in game / toolkit
4. packed / compressed files - (I'm not sure if the toolkit actually makes these automatically yet). This is like the rtxio package of textures that lets them load directly onto the GPU in Portal RTX.

it's possible to go from 4) back to 3)

[dusk trail]

Pretty much, between that and people just taking them and either reselling or claiming them as their own without credit

[static mason]

You mean like that guy who ripped the entirety of portal rtx

[royal sonnet]

DDS files are lossily compressed, so if you go back and forth between dds and png you'll start seeing a lot of compression artifacts (similar to how jpg works)

and the triangulates meshes / png textures from step 2 are a lot harder to modify and work with than the original art source files from step 1

all that being said... if the artists are worried about someone grabbing textures or meshes in a useable state from the mod, then unfortunately I have to say yes, that's generally easy to do

[dusk trail]

Well let me ask this then, would it require a lot of work to get the original assets from an Remix file?

[dusk trail]

Damn...

[royal sonnet]

The mods yall are currently making are 'Remix files' - we just open USD and textures packed in an industry standard way.

maybe aside from the octahedral normal maps, but there are open source scripts for converting those back to regular normal maps

[dusk trail]

So remix doesn't have any sort of encryption system in place for mod files then to protect the art assets and stuffs

[royal sonnet]

any future compressed remix mod will just be using usdz or some other zip style compression.

as a general policy we want these mods to be shareable and further modifiable, not locked down

[dusk trail]

That's fair I suppose

On one hand more open and accessable modding, altho on the other hand people taking said assets and using them for nefarious uses without much effort

I wish I could say people wouldn't be that way but it's happened across many modding spaces

[royal sonnet]

well, it's not like it's hard in general to scrape game-ready meshes from any game that uses d3d9

[dusk trail]

Looks at Arma

[dusk trail]

True

[royal sonnet]

and all the remix mod really contains are those game ready meshes

[dusk trail]

Ninja Ripper and such are literally made for that sort of thing sadly

[dusk trail]

Right

@dry shoal I probably won't be able to get those assets then, but I can still get refs and what not for you from those

Thanks for the info Mark, I appreciate it

[dry shoal]

Mark always coming in clutch

[dusk trail]

Indeed

[dry shoal]

No worries. It only means I have to learn and become the GOAT of modeling

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

||not really but I hope to be pretty good by the end||

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

Also I just thought of a mesh that you might be well equipped for!

Well "mesh". At the end of the arena there's a metal bunker thing that I feel like would be great to get help on, given you've made various rooms and whatnot

[dusk trail]

Sure

Just need the original files and some screenshots of it in the level in game as was

I'll be back home either tomorrow or the day after

[dry shoal]

You got it boss. It's possible I won't be able to get the original originals in their entirety since parts are actually BSP geometry, but Remix is able to extract those so that could work maybe

[dusk trail]

I just need something for scale, since the collisions can't be changed via remix

[dry shoal]

They can't be changed via remix but I can change them in the level editor

[dusk trail]

Well either way still need it for scale

[dry shoal]

Basically as long as it's close enough I can make little tweaks to those as needed.

[dry shoal]

Absolutely

I'll try and get as much as possible so you aren't in the dark. So the extracted model be it game or remix, screenshots of how it looks in the native game including wider shows that show what's gonna be outside of a given area you might be working on

Stuff like that

Man this is where my mind starts running wild with what's 100% possible. But I don't have the skillset or time for it

Like in talking stuff like adding droids inside the bunker doing basic animations to make the level feel less static

It can be done, but the scope required to do stuff like that would be too much

[dry shoal]

not RC related, but I'm trying to get modeling practice in general to apply to this project 🙂

[dry shoal]

My priorities for the project have been a bit all over the place. I think it's time to come to terms with the fact that I'm burning out pretty hard. I've hit multiple roadblocks that stopped progress from happening, and when I push to make an important model or something I often get frustrated that I can't figure out how to do a specific thing that can be tricky to look up wording-wise. Hence why I'm following the guides for this scifi rifle^ itll help me a lot and already has in some ways

I can only go so long only exploring ideas or half-implementint things to do a better version of it later

Doesn't mean I'm quitting the project or anything remotely similar. Just trying to get the motivation momentum back up which will come soon enough

[dusk trail]

I see

Well hopefully when I return home and get started on stuff it'll help with your own motivation

[dry shoal]

every now and then I wonder if it was even worth remaking this model, but when I put them side by side I think it is

[dry shoal]

currently I don't plan on doing the Kamino intro, but I'd really love to see this scene in full PBR and fully set up lighting

[dry shoal]

running into an issue where everyone gets this shader effect put on them on direct viewing, even droids

this is on a reset conf btw

comparing my previous rtx conf to this one. Seems like I had enableStochasticAlpha set to false. I'll look into that later for the exact settings needed for the helmet UI

[dry shoal]

"linking up with your HUD boss"

[dry shoal]

I'm 95% sure enabling the helmet requires the toolkit, not just the runtime

but matching the settings to my last project USDA file didn't seem to work. They have different material names but I did match them

in their respectively projects

[dusk trail]

[dusk trail]

I'd say it is

[dry shoal]

probably makes the most sense to play it safe and stick to the last project file, just with new captures

[dry shoal]

nvm it doesn't use the toolkit I guess

[dry shoal]

by disabling antiportal actors I'm able to get 95% of the level in one capture. The circle is where I am in this one

for my own reference. Gonna make a replacement mesh for the ground since the base game has awkward behaviors due to it being BSP

also this so I can have a ground surrounding the level at all times. Usually it doesn't render so you get random patches of light, no bounce lighting etc

[dry shoal]

playing around with lighting, I think indirect might be the play. If I do that I think the idea of light shining on the objective would be really sick

so down the line when I make the necessary geometry I want to finesse the lighting to make it striking

[dusk trail]

@dry shoal I HAVE RETURNED HOME, LET THE GREAT WORK BEGIN

[dry shoal]

[dusk trail]

Send me everything you have and want done

[dry shoal]

this was the mesh I was thinking

that grating in the front is where a bomb is planted as part of a squad action, so it's important for that to line up

I can do all the materialwork, it's just the mesh I need

it shares a material with much of the area so might not make sense to do it twice

you can see here the other side is a window for the droids to see through across the battlefield

[dusk trail]

Eh I may make a quick material for it anyways, at least for my own sake, even if it's not good

[dry shoal]

fair enough!

and feel free to go relatively crazy with geometry. I wanna take advantage of pathtracing's performance scaling where possible

so like the lines across the texture and such would be awesome if they were geo

I have an export of the original mesh file I can toss your way

[dusk trail]

Very well

https://tenor.com/view/order66-will-do-will-be-done-star-wars-revenge-of-the-sith-gif-22742954

[dry shoal]

expect to take at least a little creative liberty since the inside of the original is fucked

after the squad actions there's a destroyed version, but I have plugins for blender that make destroying meshes fairly easy, so don't feel the need to make that version too. I could totally cover that

[dusk trail]

Alright

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1098995005512765481/1228911300869099592/image.png?ex=662dc3d6&is=661b4ed6&hm=7f207d6195a96b14cc71b5d720be97e8c33224a72fcb8f7fc0f756d5dc39f2ad&

You can open entire remix captures in blender

[halcyon knot]

Hi, the ModDB instructions for this game should really include turning off the helmet! I was stuck wondering what I messed up wrong when I started a new game through remix and got hit by a 9bang from that glitching out lol.

[dry shoal]

hey! I'm pretty sure that is part of the instructions

let me double check

looks like I have it here but maybe it's not on the moddb page

but I also do have the helmet working now, made a good bit of progress. I don't think it's ready to update the moddb listing for the rtx.conf file but yeah the instructions should be updated for sure

@burnt light no rush, could you look into this when you get a chance? 🙂

also messed around with the wording on the discord instructions if you wanna copy paste that minus stuff that doesn't apply like "link below"

[burnt light]

sure. i can do it tomorrow morning

[dry shoal]

boom barrel

middle is the original, right is first attempt, left is current (2nd) attempt

[analog wedge]

Funny. I never realized that the intro was in an arena. Graphics too bad lol.

bsp map format is wild, too

could one import bsp maps from other games?

[modern isle]

The CSG system that unreal uses isn't identical to what quake or half life uses, so proper conversion isn't possible

[dry shoal]

Trust me, I felt the same way going into this project. I noticed the arena itself but so much debris just seemed like random rock when it's actually just that, debris from the arena architecture itself

[analog wedge]

Conveniently placed blocks of stone to obfuscate the abysmal render distancr and lack of skybox detail

[dry shoal]

The render distance is actually fairly impressive imo, like there are assets that are 600m tall in full view. The real pain and suffering comes from the original meshes. They're an absolute mess, each and every one. Tons of intersecting geometry, random gaps, weird one sided face setups

It would make my life way easier if I could take advantage of the existing models on some capacity but the amount of effort needed to make them good enough to even reliably edit is wild

[modern isle]

Tons of intersecting geometry
Kitbashing?

[analog wedge]

Yes, but is it not UE2.5? The aliasing is particularly nasty.

[dry shoal]

Actually with modern resolutions it looks quite good with the default AA. Played quite a bit on my laptop recently and everything looked crisp

Now the textures on the other hand, different story lol

[analog wedge]

not me still on 1080p

[dry shoal]

I'd be surprised if it didn't look clearer than modern games with their TAA

[cobalt cypress]

I see this and all I can think is that spongebob meme where he gets in Sandy's Dome and needs water. Screaming "I NEEEEED ITTT"

[burnt light]

https://tenor.com/view/thirsty-i-need-it-spongebob-gif-11796572

[dry shoal]

Well thanks for tossing a message here. It's always good motivation

I do want to do a character model import sometime in the near future. I was originally thinking of doing the clone trooper replacement but I wonder if I'd have an easier time time creating a battle droid

Most of my experience is hard surface modding so unless the animations have plenty of deformation it'd be easier for me to make from scratch

[analog wedge]

UE 2.5 is really sharp. It's just very badly aliased as a tradeoff. There's a reason they gave Red Orchestra the nickname Pixel Hunter 2005

Then again those were engagement distances of 500m

UE4 is comparatively blurry af

[modern isle]

TAA will not resolve sharper than MSAA, makes sense.

[dry shoal]

I looked up the game out of curiosity and yep, I absolutely can see how that game would be a nightmare. Seems like it was ahead of its time in physical scale. Republic Commando is much tighter packed by comparison, so no needing to spot pixels from 500m away

[dry shoal]

This dumbfuck explosive barrel will be my magnum opus

[dry shoal]

If I'm on top of things I can finish this barrel today without too much trouble

It's mainly a matter of how much do I care to look into the stand design

I don't know when I'll be texturing it. I think it's probably a good idea to do it right after the mesh is complete

I've noticed a pretty consistent cycle of spend a lot of time on material making -> fumble and mess up a ton going back to modeling and the vice versa of spend a lot of time modeling -> fumble and mess up a ton going back to material making. I should be taking turns between them rather than hard focusing on one at a time I think

[dry shoal]

took me way too goddamn long but I'm very happy with how this has gone

[dry shoal]

in the final stages. No shading issues. Unsure if I'll add the stand but I do want to add smaller details as well

quickly assigned a few materials so I could test it

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1098995005512765481/1230371647605833830/image.png?ex=663313e3&is=66209ee3&hm=a2f7cc82785a19f7746ebc68ebffcac60e19c29985a65ebfac9e4493a700b111&

I was about to say I forgot to show the back but now that I resent it I see it...

Used placeholder materials to test

[dusk trail]

@dry shoal I'm still here, just been sick, won't be able to do much until I'm feeling better

https://tenor.com/view/cat-cat-meme-funnt-cat-black-cat-sleepy-cat-gif-16409614852005252877

[dry shoal]

No worries

[dry shoal]

Making lots of interesting discoveries with native RC modders. I'm doing some light collaborating with them by scaling down the assets I build for my Remix project (that's the plan anyways) but it seems as if it might not be much of a problem at all. The biggest concern by far for the native game is related to memory since the limit is very low. But importing static meshes into Unreal Engine 2 consumes an extremely tiny amount of RAM it seems

They also found out things that will be directly relevant to this Remix project. Namely how to use replacement animated meshes that use more materials than the original

[dry shoal]

Model memory footprint scaling is also much smaller than any of us were expecting, so there's a very high chance I'll have models I won't need to scale at all when sharing for their project. Naturally they won't have the fancy lighting and PBR materials but it's cool to imagine a game from that era with such clean looking geometry

[modern isle]

Until you discover the max vertex alloc and get half the framerate because the cpu gets swamped. Creating LODs is something you absolutely have to do.

Raster just bloody dies in performance when triangles are smaller than a single pixel.

[dry shoal]

UE2 has a built in system for generating LODs. No one was intending to force LOD0 at all times

Though I know I'll likely increase the LOD falloff distances since I won't be adding too many assets game-side myself

[modern isle]

I need to check that, if it's similar to ue3 it'll be dogsh...

[dry shoal]

I don't doubt it is lol

But for the purposes of a native mod they should be alright. Worst case scenario they bump the transition distances

@modern isle since you've worked on games, do you have any reference you could share regarding the tri count of models in modern game projects

Like the full quality one that will render in-game

I have quite literally no point of reference with tri counts except that Ryze Son of Rome had like a 60k tri main character

[modern isle]

For UE2 or modern?

[dry shoal]

Modern

[modern isle]

Characters 25k excluding face morphs
Small environment details 1k
Larger environment assets like rocks, shack walls etc. Generally 5k, up to 10k depending on size.

Ofc it depends on art style and density

But there are many more considerations to make for modern games. GPUs are very good at crunching through polys, HOWEVER if the shader applied to the mesh is heavy then performance can take a nosedive. So keeping polycount as low as possible while still looking good is very much still a thing.

Even nanite shouldn't be overdone, a soccer ball doesn't need 1 million polys, that just completely <expletive> with memory requirements.

[dry shoal]

Yeah absolutely. Through all the experimentation it appears as if UE2's general tri count performance scaling works roughly in line with what most games still use, in that there are no hard limits. The modding guys found that 25-30K is the limit for when the model import breaks so that's the hard cap in practice

[modern isle]

I have a focus on shaders and optimization. So I spend plenty of time looking at performance cost and tweaking things until they run well.

[dry shoal]

Well you'll be happy to know I plan on putting a good deal of effort into optimizing the Remix project lol. Anti culling does work and works fairly well, but the performance hit is intense

I'm planning on doing a sort of hybrid system where I use much of UE2's normal culling system where it's unintrusive, then using anchor meshes the large environmental assets like cliffs/walls etc will always be rendering

That should do wonders for performance. The thing flies when leaving the default culling as is, I got over 200fps on DLSS balanced iirc (using frame gen*)

So getting some of that benefit will be great

---

I will finish this barrel mesh TODAY

I swear it on my LIFE

It's gonna be a BANGER

I hope

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/spongebob-rip-sad-sponge-bob-stephen-hillenburg-crying-sponge-bob-squidward-gif-12966776

[dry shoal]

I take it back 🙂

details got heavy potential tho. Screws, split panels with hinges

[dry shoal]

[dry shoal]

Surely the barrel will be completed today

[dry shoal]

nvm bc I'm being held at gunpoint to make welding imperfections (which look amazing tbf)

I really gotta get this damn barrel done though. I'll mirror this weld, follow some other, relatively simple feedback I got that could go a long way, and I'm calling it

I need to get back into texturing

[dry shoal]

mesh came out with some issues for some reason, but I'm relatively happy with it. Gonna make changes and make the materials more true to the original, but I'm so sick of this fucking barrel that it's going on the backlog

[dry shoal]

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1196836285545971712/1231726361396379668/matdemo.mp4?ex=66380190&is=66258c90&hm=9cec616deb45c142ae79c430ccdb62d5781905256c3e1f4a2775e8877818add7&

Was making my own custom material for the model, this is a snapshot of where it was at sometime the other day

But I'm going to be taking some advice that will help with the project, and that's simply to take advantage of existing materials to tune as I see fit. No doubt it's much more efficient, so might as well give it a shot

[dry shoal]

At a weird point where idk what to work on I could finish the barrel by biting the bullet and using existing materials and altering them as needed but

[dry shoal]

WIP

[dusk trail]

Oh nice

Also just wanted to say I'm still here, feeling better from being sick but I'm really busy with house renovations atm, haven't been at my PC for more then like 20mins in the last 3 days

I'm tweaking over it, I NEED MY PC DAMNIT

Gotta get that fix

[dry shoal]

I know it'll be worth the wait

gonna 100% finish the barrel today, I'm extremely close

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

[dry shoal]

It is done

And I refuse to get stunlocked into working on it more. It's time to move on

It has room for improvement but I'm just not gonna acknowledge that internally otherwise I'll work on it more

[wind briar]

But I literally work at Stunlock though

That's MY JOB

[modern isle]

I should open a studio called Feature Creep and then never add additional features mid development.

[dry shoal]

no you misunderstand. What I mean is Stunlock sets such a high quality bar with employees like @wind briar that to try and match up to them is a fools game

saved

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/kuzco-kronk-yzma-right-wink-gif-22358009

[wind briar]

If you're trying to get in my pants at least buy me dinner first

[dry shoal]

Okay keep it real with me how shit is the barrel @wind briar

[wind briar]

I'm at work! I'll shit on your hard efforts later ❤️

From a quick glance though it looks nice!

[dry shoal]

[naive robin]

Lead programmer does an entire play through. https://youtu.be/Jd9PkWahp8k?si=6WRZz5Dp1nLFA4dz

https://youtu.be/ouA92ftVzFE?si=gZVM1HgzfcxwrBYO

[dry shoal]

Wait this is peak

[naive robin]

https://devgameclub.libsyn.com/2020/07

I’ll do some more digging later

[dry shoal]

For easy future reference bc mod privileges

Thanks a ton Adam my boy, this is big

I'm sure I'll also find something I'm inspired to work on next through some of this stuff

[dry shoal]

Listened through the whole segment with the guests (main concept artist & UI designer). Got some good insights and confirmations of things I had come to understand about the game's visual style. They very intentionally strayed from established Star Wars to get a more gritty experience. They wanted everything to feel dangerous and intense with the red glow on the Geonosians and the battle droids. The first area taking place in the arena is apparently taking place at the exact same time as the movie. Like the Jedis are doing their fancy Jedi thing and this elite unit of clones went off into the lion's den with their own orders. They made a point not to make the game too vibrant, everything was intentionally muted to keep the gritty tone intact. They never wanted the player to feel quite comfortable. In the game's development a core design pillar was "you're the ones fighting behind the scenes against an army that overwhelmingly outnumbers you. They aren't cannon fodder like they are to Jedi, they're a very real threat that are in a way scary to the clones

They went over design decisions for the helmet, wanted the player to feel grounded and immersed. They didn't want to put everything in the visor, hence the display showing total ammo count on the DC17 as well as the individual mags having lights to indicate how many shots are left

An important one is that they didn't want the helmet to just feel like an overlay, it's a key piece of immersion such that you can even see the little speakers and microphones they use to communicate with their squad. The HUD elements smoothly follow the shape of the helmet in a way that's certainly unrealistic but gives more character to the game

The helmet being the only "comforting" color is very intentional. The helmet is your home, your armor against the threat beyond. What you'll see through the entire game

I absolutely think I can take some of these things into account as I work on the project. The mood is something that's important to maintain. It also 100% confirmed that I don't want warm pretty lighting in the arena. It needs to be harsh or indirectly lit

[naive robin]

Ah, you’re finding out how important the research is Glad it was such a great resource for ya

[dry shoal]

I'm thinking like an artist now

https://tenor.com/view/yippee-happy-celebration-joy-confetti-gif-25557730

By the end of this project I'll be unstoppable

[dry shoal]

This could be super important so leaving it here

[dry shoal]

v2 vs v1

[dry shoal]

I found out how I'm gonna attach proper light sources to all blaster shots

I can attach static meshes to the laster projectiles. In other words, I can just add a unique mesh to attach to lasers that isn't visible in realtime

in this I tested attaching a light fixture mesh to each projectile and yep, stable hashes

🙂

for my own reference

[dry shoal]

Ngl though the game is in a really odd spot in terms of the remix project setup. Running into an issue where the helmet's "screen" is just pitch black and I'm not sure what it it. So most of the screen is blocked but only when using enhanced assets

Which leads me to believe there's something I fucked up that I can solve by resetting my changes to the helmet

[static mason]

insert CAve Johnson like quote

Wait did the original post I was making a funny about go? Now my comment doesn't work 😦

Oh wait it is further up editing post then 😛

[static mason]

"They say great features eventually added to a game can broaden a games scope. Well not here. Here at Feature Creep we brainstorm ideas. There is no additional development here".

[dry shoal]

What's next for the Remix project as of today:

• now that i have a method to attach dedicated lights to the laser bolts, I'll have to create two to three virtually invisible meshes to import into UE2 and add it to each laser bolt instance. It'll have a stable hash, so it's smooth sailing from there. Also I'm 99% sure this is gonna be helpful in far more ways than that. But don't wanna jump the gun. It's kind of a massive deal that I discovered this

• the helmet is in a pretty functional state, but I'm running into alpha related issues only with enhanced assets enabled. So everything related to the helmet I'll be reverting in the toolkit. It'll still be fully functional

• More assets! Now that I'm not as stubborn and likely (emphasis on likely) won't be making a custom material for every single thing (I want to tho), that side should be faster for props. Environment materials I'm still trying to do from scratch. With this that also means making more meshes. Ngl I'm in a bit of a slump after he explosive barrel and I am so sick of working on environments that I'm gonna need to find more props to work on that won't make me die inside while also not being too complex

• Research on emitters. Emitters are used for a shit ton of different things visually. "Fog", smoke particles, background laser bolts, explosions, all the fun stuff. For some emitters I simply want to make one that's static, as it'll let me smoothly implement a high quality flipbook while still following the player camera. For other emitters though, I might be able to add what would essentially be scripted light sources

[dry shoal]

After some skimming in Unreal Engine 2's documentation, there's a 99% chance I can create what are essentially scripted light sources. I can create or set emitters around the map each with various trigger points (I'll reference existing triggers). Emitters can spawn static meshes. So that means for an explosion for instance, I can spawn in a really intense light that lasts only for as long as it needs to. It'll give a ton of kick to them. It should also let me attach an anchor static mesh for things like the clone advisor holograms too. I just set the anchor and place the lights such that it matches the general shape of the clone's pose

[modern isle]

would those mesh emitters be stable? I think you could also use a light emitter directly so that you can drive the intensity from the game engine side.

[dry shoal]

They would be, yes. I did some testing on it but didn't go too deep tbf

And I could do in engine based lights but that seems a lot harder to configure than doing it through Remix

[modern isle]

you sure? Might be my over a decade of experience in unreal, but the particle editor is pretty straight forward to animate in.

Unlike remix which can do... exactly none of that.

[dry shoal]

No I mean stuff like the strength of lights

And I wasn't planning on going fully static. Meshes you attach to an emitter particle follow that particle. So whatever it goes, the light goes

I can make custom emitters no problem, I just don't want to reinvent the wheel if I can mostly utilize what exists and just add the lights in remix

[dry shoal]

dark = bsp

underground area is also BSP which explains why it sucks

ramp to the bunker-ish area is also BSP

geo1b has extremely little bsp geo

the night vision mode should be able to be adapted. The overlay doesn't work but if a light source is activated and is tuned well I think it'll work

[dry shoal]

@sick river running into this quite frustrating issue where when I switch to enhanced assets the visor mesh in front of the player just goes pitch black (image 1). When enhanced assets are off, (image 2) it works just fine. Naturally my first inclination was to reset whatever changes I had made in the toolkit, but in image 3 in the exact same location on the exact same scene with the reset meshes it looks normal. And yes, I saved the project and went back into the game. Same issue as image 1

[sick river]

So one of your mesh replacements is causing the screen to go balck then, correct ?

[dry shoal]

that's what I would think, but in the last image there are no mesh replacements

I completely reset the mesh

[sick river]

What's wrong with the last image? You're not supposed to have the yellow square ?

[dry shoal]

last image is in the toolkit. I went into the toolkit, reset the mesh, saved the project and went back ingame. Same issue

[sick river]

I see so you're saying that the toolkit looks OK with & without mesh replacements but the runtime is broken in both cases

[dry shoal]

even if the toolkit is matching how it looks without any mesh replacements, it looks like it's stuck with a mesh replacement once ingame

like for further context that last image is a scene capture I took right after those other two screenshots

there were no other variables I could think of

[sick river]

You don't work with sublayers ?

[dry shoal]

uhhhh

no

I haven't touched that workflow yet so I suppose everything I'm doing is destructive in a sense

[sick river]

In this case it should be fairly easy to test if it's a runtime or toolkit issue

[dry shoal]

oh cool. What should I be checking?

[sick river]

You can create a new project just to test, then take your mod.usda from your new project and copy it over in your existing project

just make sure to rename your mod.usda in your real project first to not lose your changes

That'll ensure you have a completely clean mod.usda in your project, so if you still see the issue the problem is either with your project file (unlikely but possible or in the game)

The next step would then be to test using your empty test project as a mod and then you'll know for sure that it's the runtime if you still have an issue

[dry shoal]

I'll try your suggestion but I did one additional load into the game on a fresh start. The black screen is gone but the replacement mesh that should have been reset is still there, alongside the thin glass panel I had manually placed there sometime earlier (you can see the HUD reflected in it). I imagine this suggests it's a project file issue

I looked through many different captures to see if one had a different hash but unless I wasn't thorough enough, nothing

I'll give what you said a shot

[sick river]

Yeah if you do that you'll be able to isolate the cause, if it's the project you can send me your USDA and I can check it out

[dry shoal]

you got it boss. I'm gonna take a short break but I'll tag you once I've done it. SHould be within the hour

[sick river]

Probably gonna check it out tomorrow 😛

[dry shoal]

roger, take it easy

[dry shoal]

confirmed to be the project file. Upon using a clean mod.usda the issue no longer occurs. File extension is renamed but it opens as intended with notepad++ anyways @sick river

this is the file for my current project

uhhh I started an actual fresh project to start from scratch. It's contained in it's own folder and I opened the last capture that I took in my existing rtx-remix folder. It contains meshes that I replaced from the previous mod project and treats them as if they're original meshes?

namely this throwaway wall back here I tested but left up in my previous project

I might expect that in the game itself since the mod is still referenced in the rtx-remix folder there, but the toolkit?

img 1 is my new project directory, image 2 is my previous (it's labeled weirdly, "RepublicCommandoNew" is not the new one)

[dry shoal]

I found a couple more meshes from the other project in the new one here. But notably the replaced meshes don't also have the textures asssociated with them. They use the original game's textures instead (I assume because these are parented under the originals with those textures)

[modern isle]

yeah exactly, can't animate that in remix, that's what I said.

[dry shoal]

That's true but it'll depend on the use-case. Right now I don't see any need to do that but we'll see

[sick river]

So the issue is in your mod, not your project file ?

[dry shoal]

Ah I think I got the names messed up in my head. By mod you mean literally mod.usda and project is the projectfilename.usda

Idk how I didn't pick that up earlier but you're right

When using a fresh mod.usda the issue went away

[sick river]

I'm not sure how you go to that point but that's not normal. Any changes you make should be applied on mod.usda or its sublayers so original captures should never have modified data

[sick river]

Correct

[dry shoal]

I would think so too which is why I particularly found it odd

[sick river]

So your mod.usda still had an override somewhere for your mesh in question, if you open it with notepad you can CTRL+F for your mesh hash

[dry shoal]

Appears to be the case yes. So solving it would be a matter of finding the mesh hash and removing references below it? I haven't really touched the usda files yet but from a quick glance I had the other day it looks fairly intuitive. I could probably figure it out

[sick river]

Yeah you'll have an entry like

    over "meshes"
    {
        over "mesh_9858949B5B49CCDC" (
            references = None
        )
        {
        }
    }

You can just delete that entry from your mod.usda and normally that should completely reset your changes

[dry shoal]

That seems almost too easy lol. Cool, I'll be doing that later. Thanks for the assist

[sick river]

NP! If you figure out the culprit lines let me know! It'll be good to look into it to see if it's an issue

[dry shoal]

Actually one quick question, if one game contains multiple projects, which mod.usda file is prioritized? They're all referenced in the rtx-remix folder @sick river

[sick river]

For now it's alphabetical, in the future the runtime should support multi-mod but for now it picks the first one it finds based on its name

[dry shoal]

Makes sense. Thanks, I was curious about that one since I had a mess of projects some time ago for the same game

[dry shoal]

@sick river houston we got a problem. I have the mesh + mat hashes here, but they don't get any results in the mod.usda file

proof that these are the same projects

[sick river]

Might be caused by another hash then, unless you have a solid repro you'd have to do trial and error to try to isolate the cause

[dry shoal]

understood. I might just restart the project entirely since I had planned on doing so anyways. But that means we might not ever know what it was

[sick river]

Yeah ideally if you have clear repro steps we can identify the cause

[dry shoal]

the default setup in the latest builds of the runtime have a great deal higher compatibility out of the box than the builds from jsut a few weeks ago

in this screenshot I had only categorized the reticles for the guns and set sky to automatic camera detect

[dry shoal]

this game is fucking awesome. I spent so long doing modding nonsense that I haven't actually played too much

I think the scope of my project is gonna expand quite a bit. It would be extremely jarring to end at geo1c

I think I'm gonna aim to cover the entirety of geonosis

[modern isle]

Do me a favor and don't scope creep. Finish the first level entirely, then move to the next. Otherwise you'll open up too many construction sites at once.

[burnt light]

or if you do, make a separate project + workspace for it & delete it when you're done messing around or testing

[severe flare]

"yet unbeknownst to automata, they truly had no idea what they were in for"

in any case, please by all means do whatever u want, checkin in on this every few days has been so goddamn fun

[static mason]

Damn this is coming along nice

[dry shoal]

To be clear since it's Geonosis there are a ton of shared assets. There are definitely areas that will be more challenging in the later content I played the other day, but working my way up to that I should be well equipped by then to take it on. Genuinely it would be far too jarring if I stuck to the original scope of 3 maps. By going through the first Geonosis "chapter" or whatever of the game, there's a pretty fulfilling experience there that is nowhere close to the demands it would take to cover the whole game

[modern isle]

define jarring

because you should create a vertical slice/demo first

[dry shoal]

As in you go through a door, load screen, it's over (for what would be covered in the mod) but the mission is still continuing

[dry shoal]

I mean the whole thing is kind of a demo already

Also I'd be stupid to jump ahead to this and abandon everything beforehand

That much I'm well aware of

Honestly the thing that's gonna be most painful is that I have to do literally everything myself. Like I'm not just doing assets with someone else handling the native game stuff. I need to do all of it

[modern isle]

🤔

Why

[dry shoal]

Because no one else is going to lol

[modern isle]

Didn't know you had a level completely done already.

[dry shoal]

I don't

What I mean is the scope of the project is not the whole game

It's a start to finish first chunk of the game. Enough to really see what Remix can do and how the game would look if taken the whole way, but without such an increase in variety that it becomes a monumental undertaking

Wait just a goddamn minute

Do you mean you people thought I was going to just put everything from before on pause to do the later levels

Where did I give any indication of such an intent

[modern isle]

what

[dry shoal]

"otherwise you'll end up with too many construction sites at once"

I wasn't going to start construction there yet bc the earlier stuff isn't done

[modern isle]

I meant this as
geo01, geo02, geo03 etc.
finish one map, then move to the next, don't try to finish all geonosis maps at once.

[dry shoal]

That's what I mean. What makes you think I was going to do them all at once

The most I did in geo 1b was place a single light

[modern isle]

because you said you want to expand scope my man.

[dry shoal]

I might be crazy bc in my head that's not what expanding scope means

When I think of it I think of the bigger picture. Like in the end more will be covered than was intended previously

[modern isle]

it means that you will work on more things before you consider this project (you called it a demo) done.

[dry shoal]

Ah okay I see what you mean

I didn't really think of it that way but it's a good point. It probably makes the most sense to stick to what was aiming for and put that out as part 1 of the demo. Then part 2 covers the rest of that Geonosis mission

Not that I planned on doing otherwise it's just not something I thought about yet

[modern isle]

and that was all I was saying, get that first map fully done, then you can release it if you want as a sneak peek. But at least you got something out the door and people can take a look at it themselves.

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

yall have no idea how much easier my life would be if I had a native game modder helping me directly on this

[modern isle]

I ain't touching UE2 uscript

[dry shoal]

not only because I have to learn so much shit by trial and error, but also because with well done native game modding this Remix project could be one of the best ones out there. There's so much to do on the engine side that would push remix to the fullest

[dusk trail]

Same

[modern isle]

that thing can burn in hell where it belongs

awful

[dry shoal]

not even uescript, just basic stuff like configuring properties of actors

[modern isle]

just awful

[dusk trail]

Give me UE4/UE5 any day

[modern isle]

you mean the F4/F5 menu?

[dusk trail]

UE2 =

[dry shoal]

if that's a keybind for that then yes lol I just right click though

in other news the newest Remix runtime handles terrain blending dramatically better than before

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

it just straight up did not work previously and now it does out of the box for the most part

i need to figure out disabling the helmet lightsource. It makes using in-game lights totally unviable if the helmet is gonna stay

[dry shoal]

there are two "helmet textures". One is labeled HUD specifically and the other is labeled as a shader

this could explain why there were two instances selectable within the helmet mesh

[modern isle]

you mean the texture on the left in the texture browser?

that's the texture that is assigned in the shader

[dry shoal]

right but they seem to coexist when the game is running

it would explain some odd behaviors I've seen previously

[modern isle]

the texture is loaded by the shader and displayed through the shader

unreal doesn't maintain this object outside of its shader domain

[dry shoal]

hmm okay

I feel like there's a lot I can learn from native game stuff that would help so much on my project

[modern isle]

probably, UE2 is just a bit difficult to navigate if you don't know where everything is

[dry shoal]

well that and the function, like you just described to me with the shader

it doesn't help that the native game modding community (the most knowledgable ones at least) aren't very ecstatic about helping me when I ask stuff

it's gotten better but it's clear they don't care all that much vs people doing native modding for native modding

[modern isle]

I know some stuff about UE2, most of my experience is with UE3 however.

[dry shoal]

I already wanna give up on the whole project lol

I think that's a good sign to take a break

fkn dumbass helmet !!!

[modern isle]

put it on your to-do list and work on something else

[dry shoal]

funny how I said I was sick of doing env work but here I am. Blue is the original, WIP

[dry shoal]

WIP prop texture

[dry shoal]

good news, I know 100% how to get the helmet HUD working within worldspace (necessary to not run into weird render target related stuff + lots of benefits). Turns out it requires tagging the UI elements as "terrain" textures. I guess how the native game behaves is something akin to terrain blending for the helmet? not sure, but this is the ONLY way to get it working

@royal sonnet ik it'll be a while till you see but I think this is important to know. Maybe other games have UI issues that use a similar-ish system to this, requiring terrain blending rather than tagging as UI

@sick river unsure if you could use this info in any capacity lol

I'm glad I got this documented so I can use a fresh rtx.conf and have the helmet working right away, just about every feature working

some odd UI elements are rendered as orthographic in the original game, namely the weapon crosshairs. But the health, shields, objective text (hidden bc of an in-game keybind in this shot) and some other smaller things ONLY render using terrain blending

[burnt light]

i've noticed this in some other games. in my cases though, temporarily marking an object as terrain (or sometimes sky) then unmarking it will allow it to display properly until the runtime is restarted. leaving it on does usually work so long as the terrain baking functions properly

[dry shoal]

the game has a really weird way of UI with render target nonsense. From my very limited understanding it goes roughly like this: only the world rendered -> helmet rendered separately -> helmet is then layered on top of the world rendering done at the start of the chain

if it'd be helpful to hear a more exact version of how the game handles it as an edge case thing for Remix development (idk, you tell me), I can ask some very intimately familiar modders to give a more technical and thorough explanation

[dry shoal]

that's interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind, thanks

[dry shoal]

test of laser projectiles as proper, shadow-casting light sources

[burnt light]

very cool

[dry shoal]

fresh RTX.conf with working helmet, brand new project, new capture that covers the vast majority of geo1a, configured alpha effects, set all original textures I came across to roughly the intended material values to have them be decent placeholders

I have the BSP geometry for the vast majority of the level within this one capture, so I'm gonna remake my ground geo replacement with some ideas so it looks a little nicer

[modern isle]

Is the video super low fps or is that just discord mobile being stupid?

[dry shoal]

It's your discord mobile lol. Granted I haven't updated since the latest redesign but it's got perfect 60fps playback on my phone

It's really amazing how much ray reconstruction keeps up with the realtime lights on each bolt

I will once again say with high confidence: with the right amount of support, this game has some of the highest potential for any Remix-based remaster. The level of fidelity that's possible even while working within the limitations of today's Remix is hard to understate. The sky is the limit, genuinely

I got a good starting point as is, good enough such that I could probably update the public RTX.conf file too since this one is so much better for out of the box playability. But I'm still trying to learn where I can make the biggest visual contributions the fastest way possible. I can get a burst of progress in the near future; eliminating major culling/ensuring there's no gaps, a few material replacements, a new BSP replacement with very subtle displacement on the mesh itself, creating custom meshes to use as anchors for laser bolt lighting (so no "add light to texture"), increasing the LOD on skinned meshes dramatically which makes captures easier, and so much more

That's gonna go a long way as-is but beyond that I hope I don't slow down too much

I'm at a place mentally where my mind is swimming with ideas but also frustrated that I don't have the knowledge yet to implement these ideas smoothly. I know for certain they're all possible though

[dry shoal]

I'd really like to disable the light attached to the helmet so I can take advantage of native game light translation

[dry shoal]

hoping the extensive map edits will help with remix

no. lightmaps.

[dry shoal]

ngl the changes I made had fewer benefits for captures than I was hoping for, but still significant enough such that I can cover 95% of the map in one capture

[dry shoal]

Did some work on the thermal detonator mesh too but ngl I am getting absolutely cooked. Despite having high aspirations and seeing the potential I'm not sure if I can see this through long term. Most of the people who have helped me a ton thus far just by sharing knowledge are all euro bros, so when I'm working it's basically radio silence bc timezones. Game engine-side stuff has a lot of potential but the most knowledgeable native modders aren't always there to help yk. I'm relatively proud of my assets when I get stuff done but the key phrase is when I get it done, because I'm not getting much done at all compared to what I could if I had a little bit more support from various experienced people in different areas

The drive is there, the vision is there, but executing that is an exercise in frustration when I'm largely left to my own devices at times when help would matter the most (not anyone's fault, it is what it is ofc)

That's not to say I'm stopping the project, but just giving an update for where I'm at I suppose

[severe flare]

im sorry man, i hope u find some passionate people willing to help. In any case we appreciate the work u been doin

[dry shoal]

I. Cannot. Figure. Out. How. To. Disable. The. Fucking. Helmet. Light.

I'm so hyper fixated on this because the game is unplayable out of the box at this point really only because the helmet has a blindingly bright light attached to it at all times when using light translation

My life would be so much easier if I could just disable that shit, and play through the content I plan on covering for this project to get a good feel for how much needs to be done on the lighting side. As it stands now feels like my only option is adding lights through remix which fucking blows for a handful of reasons

[formal cypress]

could you try putting a cube around the lightsource so that the light doesnt leak? Probably not ideal but might be a hacky workaround. I'm not super knowledgeable when it come to remix (or most game dev) but it may work

is it a light source, a filter, or both in RC?

[dry shoal]

The problem is the light is right smack in front of the player POV from what I can tell. So while I could but a cube around it probably, it would need to be big enough that it would affect the game too much

Though I'll admit I didn't really think of that previously. It's possible the light is behind the player or something so it wouldn't be an issue at all

I'll have to experiment with that for sure

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/385459532282855434/1235084382729932810/image.png?ex=66331577&is=6631c3f7&hm=bb47864e03023c0d8e3f3cbf963df962e17b14b682c766f9ab601a18c5b271c9&

Hold on it might actually be behind the player

[dry shoal]

There are so many great materials out there that I'd be stupid not to use them. Making materials takes me a lot longer than I would like, but for specific items I think I'll continue to do so

For example these plaster materials would be a perfect match for the plaster used everywhere in the arena

but the game makes excessive use of this texture, likely for technical limitations back then. So I won't do a 1:1 replacement. Just where it makes sense

[naive robin]

Fix UV scaling and then toss a generic / preset texture on objects is my go to starting point.

[dry shoal]

Yeah I can probably do that for a good number of assets. But I also have some ready to go so I'll have to look at that too

[dry shoal]

I may have gotten critical insider info on the helmet light. It involves doing a function override from a script within a new actor class, if I understand correctly. Someone shared the format that I would likely use so I shouldn't need a ton of technical know-how to get it going

[modern isle]

Overriding actor classes? Oh boy, more uscript

https://tenor.com/view/byuntear-incrives-meme-meme-react-gif-25029710

[dry shoal]

Don't worry this is apparently like 3 lines total

I don't understand but I probably have enough to figure it out

[modern isle]

I understood

have fun :)

[dry shoal]

Are you saying even that would be a nightmare

[modern isle]

Hey I'm just saying I'm glad uscript got taken behind the shed and splattered across the whole countryside in such a way that not even dental records could identify it.

[dry shoal]

yippeeeee

I love modding

[dusk trail]

[dry shoal]

I'm getting some help from RC modders but

it's like they assume I already know 90% of this

"add this line as a pawn under X class"

like bro what the fuck does that even MEAN

[dusk trail]

Oh neat

[dry shoal]

I think it's what I got in the ss but I sent it there for them to verify

[dusk trail]

Hopefully I'll be able to do more on the bunker soon, still doing house renovations rn

[dry shoal]

you got it boss

[dusk trail]

Ah yes actor classes, what fun...

Not really hard at all in UE4/5 but in UE2...

[dry shoal]

I have to compile all new code........

on the bright side, colored laser bolt light sources are in

I just need to find a method to get that cube out of the way

[dry shoal]

not all the mats are in but got a good few

I keep getting stunlocked into little things that aren't a big priority. Hoping putting what I have together + a couple placeholders will get me on track

[royal sonnet]

Interesting. Thanks for tagging me on it. If we can narrow down what it is about sky / terrain categories that is fixing it, we can probably add a new texture category to just do that.

[dry shoal]

Could be missing something but AFAIK the sky doesn't play a direct part. That said, there's a part of the first level where either the skybox is culled out or the order it's placed in the list of drawcalls changes, which causes issues with sky auto detect. I'm unsure how relevant it is to the helmet, but I feel like I remember the HUD disappearing whenever the sky was changing behaviors. Only way to solve that was manual texture tagging

When the sky is having issues the helmet mesh itself does stay present though, maybe because it's recognized as a view model within Remix?

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/385459532282855434/1235772337983459418/image.png?ex=66363eec&is=6634ed6c&hm=426ad5a392336d71e61b51e24a7f7b24f3b5c70db80bc2b19a20474ca5742d7d&

Then of course there's this nonsense where giant helmet related HUD elements are kept behind the player, even when these HUD elements are displaying properly on the helmet's "glass" surface

To add a bit more info, when disabling vertex shader translation the HUD and these giant billboards stop rendering

[royal sonnet]

It's intriguing that the HUD is somehow interacting with sky / terrain - definitely sounds like a case where we need to actually understand what the game is doing and handle it better within Remix.

Have you filed a github issue about it?

[dry shoal]

No, but sounds like one I should do soon enough. I know modders of the vanilla game have a much deeper understanding of how the helmet renders, would it be beneficial to bring a technical explanation of how it's done as a part of the GitHub issue?

It's likely relevant to diagnosing the problem from the little bits I remember. And better than whatever I'd be able to describe myself most likely

[royal sonnet]

Well, if it gets to the point of an Nvidia engineer directly spending time debugging it, we'll probably wind up capturing the full d3d9 trace and puzzling it out from there. But if you can get a more technical explanation of what's going on, that may help us figure out quick workarounds. Or ideally get a sudden "oh we can fix it by just doing X" brainwave, which can lead to it getting fixed much faster.

[dry shoal]

the amount of shit I'm putting myself through for this mod is unreal, pun partially intended

time to download visual studio 2003 and make C++ code to compile for the game :)

https://tenor.com/view/anime-headesk-bang-headbang-dessert-gif-17584997

[dry shoal]

not digging the ground color I don't think

also probably gonna use a different plaster textures that are a little less "dirty" (?)

[late jetty]

Haven't really dug into this yet (or played the game) - but as it is, is it mostly playable through most of the campaign?

I remember booting it up once and getting it going - but didn't get far

Are the pinned instructions still current, or any revisions? 🙂

[dry shoal]

progress on the new dc17m model :)

[dry shoal]

yes it's mostly playable with some caveats. You could probably play through the entire game as long as you have the helmet disabled and use translated lights. Only things you need to look out for really is tagging the sky and lightmaps. Everything else should kinda just work but it's been a while since I've tested without a helmet

the helmet isn't useable atm because it has a blindingly bright light attached to it that makes the original game's light translation not viable

the instructions should be roughly correct. Just turn off the helmet (if I forgot to include that in the instructions) and you should be alright. If you want my current rtx.conf you're free to take it off my hands 🙂 I can help with any little things that might crop up

[late jetty]

Sweet, and yes please! I'd love to grab it from ya

[dry shoal]

@late jetty as long as you follow the rest of the instructions, you should be good

in fact 0.5.0 of the runtime kinda makes this easier. If you download the latest stable runtime it should include the wrapper used in this project. Just double check that the name of it is correctly set to d3d8.dll

TLDR: Install remix runtime with the included wrapper (d3d8.dll), run the game. Close the game, then install the SWRC fix mod linked in the instructions. Set everything to lowest except textures, characters, helmet off and you should be good

if you run into any trouble just tag me

[burnt light]

@dry shoal i ran into an issue with my A/C unit. can you help?

[dry shoal]

if you let me consult my A/C repair ultimate handbook then I'll get back to you

[late jetty]

Roger that, tutorial works great, thank you!

[dry shoal]

WAIT NO

YOU NEED TO TAG A FEW TEXTURES AS UI

actually I'm gonna give you a new rtx.conf one sec

@late jetty try this one boss. UI should be fully functional without helmet enabled

the only things you have to look out for for the most part are tagging sky textures and lightmap textures. They should be covered for the first two geonosis levels. Auto sky detect can come in handy if you progress further and run into issues finding what to tag. Both of the "on" options work better at different times so flip between em if something's really cooked

other than that I believe the game is fully playable with those caveats

I enabled anticulling in that conf as well which covers that, though it does have a performance hit. Your fps looks plenty high enough from that vid though so you should be alright

it's so surreal seeing someone else play it

[late jetty]

EEEEE thank you, this game is so cool

[dry shoal]

YESSIRRR. Only issue is the billboard that follows casting a shadow, trying to figure that one out with time. If you wanna try something neat, categorize the blue and red laser beam textures to add light to them. Then watch the fireworks

Enjoy

[late jetty]

Got rid of that huge billboard floating around us, went into free cam mode and ignored it's textures

So far I don't notice it affecting any gameplay - so far. Not sure what it was there for, but my shadows aren't cursed anymore lol

[dry shoal]

for some reason I can't actually click the billboards even in freecam. As for why they're there, they're helmet related. Since you aren't using the helmet and just use the alternate UI, you should be able to ignore them just fine

ignoring them with the helmet enabled breaks everything lol

(wip project ss)

[late jetty]

Ahhh that makes sense

It looks so good!!

[dry shoal]

the game may be mostly playable as-is, but I want to go all out on this project

[modern isle]

And the light is unstable I presume?

[dry shoal]

that's right unfortunately. I tested it a couple days ago thinking "hold on, could I just lower the intensity in Remix?". So I took 3 different captures containing the helmet light and I had to set each to an intensity of 0, it didn't carry over between captures. and in-game everything was exactly the same

[static mason]

[dry shoal]

rifle remake proof of concept. It works

[ancient void]

wow looking good

[modern isle]

You're gonna make your mod look like this, right? https://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/heres-what-star-wars-republic-commando-remake-could-look-like-in-unreal-engine-5/

No pressure 😛

[dry shoal]

No, mine will look better

[static mason]

I'm gonna hold your word to it, as soon as I purchase the game, fo not fail me anakin (kidding)

[dry shoal]

I'm actually getting some help from an RC modder, he's working on some code to force disable the helmet light. It's got some issues though so still WIP

[dry shoal]

Don't worry boss, lemme cook

I hope some of the shots so far give an idea of what could be as the project is more and more developed

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1200925027554558034/1236850932726104145/image.png?ex=663a2b71&is=6638d9f1&hm=2409dc8cd4479ecd00b3ce0e94656f367ff6a1415d93654c39e35b45563963ea&

Like this shot is pretty sweet imo

[static mason]

People look at this, and think hell yea(very cool)

[modern isle]

https://tenor.com/view/joeblesson-penguin-discord-gif-25126252

[dry shoal]

Thanks again for the material you made a while back, I'm still using it on the cave walls haven't found anything that would fit better

[static mason]

My favorite mentally unstable game dev

[modern isle]

Same, Dani is my spirit animal

[static mason]

Giraffe

[modern isle]

Always happy to help 😅

[dry shoal]

I'll be around asking for more help in the future as I fumble around the node graph like a complete fucking idiot

I've forgotten almost everything feels like

[limber marsh]

1.5 years to make - yikes

[dry shoal]

Yeah, I actually contacted the main guy working on it to see if he would share stuff for my project, but he basically said he's sick of Star Wars at this point

oh my god with the sniper model replacement I can add a physical scope instead of using UI

[dry shoal]

sorry rune but I truly cannot be assed to remake this

[dry shoal]

WIP, will be using custom materials with colors taken directly from thermal detonator reference images

[dry shoal]

lighting test

[burnt light]

awesome

[dry shoal]

probably gonna make the ground heightmap a touch less strong

I have reason to believe I solved the billboard problem with the helmet

did some messing around and got a close recreation of the original game's "overly shiny" commando textures

not so great reference image

https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/447080997645844483/1237277955462533171/ss_7c16576d21e1b9638b8773f00cc8f60a8c517656.png?ex=663b1064&is=6639bee4&hm=d994bd8f94830cdcd2f495052257c5542243a1e12ad4bbb81c2f62afa5e178a4&

Better reference image

[static mason]

Silver

[formal cypress]

looks pretty good, idk how you would feel about it but I think warmer lights for the background instead of white might thematically look better, but that might just be me. Or is it a volumetric fog doing that look?

[dry shoal]

Good eye! So that is being caused by volumetric fog, but that volumetric fog is being lit by a colder white light around that corner. Don't worry, it's not an intended part of the lighting. I placed it there to have clearer lighting on an in-game asset I was working on in blender as a point of reference

[formal cypress]

that makes sense

[dry shoal]

Since that shot I've already removed the white light so now it's only warmer colors for the most part. Definitely fits a lot better

[formal cypress]

:rave:

ah it broke :(

tried to send a a dancing dwarf spider droid like a stick bug

[dry shoal]

That sounds oddly fitting

[dry shoal]

[dry shoal]

geo1a anchor is in. Scaled to encase the entire play area with geometry surfaces that will never be seen by the player. But because it's so huge (impossible for bounding box not to be in LOS) and hardware occlusion culling is disabled, it'll always be rendering

okay the anchor didn't work