[Old PotW] PotW: Goku Pwns on Planet Namek

[Grega]

Well... overall it looks 'OK'..

don't get me wrong, it's not terrible by any means, but it could be significantly better.

The level as a whole doesn't seem particularly cohesive in it's appearance... I think you need to pick an art style, and make sure all the elements conform to that. For example the characters we've been seeing lately seem to be developing a soft, rendered, sort of vibe from them. Then you have a level with very flatly painted textures, with pretty bland, subtle lighting. The water shader with it's normal map feels out of place with the textures on the landscape.... and considering the BG texture alludes to the ambience fading off to yellow, that would mean that both the light source in the environment and the fog should also be yellow, but they seem to be of a blue-ish colour, that again doesn't really harmonize the scene (not to mention that the blue from the light is obviously getting a bit more of a bias, and is getting more blown out by the bloom effect). Also the islands loo like they're floating on the water, as they have neither a shadow on the water, or any kind of reflection to help ground them.

This all really sounds a lot harsher than it is, and is all fairly fixable really quickly.

just sorting out the lighting and atmosphere to get the colour balance right will do a lot. You could apply some kind of alpha blend meshes around the islands to hint at either water making contact with the edges, or give it a fake shadow, and better lighting baked into the terrain itself will pull out the form of the landscape in a much more pleasing way.

I think the textures are actually quite nice, but like i said earlier everything is a bit too flat... bringing stuff in line with your characters would definately be the right way to go, and it would look different from the anime in an interesting way too!

Hope that helps!

The bluish Fog effect is the explosion. Dalte made a lighting effect for gig attacks that colour the sorounding area in the attacks colour. So it isnt really part of the map.

As for the reflections/shadows. Sadly our water only reflects the skybox and not the mapped terrain. So it would need to be made manually by a workaround. That said im not to sure of how good that would look in combination with the water shader itself. Then again maybe Raven has some ideas. Would slight water transparency perhaps solve the floating island apearance?

 

[MrPlow]

The bluish Fog effect is the explosion. Dalte made a lighting effect for gig attacks that colour the sorounding area in the attacks colour. So it isnt really part of the map.

Wow that sounds awesome! So what happens when two different colored attack are fired at the same place?

 

[Grega]

Last attacks colour prevails id say. We cant really know since the deathball crashes the game XD

 

[MrPlow]

Last attacks colour prevails id say. We cant really know since the deathball crashes the game XD

hehe that must be fun xD

 

[hleV]

Deathball must be an ultimate attack to crash the game. Gonna play as Freeza.

 

[DeN]

the blue tinge to the sun and in goku's aura are from the explosion?? bloody hell... LoL

I'd definately say you should add a level of transparency to the water, and adding other elements to the reflection shouldn't be too hard to be honest, some nice specular distortion, mixed with some parallax scrolling on the water would look nice, i don't see how having reflections of the terrain would make it any worse....

what about the lighting of the level, how are you guys handling that? it looks like it could use a solid lighting pass, probably bake some ambient occlusion in the verts or soemthing...

 

[Grega]

As far as i know the shadows are part of the texture. As an example you might remember the Kamis Palace map that people were complaining about. The tree and tower textures apeared on the floor, but not on the grass that was right under them. The shadows were put onto the ground texture but have yet to be made on the grass.

Well thats as ar as i guess. Though since then things might have changed allready.

As for the blue again XD

Sorry i thought you ment the blue fog like effect in the left side. Well Gokus aura is blue and since AURA light takes priority over the ENV light it isnt to much affected. That and the aura itself is a sprite. So i guess the code would need tweaking. Similar for the sun. Its a sprite placed abbove the map. As of yet that is the only sun sprite we have XD

That or Layne thought it can wait till the terrain/texturing and optimization is donne ^^;

 

[Grega]

Show him 1.2 then he should believe

 

[Skyrider]

1.3 rapes 1.2 .