Another mixed bag of a day, largely spent on textures. Did you know video games tend to have alot of them?
So today's issue came from me grappling with the fact that what's good for Signalis texturing is not good for Doom texturing. At first, i didn't see the issues though. Signalis's Textures are all actually at or around doom's texture resolutions, and it's sprite sheets can easily be chopped up into good looking walls and pillars and such.
The problem comes from two places.
1. these are textures made to wrap around a 3d model, not laid out along a floor or a solid wall, so i had to figure out exactly how i was going to chop it up. Do i have a few solid pieces? do i chop it up into a dozen small ones so i have the most control? the answer is it's gonna vary.
For example. here's a chunk of the Penrose and it's wall texturing. The entire room is one model, and every part of it(including the lil' spires in the corners) are all pulling from the same sheet. Each part is meant for dif stuff, which explains why some chunks are much brighter, or darker, than others.
That's great for UVing, but i don't really know what i'm supposed to do with something like this. What do i do with the clearly darker chunk of wall?
Sometimes, there are walls that have a lil' extra line on the bottom, or the top, and i don't know why. I think they'd texture rooms so that dif parts would look better to the camera angle. That's great for their angle, but a bit odd in first person.
I mean it guess it's not that weird, but i think it'd have to edit it to have a more natural falloff or somesuch. It doesn't look great ported as-is, and this problem comes up alot (this is a minor example tbh)
2. Doom's textures more often than not are expected to look acceptable when used on large surfaces. This means floors and walls and such need to be able to tile (or repeat forever) cleanly, but without drawing too much attention to the repetition. Like a walking loop, you don't want a specific action to pop too much because it'll call attention to the loop.
Signalis's textures, however, are often very small textured tiled very aggressively. It's something that you don't think much about in a slow game from a pulled back perspective. However, once you're low to the ground and moving at a clip, not only do you notice the repetition, but it can honestly get a bit nauseating to see the patterns whoosh by.
the floor textures look like this. Most areas are made up of the middle tile in the ring, with the ring parts often running along walls. The bits on the righjt and bottom are often used to break up the visuals.
At first, i thought this would be a big problem. The 32x32 tiles just repeat too hard to look good. However, i am a dummy, and forgot that this is pretty easily solved by breaking the ground up and slotting those tiles in.
Now, it's more work than it'd be on a 3d model, cuz i'm gonna need to remember to do this manually. But, that solves the problem of using the little details. Doesn't really solve this tiled floor being a nightmare to see stretch on forever, but at least it's something.
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I spent a bit of time working on getting some 3d models and stuff into the game as a test, which didn't go great. The community models for the characters are fantastic, however, they don't deform well when converted to the .md3 format.
GZDoom doens't used fbx files, it uses OBJ for static stuff, and MD3 (an old quake 3(?) file type) for stuff with animations. It's an old old format, and only really works via a couple of blender addons or old modeling programs.
Conversion from obj/fbx/ect to md3 can always be funky, i don't really know why, it just can be. Sometiems it works, or sometimes you need to model in md3 from scratch. i don't know how far i'm gonna go with that.
I also played aroudn with getting sprite turnarounds of the characters. However, that's going to take it's own tech setup that i didn't give much time to today.
Overall, a pretty frustrating day, but i got alot more stuff in-engine and figured out mass naming schemes and so on. I can't say i've really solved any problem, but I'm gonna pretend noticing the problems is progress in-of-itself.
So uhh, i dunno, hey do you wanna see Ariane's bathroom? god, poor girl, 20(?????) years in that tube and this is what she's got to work with.
(the blender scene is not mine, it was assembled by a very skilled person on the signalis discord. all credit goes to whoever did it, they're a godsend)
