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- Nov 15, 2021
Duke Nukem Forever 2001 Build Discussion
- Thread starter Milwaukee Macho Man
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2022
Brushes are like Legos or bricks. Usually Quake derived engines use them, so Quake, Quake 2, GoldSrc (Half-Life's engine) and Source (Half-Life 2 to CS:GO engine).
Imagine you need to create a nice ancient temple level; with arches, columns, on uneven terrain and other stuff in a realistic way and you have only legos to do so.
Shit's going to look very rough and dated (unless you're a Hammer Editor turbo-autist wizard or a Valve developer).
Why? Because that's how the engine (and the editor) is coded, all way back to 1996.
For some reason all of your brushes, or blocks, needs to be convex and planar.
Want a fancy concave brush? Fuck you, I throw you an error and then piss myself and crash if you try to automatically fix it from the error report menu. -Level Editor
Looks fine? After you load your map again, poof it's gone and it will take some time before you figure out something is missing.
It's so archaic, the level MUST be sealed off the game's void or the lighting can't get baked properly.
Have an entity, eg a health charger, that's too close on the sealing wall? Error, map leak found go to coordinate to fix.
Move a door entity to another place? For some reason it's rotating axis coordinates gets thrown in the middle of the void and you have a leak even if the door itself is inside your level.
It also takes a huge time to optimize your level, which it can make more harm than good if you do it improperly. In fact, I never optimized my maps.
You need to calculate how many brushes are in a place of your map, then create another brush that tells the player that you want to render what's the player seeing and block off the rest, then you need to make that the optimization brush to go away when the player opens the door or it's going to be a glitched, halls of mirror, mess.
Even if you're creating a map from a 2004 engine, compile time (imagine baking a cake) is going to take from 5 minutes to 3 hours while you can't use your computer at all because compile tools are x86, single core, crash prone and outdated as fuck.
Lighting baking takes most of compile time, yet you still have to build reflections cubemaps inside the game with the console, go figure.
With meshes, shit's easy.
Imagine you have clay instead of lego bricks; you can create every structure or terrain how you want it to be.
Lighting gets rendered in real time by the engine and it doesn't need to be baked on the map, thus it's more flexible, stable and it takes less time than setting manually each light, shadows and ambience points of your map.
You don't have to mess with outdated editors from 1996, instead you use whatever modelling editor of your choice and then you can export it to your game.
Also, if you learn modelling meshes you can use that skill in other games (even if it's on a totally different engine) with little problems.
With brushes however, you are stuck with Q1, HL and HL2 engines - and that's it.
Imagine you need to create a nice ancient temple level; with arches, columns, on uneven terrain and other stuff in a realistic way and you have only legos to do so.
Shit's going to look very rough and dated (unless you're a Hammer Editor turbo-autist wizard or a Valve developer).
Why? Because that's how the engine (and the editor) is coded, all way back to 1996.
For some reason all of your brushes, or blocks, needs to be convex and planar.
Want a fancy concave brush? Fuck you, I throw you an error and then piss myself and crash if you try to automatically fix it from the error report menu. -Level Editor
Looks fine? After you load your map again, poof it's gone and it will take some time before you figure out something is missing.
It's so archaic, the level MUST be sealed off the game's void or the lighting can't get baked properly.
Have an entity, eg a health charger, that's too close on the sealing wall? Error, map leak found go to coordinate to fix.
Move a door entity to another place? For some reason it's rotating axis coordinates gets thrown in the middle of the void and you have a leak even if the door itself is inside your level.
It also takes a huge time to optimize your level, which it can make more harm than good if you do it improperly. In fact, I never optimized my maps.
You need to calculate how many brushes are in a place of your map, then create another brush that tells the player that you want to render what's the player seeing and block off the rest, then you need to make that the optimization brush to go away when the player opens the door or it's going to be a glitched, halls of mirror, mess.
Even if you're creating a map from a 2004 engine, compile time (imagine baking a cake) is going to take from 5 minutes to 3 hours while you can't use your computer at all because compile tools are x86, single core, crash prone and outdated as fuck.
Lighting baking takes most of compile time, yet you still have to build reflections cubemaps inside the game with the console, go figure.
With meshes, shit's easy.
Imagine you have clay instead of lego bricks; you can create every structure or terrain how you want it to be.
Lighting gets rendered in real time by the engine and it doesn't need to be baked on the map, thus it's more flexible, stable and it takes less time than setting manually each light, shadows and ambience points of your map.
You don't have to mess with outdated editors from 1996, instead you use whatever modelling editor of your choice and then you can export it to your game.
Also, if you learn modelling meshes you can use that skill in other games (even if it's on a totally different engine) with little problems.
With brushes however, you are stuck with Q1, HL and HL2 engines - and that's it.
TLDR:
Brushes, dated Quake crap from '96 - very strict rules, no concave or non-planar structures, limited vertexes per brush and uses baked lighting. Troubleshooting and optimization is going to take more time than building the level itself.
Meshes, used in every game that is not based from a 90's engine. Flexible, easier to use and looks miles better than brushes as you can create every type of structure you want without stupid limitations.
Lighting is based on real time so less time to optimize it since it will be handled by the engine itself when the map is loaded in the game.
Usually doesn't require to be compiled, as it can be launched directly from the editor to the game without compiling process.
Also, if done with meshes your map can be detailed as you want without major performance loss and maps tend be way bigger than the ones that uses brushes, as they need to be small levels or it's going to tank your framerate.
- Joined
- Jun 18, 2019
Disappointed to hear Half-Life 2's engine is so dated since I love the look of games on that engine.
If you can only design in blocks, how did Valve make the smooth cartoon characters of Team Fortress 2?
Not to get too off topic but I'm curious to learn more.
If you can only design in blocks, how did Valve make the smooth cartoon characters of Team Fortress 2?
Not to get too off topic but I'm curious to learn more.
- Joined
- Jun 24, 2019
All the NPCs and players are meshes, soft body rigging with brushes would be a nightmare if even possible. For how they did the scenery, just lots of effort.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2022
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2020
Irrc isnt tf2 code a shitshow due to spaghetti code
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2018
Honestly I don't play TF2 for two reasons, one, my PC will probably think it's malware if I install it, and two, my PC will probably catch fire from the horrible snarl of code it is if I install it.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2019
Source is the crummiest fucking engine to ever exist and I'm absolutely impressed that Valve still uses it at all when this shit was outdated before it even came out.
Mega Man II Intro - GB
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2021
What's a good game engine? I want to know because I've seen this said about a lot of them and then there's devs who move away from their own engines. Is it even possible to code a good game engine these days? Every story I hear sounds like all game developers just barely slap together a functional product with broken tools and somehow we have a thriving industry that rarely results in a Cyberpunk fiasco.
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2019
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2020
Trans is not a real identity. You are a faggot in a dress.
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2021
Ion Maiden has a shit protagonist with shit voice lines. The AI is pretty terrible and the enemies aren't varied. They tried to emulate that style but failed to remove themselves from modern game design. The jokes in the game are also lame. I don't know what they were even going for.
ditto
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2019
But nerd + discord + 5 months = tranny,
Elon needs to hire some nerds, put 'em in an office above a strip club and below another strip club, disconnect the internet, and let them finish the game ungroomed.
- Joined
- Apr 29, 2022
Mapping wise, Source brings in displacements for smooth terrain, which more or less resembles modern day meshes.
Though you still need to seal the world, so you need an invisible brush underneath it, because technically speaking it's handled like a model entity than a brush itself.
That's the reason why in Team Roomba videos they could spawn kill players by being underneath the terrain with sentries outside RED's spawn in Gravel Pit.
They were, indeed, standing and building on the sealing invisible brush and shooting people thru the invisible part of the displacement.
Another thing that most of the developers do, in modern Source games, is to place a fuckton of models (composed by meshes) everywhere and use high resolution textures to hide the aging engine and brushes are used just as a core skeleton of the map.
It's like ricing a car from 1996, it may look flashy, cool and fast while in reality it's the same old and slow-ass piece of crap.
Anyway, if you load up the map editor, then load a TF2 map and remove every model and displacements entities, then it would look like it came out straight from Quake/GoldSrc engine.
Edit: I'm fucking blind but anyway, the characters models consists of soft meshes compiled and rigged then for Source. Brushes are only used for level design.
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SlipNHonk
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2020
Source's bizarre behavior is so unexplainable at times.
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-working-on-making-source-sdk-less-painful-to-use/
Source's level editor Hammer was even dated by 2004 which a lot of decried about. The UI is still no different than Worldcraft (Quake editor released in September 96) which it was based off of. Over a decade ago in 2011, Gabe said we'd see a revamp and that never occurred (because of course).
https://www.pcgamer.com/valve-working-on-making-source-sdk-less-painful-to-use/
Displacements are like managing crumbled up paper in Source. Excruciatingly time consuming to get it properly work out well.
That's why Valve's forgone all usage of brushes in CSGO. They even added a resizing tool for models for CSGO's hammer editors, something people have clamored for since 2004. All of the maps are made in other 3d model making tools and then exported over to Hammer nowadays by Valve. Everything else is just nodraw brushes underneath to avoid leaks.
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Meriasek
kiwifarms.net
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- May 16, 2020
- Joined
- May 9, 2019
RE: Brushes. Meshes are way more versatile for beautifying a map, but brushes are definitely not restricted to planar/orthogonal forms or anything like that. The real problem is that brush sculpting in the Worldcraft/Hammer editor interface is like pulling teeth.
Below, a small demonstration of what a modern mapping utility can do with brushes. Sadly this tool only creates maps for Quake/Quake 2/Hexen 2, none of which I am very fond of.
Below, a small demonstration of what a modern mapping utility can do with brushes. Sadly this tool only creates maps for Quake/Quake 2/Hexen 2, none of which I am very fond of.
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- Joined
- Sep 30, 2018
I disagree with you there, I played it and had a blast. It compares well to Duke Nukem 3D or Shadow Warrior, the problem is more that 3D Realms' games were just never as solid as Id's to begin with, not back then and especially not now. People think of "classic boomer shooters" and their mind immediately goes to Doom and Quake, not realising that those games really were the cream of the crop of that decade.
I'm also not sure what you mean by not removing themselves from modern game design? The levels never felt ultra-linear like modern FPS games tend to. If you want to see a bad attempt at emulating 90s shooters then look at Strafe, now that game was crap with a capital C.
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
To be fair the maps in Strafe are randomly generated by a simple mindless algorithm.
Which matches the intelligence of the modern level designer.
- Joined
- Sep 30, 2018
That's the problem, "90s-inspired shooter" and "procedurally generated" don't belong in the same sentence lmao