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So today, I discovered the joy of flares via the command line, and I'm simply in love. Maps like Kaos and Agressor make nice use of this feature. What puzzles me is how a map like Koas for example, which has heavily flared lava can be built when DM4ish has the same lava textures, but no flaring. Is flaring not added to certain textures automatically?

I'm not a map maker, so I have no idea how these things work. I could probably tweak the maps myself to do  flaring, but I may end up destroying something.

Dm6ish, Kaos and Aggressor were compiled with q3map, and Dm4ish was compiled with q3map2 which removed flare support because ydnar thinks he's high and mighty and chooses his own preferences over the mappers.

That is not entirely true, you can enable flares with q3map2 with the flag -flares in the bsp stage of the compile (As evidenced by those silly flares in my two maps compiled with the latest q3map2.  See http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Q3Map2/BSP#-flares (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Q3Map2/BSP#-flares)

two things....


#1 what is q3map and q3map2?
#2 if you can do flares in q3map2, couldn't someone just modify the maps to do it?

You could, but not every level "needs" flares, and some look like crap with them.

Ohh, very nice *dies of eye candy* :p

The only reason why I bring these things up is because of a little game called Nexuiz....

The thing that sucks about Nexuiz is well....allot. The engine has extremely lofty requirements, the models are terrible, the weapons are disgusting, and the sound is even worse. However, OA has better gameplay, is able to be played by more people because of the low system requirements, and in my view has a much larger potential. The thing that draws allot of attention to Nexuiz is things like HDR, blooming, and coronas....

but anyways, what i'm getting at here is that if someone figured out how to tweak the engine just a tad more, OA could end up looking better than Nexuiz in every sense of the word while having much lower system requirements....

I appoligize if this whole concept seems a bit ridiculous/useless to everyone else but me

What is lofty about this:
I don't see anything lofty about that.  That is a 5 year old system that even sub300.com tops with their barebones systems. 

<soapbox_rant>
What you are saying isn't ridiculous/useless, it just doesn't need to be done in the engine and has more to do with level design, texturing, and map compile options.  Not that I'm an expert, I'm still learning, but in comparing iD's maps with ours the only thing that makes their maps look better than what is currently available in this project are the details that went into their maps, namely through design and texturing.

We can do better and we probably would if people would be more constructive in their criticism e.g. rather than saying this sucks or that sucks say what sucks about it and suggest improvements. </soapbox_rant>

first,i still think that Nexuiz is incredibly underwhelming considering how much horsepower it takes to make it look that good. my friend has a top of the line dell with a geforce 7600 and 2 gigs of ram and still never gets that great of a result from it. it's just NOT an optimized engine,and doesn't scale back well at all.

you probably are right about the map thing in some ways, but what i was referring to were some effects that do have to do with the engine's lighting, and lighting only. For example, a map looks different depending on vertex or lightmap lighting (of course, you know that) and a rocket explosion in the same way looks different using different lighting techniques. that in itself would be from the engine, and not from a map.

i appoligise if i have seemed rude or condescending with my last couple of rants about this.

Actually that is a shader issue, not an engine issue.  The rocket explosion has two concurrent animations followed by a few more stages that do not get drawn in vertex lighting, if the stages that don't get drawn were added to the animation stages of the shader you wouldn't notice the difference, assuming that it didn't suck. 

Probably the best example of what I am talking about here are the e8 bouncepads, they look great on a system that can handle lightmaps but with vertex lighting and all the details turned down they look like absolute shit (They also cause a few interesting effects when used in certain places and angles, check out the jumpads in Kaos above the lava, you can see straight through them)


You weren't rude but some people have been less than forthcoming with constructive criticism.

I was wondering about that, I can see throught the two jump pads at the plasma point above the megahealth room.

so is there any chance of anyone implementing some cool shader techniques in the future, or is what i'm imagining impossible to do? i mean, engines like XreaL are doing crazy things with the quake 3 engine.

If we did that it wouldn't be a GPL version of Quake 3:  Arena, it would be something else (In other words, probably not, but there has been talk of mods with "cooler" features).

openarena

Very good bump :D

Great! Someone has said that things before me. :D

openarena