It's dark out there...

Quarto

Quarto

Unknown Enemy
Space is a dark, dark place. Not everybody realises this. And so, we've decided to show off a shot of our intro, just so we're all clear about it :p.

...Eh, actually, we're just showing off a little something we figured out in the past few days - how to make parts of the ship light up regardless of external light sources. Apart from hangar lighting, which you can see in this shot (and which makes the opening shot of the intro even cooler), this is also used for capship engines.

On a side-note, this might well be the last pre-release shot. We're running out of time and of things to shoot in the Prologue :p.

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Ooh. That ended up looking awesome. Congrats to Tango for getting on to this, it makes those hangers look that much cooler. And I thought the intro looked good /before/ :)
 
Eh, wait until you *hear* the intro :cool:. Michael's done a great job with the music. I wish I could say more about why the intro music is so great, but it's classified, so I can't talk about it here ;).
 
You could tell me, but then you'd have to KILL me. Oh wait.. I'm allowed to know. I'm on the staff..

The killing me bit would just be for the enjoyment purposes. I get it now. :p Considering the job he did on the theme, I'm not surprised. I can't wait to hear it in action. :)
 
I already wanted to start a thread and ask if you use the glowmapping feature. 'tis now explained I suppose.

Does the SO engine have specific glowmap files or are just certain texture specified to be unlit?
 
Triangles with more than one type of map on them are for wusses! :p

(In other words, the engine just allows faces to be fully lit, though we haven't experimented much with other values for the variable which Tango found out is responsible for this.)
 
And people copmlain about the "dark FS engine". :p

It would be cool if you could have more maps per triangle, even if it's for wusses :p , thus allowing more sophisticated lighting effects. Maybe it's just me but I seem to remeber something like that in the original SO campaign. But it looks great nonetheless. :cool:
 
Oh, Standoff is certainly "blacker" than anything the FS engine could ever pull off. ;)
 
Yeah, I tried very hard to make the scripted cutscenes as dark and as bright as possible :p. Chiaroscuro lighting is great :cool:.
 
Dammit, I hope I get my computer fixed before the final release. I'm still running off old betas, and it sucks!
 
Okay, heard the intro music, and I can promptly say: It's awesome :)

Overmortal, I hope you do too. Not long left to go, now.
 
It's actually quite a simple thing... I don't remember the details, but basically it's a matter of changing one line in the FACE chunk - just have to change a 0 to a 2, basically :p.
 
I know it's meant to be more 'realistic' in regards to lighting, but I despise not being able to see ships in WCSO. For me, the lighting in WCP was better because all sides of the ship had at least some ambient lighting. But that's just me. :p
 
KillerWave said:
Nice effect there Q! You guys must tell me how you did it sometime :p
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Decode a mesh in WCPPas, look in each face inside the FACE chunk, there should be two unknown values referenced by Thomas as unknown1 and unknown2 - change unknown2 from 0 to 2 and the face is lit. Of course, you can't recompile large meshes in WCPPas, so you gotta do it via Hex editing in those cases, which is real fun. :p
 
Wedge009 said:
I know it's meant to be more 'realistic' in regards to lighting, but I despise not being able to see ships in WCSO. For me, the lighting in WCP was better because all sides of the ship had at least some ambient lighting. But that's just me. :p
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Realism isn't something we gave much thought in Standoff ;). It's all about making things look right. So, in some places in Standoff, you will have pretty good lighting... and then there's one or two situations where you will literally only have one directional light.
 
A game in space where things aren't always lit? Wow . . . just like in real space, where unless you're close to a star or something similar, there's probably not much light. Who'd have guessed that?
 
Like I said, though, realism is not an issue. I'd make everything as bright as day, if that's what I happened to need (but it isn't ;)). Realism doesn't go too well with WC... you start off talking about reducing the lighting, and next thing you know, we'll be having invisible lasers and no sound :p.
 
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