Hey Guys,

I recently looked up some games that have been made with fps creator. Wooden House for example. I think the game itself is not that awesome, but it definitely looks good!
Looks better than any gameguru made game including mine... Can't tell what it is though, I guess it's the textures...
Why is that? Is there a way to get better textures in gg as well?
Some nice grass and terrain textures would be cool. Not that the ones available right now are bad.. I really like them. But I think they can be a bit better.
What do you guys think?

I'm interested to hear your opinions!

Duchenkuke

Wooden House has hyperviolent specularity on wood and this one claims it looks better than my guru games.
Oh well! I guess opinions can differ. Its, as always, the lighting buddy....and to an extend GG's postprocessing makes some things look a little blurry.



What exactly do you mean by that? I know pretty much everything there is to know about visuals in FPSC so gimme a rundown of what you want to do or what you like so much in wooden house (also check out Jonez Games Phobia 1.5, the real wooden house) I can tell you how its done.

I'm not hating on GDNomads games, I believe that what he does achieve visually and that he has the patience to apply those shaders in FPSC is respectable...I just find the gameplay and execution of many of them lacking, especially to be sold like they are...but its a free market.



-Wolf

Yeah, I totally agree with you on that, regarding their quality... I just like the clean look of them. gg is a bit blurry sometimes indeed. I just think it depends on the texture size of the entities themselves.
Some stock media is kinda low res...

And what do you mean "your" gameguru games? ^^ Can I look them up? I am very interested to see!

But what if I'm wrong and.. everything is fine and I.... only need to clean my glasses ....

I don't know. Just had this feeling.

Texture size is way less important than generally assumed. Look and style are really paramount, also how they are applied. (To clarify: I am in no way saying that resolution isn't important, just that its impact is overstated by the gaming press and the modding community).

I am 99% sure that GDNomad uses barely any textures with a resolution above 1024x1024, I even assume that most things are around 512x512.

FPSCreator has a very strict memorycap, that means that you can only load very little into the memory before the whole thing crashes. As Wooden House has a shader effect on almost everything, he also needs the _N and _S maps, cluttering the cap even more.
FPSC games tend to play in small hallways and little houses because the average FPSC map is the size of 4 rooms and a larger hallway. Its all you can squeeze in without it either crashing during build or while loading in the final game.

In early versions of my game Acythian, I was trying to use mostly 4096x4096 sized textures for environment props in a stupid attempt to trick the blurry postprocessing. Didn't work...and the difference was not all that noticeable when I went back to contemporary sizes. For most things, your monitors resolution will be restricting the pixel count anyway so that many resolutions above 2048 are utterly pointless.

Even the props in current gen games aren't that high res. 1024x1024 is the average standart AFAIK.



I wasn't entirely serious with my complaint but sure!! I'm currently working on this thing.

This is an ongoing art project that actually also started in FPSCreator.

Also: Everything is not fine. GG in its current state DOES have an ugly renderer.
Most is the way it lights, some is its shaders and some more its postprocessing and lack of current gen filtering...or even last gen filtering.

Since I never miss an opportunity to do this, here are screenshots taken in the unreal engine of a scene with lighting and without, for you to see the difference of its impact and that its among the most important aspects of graphics.



-Wolf

Don't really know what to say on top of that. I only can agree. Lighting is the most important thing.

We'll see where gameguru goes from here.

Thanks for your post, it kinda cleared my mind.

Performance issues will reduce your texture sizes and make things look more blurry as GG scales the image down if you fall below 60 fps. You may be able to disable that in the setup, but if you do then you will suffer even slower frame rates. I've never looked to see yet, it may be fixed in stone.

interesting... what's the name of that function in the setup.ini?
hardwareinfomode, or dividetexturesize ?

Will check that out, and see if there is any difference.

disabledynamicres = 1

forces the game to remain in native resolution rather than downscale upon lower FPS!

yes, just tried it and wow... looks gorgeous!
Biggest difference I saw was the grass. Looks way better. Very nice!

Is there a way to make every object more shiny like in these fps creator games?
Changing the specular map to be exact?

Yes, you open the specular map in a paint program and
clamp the levels and
adjust the brightness.

The brighter the more shiny. This is for non metal textures.

Metal tends to throw off the color of the base metal in the specular color.

alright, thank you!

Do you have GIMP or Photoshop to do this?

What he uses in these games are Bond1's "herospec" shaders. Meaning that the specularity follows the players camera.
I don't think we have this kind of shader in game guru yet.



-Wolf

no but I got photoscape and paint.net. I convert the file to png, change the brightness and reverse it to .dds

That already worked in the past ^^