GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[radorn]

Hi:

This is the "official" WIP development thread for the level (or series of, perhaps) I'm working on.
This is something I've been dreaming for a long time since I had my N64 and started playing Goldeneye, my first FPS (good way to start, huh?). I mean, having some of the levels from my favorite games available in an FPS. And now that FPS is no other than Goldeneye. PERFECT!!

So, let me show you:






(older pictures here)

As you can all recognize, this is Super Mario 64's castle first area.
For now it includes the main hall, picture rooms for "Bob-omb Battle field", "Whomsp's Fortress", "Jolly Roger Bay" and "Cool Cool Mountain", the passage for the courtyard and the cellar, and also the spiral stairs that lead to the upper levels. You may notice the room for "The Princess' Secret Slide" and the "room" for the first Bowser level are not there, but they will be, I just couldn't wait more to show what I had done so far.

As there's no public (or available to me by any other means) way to extract the geometry data from the game, I had to find some way to reconstruct it by hand.
Luckily for me, When I was fiddling with Toad's Tool 64 a few days ago to see if it could extract the geometry for me (which it doesn't) I realized the designers used the patterned textures as a guide for measures, and everything is aligned to something else in one way or another. So, it just a matter of knowing how to look at things to find some correlation somewhere, and draw the lines.
What Toad's Tool has done for me, appart from giving me the textures, is offer the MUCH USEFUL parallel projection feature, which allows me to find correlations across different rooms in all the three coordinates so I can do multiple measures and not trust a single one. I also used the orignal game on my trusty N64, of course.
My other, UNVALUABLE TOOL, is a 30cm promotional plastic ruler I someone in my family got from a local newspaper God knows how many years ago. I use it to make quick and dirty measurements (seldomly and only if I can test the results against another reference) and tracing virtual lines to ensure paralelism between certain edges... OVER THE SCREEN.
Yeah, laugh as much as you want, it works .

Anyway, doing all this, I noticed some strange and unexplained misalignements and strange sizings for no aparent reason withing the game. Sometimes they cause tiles to misaling from one room to another. It doesn't matter in the original environment because the camera hides them, but on an FPS, you have them against your nose, so I made them better, trying not to change more than what was necessary. Also, many rooms that look symmetrical are NOT, actually, and for no good reason, as I see it. I corrected that too. Strange Nintendo...

I plan to "stack" all the separate areas from the castle into a single one, but I may also release some "intermediate" work.
For the "stacking areas" thing, well, some quite heavy modification will be needed, as may areas would overlap.
For example, the "donut" room in the second level will actually overlap the ceiling on the main hall if I just leave things as they are. I would have to make the spiral room twice the tall, or cut off the ceiling of the main hall, or maybe cut the donut room in half, or even make it ridiculously large so it goes arround the main hall's ceiling xD.

Last, I would like to show a little modification I may try, or rather, two version of it, so you can give your opinion on which one would be better and why:

the original:


mod_v1:


mod_v2:


The looks of the first or the tactical aspect of the second? which do you prefer? (note that the elevation of that little wall is 1'25 meters, so maybe it doesn't help much, unless for ducking)

you may have already noticed but I tend to write a lot, and make my posts really dense. hope you don't mind.

Almost forgot:
A technical question.
How much texture data do you recomend I use?
The level pictures are 2 64x32 textures each (one for the upper half and another for the lower one) and I have 4 of those already, which makes it 8 textures just for the pictures. Do you recommend that I take them off when I convert it to an actual level?

EDIT: Now someone else has bumped the thread, I take the oportunity to take the "(Castle Mariostein??)" bit off the title

Last edited by radorn on Fri Jul 25, 2008 2:23 pm; edited 1 time in total

[connery as bond]

I think this is a long shot, but are you planning on recreating the outside of the castle, minus the water?

It'd probably be HUGE, but it'd be awesome - none the less. That, might be too much however... still, great work. One of my favorite games of all time in my FAVORITE game of all time.
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[Goldroger]

I think this stage will be amazing. Can't wait to see a playable version of it.

[radorn]

well, I plan to make faithfull models of all I can and use them as a base for a series of maps, first for goldeneye, and then maybe for other PC games. I may even allow moders to get access to my models so they can use them as a base for their maps.

As for Goldeneye. The first I do will probably be a map based off the 1st area, which is what I have now almost finished. I would add some more connections here and there and maybe some "secrets" (and I'm talking too much hehe). This would be in a mostly no compromise style, leaving everything with as much the original level of detail as possible (maybe axing or resizing some textures).
I may do that also for the upper and lower levels of the castle, but they are not as interesting as the main hall, so they would need to be used in conjunction with it to make something nice.
In that case, I'll probably would be forced to water things down so Goldeneye doesn't choke xD, although I'm not very sensitized whith how much it can withstand.

For now I just copy the original, and experiment ideas and aditions. I don't have a proper setup to do anything else anyway so actual levels will have to wait a little, not much I hope.

[GE MASTER]

For the railing? I think solid is better, but I don't know about shooting through the railings, if possible, and or if the railing would act the same as the wall. If you can't shoot through the railing, I'd say the wall is better. It would be possible protection in the spot, but throwing a remote up there would be just juicy.

[Wreck]

I personally am liking the idea of mod_v1 the best. It looks very stylish and suits Peach's castle really nicely. The railings would need to be made as what we call "secondary indices" for GoldenEye. Primary is pretty much everything solid, which makes up the majority of a room model. The secondary are overlapping images, which can have their transparancy set, colours removed from them (like how a railing texture would likely have a black background), and also be shot through. It may require some manual tweaking afterwards, or even could be converted automaticaly through a tool, in order for it to display and respond properly.

This is really coming along great, Radorn.
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[Dragonsbrethren]

Yeah, I agree, v1 is the best.

[GE MASTER]

The reason I disagee with you guys is because having a wall creates cover, which the level or room is lacking.

[radorn]

Wreck wrote:

I personally am liking the idea of mod_v1 the best. It looks very stylish and suits Peach's castle really nicely. The railings would need to be made as what we call "secondary indices" for GoldenEye. Primary is pretty much everything solid, which makes up the majority of a room model. The secondary are overlapping images, which can have their transparancy set, colours removed from them (like how a railing texture would likely have a black background), and also be shot through. It may require some manual tweaking afterwards, or even could be converted automaticaly through a tool, in order for it to display and respond properly. This is really coming along great, Radorn.

So, how do you recommend that I organize them within the geometry structure. A separate group (it already is, well, according to sketchup specs, anyway) or maybe even a separate obj model?
And another question. Is it possible to make fake walls like in the complex? I may want to use them to hide some secret or two .

And I edit this again within less than 5 minutes to say how stupid I am that I had not realized that with a combination of that and an adecuate clipping file you can do just that. Just one thing. What Should I do to have an alpha blended texture in one side and an opaque one at the other, you know, like in complex...?

[Wreck]

Although I have not yet made my own map, I've had a little experience in this with Dragonsbrethren's assistance. He had created the first real new map using the Hammer Editor, a popular modeller used quite often for Half-Life mods. With his Soviet Office Tower, as well as other test rooms, we tried creating "secondary indices" for them. Things like posters, ceiling lamp fixtures, and even railings were tested.

What I found to be the best method, is to make two seperate versions of the same room. The first includes only your "primary" architecture. All of the walls, floors, and ceilings. Other things may also fall into this category. The other version is your "secondary" room. This only features the textures that overlap others, require transparency, or need colours removed - such as railings. Also, everything in the secondary indice can be shot through. So if you wanted to be able to walk through a certain painting - and fire through it as well - it would need to be a secondary.

I believe the primary images can only be seen from one side, whereas a secondary can be shown from both - if setup that way. In the case of the Complex, each of those little hidden pockets is its own room. If you created a hidden area behind - let's say one of Peach's paintings in her secret slide room - the normal area is fine as is. Since the painting is only shown from inside the room, standing behind it would render it invisible. You wouldn't be able to see the hidden pocket from the outside, but could see out of it once inside. An interesting thing to do in that scenario, would be to have another version of the painting shown from inside the hidden space at same position of the regular one. Only this time, it'd be slightly transparent (and obviously reversed). This would give a real magical feeling, as though you are actually seeing through the image itself. As long as your images are drawn on only one side - not both - there won't be a problem with textures clashing or fighting eachother to remain visible.
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[radorn]

Understood!
Thanks Wreck!

Since I have everything as separate groups in a hierachy, I can easily make them into separate "rooms" so that won't be a problem.

Just to make it clear for me.
There are 3 main things I have to build for the geometry of the level:
primary and secondary backgrounds and the clipping, right?

[Wreck]

The clipping can often be done by using your primary room model, so long as it includes all of the walking areas, such as floors, ramps and stairs. However, you'd have to be sure that none of them extend beyond where you want the player to go. Like in the current Bob-Omb Battlefield world entrance room. See how the red carpeted floor extends past the walls in the corners? You'd need to modify that, so it stops right along side of the walls. That way, when you go to create the clipping, it'll be much easier and require less modification.

It may be a good idea to create a clipping version of your room models, which only includes the floors, etc. That way, you can still have sections sticking past walls in your normal models, which means that the game will have to draw less triangles to make it. And the less there is to draw, the better. But your clipping version will have that corrected, so it only fills the areas you want the player to access.
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[radorn]

Yes yes, I already knew that about clipping, hehe, but thanks to take the time to point it anyway.
For now, I just model the original, with that kind of "optimizations" to reduce the poly count (a simple square for the floor is renders faster than a strange form with many sides.

With this program, Sketchup, it's pretty easy to model a clipping surface, as I just need to have everything closed into groups and then draw the clipping surface over it following all the sides I need to, even if they are from other groups.

You mean this, right?




Maybe even better with a simple ramp for the stairs? Does it make much of a difference?

Still, sometimes I have to take care not to abuse the use of intersecting planes over more "formal" vertex and edge "welding", because of one thing, or better said two things, because one depends on the other.
One is Z-buffer and the other is antialiasing.

if you look at certain parts of goldeneye, like in the first parts of the dam and the upper levels of the control where human structures intersect with natural rock, you can see their sides aren't "welded", but simply intersected, and because of that, theres a little z-fighting and also lack of antialiasing, because it seems it only works under certain circumstances, and would take too much extra calculations to antialias everything regardless of how cheap or expensive (in cycles I mean).

Also, since I have the action replay, I made some screenshots from games and noticed something a bit strange to me:
There are parts in the game on screen that are antialiased that in the image taken by the AR are not. Notably are those in which an edge is "floating in the air". I mean, an edge uniting 2 faces would (welded vertexes) would be shown antialiased on the AR screenshot if the adjacent side is shown too, but if that same edge is floating in the air and behind it is another part of the scene, it's not antialiased and shows all it's jaggies. Normally, these edges are antialiased too in the picture on your TV screen, but not so on the AR/GS picture taken from the framebuffer.
This is strange and suggests me that antialiasing takes place in two stages, one for the "easy" ones involving welded edges and another one for those that are not, and then the intersecting planes of which their union is not really an edge, just the result of z-buffering and are not antialiased at all.

So, there are cases in the building of this level that I find myself having to decide between lower poly count and avoiding intersecting planes so antialiasing can take place.

Maybe this is not so much a problem since in emulators the rendering pipeline is replaced altogheter and I don't have a backup unit to test on console, but still I want to find a good compromise.

[Kastro187420]

This is awesome. While I'm no good at this kind of stuff, this definitely looks great and would be fun to play I think. I've always liked Super Mario, and thought that the Castle would be awesome to play around with in other games too, but I never thought about Goldeneye. I'd definitely be checking this out if you can get it finished.

[Wreck]

The clipping for the Bob-Omb Battlefield world entrance room should work very well. I completely understand where you're coming from, when you mention about lowering the poly count - aside from the highly technical terms that are currently way above my head. One big square floor requires far less drawing data than if your were to model it to fit perfectly within the room itself. So long as you're sure to make a seperate model for the clipping, all should turn out just fine.
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