Dia Siete: Luz y Tierra

Outdoor terrain levels such as Ixltan don't seem to need much in the way of traditional mission lighting, yet it is as important here as it would be in a 'dungeon crawl'. First I opened the temple building in an empty level, and added the molcajetes full of incense on the sides and torches where the spawnspheres will be. I left two rooms unlit as they will have dynamically triggered effects.




Once I was happy with the Temple, I saved it plus all the lights as a prefab and replaced the existing temples with the newly lit one. Note to self: add Konrad Kiss' 'Inheritance for Prefabs' mod, this was a pain without it.




With the Temples in place, I added a skybox and lost the scatter sky. May still go back to it for procedural reasons but for now, the detail in the skybox will help reinforce the idea that the game is being played in an alternate dimension. Here's Red Base with torches lit:




A side shot showing the normal mapping on the structure and glow layer on the mech:




Lastly, I copied my 'tiling' terrain and began stitching the copies together to create a larger land mass. Given that the mission area is the size of the terrain, I'm adding the copies to block line of sight and achieve the sense of an endless canyon. SNAP! Didn't work very well, wound up spending hours manually editing the terrains to match. I'm sure there were reasons for T3D terrain not to tile but I can't imagine why a modern game engine wouldn't have that feature.Why in TGE it would literally been a single check box. No Worries, that'll be top of my list of code to address when this level is done...

Here's a panorama, showing the balance between level fog, visibility distance and the skybox. These values are tricky because I don't want to see the world end from an airplane, yet want high detail if I'm treading the ground:





Day 5 & 6

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