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SWAT 3 - LAST RESORT GAME MODIFICATION


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Import Store remake

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7 years 3 days ago - 7 years 3 days ago #321 by Slippery Jim
Copy-Cat and I have teamed up to produce a remake of the Import Store map from Swat 3.

Below is a "work in progress" video of the map running in Swat 3. For the sake of the video the AI are turned off so I wouldn't get shot at while capturing the video.

The main purpose of the remake is improve the exterior outside the store. Back in 1999 when Swat 3 was first released video cards couldn't handle a very high polygon count. The developers were forced to make compromises to keep the frame rate up. Modern video cards are multiple times faster and so I thought it would be fun to revisit the map.

All the textures that you see in the video are standard Swat 3 size of a maximum of 256x256 pixels. I also will release a Last Resort mod version that uses much higher quality textures.

The video also highlights some issues with the Swat 3 engine (lighting and fuzzy textures). If anyone has anyone has suggestions how to fix this please let me know. The problems are shown about the middle of the video.



Highly recommended you go full screen when watching (1080p HD at 60fps):

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7 years 3 days ago #322 by DarkSynopsis
Replied by DarkSynopsis on topic Import Store remake
Does increasing the texture size reduce the fuzzy textures? imagine SWAT is taking care of the mipmapping itself? so creating a higher res texture might increase the size of the lowest mipmap? I don't know much about mipmapping so don't know if that would even work, could be the lowest size is the same no matter the max size.

Maybe look into seeing if anyone ran into similar issues with other games that used Worldcraft? Half-Life, Quake?

Can't say I've ever noticed that effect on standard SWAT maps, distance does not even seem that far.

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7 years 3 days ago - 7 years 3 days ago #323 by Slippery Jim
Replied by Slippery Jim on topic Import Store remake
I wondered the exact same thing about the larger texture. Should be an easy test to do tomorrow because I have the larger textures already on hard drive.

The lighting getting brighter as you approach the wall pisses me off. I know that Swat 3 used the technique of distance objects going darker instead of the typical fog that games use. Very frustrating.

There are some lighting settings that I always wondered what they were for. With func_solidref entities you can choose "smooth angle", "smoothing ambient" and "smoothing dir/light". I have never read anywhere what those things do.

PS: forgot to mention in the top post that those buildings across the street aren't done yet. Only a few are somewhat done.

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7 years 3 days ago #324 by DarkSynopsis
Replied by DarkSynopsis on topic Import Store remake
dgVoodoo also has a "No mipmapping" setting, I know its not really a solution since that doesn't fix SWAT itself but might be worth trying, imagine it would force the texture to always be using the max size.

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7 years 2 days ago #326 by Slippery Jim
Replied by Slippery Jim on topic Import Store remake
Great suggestion.

The other thing I want to check is my settings with the Nvidia driver. There are a lot of custom settings you can force when it runs the Swat 3 executable but I can't recall if I messed with them on this machine. Will need to look.

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7 years 2 days ago - 7 years 2 days ago #328 by Slippery Jim
Replied by Slippery Jim on topic Import Store remake
I ran a few tests.

  • My Nvidia control panel settings were all set to default for Swat.exe and changing them didn't seem to affect the blurry texture when distant issue. I assume dgVoodoo has taken control over most of the settings.

  • Changing the "no mipmap" settings in dgVoodoo didn't help. Changing "force bilinear filtering" and "force linear mip filtering" didn't help either. Probably hard coded into Swat 3.

  • I noticed on the Convention Hall map that there were texture blurring depending how much the texture was stretched. Swat 3's level designers were careful to generally stick with tiling textures over large surface rather than stretching one over a big area.

  • Going with the theory that a larger texture gives less blurring I bumped up the resolution of some of the trouble textures in the Import Store remake map. Yes, the blurring was still there but it was much better.

Conclusion: the amount of blurring depends on how much the texture is stretched on a surface.

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