Cartoon tileset experiment

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I REALLY love this mod. Everything looks ray-traced in-game.

Great stuff. Keep up the great work!

[Jorzi]

@Goth: Thanks, man Although the rendering is really as simple as it can get
The new propulsion models can now be downloaded from felipe's git repo, I've tested them ingame to ensure that they work correctly out-of-the-box.

[Fabio_IT]

really interesting work
I'm interesting about this custom simple cartoon texture.
With it the graphic engine can running light, i think, and the view are nice.
where i can find a one titleset folder for use your texture on flame, for wz 3.1?

[aubergine]

@Fabio: All the files are here: https://github.com/epilef/mod_cartoon

[YosemiteSam]

I love where this mod is going. From the screenshots, it's looking very promising. Unfortunately, I am either unable to or unaware of making it work myself.

I pulled the zip, changed the file extension and placed it in my mods/autoload folder. It appears to recognize the file and announces mod_cartoon over the title menu, but running campaign/skirmish doesn't show any change content-wise. I downloaded from the Ubuntu Software Center.

[Stratadrake]

Wow, good work. I remember attempting to do something like this back in the 1.x days myself but I lost interest (and pretty much all I had for painting in said day was MS Paint, which didn't help much either).

I did complete a few terrain textures and models, though....

Here's some screenshots for posterity:
- Modified Desert tileset (all done in MS Paint)
- Modified Viper Wheels

Note the cel outlines on the Viper Wheels. It's actually quite an easy effect to do - just duplicate your PIE geometry, flip the polygon normals, offset them a small distance and paint 'em black.

Oh ... that's right, we don't exactly have a PIE editing GUI these days ... but I do have my old copy of Pie Slicer is still in (mostly) working order on my system and the PIE geometry specs haven't really changed much since then - I can fix you up some cel-outlined versions of the default PIE files pretty quickly if you want me to.

[aubergine]

I like the ways the wheels have their own separate armour plates, clearly differentiating them from other propulsions.

[Jorzi]

I really like your track marks and cracked mud
Also, the outlines idea is simply pure genius, so simple and so powerful, only problem is it doubles the polycount and might mess with shadow casting.
Tried it on my cactus

[Stratadrake]

Can't wait to see what one of your screenshots look like with black outlines around all the units. ('Tis a lot of PIE files to tweak, but the end result is totally worth it)

...only problem is it doubles the polycount and might mess with shadow casting.

Who's counting?

It won't mess with shadow casting, it still has the same shape as the original so it casts the same shadow, only slightly larger/thicker.

Oh, and if you want to use or incorporate some of my old desert tiles go right ahead - I don't mind at all, as I'm obviously not using them anymore.

[Jorzi]

Well, the 2x polycount thing might not be that bad, even though warzone's current rendering is quite slow and polycount-sensitive.
I am more concerned about the outer shell casting shadows on the inner shell, since afaik the shadow calculation doesn't take backface culling into account.

[Stratadrake]

I first observed the reverse-shell trick in Interplay's Descent, noting how when it rendered your laser fire (e.g. solid yellow center, solid red outline) the center was always visible regardless of the display angle. When I had the chance to load the model file in a fan editor I noticed that the outer shell was inside-out, and because it was a fixed, non-textured color you never saw the actual geometry in-game, only the colors.

Anyway, Warzone's PIE files have a low poly count partly because they were designed to render 200MHz PCs and Sony's Playstation.

As for the way the shadows overlap the object at times that is a nearly unavoidable side-effect. An alternate method is to render the outline with the z-buffer write-protected, then render the model with the z-buffer writable ... but that's not exactly something you can do with WZ's engine.

And since the game is usually played with a distant camera angle anyway, the minor overlaps aren't all that noticeable. Take that cactus of yours there, even at that size it's hard to spot from that angle and with that texturing.

[Jorzi]

One could of course do the shell as a separate object and exclude it from shadow calculation, but unfortunately that would require more than a mod afaik.

[AlphaThor01]

All I can say is this: WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWW!!!!!!! Love it! Noticed that one of the pictures had the Acme thing, like it! Is that a reference to Warner Bros. Looney Tunes?

[Originway]

inspired from borderlands?

[Kamaze]

Actually quite interesting and gives the old visuals a nice and fitting "kick".