Synaesthesia

These two statements are both incorrect. I'll explain why: 1. Cylindrical objects require a decent amount of polygonal detail to look less like rotating hexagons and more like the object they're meant to resemble. 2. Optimize is a decimation modifier. It's not going to clean up that geometry the way a human would. You'll quite likely get very shitty decimation of the model and it'll look as if someone took a weed whacker to it. You're better off manually removing loops. In Max 2013, click on one edge and hold shift, then click on an adjacent edge to select the loop. CTRL+Backspace to remove it and the vertices attached to it. 2014 and above: double click on an edge loop and CTRL+Backspace to remove it and the vertices attached to it. Shnappz: Here's one of my vehicles that shows you how I lay out my topology. You'll notice that my wheels have far fewer edge loops than yours do. You also need to work from reference material to really get a good feel for the geometry you're building.

There's no point to going past 5k to 10k in this engine. You'll end up with a lot of wasted texel density. You'll get one of two options: 1. Everything ends up with similar texel density, making the texture muddier overall 2. Larger pieces end up with more space, while smaller pieces suffer due to a lack of resolution available on the map I always go with #2, but then again, I work with vehicles that get many more textures than anything in Renegade could dream of.

You don't have anything "invested" in Renegade. I've made far more content than most people have (I'd be surprised if anyone actually beat me for the amount of content generated) for the game and I had no issues dropping it for better things. There's no sense in being emotionally attached to game engines. They're just tools. I get what you're trying to say but you're not making a convincing argument here. Now for the flip side: How many people are actually playing what you're making? Who knows about it outside of the ~50 people that are left in this game? What happens to your project if Jonwil decides to quit, or if he gets hurt and can't program anymore, or dies, etc? Or if Saberhawk decides to be a shit and refuses to help anymore? It's a house of cards right now, man. You're better off learning how to do better things on better engines. There's plenty of talent to recruit from. If you have to start over, at least you're learning something new instead of trying to mod an engine whose graphical capabilities rival that of Deus Ex in 2000 - and whose gameplay is always a modded form of Renegade's C&C Mode.

Regardless, Unreal 4 might be worth looking into. I do have a free year of UE4 due to industry connections that I haven't started using yet.

Right, but you're making a distinction between RenX and UDK. Where Jerad was implying that UDK's physics suck, you're making the distinction that RenX's implementation of those physics is what sucks. And you'd be right!

Why ask? You just answered your statement

If Renegade's engine were a viable platform, we'd see these mods being substantially more popular than the small cult following they have. Anything based on Renegade's engine (sans RenX, although it's only moderately more successful than Renegade-based mods) doesn't even blip on the gaming community radar. Nobody develops for old engines. Minecraft isn't a 1-1 comparison because it was designed to look that way, not because they were limited to an antiquated engine that could create nothing but pixel art for their game. I get the idea that you enjoy doing this (and I still do, to an extent) but making UDK sound like it's not superior in basically every aspect is ridiculous. Be honest with yourself: you're working on a small cult-following game to create an even smaller cult-following mod of that game. There's nothing wrong with realizing that. Just don't pretend that UDK is somehow inferior to Renegade because RenX can't get their shit together. There's more bugs in anything we've ever made for this engine than all of RenX's issues combined.

By modding definition, a project is more than just "hay guyz, I have an idea, let's make it" It usually involves having a tangible amount of work to show off instead of posting images of work that Westwood created over 10 years ago

Why don't you go ahead and start by uploading your vehicle, first? I'd like to see this thing up close. Preferably in *.OBJ format.

What Noddingham was: What it was being developed into:

Just bought my 2014 Impala LS With my commuter and all-around vehicle attached to it. Trek 8.6 Dual Sport 10 speed, remote lockout suspension, lightweight aluminum frame, 29" wheels

There was no intention that I'm aware of. It was always a relatively cartoonish art design from the beginning before they scrapped everything and built Renegade as it is now.

More specifically, I made those models for a series of levels that would've been integrated into Renegade seamlessly by using temp presets instead of a mod package or a standalone mod installation. You could've tossed it into any Renegade server and played a very TD-like experience without needing to install a standalone mod to get it going. The testbed was going to be Mike Amerson's (creator of Islands) Noddingham design that I modified extensively. I have some images of it at home. I'll post it when I'm out of the office. The texture style is indeed different, but I feel that's a good thing. Far too many C&C mods have cartoonishly inaccurate textures and I wanted to represent the vehicles and structures more closely to what they'd be if they were actual buildings and vehicles in everyday use. Some of them don't hit that mark completely, like the Hand of Nod - four years later, I can definitely see what to improve with it.

That is a valid point It's entirely possible to bake down diffuse textures in xNormal for lower quality models in Renegade, while you can still develop high quality models for UDK and beyond

UDK Pros: It's free It runs on most hardware if you've packed your projects correctly Enormous community behind it that leads to a vastly larger potential for players to play this Large amount of artists that could be recruited to work on one of these projects Tons of tutorials and advice abound Cons: People refuse to work with it because change is difficult It would need modifying to match up with C&C Mode gameplay There's a learning curve Etc W3D Pros: It's free through some nebulous idea that EA somehow endorses having one of their engines distributed without written consent It already has C&C Mode Cons: Just about everything. It's old, dated, lag-ridden, there's no source code, no method of modifying the engine besides hex editing and scripts, and as Windows continues to progress to new versions there's no guarantee that Renegade will continue to work anymore

Some old stuff I'm planning to send to Reborn, and potentially to someone here who's planning on building a Tiberian Dawn conversion that actually goes somewhere I imagine some of this will need some retexturing to fix up portions of it

Sure, you could. But really, what point is there to it? I create ~20,000 polygon models at the office and I generally only get one 2048x map to work with unless it's a tank, which gets two 2048x maps for the chassis and the turret, plus a 1024x for the wheels and a 256x for the treads. Unless you're doing what we do and breaking up models into sections that have more texel density to work with, 23k polygons won't look all that great even with a 2048x. You'd have to have one amazing UV layout for that to work well, and that requires a lot of understanding of where to have larger UV space and where to minimize the amount of texel density that your UVs take up. You're better off with less detail. You can get more texel density that way and you're not sacrificing much that the player can see.

You basically said "gameplay > graphics because Deus Ex was amazing and looks like shit" What you failed to mention was that Deus Ex looked amazing for its time, because it was a top of the line game when it came out in 2000. Deus Ex had great graphics and gameplay for its time, and the gameplay still holds up. The graphics, not so much. I addressed what you wrote - there was no tangent.

Why are you *still* "gauging the response of the community" after five years? I don't even know how to respond to you anymore. Nothing gets through.

I stand corrected However, my point remains the same: Stop posting art here and post it over there so you can have your artists learn from professionals. Most of the people here aren't going to tell you what you need to know. They'll tell you "this is the best thing I've ever seen" and that's pretty much it. I didn't grow much as an artist inside of C&C's community. I grew a lot more when I went to college and became a professional in my field. I've learned so much more from other artists. If you're serious about your work, you will get your team to do what I'm saying. Otherwise you're going to produce mediocre work. Did you notice how unreceptive PC was to the images you posted? Imagine that on launch day, if you ever get there. Imagine that multiplied by many hundreds of people.

Pretty much anyone who reads that thread will come to the same conclusion that the rest of us did over the course of five years: You don't have the manpower or skills required to get this done. I wrote a bunch of helpful information for you and took quite a bit of time out of my days to try and get you to understand what steps to take and you basically refused every time. Remember when I told you to get your team's work posted on Polycount so that people with experience could critique it and help you improve? That's one of many things that never happened.

"huge audience that are more interested in gameplay than graphics" I keep hearing this oversimplification of video game development and I rarely if ever see any proof provided. It's been a constant thread in gaming society for many years. "Gameplay > graphics" It's not a zero-sum game. You can have great graphics and great gameplay. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a perfect example of this. When you can have both gameplay and graphics, why settle for less? This is possible even in modding communities like this one. You find talent and groom it to create competitive art that can stand up against other mods and other games. There's no excuse for not having gameplay and graphics anymore.

Get used to waiting. This has been "in development" since 2010 and has shown very few signs of progressing since then. There's a thread on the Renegade forums where all of us basically gave up trying to help this guy after many months of trying to reason with him.

lol, "polygons don't matter" - that's amusing There's literally no point to having a very detailed tank above ~5,000 polygons in this engine. It doesn't have the capabilities of showing that detail properly. There's no support for normal maps, spec maps, etc. The simpler you can get it, the better it will generally be. 5k is perfect for almost every tank you could want to make.

I'm still having issues seeing images across several web browsers. /Apparently disabling ABP helps for some reason