Over the last few months we've been silent, some may say we've been lazy, while others will say we've stopped working on Solitude. Oh how wrong can people get. We've been making textures, models, maps, and adding a hell of a lot to Solitude's engine.
Today, lets talk about one of the new engine features, Half-life BSP support. This is a massive step up on engine-wise, this allows our artists to have all the creative freedom they need to make the textures, as they don't need to use the same 256 colours for every texture in the game. As we would of had to if we didn't have HLbsp support.
Here's a comparasion.
Now some people might say they can't see a big difference, some may say they don't see a difference at all. After all, I picked the textures that looked best compared to all the other one's after they were forced to the Quake pallet. Have alook at it zoomed in 300%.
That's not all, now we can use colours that we perviously couldn't use. One of the main textures we could never get to look right at all was grass. Look at the Quake pallet :
That's all the colours we had before, one very important colour is missing. A range of greens!
Make a nice grass texture, your really happy with it, now it's time to convert it.
What the hell!? Oh yes, Quake pallet doesn't like green.
Solitudes current engine, that, as I've mentioned allows 256 colours per texture allows that random mash-up of pixels, turn into :
Here are a few screenshots showing the HLBSP support in action.
So that's hlbsp support wrapped up. It looks better, it gives us alot more freedom. A strange feature is that it seems to be rendering maps faster and giving us a faster framerate. Maps that usually ran at 40fps now run at 60-80!
If you have any questions about Solitude or want to talk to any of the developers join us on IRC: irc.EnterTheGame.com, #Solitude channel.
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See ya!
