Blogs - Te5seract

I've had time to play and enjoy SOMA and also had time to study HPL3.

HPL3 is vastly more demanding on power and time than HPL2. Texturing requires more demanding formats ( 2048x2048 standard UV resolutions .dds DXT1 to DXT5 for diffuse and specular materials depending on what you think looks best and 3dc .dds normals.) If you want things to look good in the engine you really have to knuckle down and work hard, otherwise you will get a half-arsed result for half-arsed work. Which means baking AO and blending it in with the diffuse texture - I'd bake normals but it's not really necessary for my low-poly modles.

The coding seems to be a hell of a lot more flexible and resembles more of C++ with some Angel script mixed in for simplicity. I believe I have made sense of the code which is very promising and quite relieving too.

I've spent the past week or so working on something - it's not Hollow I regret to say. It is something I had in mind for far longer than Hollow and now that I have the experience behind me I think I will be able to take on its artistic demands. The premise to what I have in mind is going to be very much like hollow so this could perhaps be a more advanced version of Hollow.

It has a long way to go and no specific date to completion - if ever there will be one - it does have a name but I'll keep it a secret until I think it's fitting enough and I have a screenshot. Bare in mind that this is only the beginnings of a room and there is so much more to come of it.

As I'm putting a lot of time and effort into this, updates here should become a bit more consistent.

Here are some development screenies too.

This window asset consists of 3 modular assets: a frame, the window frame, and the window itself.

This is the window and window frame alone.

The UV for the window frame - hand painted textures with some blending methods from some textures I get from CGTextures.

That is all for now, I'm glad I finally got around to writing this, I don't know how many people come and look at this page but hopefully there are some people that are interested in what I'm making.

There are a couple of things going on lately firstly I'd like to share a short video I made showing off the atmosphere of Hollow. It's a short video, it's not very interesting but it's something. As SOMA nears I feel like it'd be good to keep this page up-to-date.

I'm also coding up a little website/portfolio where I might add some Hollow stuff, the page is still being developed slowly but it's something to keep an eye on.

>>Tesseract<<

Last but not least, I have a friend of mine helping out with some of the writing for Hollow, her writing skills are exceedingly impressive, she is able to paint such a beautifully vivid image with her writing so she'll be an excellent addition to my little mod.

Thanks for the two or three of you who are interested in my mod, I'll try to keep up-to-date with news, once SOMA is released and I've played it I'll be cracking down.

It has been some time since I've been active on here and for the one or two of you who expressed interest in my mod, Hollow, I felt it necessary to post a little update.

The mod is indeed very much alive and well, though it's undergoing a redesign (asset wise) as it's going to be used in Frictional Games' new HPL3 engine.

Most if not all of the assets will be custom made along with all of the textures being hand-painted.

As progress is made I intend to make small updates disclosing a few neat features along the way. I will be keeping all progress updates on this profile until I feel that it has come along far enough and to be completely sure of its release I will make a mod page for it.

Before progress came to a halt with the HPL2 engine I shared a few animated images to the Frictional Games forum:

Down a corridor

Demonstration of "volumetric lighting"

An eerie encounter

So far Hollow has been getting some new hand-painted textures made by me as this is still a solo project.

Here are a couple of textures:

Of course, these textures might not be final and will appear different in the engine, there are a few more completed and still many to be done.

When there are substantial things to show off I shall make another post.