Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
BF42 limits one envmap to each map (that's what makes the ball currently shine). I could adjust the envmap. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do with it yet.
I plan on adding some flashing sprites to it to add a glimmer effect to it. I'll see if I can make it look good without using the envmap.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Ok, I found out how to enable a reflection to be rendered to lightmap files. (which will also be animated)
Thus I can make the disco ball reflect the scene around it and bake that to a texture. The reflection will animate as well so it's almost as good as true reflection. Though players and vehicles won't show up since it's pre-baked. But for BF1942 this is a big step up from the crappy envmap system anyways.
To achieve shine, I will use a slightly larger version of the ball that will have specular and 50% or less alpha to add the shine to the ball + some glimmer effect sprites.
Only the half alpha larger version will rotate, thus providing the illusion that it's moving. This should be an effective replacement to the envmap system for this object.
I will post a video of the end result as soon as max renders it out.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Prepare for Epic:
(enable HD to see the effect better) EDIT: Now with glimmer shine effects. Video updated.
Probably the most realistic disco ball ever made for BF1942.
Came out much better then I expected.
It works by using two meshes. The reflection is a projection map generated in 3DS Max. This projection map basically projects a reflection of the room onto the ball which gets output to the lightmap file(s). I animated those like I did with the room's lightmap to increase realism. The mesh with the reflection remains stationary (since if it rotated it would brake the realism of the fake reflection). The rotation is achieved with a second slightly larger mesh. With that mesh I took a screenshot of the uvmap, then make the UVs appear black and filled in the squares with partial alpha colors (red, green, blue). It's got partial alpha on the colors while the grid lines are 100% opaque. I then saved that as the texture. This is the part that rotates.
I turned on specular and lighting for the outer mesh and added it to the disco_facet object (which replaced the original disco ball geometry on that mesh). The stationary mesh is it's own object.