T.U.C.Q. Progess Thread

[Boingo the Clown]

Since Everybody seems to have liked the progress reports I was giving while I was converting over to GZDooM, I am starting this thread specifically for giving new progress reports.

Ironically, there may not be a whole lot of progress to report during the run up until Christmas due to the increased amount of work I am getting right now, including manning Christmas kettles for the Salvation Army, and the fact I need to finish my Christmas shopping (natuarally).

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report:  December 3, 2012

Very little to report today, except for a repaint of the chef in the diner.  I didn't want to steal Chukker's repainted version from CQ3, so I did my own repaint.



I will admit he looks kind of grumpy now, but it is an improvement.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report:  January 25, 2013

I have been working on E2M1 again. I raised the room with the red key in it up 16 units, so it is now no longer possible to jump up and get the key. The elevator no longer works from the secret door side, making it impossible the grab the red key early from that direction too.

{{EDIT: I also added all the table supports as promised.}}

I am trying to fix up the exterior of the diner to look a little more like a 1920s-1950s style diner. I built out an overhanging section at the top with the corrugated metal as a temporary texture (I will change it as soon as I can.)and added chrome trim at the corners. I made up a robins egg blue wall texture with black and white chackerd tile at the bottom, largely because robins egg blue was popular in the 1950s. The colour is not entirely satisfying to me.

Here is what I have so far.



Any suggestions as to how I can make it look better?

[xbolt]

I think red might look better. (Red was also popular back then, right?)

[Boingo the Clown]

Yeah. I was thinking about switching to red too—probably a dark red.

[MajorSlime]

Hmm... IDK about red, but perhaps try some neon accents? Also, I think the window needs some sort of trim; it looks too much like someone cut a whole in the wall and stuck a piece of glass in.

[Atariangamer]

I'm cool with red because it just matches alot of the established colors in Chex Quest.

But on that neon vibe, this was from the 90s. Neon might not be too far off...

[Boingo the Clown]

 I do prefer the idea of a '50s retro look for the diner, but neon is still a heavy part of the retro look.

Actually, last night I tried something very simple, but it made a huge difference to the look of the diner exterior.  All I did was round off the corners, and suddenly the diner looked a whole lot better.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: January 27, 2013

I have been working a little bit on E2M4. The first thing I did was fix that railing up a bit so the warning striped posts no longer show throught the railing itself.  Then I fixed up the sky bridge by giving it some better textures than just that ugly default grey.

Remember that 3D police barrier made out of lines in DeiM?

I am trying to get it to work in T.U.C.Q. and I am transfering it in to E2M4. I have not had much luck with building 3D models, so I am falling back on my tried and true method of faking 3D models using 3D sectors and lines. So far the results seem fairly good.



Mind you this is not a finished version.  It only looks good from this angle. The legs of the barrier are just lines and from a more direct view they look like the cardboard cutouts they actually are. The main bar of the barrier is a 3D sector, and I am probably going to have to fill the legs with 3D sectors to make the legs look solid.  The reason the insides of the legs appear to be glowing is I set the brightness levels high to make it harder for the perspective to reveal the trick.

In any case, I am working on it. There will definitely be police barriers in the next release.

I noticed the two Egyptian statues in the museum were not solid. I fixed them.

There doesn't seem to be enough exhibits in the museum. I need to think of more of them.

[Replica]

Perhaps 3D Sloped floors would look better on the legs of those barriers? They're rather frustrating to get working correctly, but they look really good when you finally get them right.

[MajorSlime]

Hmm, the only problem with the sloped floors is incompatibility with software 3D floors. Don't suppose its too big a problem if were going full GZDoom here, though. They ARE really annoying to set up, however (speaking from agonizing hours of experience).

[Boingo the Clown]

Yes.  My main problem is that my experience is with Legacy and vanilla DooM, and all of the levels are taken from Legacy. That means there is an incompatability issue, and I currently don't have the proper experience to switch it all over.

BTW: I have figured out why it is so dark back in the storage room on E2M3.  It appears that the flemoids slimed the fuse box and shorted out much of the power back there, so I am going to have to make a fuse box with a 3D sector and make the appropriate texture to go on it.

[Boingo the Clown]

Progress Report: January 30, 2013

I have done a lot of things over the last few day, but a lot of it is subtle.

The main thing I did was to finally get around to detailing most of the walls in the teleporter rooms. I had previously detailed just three teleporter rooms with sector based glowing walls instead of the animations that were there before.  As of last night, all but one of the teleporter rooms have glowing walls, and the one that is left is only because of the floor and ceiling height difference. I will get back to that one later.



Ooh! Slimey!

This one amuses me me.



Why?

Because the width of the room was odd and the far wall could not be done with the existing texture, because it just didn't match up.  I decided the only thing I could do was to divide up the wall and try to  fudge it. As I started doing so I came across an odd teleporter texture in the textures section. It turns out I actually made a new teleporter texture specifically for that wall years ago and completely forgot about it.

Oh well.

I also did some work on the museum.  The first one was a bit of a pain, and ends up being subtle again. Legacy's bug that allowed some walls and ceiling behind void space with sky texture in front had previously allowed the main facade of the museum to be entirely visible from the courtyards, but without that bug GZDooM blocks part of the facade out with sky whenever the ceilings of the entryway (and their void space) were in the way.  The solution was simple. I made all of the entryway walls lowers, raised the ceilings slightly and put sky on them, and used 3D sectors as new ceilings. So now the museum facade is fully visible everywhere.

And do you think anyone will notice?

Nooooooooooooooo!

I also added  more wall lights, fixed up the railings around the dinosaurs so they don't look so chaotic, and added some sinage to the dinosaurs.





I also did some extra detailing on some of the buildings on E2M4 and swapped the switch at the end of the level with a doorway with stairs leading down in to the sewers.

[MajorSlime]

SO MUCH BEAUTY


In all serious Boingo, your work on this is simply amazing...

[xbolt]

Loving the signs.