Is it me or does Serious Sam 2 still have the best texture "engine" - compared w U2

[CaineTanathos]

Well in SSam 2 you can run up a wall and the texture is still extremely good from that close.

In Unreal2 does it only have on a few places and not even that good.

And I thought unreal 2 would have bumpmapping (don't know which type) but it seems that only the water has bumpmapping.

[GNEP]

Doesn't Croteam use something like Perlin noise to generate random "detail" when really close to e.g. grass or a wall? Which is why they look more "detailed" up close - really it's just semi-random perturbatutions though.

But I agree they look better up close imho.

Gnep

[CaineTanathos]

but it adds alot of detail for textures like stone.

So why doesn't anyone else use this method ?

its almost like a bumpmapping effect (as in adding detail)

[crow8k3a]

i have ss1 and 2, excellent engines, i wish they woud use that engine for more games

[Reckless]

Croteam have a very good rendering engine but it does seem to bring out the worst in video card drivers. The game engine itself is OK but not nearly as friendly as Unreal which will impact development times, etc. Worst bit of the package is their networking engine which still seems to be pretty bad when compared to all other engines available - I think they're on their '3rd' major update (SS1->2SE->BIG rewrite->1.50 patch).

I've given up hope that Croteam actually do anything about this

[GNEP]

Yeah the network code pretty much made LAN play with a mate a game of "who crashes first"...

So we played UT instead.

[crow8k3a]

thats odd, i've played multiplayer on lan and over the innternet and it played great.

[GNEP]

I think it actually had more to do with his machine - Win98/500MHz Pentium whatever/Voodoo 3 (which the game had a few "issues" with on release, since mainly fixed in patches.

But singleplayer I find it an absolute blast. And co-op multiplayer (when it worked) was the reason we kept on trying to get it to work...

[Reckless]

Not the machines - I think it all depends on what version of SS you run. All our machines are AMD 1Ghz++, Win2K, GF2++ etc.

We got into SS SE and was on the beta testers for the V1.0x patches) - V1.07 was pretty damn good. A recent LAN session we tried the public beta V1.50 and it was terrible. Lasted 15 minutes before we gave it up and went to play UT!

[leech]

My brother and I had a blast playing both of them Co-op. Didn't have any problems, though on the first one it would always crash when I had my G400. Now if Matrox will ever come out with the 3D drivers for linux, then I'll play SS again, since they ported the first one over, and are working on the second :-)

Leech