And More Screenshots!

First off, in the AI post I mentioned the ridiculous range the girls had engaged a White Leg at in the last run through Honest Hearts; but like the scatterbrain I am, I forgot to post the screens to go with it. I rectify that now:






If you look closely you can just barely see the corpse in the center of the first shot. Obviously, I couldn't pace it off; and I've never found a rangefinder in NV that actually works... but that's got to be some kind of record. Definitely the longest shot I've ever seen an NPC take.




And as soon as the fight was over, Mystery-chan and Natasha returned to watching Two-Dogs-Fucking or whatever his name is like a hawk. They really didn't like that guy.

You can also see Maeva watching me out of the corner of her eye; just like she does in Skyrim.


Next up, I also mentioned recently messing with my visual settings in an attempt to replicate the improvement I got in Skyrim.










Seems to be a bit of an improvement; but it's not a clearly noticeable thing, either. Performance is down a bit; but not much. The only place I've had a real problem with slowdowns was in Vault 11; when the robots mob you in the sacrificial chamber. But, there's so much VFX flying around then that it caused my FPS to tank even before most times.


Also:



The Powder Gangers never knew what hit 'em.


Lighting in FNV continues to be the biggest hurdle to nice screenshots. It's just... so... bad. Even with Fellout installed, the lighting is just shit. It's either washed out like a bad indie flick, or oversaturated orange. I mean; I suppose technically it's better than the green tint that FO3 has, but still.

One of the things I like about my estate is that I set it up with custom lighting -- when you kick the overheads on, the light is white and clean and with only a couple exceptions produces good lighting for screenshots without lots of glare.


Lastly, I wanted to show off screenshots of the new and improved NosCo 1911-A1; with its spiffy new normals that showed off the slide engraving and all... but it isn't cooperating.

Stupid thing looks like it's been drug two hundred miles behind a jeep. So... I'm having to rework the base texture and then hopefully generate a less shitty normalmap from that. Trouble is, as I have said before I am absolutely not a digital artist; so I'm having to resort to evening the texture's many scratches out with a combination of partial-transparency darkening and the blur tool. It's about half done, and barring any catastrophic fuckups will be ready to show off in another day or two. Would be sooner... but I've got one of those sinus-induced eyestrain headaches tonight that make it hard to focus on what I'm looking at; which is not conducive to good texturing. Nor to typing without having to constantly correct mistakes, as it turns out.

Anyway, the NosCo SBH is being more agreeable, so I thought I'd show it off:










As you can see, I still need to do some smoothing on the... well, smooth parts -- the sides of the hammer, stocks, trigger and trigger guard, and the grip frame above the trigger... but man, do those engravings look nice. One unexpected result was that because of how the normalmaps generated, the engravings came out as relief engravings, rather than standard. I have to confess a bit of a weakness for relief engraving; since it not only looks nice, but requires more technical skill to lay out properly and pull off than traditional engraving.

I also have to say I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to pick up creating normals. I had always assumed it would be a lot more involved than it is. I still think texturing in general would be easier with a tablet, though -- I never have been able to draw with a mouse.