[SUBMISSION] Doomed Buildings actors

Information:
Name: Doomed Buildings
Connection: Cloud Spawner (modified)
Palette: PNG Truecolor
Summon: Building_1 through Building_18, Rubble_1 through Rubble_4 and Building_1_Demod though Building_18_Demod
Ambient Sound: No
De-/Activatable: Yes
Destroyable: Yes
Special Effects: Cloud Spawner(modified) and Dust Cloud
Brightmaps: None
Actor modification: No
ACS: No

Credits:
Code: kfpopeye
GLDefs:
Sounds:
Sprites: CGTrader.com and Free3D.com
Sprite Edit: kfpopeye
Idea Base: Every city wad I ever played.

Description:
18 3D modeled buildings textured with Doom2 graphics (not included) so to fit in with the game. The buildings are animated to collapse to a demolished state. Also includes 4 piles of rubbish for garnish. All models are low poly, can be easily re-textured by editing the MODELDEF  lump and spawn additional hit boxes for non-regular shapes. Refer to DOCUMENT lump for instructions.

Sprite:

Download Link:
https://mega.nz/file/gBg2WZCD#NyhBLx8pFAL6p9DVvlzZ0v2DZiiAgecskUJVvis49R0

They look really cool, but one thing that puts me off is the 3D smoke, I wonder if it would look better with smoke sprites instead.

Gothic wrote:

They look really cool, but one thing that puts me off is the 3D smoke, I wonder if it would look better with smoke sprites instead.

 

I thought of that but sprites are 2D and the model is 3D. The sprites would get clipped alot especially with multiplayer.

Why does the base building class have a function that seems to just spawn in a rocket, then modify it to just be an explosion ? Wouldn't it be better to just make an explosion actor and directly spawn that, no modification required ?

Also those rubble textures inside /textures/rubble/ take way too much space, they are 3 MB in size in total, which is about half of the file size of the whole PK3 archive, and it's only 4 textures.

You can use SLADE's PNG compression to cut their size by 400 KB with no quality loss*, you can do that by selecting a PNG or more, pressing right click, then going to Graphic>Optimize PNG and clicking on it. But to do that you need to link the 3 PNG compression tools SLADE supports (PNGout, PNGCrush, DeflOpt). You can do that by downloading them off the internet, then going to Edit>Preferences>Graphics>PNG to link them.

But besides optimizing them, what would help the most with decreasing their file size would be to decrease their resolution, the rubble models wouldn't look any worse if you just halved their texture resolution, not to mention that by decreasing their resolution they would just fit more in Doom, since the textures are 734x1042, when the building textures themselves are Doom 2's, and are therefore only about 64x128, that almost makes the rubble resolution like 6x larger. Removing the large amount of empty space at the bottom of the textures would also help a lot, because in PNGs even empty space takes a lot of disk space. Another optimization that could be done with little to no quality loss is making the PNGs 8-bit. In fact, here are the results of me applying all these optimizations mentioned in this paragraph to rubble3.png (The largest texture, even after optimization.):

File size outside of PK3/ZIP archive, post optimization: 940 KB

File size after cutting all of the empty bottom space: 920 KB

File size after resolution was cut down 50% using the Best Quality option in paint.net (Super Sampling): 260 KB (!!!)

File size after re-exporting the PNG to 8-Bit color: 84 KB (!!!)



If you compare it to the original texture, the only real difference is that this one is a bit more blurry, but that's only because I downscaled it with Best Quality/Super Sampling, you could downscale it with Nearest Neighbor scaling, get the same file size decrease, and still have it look crisp (Which is better IMO.).

*I know because I compressed them to see how much smaller they can get, or if you had already compressed them.

Do I need to make these changes to get accepted?

No but it would be good to optimize the graphics like I recommended since they currently take the most space out of anything else for no real reason. The thing about spawning a rocket that is instantly killed isn't as bad though, but spawning a custom explosion actor instead would make more sense.

I suggest including a test map to show them off, it usually isn't necessary with regular props, but these are too big for any of the vanilla Doom 2 maps.

OK, I reduced the size of the PNG's by 50% and optimized them in Slade. I left the blank parts in as removing this would mess up the UV mapping on the models.

The code you mention is taken from the Icon of Sin death state. It worked fine so I left it.

The updated ZIP file is here:
https://mega.nz/file/9NxyFbTD#ElrIt0o96xy_UrT0ZgZPgpXgfXiAHTQXl9qukBIrraw

I don't have a test map but I did make a Youtube video of the buildings:
https://youtu.be/GUd3iPGolg4

I also uploaded the Blender file to a cloud here:
https://mega.nz/folder/gYIzwKgZ#rgW1TqhASFG4hvkeAOYXBA

Making a test map couldnt be that difficult given that you in one in the video