Following FictiousWills successes, and the posotive feedback from the community, we've decided to do another series of development logs. This time however, we're going to go right the way through, as we do it, the creation of one map. The process is decisivly longer than modeling, and all aspects of visual mod design will be included at some point, including texturing, playtesting etc.
The aim of this project is to:
- Create a new and visually attractive environment for the player to experience
- Experiment with a different type of map design
- Use as many custom textures and models as possible to bring the map up to v2 standard
We've only been planning for a few days, but we've come up with the following design specifications for this project:
- The map will have a grassy, WW2 style battlefield with plenty of natural cover
- A centeral bunker/pillbox will be reachable and possibly holdable using a system of teleporters to create a strategic objective and in effort to reduce stalemates.
- The build area should be familiar to SF players, with flat surfaces for building and raised areas to build up to.
The team members involved in this are of course, myself, o_nobody_o who will be providing the concept art work, Stieffers and/or Fic for modeling and KG for any additional textures. Of course, that all depends on how busy they are with other things.
The first concept sketch, a basic overview, has been completed by o_nobody_o. It shows the general idea for the layout and what we should be aiming for:
Of course, this early into production, the designs are very flexible, and nothing is concrete. I amended the map to make it more level-designer friendly, and adding unit measurements to areas to give a better idea of size.
Firstly, I rotated the entire map 45 degrees to give a right angled L shape. Hammer, generally speaking, hates diagonals, and trying to make something entirely at 45 degrees will end up with points lying off the grid and other nasty things.
The blue dotted line represents where my displacements (terrain) will be created - The bumpyness of the cliffs will be 'painted' in. It is also a rough guide of where the skybox will be placed - It is important that the sky goes around the map instead of just boxing the whole thing in for optimisation reasons.
The thick black line is the point of symmetry. This is a basic hint of where things will match up - but this map, trying to be as natural as possible, will have some minor differences between both sides.
The thick green line is showing that neither of the two bases can directly see each other. This is one of the major points of this map. It discourages people from camping in their forts, and is also very useful optimisation wise, allowing the map to be much higher detailed.
The red boxed area is an area I am concerned about. Note the diagonal trenches. This shouldn't be too hard to work around, but it's going to make for some interesting displacement work.
Finally, I added in the size guides. They're just estimates for the moment - Hammers grid works in powers of 2 and it makes things a lot cleaner if you stick to it. One unit = One inch, to give you a size reference. This maps going to be big!
Next in development comes the orange map. I'll explain more next post, once I get rolling.
Steps to producing an in-game map.
Hybrid Mode
