brethren's map thread

[brethren]

OK, my turn at a thread with details on my mission. As I stated in the "introductions" thread, I'm changing my mission from a mansion to a "lost city" style map. It's up to Ungoliant how he wants to fit this into the overall plot, but typically when you have a lost city area, it's somewhat remote and away from The City (in our case, Bridgeport). And typically, the protagonist travels there to obtain some type of rare item or information that can only be found at that location.

 

For my level, I'm picturing this:

 

5 outdoor "areas" - by area, I mean basically a glorified room where the sky is visible.

10 inside rooms, located one level below the outside areas, accessible by stairs or a ramp.

 

For AI, I'm envisioning either skeletons, revenants, werebeasts, and/or spiders. I'd like to stay away from zombies, that doesn't seem to fit. Any humans are probably out, but there might be a stray thief or two who is doing some treasure hunting.

 

Also picturing a couple of puzzles, and maybe some old traps left behind by the previous inhabitants of the lost city. And as much as it's possible with a smallerish level, I'd like some focus to be on exploration. One or two small secret areas would be cool.

 

I kind of see this area only accessible via an underground passage - it's possibly our protagonist gets a map or key or artifact from another mission that allows himself access.

 

I don't think there's much in the way of "lost city" assets in TDM, so I'll have to get creative. Lots of torches and statues and remains/bones/deadfall is the way, I think.

 

More later...

[ungoliant]

Don't forget necromancers. A lost city is a perfect place for that. Granted, we don't have the actual AI models, but throw up a couple of deerskulls-on-a-stik, and a few pentagrams, and bloody smears, and the point gets across very well.

[brethren]

Hmm, not sold on necros for this particular mission, especially since the closest model is a mage, and we'll probably be using that elsewhere in the campaign.

 

Now what I really wish we had was some nice fire elementals...

[ungoliant]

fire elementals have been allegedly WIP for like, the past few years. i'd like to see them too.

[brethren]

One random thought that kind of passed me by - it might be cool to take a finished lost city type mission and "sink it." In other words, make it an Atlantis type scenario. Could be cool, and doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do.

[fllood]

One random thought that kind of passed me by - it might be cool to take a finished lost city type mission and "sink it." In other words, make it an Atlantis type scenario. Could be cool, and doesn't seem like it would be that hard to do.

idea sounds cool to me.

 

Bridgeport is at the water line and has a whole part of the town partly under water. Indeed the fllooded section is the part of town I was about to start my first map of what I hoped could evolve in a series before the campaign did pop up.

 

An totally sunken city Atlantis type like you said is also very cool, probably with long diving and good need of breath portions... try it!

 

not there yet... but slowly I see why you did drop the mansion setting for a first map.

[jaxa]

Idea kind of reminds me of this: http://darkfate.ru/?thumbs=files/fan-missions/Thief2/1contests/Water_Contest/Temple_of_the_Tides/screenshots

[brethren]

Just an update on my mission - was able to put in a little work in over the weekend, things seem to be progressing nicely. The general flow of the mission will be kind of alternating between outside areas on the surface and inside areas that are down a level or two, and I will have one submerged, underwater area as well. I probably have half of my mission laid out in a very rough manner (no detail at all, just walls/ceilings/floors), and am kind of envisioning how the rest will be filled in. I'm planning on having a maze area the player will need to navigate, as well as a climbing/rope arrow/jumping area (dare I say somewhat platformish?).

[fllood]

Just an update on my mission - was able to put in a little work in over the weekend, things seem to be progressing nicely. The general flow of the mission will be kind of alternating between outside areas on the surface and inside areas that are down a level or two, and I will have one submerged, underwater area as well. I probably have half of my mission laid out in a very rough manner (no detail at all, just walls/ceilings/floors), and am kind of envisioning how the rest will be filled in. I'm planning on having a maze area the player will need to navigate, as well as a climbing/rope arrow/jumping area (dare I say somewhat platformish?).

Good to hear Brethren! Thanks for the update.

 

While you're still on rough geometry - if not done anyway - remember that mitering corners of two bush walls touching can bring some bit of performance. With that little effort you can reduce the displayed faces per corner from three to two faces and thus reducing tris. (Presuming you want to keep basic and don't consider carried away with beveling all the corner edges ) It might be not very much for a small map, but it's good getting into the habit thinking about that little performance savers right from the start while learning the basics of DR ...

 

Edit: see here for how to do.

Edited June 27, 2011 by fllood

[brethren]

remember that mitering corners of two bush walls touching can bring some bit of performance. With that little effort you can reduce the displayed faces per corner from three to two faces and thus reducing tris.

 

Not sure exactly what it is you're saying here. Maybe a quick explanation over in the mapping basics thread might be in order? Might help others as well.

[brethren]

More work last night. Working on a lava area, which looks to be cool. I'm actually taking some architectural inspiration from my recent runthrough of Quake1. Man, for a 15 year old game released right near the beginning of the 3D era, there's some great level design in there. Some great memories there too.

[fllood]

Quake1. Man, for a 15 year old game released right near the beginning of the 3D era, there's some great level design in there.

That's much true! ... Dev's could concentrate on design and gameplay in those pre-Millenium games and not having to spend most of their time instead to impress the audiance with Uber Graphics like in most game since.

[brethren]

(looks around forum) Anyone out there? Seems after some initial enthusiasm, there hasn't been a lot of posting here (nothing at all in the past week!). Hopefully everyone is still on board. Feel free to throw out an arbitrary comment or post if you're still around and just lurking.

 

Anyway, hard to put a percentage on my level, but I'd say it's about 10-15% at this point. I've got about 400 brushes down, and most of the basic layout is done, but in need of huge heaping amounts of detail and refinement. Haven't added any AI, objects, objectives, readables, or lights yet, so still a long long ways to go. I do have a good grip on how the level will play out though, and that's helping to keep me focused.

 

Looking forward to this weekend - the wife will be out of town so I can just sit back and build for hours on end with no restraints!

[fllood]

Looking forward to this weekend - the wife will be out of town so I can just sit back and build for hours on end with no restraints!

Same here...

[ungoliant]

still here. still lurking every day. i know what i want to do with my map for the next 10 hours of work, its just a matter of getting up the intestinal fortitude for the brute force plugging and chugging. story ideas still swimming in my head, trying not to put ridiculous burdens on mappers with my love for 'epic' stories. hopefully everyone involved is still on board. might do a profile check for last login time on team members.

[fllood]

How had the brushing weekend with the wife out of town been Brethren?

[brethren]

:blush:

 

Yeah, well, my latest Minecraft obsession kinda got in the way of any DR work, so I'll have to try to get back to it this week.

[brethren]

My map has gotten to the ugly and unwieldy point where I'm considering just starting over again. I really need to focus on nothing more than than just a small map, and think I have an idea. This would be a more of a temple map, still with some "Lost city" feel, but much more contained and restricted than my last disaster which started to just shoot off into too many areas/branches/sections and got out of control.

 

Updates later if I can get this new idea started up this weekend...

[fllood]

My advice Brethren is to sketch hand-drawn layout plans along with basic design ideas before even doing a first brush room. That way you are able to brainstrom through some various ideas and quickly feel what might work (and what not) without your setting get out of control only after many hours into mapping. Did so about three weeks and a few discarded ideas, sketches and settings before even firing up DR. I think it's because of that that geometry setting and ideas work much like sketched still in my map as a result.

[fllood]

any feeback about your progress Brethren?