Looking for textures and general advice for a mission based on A Tale of Two Cities

[gerostock]

This will be my first mission. Any help would be great. I have a wee bit of experience with Valve Hammer, and I've familiarized myself with the Dark Radiant editor.

 

The protagonist is a member of what will essentially be the Jaques revolutionary deathsquad from the novel, tasked with identifying, robbing and murdering a spy who has been placed in a village to inform on malcontents and agitate for the monarchy. There will be a dozen suspects with houses in the village and you have to rob them and search for clues as to whether or not they are the spy. It will be a bit subtle and adventure-gamey; there will be no diary under the spy's bed saying "ha ha, I am spying for Louis XVI and nobody will ever find me out". Maybe a telling inscription on a goblet or just a little too much loot for a peasant - that sort of thing. Kill the wrong guy - game over. The second part of the game is the robbing and assassination of Monsieur the Marquis. For some contrived reason the Marquis has to die in the afternoon of the following day, so you can't just stab him.

 

The first level will take place in a picturesque French village, the second in a gigantic mansion which I dreamt about a few months ago: very dark, very tall, very narrow and very long. I haven't been able to find any appropriate textures yet. Here's the sort of thing I'm after:

 

 

Nineteenth century French architecture appears to be Italian architecture with more leaves, so either would do.

[nbohr1more]

Yes, some of those repeated cobble-stone patterns might be similar to some

TDM assets with a few changes to scaling but... there's a lot of patterns in

these scenes that might call for new textures...

[Melan]

Welcome, gerostock! I hope your missions see release; they sound interesting. First, I would recommend that you play In Rememberance of Him from the recent contest, since it has a slightly similar environment to what you seem to have in mind. Then, study which textures RPGista used, as well as others in the texture hierarchies. Sometimes you find the best ones tucked away in odd locations, like tiling_1d subfolders or something like that... That said, a lot of what is in those shots already have close equivalents, such as...

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/fieldstone_mixedcolors and fieldstone_wall_shale (groutless brick walls)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_small_blueyellow_crumble (I specifically made this for that "old French town" look )

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_worn_blocks_001_wet and old_worn_blocks_003(irregular stone wall)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_worn_semiplastered (you will love this, although you will need to break it up a bit with horizontal beams and/or trims)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/rough_blocks_limestone

Also look at the textures/darkmod/stone/cobblestones/tiling_1d/ textures (they only tile in the X-direction but are good for what you are looking for) and even the textures/darkmod/plaster/ branch of the texture tree.

[Glyph Seeker]

Wow that sounds really fab! Ambitious but "do-able". =)

[gerostock]

Welcome, gerostock! I hope your missions see release; they sound interesting. First, I would recommend that you play In Rememberance of Him from the recent contest, since it has a slightly similar environment to what you seem to have in mind. Then, study which textures RPGista used, as well as others in the texture hierarchies. Sometimes you find the best ones tucked away in odd locations, like tiling_1d subfolders or something like that... That said, a lot of what is in those shots already have close equivalents, such as...

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/fieldstone_mixedcolors and fieldstone_wall_shale (groutless brick walls)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_small_blueyellow_crumble (I specifically made this for that "old French town" look )

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_worn_blocks_001_wet and old_worn_blocks_003(irregular stone wall)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/old_worn_semiplastered (you will love this, although you will need to break it up a bit with horizontal beams and/or trims)

textures/darkmod/stone/brick/rough_blocks_limestone

Also look at the textures/darkmod/stone/cobblestones/tiling_1d/ textures (they only tile in the X-direction but are good for what you are looking for) and even the textures/darkmod/plaster/ branch of the texture tree.

 

The semi-plastered is good, but most of the other stuff won't work. Rural French architecture either involves grey to white stones as thick as your arm or small mutlicoloured stones barely visible under a sea of cream concrete. The Dark Mod textures are a bit too, uh, dark.

[Melan]

Hm, that may mean you will have to create your own textures. That is not as hard as it may sound, since most of it involves routine image / text editing, and there are multiple tutorials on the wiki. Your best bet for image sources is CGTextures, especially the Brick/Brick Medieval and Plaster families. Many of these textures are already tiled, you just have to resize them to the correct dimensions.

[demagogue]

Ha, I know those screenshots from my own Google Image searches.

I was making a top-down quasi-RPG/RTS game in Unity based on the French Revolution, where you can take sides. Everything is boiled down just to the Paris streets -- actually the background art is literally the famous 24 page Turgot/Bretez 1740 map of Paris stitched together...

 

I'm also a fan of more adventure-gamish Dark Mod missions, especially based on literature. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, but I've always been a fan of that style, so I'll be cheering for this one.