Is there a limit to how long a mission can be (& others) ?

[Dark Phoenix]

I'm still looking over the materials for the engine. I was thinking of a way that may help mappers be able to create mini campaign via a single mission area.

 

What would make this work is locking off certain areas of the map until you receive a new objective.. These could be akin to the cut scenes you see that make a transition between gameplay areas and shops to purchase more equipment, like in other games. In this manner you could make a very large, and long and very detailed mission. You could have thus multiple missions all inside one mission area.

 

Is this possible?

Edited October 29, 2013 by Dark Phoenix

[nbohr1more]

Yes, you can spawn or destroy entities at will. That said, I don't believe this works for brushes so collision\caulk would always need to persist

to ensure that AI can path-find. Visportals already do this to some degree on the rendering side but they can be tricky to arrange and

control. Some mappers use "func_portals" which can be controlled by scripts, timers, triggers, or distance checks rather than the normal

Visportal mechanism. The Dark Mod also has a new LOD system for making objects either less detailed or removing them with distance.

That LOD system is paired with another system called SEED which can procedurally generate objects and can merge many on-screen entities

into one render-model at run-time. There are options to make big maps, though the light count performance may be somewhat intractable.

[Serpentine]

I'm still looking over the materials for the engine. I was thinking of a way that may help mappers be able to create mini campaign via a single mission area.

It's possible, but TDM supports linking maps together. For performance reasons it'd be better to split up a huge potential map into a few maps. You could however make sure that AI is fairly limited and do large static areas, and make a fairly large and complex map.

 

Lastly, the further away from the maps origin you are, the more likely you are to encounter strange errors in the map compiling process. This is not normally a huge problem, but it's been reported in other projects that things can get pretty strange when you push the limits.

[Deadlove]

So can we make a map as large as Sabotage At Soulforge? Or Mages Tower, the larger T2 maps?

 

From using the editor briefly (I'm not a mapper by any means), DR / Radiant appears to me as just a giant cube for building area, is this correct? And then the mapper fills in as much as they can fit into that cube?

[RJFerret]

Yup, you can probably make maps larger than your time available to make the map. ;-)

 

Depending how you mean "giant cube", not exactly. The editor provides a space in which to work. But it's got nothing in it, it's void if you will. The game engine doesn't want to be thinking about infinite horizons of nothingness. Mappers use a fraction of the available space.

 

The mapper provides things for players to interact with, and forms boundaries sealing out that void. That way the game only deals with what matters, the environment the designer provides for the players. One beginner pain point is learning to keep the void sealed away properly, so sound propagation and ambient effects and other things function properly. (You wouldn't want sound from outside on a city street to be heard in the sewer, as it would if there were a crack in the street and sewer ceiling, unless you intentionally put a vent shaft there to connect them.) People refer to it as sealing out the void, but it's really about keeping the AIs, light, sounds and stuff in, rather than having that stuff calculated out infinately.

 

So the mapper establishes the size they want, and defines the "walls" accordingly, typically forming multiple interconnected "cubes" as you say, each one containing a collection of rooms or environments, perhaps a building, courtyard, street, etc.

 

For a great walk-through with visuals demonstrating this, see http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/12568-fiasco-at-fauchard-street/ where Melan journals his process building that mission.

[stumpy]

you shouldn't build too far away from the origin in the center, the grid covers about 2 miles from edge to edge.

 

you could probably build the soulforge map and mage towers map in the same map and link them together with a teleport each map uses about 2500 objects at most, and tdm can have 8000+ object but you shouldn't go over 6000 due to spawned objects. but you cannot build those two maps in TDM due to copyright reasons.

Edited December 31, 2013 by stumpy