Question about prefabs

[Digi]

Have to keep reminding myself that I need to make something at all before I can think about this higher-level stuff. But I appreciate that you guys think I can already have an approach to level design.

 

Off topic for this thread, but so you can make plans without disappointingly going the wrong way down a long road (pun intended), due to needing visportals to divide areas for performance, long straight streets aren't really an option, hence all missions having lots of zig-zags, corners, and uneven city blocks, so streets won't line up with long sight lines.

 

(It's much harder to try to mutate a long street with single digit FPS, into one that performs well with multiple corners in it, rather than to start out making short stretches between sight blocking corners.)

 

The rest sounds action packed!

 

Heh. I gathered as much from reading some chatter on visportals, but a boy can dream. I guess I'll have to find another horrible mission to create.

 

*shakes fists*

 

Anyway, sorry for the tangent.

[Springheel]

Here's the next one. Didn't change a great deal, but added details to the front to make it less flat, added some decorative trim and tried to vary the textures a bit, grimed it up, etc. I've kept it as a func_static so it can be easily rotated.

[grayman]

Looks like that building took some steroids!

[Sotha]

Aye! It is important to keep them f_s so that they can be turned back to editable form. With some modularization mappers could transform that into building blocks.

 

Instant city streets for the lazy mappers!

[Springheel]

Yeah, once I'm done updating the buildings, I thought I'd take your modular idea (which I used for the interior spaces in my mission) and make prefabs of them. Even toyed with the idea of entire modular city street prefabs. The lower the bar gets to making a simple mission, the more people are going to give it a shot, is my theory.

 

Not only that, but it may free up mappers to focus on other challenges. If I didn't rely on prefabs so much in aRtU, I probably wouldn't have had the energy to get creative with the gameplay options.

[RJFerret]

Much more depth, very nice.

 

Two nitpicky things feel free to ignore. (I usually wouldn't even bring up such, but if they'll be prefabs people expect to drop into multiple future missions...)

 

The half timber texture on the top center doesn't match the rest, it appears ridiculously clean, in a completely different architectural style, and with different wood timbers (much thicker) having been used.

 

The top of the bay window might want to extend up to the overhang above rather than having a sloped roof section coming to rest against the plaster and having timbers appear to penetrate the window space. Either that or add framing/copper flashing around that roof section.

 

It's awesome to get rid of that repetitive stone texture, I spent a good amount of time tweaking that for InnBiz.

[Springheel]

The main plaster texture with the windows doesn't have any other companion textures, unfortunately, so I've had to make do. I noticed the problem of the one texture being too clean too...I actually added a dirt decal to tone it down after taking that screenshot, though it's still not perfect.

[Springheel]

Here's the next update. More significant changes here, as the original architecture didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

[Goldwell]

Wow it's like night and day! Very good work Springheel.

 

Is there an ETA on the release of the updated prefab pack at all?

[Springheel]

Is there an ETA on the release of the updated prefab pack at all?

 

Not really. I can probably include some of them in 2.02.

[Bikerdude]

Wow it's like night and day!

Thats what I wanted to do with TA:1 and you can see I moddy a few of the building you originaly made in that mission.