Building facade prefabs

[BEAR]

Alright, I've been meaning to get around to this sooner but better late than never.

 

Fidcal and I have been working on trying to modularize a map so that it can be worked on by multiple authors, and we moved into the idea of making more modular prefabs of buildings and what not for easy insertion into any map.

 

The purpose of this thread is to discuss and coordinate that effort. I'm far from the most knowledgeable or talented mapper around her (see: least), so lets try to come up with as many tips and ideas as possible as the start to a wiki article on the subject.

 

I'll start out with a few ideas of Fidcals in our Hoarders thread in level editing:

 

Always start at 0,0,0 (origin) of a new map so that when imported, it will be near where the mapper imports instead of some strange area of the map.

 

As far as size, make sure you vary most of the heights a little so there is no unformity. If you look at the three houses I did in Hoarders you will see the rooms are fairly low and each house has two floors plus roof space/attic. If I were doing this I would drag out three temporary solid brushes one above to represent rooms with reasonable floor space between, stick on a couple of model doors and put an AI inside each brush to get a sense of size - just so you don't make houses with rooms that are only five foot high! A very low ceiling might be eight foot I guess with doors about seven foot. Other houses might have twelve foot high rooms. Floor space between rooms would be maybe 1.5 to 2 feet I guess.

 

Don't make full interiors of course but the inner defines the exterior so if the inner scale is about right then the outer will follow and you will know where to stick windows etc.

 

You might do some very low one floor buildings, some two, some three.

 

Note I said buildings - try to vary between dwellings, shops, taverns etc.

 

Consider adding smoke to chimneys, crowd sounds inside taverns etc. lit and unlit windows. Avoid putting actual lights at windows as I don't see the need when lit textures should be available at no performance cost.

 

These buildings should all rotate fine so only need to make all buildings orient in one direction, eg, facing south whatever.

 

Another problem might be the old one of climbing/roping. I would texture the roofs and extend them back maybe 6 feet. Vary the angle of slope and texture of course. If the mapper wants to extend the roof back they can. If they want to block them with other walls or railings leave it to them. If they want to put their sky ceiling to block the roofs that too is up to the mapper. Think generic and flexibility for the mapper. It is easier for them recaulk or block the roof off than to have no roof at all and have to build it themselves.

 

Think mass-production and think texture so you can make one house and retexture it, even crop it down a floor, to make ten variations of the house. Try to make each wall surface a large grid size so full texture tiles will fit. Some houses one texture, others vary top and bottom, some with trim. Variety is good but you don't want every house totally different in style so nothing goes together at all. A typical district is likely to have common local materials.

 

To expand on what he said, I think mappers should even consider doing single floors of more rectangular buildings. You could even have a bottom level, intermediate floors to be as many as needed and a roof, so the mapper could change window styles on the single pre-made floor and copy it as many times as needed and change the texture and build a building really fast.

 

And the first obvious question for the many of you who have done such nice work so far: is any of it reusable? If so, see if it could be reasonably easily pulled out and made into a prefab. The thread is facades, but it could be houses or any other kind of building that could be plugged into a map for added variety.

 

As Fidcal suggests, try making the building reasonably deep, at least deep enough on the side walls that it could jut out in a street or be inset equally easily. Hopefully people familiar with making premades can chime in with some hints for those of us who are less experienced.

 

My first order of business I think will be to make a few tunnel premades from my collaboration with Fidcal, and perhaps the building that resulted (regardless if we'll actually be able to use that much of it). Feel free to chime in with some screenshots to get feedback on whether something would do well as a premade.

[Flanders]

Also, don't add models to the prefabs. This makes the building difficult to rotate as a whole. Mappers can add doors, awnings and such later themselves.

[BEAR]

Here are a few preliminary attempts at some tunnel prefabs. They are nothing fancy to be sure, but they might be of use to someone. They are made in sections as func_statics so they can be easily moved around and rearranged. Curved sections can be copied and fit together to make any number of snaky turns and strait sections added etc. I made 4, the 3 shown here and one more that its like the concave down s curve one that is concave up (steps go down instead of down, just in case that was useful to anyone).

 

They would be pretty easy to modify and change textures on as well I would think, but I'd like to hear what anyone else thinks. I'm probably going to touch them up just a little more and make sure every section will fit together in any arrangement, but probably not try to customize them too much.

 

Christmas break has started so I should be able to prefabify the building facade I was working on for Hoarders and see if I cant make it presentable.

[Fidcal]

Yes, they should be useful links between sections - and not easy for many mappers to make.

[HappyCheeze]

Those look pretty good.

Are you going to make forking tunnels and stuff? So you can just add and rotate and you'll quickly get a nice system going? Like if those were to be sewers, or just a really complicated city network.

 

I was thinking how useful that kind of stuff could be.

 

With a game like this it can be tough to have to make everything, but these prefabs are nice. You can mix and match and still make them flow good together. A game like Never Winter Nights has a tileset, I think it would be cool to have a quasi-tileset with these prefabs because it will save a lot of time.

[Fidcal]

Just wondering how some of these might work as an old sewer system wading through filthy water.

[BEAR]

@HC: Thats a good point, I didn't think of a fork. I'll do that and size it up to fit with the other ones I have.

 

@Fidcal: I had thought of that too. They are a little narrow perhaps for a big, traveled route, but for a sewer or abandoned aquaduct or something they would probably work well. I had had thoughts of having pipes flowing in, like small ones dripping water, and maybe even a concave up floor with a stream of water like you had in thiefs den or something. Would that be something I should do or let mappers customize that?

 

I've gotten pretty proficient at patches and making these tunnels are fairly easy for me, so feel free to just start listing off some pieces you would like to have. As of now I guess all I have is:

 

Strait

Half-S curve (can be doubled into full S)

Stairs

Door Arch (only really usable outside, but might be useful somewhere else).

 

Would anyone like me to make a map with just each section split up on different levels so you can easily select sections in top-down?

 

I wonder what would be the easiest way to stuff accessible?

[Fidcal]

I think prefabs are best. If you drag them to 0,0,0 then save as prefab under prefabs/architecture/arches. Then rename that folder to arches,tunnels (SVN rename!) as I think they go together. Some archways are deep and some tunnels are short so they are similar. Well, an archway is a short tunnel and a tunnel is a deep archway!

 

In addition you might consider some very short tunnels without a bend so they would be like cutting through a thick wall. Then one short L shape if you haven't already.

 

Consider other textures too.

 

The sewer idea, yes, I would add the water yourself. Try waste deep. The mapper should be able to lower the water to a shallow trickle if wanted. Add junk, scraps of wood, etc., drains and pipes and also sounds: water rushing sound here, gurgling there, dripping, distant clanking other faints ambient sounds are atmospheric, and so on. It's easier for the mapper to rip out what he doesn't want than to add.

 

When you have made some prefabs, and before committing them, start a new demo map, say, test/tunnels.map and import prefabs one by one, and apply them through walls and simple buildings to prove there are no practical problems and the prefab has saved correctly before you commit them.

[BEAR]

Alright, I went ahead and broke all the segments up, made sure they fit together in any combo and made a few more and put them in a new map called tunnel_pieces.

 

I have:

 

Stairs

Strait (short)

Strait (medium)

L Bend

Curved Bend

Arch

Arch w/ a few steps

Fork (gads this nearly killed me until I got my head around it. My thinking was getting very uptight as the dude would say).

 

I'm going to commit it in the betamapper repository for anyone to look through. I've already thought of a few more pieces I'd like to add, like a waterfall (go sharply from 1 level to another with a ladder to climb down or something). If anyone wants to load this up and look at it in editor to see if anything jumps out at you I would appreciate it. I don't want to start doing to many major things with it with the chance I might end up going back later and having to change things (which is fairly common for me when I get excited about something). HC if you are interested in using these that might be a good thing for you to do before I get too far along (you might be the only one who ends up using them anyways ).

 

Also Fidcal, about the water. Do you really think I should add the water to it normally? Seems like that would be something for individual mappers to add, unless you think these tunnels are only suited to water-filled sewers. I might hold off on that, unless you specifically want to use these tunnels with water, and in that case I'll be glad to do it.

 

I also thought I might keep my map with all them in it, so if someone wanted to customize the textures it would be easy to do a find>replace on the textures, otherwise they would have to do it individually.

 

Also I'm very open to texture suggestions. Finish work and finalizing things like that are not my strong suite. If you know of one that you think would look better, don't hesitate to tell me

[Fidcal]

Now you know why mappers refer to them as forking tunnels.

 

No, don't include water in the main tunnels but I was thinking if you made any tunnels that were definitely sewer type only.

 

I'll try to check these out later.

[Fidcal]

Yes, these will be useful. Probably best to leave them simple and let mappers make of them what they will. Don't bother with water or junk or other detail. Just leave the one texture so mappers can retexture. Just align the textures and copy those front top arches across and leave it at that. I wouldn't bother necessarily with a demo map but just give them good descriptive prefab names like:

 

tunnel_brick_arched_short_Lshape

tunnel_brick_arched_short_Yshape

tunnel_brick_arched_short_bend

tunnel_brick_arched_short_straight

tunnel_brick_arched_short_L_steps

[BEAR]

Thanks for the feedback Fidcal. I'll do what you suggest.

 

I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean by "copy front arches across" care to elaborate on that?

 

I've got some ideas for a few other sections I want to make before I start prefabbing them, but I was thinking: is there a good prefab index? Seems like that might be a good thing for the wiki, or something else. Preferably something searchable. It seems everyone is fairly unsure of exactly what prefab's exist and it can be a little overwhelming to be just looking through the entirety of them in the editor.

 

Thats really an issue I think for all the materials. It would be great if there was an online searchable tool to look through available materials. Anyone else agree with that? If nothing else, we could have a prefab wiki list.

[Fidcal]

Some of the tunnels did not have an arch of bricks over the top of the tunnel at the entrance - at either end. Maybe they are meant to be middle sections or maybe you could provide the front part as a separate section.

 

Browsing the prefabs folders themselves is a kind of index so long as we keep giving them good clear names prefixed in order. Maintaining a full index on the wiki with images would be a lot of work that would never end and our time is best spent on other stuff I think. But many prefabs do need explanation so there is a prefabs comments section on the wiki @ http://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php/Prefab_Comments You might like to add any info about using your tunnels there, eg, they can be connected together.

 

Likewise with materials it would be a huge task to make a searchable index - and that's all that it would give - a word search. They are already organized in order, stone, metal, etc and you can view them in the editor in media browser and you can kind of search within each section - just type and an input appears. So a wiki list would only give a dubious search - for instance, entering diamond would list stonework, and metal, and carpets, etc with diamond details - not necessarily what you want. If you are looking for a material you are normally looking for a type, eg, wood. A possible search option is a normal Windows search in the folder which would list everything with diamond in the filename.

[BEAR]

I understand what you mean about the arch now. It would be a fair bit of work for me to make two copies of everything, one as a middle piece and others with arches (considering that any of as many as 3 entrances on each piece could be an entrance or exit), so I think I'll just try to make it as obvious as I can that the arch is included separately and can be easily appended to any of the other pieces (also saves complexity in the number of actual prefabs).

 

I know what you mean about the search. I agree that it would be too much work to be done statically, and in the end, anyone who is really trying much at all can find what they need (and with enough experience it will become easier to know what is there). Anything I can imagine would have to be heavily integrated with the entire process of submitting and cataloging materials, and it probably isn't the work (though I'll continue to think about it as I become more familiar with how stuff is submitted, it might be a worthwhile project for school at some point which would be win/win).

[Fidcal]

Just to clarify what I was saying so we're on the same page. Suppose I have a thick wall and want to put a short tunnel through. Below are front and back views of your short tunnel and we can see the back view has no top arch. Yet it does have the lower wall finished off at that end implying it is not intended to put two of these together back to back. So I am puzzled. How would the mapper use this? Make two copies; put them back to back; delete the lower part which is always redundant? Else copy the arch from the front to the back? It seems to me it either ought to be one or the other - a half tunnel that is totally incomplete at one end which is only intended to be butted against another tunnel piece - or else fully complete at both ends.

 

[BEAR]

I see. That piece was more intended as a entrance or exit piece. If you want to make a tunnel from a building like mine, you put that piece on the outside as the entrance and then connect other pieces, that isn't actually supposed to b e a tunnel per say. Its really just a cap piece. I can finish it off just for simplicities sake, but you can also just copy it and flip it around just fine. Most of the tunnel pieces don't have tops since it seems they are just going to be buried and not seen, if people think they would like to have the tunnels visible from the outside I can add those pieces. For now I'll just copy the arch front to the back so that piece can be used however, I just didn't anticipate people using that as a tunnel piece other than for either end of a tunnel.

[Fidcal]

Ah yes I see what you mean. All the pieces are middle pieces and that is just the end cap. Yes. leave it like that and just name it end_cap or end_arch or something.