Architecture (no, not the x86 kind)



  • I'm making a Left 4 Dead 2 map. Because I felt like it. Today, I built the skybox. If you know how Source Engine skyboxes work, skip the next paragraph.

    Source Engine maps are split up into two parts: a 1:1 scale playing area, which is detailed but small; and a 1:16 scale skybox which has much less detail, but can be very large. How large? The citadel from Half-Life 2 is 8431 feet tall. That's over a mile for those of you who are bad at math. The skybox is not accessed directly by the player, but polygons with the texture tools/toolsskybox are replaced with a view from the player's location in the skybox (divide by 16, shift to the sky_camera entity).

    Here's my skybox:

    That makes the view from the zombie-only rooftop in the first area look like this:

    The zombie-only area about halfway through the map has this view:

    However, the human players will not be able to access those areas. Instead, this is what they'd see from the starting area:

    And halfway through:

    How can I modify the structure of the building to make the human view more interesting?



  • Remove the walls?

    ... is this a trick question?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Remove the walls?

    ... is this a trick question?

    And how do you propose I keep the human players inside this no-longer-existent building if there are no walls?



  • @Ben L. said:

    And how do you propose I keep the human players inside this no-longer-existent building if there are no walls?

    Do what Valve did on their rooftop level (the hospital one with the helipad) and put fatal drops on every edge.



  • Give the walls some textures? Put a menacing moon up in the sky like in Majora's Mask?



  • Add more higher structures, like chimneys or masts. Maybe a building, but I don't know how ridiculous you'd have to make that before it would be visible.

    Don't fill it up. I'm sure the mood is stronger if you only see little bits coupled with environmental sound.

    ...wait, I'm assuming the pit area is only the starting point, and players will eventually get above? If not, you just made a bad level.



  • Some sort of "balcony" section on the side of the building? Windows?



  • @dhromed said:

    ...wait, I'm assuming the pit area is only the starting point, and players will eventually get above? If not, you just made a bad level.

    The pit area is the starting point:

    The area (directly) above the pit area is simply for zombies to spawn:

    At the start of the map, 1 to 3 random paths are blocked. That could be a roll-up door being closed or a collapsed tunnel or some random junk blocking a doorway.

    I've elongated the area at the start of the panic event:

    The humans use this lift to get up there. It makes noise. You can probably guess what happens because of that:



  • So you're asking how to make it so people in a warehouse with no windows can see the detailed skybox?

    I think the answer is: "they won't be able to". You can add a glass ceiling but, 1) modern warehouses don't have those so it'd have to be historical, and 2) they still won't be able to see anything other than the sky. So all those textures buildings go to waste.

    So I'm not sure exactly what the question here is still.



  • I would also like to know why everything has a subtle white aura. That's gotta be some shader crudeness.

    I once saw a playthrough of  Deus Ex HR with some kind of ambient occlusion-simulating shader active, and it looked really wonky in lots of places, like for example a blurry shadow suspended a bit off the floor behind the leg of a chair.

    But I suppose without it, it would all look super flat, like how I played it because of my hardware or DX or whatever.



  • @dhromed said:

    I would also like to know why everything has a subtle white aura. That's gotta be some shader crudeness.

    It probably just means the engine needs to "bake" lighting into the map and it hasn't been baked yet because he's still working out the layout.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:
    I would also like to know why everything has a subtle white aura. That's gotta be some shader crudeness.

    It probably just means the engine needs to "bake" lighting into the map and it hasn't been baked yet because he's still working out the layout.

    I'm not going to sit for ten minutes while my computer struggles to compute lighting if I can just do a fast compile and play with shitty-but-still-not-as-shitty-as-fullbright lighting.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    So you're asking how to make it so people in a warehouse with no windows can see the detailed skybox?

    I think the answer is: "they won't be able to". You can add a glass ceiling but, 1) modern warehouses don't have those so it'd have to be historical, and 2) they still won't be able to see anything other than the sky. So all those textures buildings go to waste.

    So I'm not sure exactly what the question here is still.

    I think I should probably start over and plan more carefully.



  •  Very simple. Think with a mind of one human child. 

    1) repalce wall with wire fences so human can see outside fence.

    OR.

    2) add windows to walls. windows work wonders.

     

    I am qualified map designer for salesforce.

     



  • @Nagesh said:

    Filed under: wow post cunt is 888

    I love you, Nagesh.



  • Re: post cunt

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @Nagesh said:
    Filed under: wow post cunt is 888

    I love you, Nagesh.

    I love you, morbiuswilters.



  • All this overflowing of live is great, but let us get back on topic now.


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