the sawmill was partially built, surrounding buildings were put in place, the little culvert where the burning tank was became a decent sized river, various other stuff like rebuilding parts of the train station were also done, and then hammer refused to open the file again. well, it sort of opened it, but would use 99% of my cpu for 4 hours before i could select a brush, and half an hour response time for every mouse click. that sucked. even the backups in the autosave folder wouldn't open, so that made it suck some more.
i hate rebuiling the same stuff after a loss, so the river/sawmill etc were abandoned in favour of a street. as the area is the exit from the allied base, i wanted it to be roughly the same shape and size as the exit from the axis base, which was the wide open railway station. so, either the street had to be a lot wider than i'd like, or the train station would need to be narrowed. the axe fell on the station, but i don't think it suffered too much, and might even have been improved a little, though it still needs a bit of bomb damage.
i know i've said before that the layout is done, but i think that this time it's true. i've 3 buildings to finish off the insides of, and maybe another 2 or 3 building faces to seal off some map edges. there's tons of little bits that need some attention, but nothing that's a problem. the skybox hasn't really been thought about, other than to keep it as simple as possible. a burning village on a hillside looked good in lostcoast, but would probably hamper performance in a large multiplayer map.
anyway, here's some recent pics.
and i've just noticed that flags 2 and 3 have their numbers mixed up. 
Posted by ReNo on Wed Apr 5th 2006 at 5:22am
I love the shot looking out through the windows. Could maybe use a few decals as some of the surfaces are a tad uniform, but it is just looks like a really nice setup around there with the curved stairs and all
Posted by Belgarion on Wed Apr 5th 2006 at 5:14am
reminds me a lot of remagen from MOHAA and remagen v2 from CoD:UO, but with a terrain and train area. very interesting. i don't have dod:s, so i really cant say anything more than that.
Posted by G4MER on Sat Apr 1st 2006 at 4:59pm
Leave PEGS alone, why does everyone always wanna bury PEGS.. =) lol
It does look good. but it doesn't look like WWII to me.
Posted by Orpheus on Sat Apr 1st 2006 at 3:31pm
Every town I know of has two things this map is missing. A park, with kids playthings and a dilapidated empty lot. Build a place where no accounts put trash when no ones looking.
Another thing you might add, a building being built. You know.. pegs in the ground with string to mark the location of stuff.
*shrugs*
from street level, you don't really notice the roofs too much. once i've finished with the layout (about 80% atm) and started optimising, i'll be looking at areas that can take the extra detail of more damaged roofs/walls/roads etc, so that might break it up a bit more.
the clipped look to the tops of some of the buildings is because the tops are in the skybox, which wasn't in the compile.
what i think it really needs is a couple of decent wooden buildings. a barn or two, and a few leanto/log store/outhouses. hmm, maybe even a sawmill. /me looks shiftilly at gwil...
haha, a sawmill it is. i just this second pictured how to fit it in. it ties up the allied base perfectly, gets rid of a huge open area that might eventually have become a vis problem, allows me to seamlesly tweak a transition to the skybox that was causing a problem, and in general, save a lot of finishing off time.
i'm away to marvel at myself in the mirror now. bbl " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">
Posted by Orpheus on Sat Apr 1st 2006 at 1:24pm
*Internet connection groans savagely*
That last set, was awfully, unoptimized Fishman.
Anyway, the one thing I was going to comment on, you seem to be addressing already. In the first set of screens, the building tops seem cropped. The hotels/factory/house all seem universally the same height.
In the second set of screens, you have altered this some, but now they seem cropped, in sections. You have houses one height, motels one height and so on and so on.
Perhaps its just me that sees it as such. My only remaining comment is, the roofs all look the same. You seem to have but one architect in the village. Hire some more and add some metal siding or wood shingled roofs. Any village, no matter where has a mush mash of old/new projects going.
well, the church is gone, as are some other bits and pieces. it can be a bit of a worry, chopping a large area, then wondering how the replacement part, that may or may not be floating around in my head, will turn out.
i've managed to leave large areas alone(relatively speaking, of course " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">), so the pics that i've already posted still resemble a good chunk of the map.
here's a few pics of more recent developments. the compile was hatchet job, so there's no pretty skybox or fancy lighting. a full compile is still a long way off....
Posted by Agent Smith on Thu Nov 24th 2005 at 10:13pm
If you have a look at some of the ground textures, you'll notice that some have skybox or similar in their names. The detail that is generated on these includes trees and things that are all sprites, so using some of them should cause virtually no drop in performance. They are made specifically for skybox use. Of course all the tree sprites are nice and bushy, as opposed to the twigs we have to use in the main map
I've figured that if my map runs about the same as the official maps then its okay, since everyone has been running them fine online for months now.
Crono, there are only two buildings, atm, with any insides. both offer an upstairs exit that can lead onto some rooftops. there are more planned, so hopefully there'll be more to gameplay than having it concentrated at street level. bomb damage will open up new routes too, allowing access to some more rooftops. (should also make the streets look less sterile)
Agent S, the skybox is partly finished. i'm mostly happy with everything at the back of the map(the fields and lake etc.), but the section of skybox next to the railway is really only placeholding. i'm not sure if i want trees or a factory there. it'll come down to performance in the end.
with the vis optimization that i've done so far, most of the areas play at just a little worse than the official maps. there are still one or two places that cause spikes on the worldbrush and static prop graph, and cause my fps to hit the red, but that's mostly to do with the church. the church that really needs to be remade before too long. hehe, maybe if i keep saying it, i'll end up doing it. " SRC="images/smiles/icon_smile.gif">
