dm_residential is a map centered around a 3-way intersection in a residential neighborhood, with a hill and seven accessible buildings in the vicinity. It takes place around early morning (or late evening); most of the lighting in the level comes from streetlights and building illumination. All of the accessible buildings have their own interiors and several ways of entry and exit, providing many potential routes around and throughout the map.
Beta 3 was released on August 8, 2007. The final version, assuming all goes well, should be released in a few weeks (almost surely before September) with only some minor tweaks to the beta 2 design.
You can check out some discussion and work-in-progress screenshots in the forum thread (see below). Thanks for looking!
Something I was thinking about :wink: So much to do...
Honestly, the usage of "I was going to do that, just didn't get around to it" and "Ran out of time for that, I'll do it soon" is starting to sound excuse-ish -- it's not. I'm overwhelmed!! Don't hate me. :biggrin:
I really like the restaurant, and the first example of how you're going to seal off the map works well, you just need to make the buildings next to the pile of rubble broken down so it looks like the wreckage came from the buildings nearby, and not just out of nowhere :smile: I'm sure that was on your list of things to do already.
Yes, exactly - when I created the broken part I was so tired I just didn't have the strength to start adding rubble/more realism to it, i just stopped after cutting it out a bit. Nice example, though - I'll get around to it soon. Sooo much to do. :smile:
Thanks for the compliment and suggestion!
Posted by Elon Yariv on
Thu Jul 27th 2006 at 11:44pm
Nice hotel.(the building above the park)
About the restaurant, it's very nice except that that broken wall really annoys me. When a brick wall is broken it usally breaks into bricks not like what happaned in your map. Your wall look like the paint job on the brick part. Maybe you should add between two thin layers like the one you used a brick wall, then it'll look awsome.
Addicted... gah, that's getting old. How about Morph. :smile:
Morph:
Yeah, it's not gonna be very simple.. I'll definitely have to resort to several tall/large buildings to help block some visibility.. and just fill in whatever the player can see past.. that'll take a while to get right. That'll come later anyways, after I finish the flow/layout.
Elon:
I didn't mean around all the edges of the buildings, just one of them. The player can only access the roof of one building and thus I only need some way to hinder him from jumping off it in two directions that are edges to the map more or less, or an environment where he can jump to that's not outside the map (which I'm leaning towards). To have fences, they'd either have to be all around the roof (which is a bit weird on itself, I've never really seen a building roof surrounded by fences) - this is ruled out due to gameplay reasons - or only on two sides more or less. They'd have to be busted out in many places to keep gameplay similar to how it is.
Thanks for the links, those look like some maps to certainly have a look at. :smile:
Posted by Elon Yariv on
Thu Jul 27th 2006 at 10:09am
I think it's important to the map's flow that the player be able to simply jump off the roof of the map wherever he wants as long as it's toward the gameplay area.. fencing it off so there are only a few openings or making the player deal with a fire escape sounds potentially cumbersome. I'll probably just add some alleys so the player has somewhere to jump to on all sides and be done with it. Although I might add fire escapes anyways (but that's another concept altogether).
Who said the fence has to be around all the edges of the buildings? It can be ramed/smashed in many places. And you only need to prevent the player from jumping of from few roofs and not on all of these roofs.
Here is another city map. It's more similar to your theme too.
Here are two more DM city maps. And here is a third one, the base map to the other two.
Yeah, tiered roofs at least would stop them from looking out forever over unplayable areas, but the more I think about it the more I realize you have your work cut out for you to enclose the map. You could do the whole HL1 trick of having a mountain or hill with a tunnel on one side, but I guess that's kinda hokey at this point, maybe.
Tiered roofs are an interesting idea. I was thinking I needed to do something like this or at least have other, taller buildings closeby so I don't have to extend the skybox+environment to the horizon. :smile: I'm liking the alleyway idea though. I'll probably try that first. Hopefully it comes out looking good and I can continue on.. getting some good work done. :smile:
Roof vents, chained link fences housing generators, solar panels, or a water tower? Or, you can just make the roof tiered, so there are other parts of the building that are higher and have roofs that you can't access. Like, say your building from the top down has a few elevated sections, conveniantly too high to climb up to or jump to.
The alley idea might just be the best one though.
Edit: The above was posted before I saw your edit.
