Level Design Spawning System Question

[Massacre333]

I believe I'm not the only mapper that has attempted to keep the action coming frequently in a very very large killing floor map.

I'm not sure if tripwire intended to limit certain things when it comes to what people can do with their modified UT2004 engine, but there are certain things that would be great to have the power of. One of these things absolutely being an option to set MaxDistance in Zed Volumes. There is only a MinDistance subcategory.

So I was wondering if someone out there had found a solution. I'm 600+ hours into the process of fully creating what would be the size of a medium sized island in the real world.

Someone that I've been collaborating with has been telling me that the only way to pull this off is to have it be an OBJ map. I would like it to be wave based. Ideally if there is any way to have a volume trigger nearby zed volumes that I would specify within the events tab, that would be perfect.

If someone has coded together a custom zed volume to include max distance, that would work just as well I believe.

What I've heard is that there are many beautiful, enormous maps out there that mappers have poured their soul into that have ended up being boring and therefore unplayed due to the gameplay being "hunt down zeds" instead of desperately pushing them back. Obviously players aren't going to like that style since it's literally the opposite of what KF gameplay is. I come from that point of view and like it to be tough to survive with seemingly more action than you can handle. That's why no area is more survivable than any other, despite it being enormous; it is dense with a lot of gameplay packed into any given small area.

If anyone can suggest a way for me to resolve this, I would be really relieved. It would make all of this effort much more worth while, knowing that there is a way that I can make this be capable of having the gameplay I have in mind. It would also allow others to use the same method that I used in mine, to feel free to create enormous maps that stay freshly entertaining for a much longer period of play time.

I am not opposed to resorting to OBJ mode if I have to in order to pull that off. Survival I think would be a nice fit, but not as well of a fit as wave based I don't think.

Triggers?
Custom actors?
Tricks/Work arounds?

 

[Massacre333]

ok since posting this I discovered that there's a setting in zombie volume called Spawn Desirability that functions as a max distance. That should solve my problem in theory. But I hear it's buggy.

If anyone knows of a better way to guarantee that zeds will spawn only if they are near players in an enormous map, then I'm still open for better solutions.

 

[FluX]

For what I remember, Murphy also wanted this for an enormous forest map he was making. It ended up dying off, if I remember correctly, due to spawn distances. Maybe speak to him and see if he had found some sort of information that could help you?

 

[Massacre333]

Okay. I'll try to find a way to reach out to him. Thanks.

 

[TheMutant]

For what I remember, Murphy also wanted this for an enormous forest map he was making. It ended up dying off, if I remember correctly, due to spawn distances. Maybe speak to him and see if he had found some sort of information that could help you?

The problem was that the map needed more navigation points than the engine could handle and therefore the map has never been finished.
Basically you need dynamic navigation points that you can add and remove from the navigation system and then split the map in several parts with separate navigation networks, but the engine does not provide such navigation points.

Edit: Spawn desirability does not work like a max distance, it is just the basic score value for finding the best spawn volume around. The higher it is, the more likely this volume will be chosen. Therefore high values there defeat other scoring parameters such as distance to players.

 

[Massacre333]

Good to know about the Spawn desirability. I'll have to rely only on min distance I guess.

I don't understand why there's a limit to how many path nodes the engine can handle. I will know soon enough. I have over 2,600 brushes done for this island. That takes care of the gameplay, so now I'm taking a break from texturing to do a zed test for the first time.

I'll know how the zeds react in the environment within the next couple days.
There are 212 zombie volumes. Just need to place in the ungodly amount of path nodes now.

I'll come back here periodically to give updates of how it's going, but I'm betting there's a lot of testing to be had on the road to release; Since not only is the map enormous, but it's very vertical in some large sections of it and the AI doesn't have any brains when it comes to thinking up and down.

 

[Massacre333]

I don't know what to do. The gameplay was very slow. It took almost 3,000 path nodes. I've been working on this for months. Over a thousand hours of labor. I need to find a way to make this work.

 

[mmnicolas]

Scrnbalance has a fix for that, works wonders in maps like KF-Farm

bCloserSpawns=True I believe