Level Design Island of Misfit Toys-Failed Maps

[Catalavos]

Hey,
We all have a failed map or two (or 20) laying around in our Unpublished folder, right? Show them off here. Tell us what you think worked or didn't work and why you dumped them to start another map. I'll post some of my stuff tomorrow when I have some more free time.

 

[Beskar Mando]

I'll go take a look in my old HDD then...
Should have a few...more like 20...

 

[Twrecks]

Dukla Pass, too big! 10km square height map with overlay, the effort would take years.


Atoll, too small. A team could take the entire island in two minutes.

 

[Frostedfire]

I tried to make a bite-size urban map on the default terrain size, so it was only like 128x128m tops. I learnt how to place cover and also found out some of the pre-loaded buildings refused to have proper collision so placing blocker volumes correctly was a nightmare

a second one was a rehash of ensk from wot. I did a reasonable job going by memory, but I still had to eg put a proper texture on the lego-block buildings and make the train cars destructible. If I can find it I might throw it up somewhere, but I moved stuff around on the pc so I don't know where it is anymore

 

[mrsirr]

Dukla Pass, too big! 10km square height map with overlay, the effort would take years.

Woah
Can you actually make a map that big? That's glorious. I'm talking IS-2 glorious.

 

[Beskar Mando]

Woah
Can you actually make a map that big? That's glorious. I'm talking IS-2 glorious.

Pretty sure it'd crash any PC....wait not the computer, the GAME ENGINE...would explode in your face.

 

[Twrecks]

Size isn't an issue with the Unreal Engine, polycount and draw calls are GPU limited.


As you see from the pic, Terrain2 is 500,0000 UU square. For RO2, 50 UU = 1 meter. Damn near fills the SDK grid. Yakovlevo is only 2.6 Km square, in comparison.


Most of it would just be background, combat areas would receive their own terrain actors. Detailing it without dropping to sub zero FPS is another matter. Adding heavy fog would make the surrounding terrain redundant. Quite the dilemma, one I stepped away from


Funny thing is, I interviewed Tim Sweeney back in 2004 talking about UE3:


http://www.beyondunreal.com/articles/bu-interviews-tim-sweeney-on-ue3


Back then, a Gigabyte of dedicated Video RAM was just a dream...

 

[nymets1104]

So could you do this effectively by surrounding the player in a "culling Bubble"? Would this keep the FPS up, or is the sheer amount of "stuff" in the level going to hold it back?

 

[Twrecks]

"Sheer amount of stuff"

Yakovlevo took roughly 600 hours. Dukla Pass would be 4x larger. PPL can't play Yakov_CA because of piss-poor hardware. The math says it's not worth the effort, not that it isn't possible.