Description:
This is a complete port of the "Killing Floor 1 Manor" map. Original textures have been enhanced and edited to fit the new Killing Floor 2 render engine. The original KF1 trader functionality has also been recreated to the best of my ability.
Spoiler!
04/20/2017
- Updated Map to "V5"
- Trader teleportation now works seamlessly across single player and multi-player.
- Trader doors now only open for currently active trader.
- Complete rework of Zed pathing.
- Adjusted level brightness & contrast.
- Collision adjustments on fences.
11/24/2016
- Updated Map to "V4"
- Fixed missing collision on rocks in front of boathouse and in cave
- Changed all trader doors to be one way. (if you get stuck you can simply walk out)
- Adjusted zed pathing though tight spaces. (zeds shouldn't get stuck as often)
- Removed one of the zed spawns by the side door of the house.
10/26/2016
- Updated Map to "V3"
- Drastically improved geometry culling.
- Eliminated overdraw caused by trees. (switched from masked branches to full tris based branches)
- Replaced dynamic "Sky Dome" shader with high res static one.
- New and improved water shader. (lightweight and looks good)
- Re-added "Fake GI" lighting. (was removed in previous build due to performance issues)
- Small adjustments to ammo and weapon drops.
- Small adjustments to AI pathing in house & basement.
- Reduced Zed spawn frequency.
09/06/2016
- Updated Map to "V2"
- Reworked nearly all the textures in order to reduce the overall file size.
- Optimized master materials in order to reduce total shader instructions.
- Adjustments to level post process chain.
- Decreased global spawn rate, and tweaked individual spawns.
- General pathing improvements.
- Barbed wire fences no longer stop bullets and projectiles.
- Significant overhaul to lighting. (both indoor and outdoor)
- Added new trader teleportation logic with a "Push Volume" backup system incase teleportation fails. (similar to the one in my West London port)
Additional Notes:
- My main goal with this update was to hopefully bring the maps performance to a more reasonable level, however the overall effect of these optimizations will vary from PC to PC.
Unfortunately the map will still have a lower overall FPS than Tripwire's official maps.
This is due to my own carelessness when setting up the geometry, the only solution for this would be for me to completely redo the entire port from scratch. - Moving forward I will be removing the map files version number from all future map updates & releases as they have been causing server owners to have to re-add the map to the server rotation every time I push an update.
06/19/2016
- Updated Map to "V1"
- Changed outdoor lighting to bring it more in line with KF1.
- Improved performance when looking at water.
- Improved water visuals.
- Added ambiance and sound effects to level.
- Adjusted overall level brightness.
05/16/2016
- Updated Map to "B3"
- Added ammo drops & weapon spawns.
- General collision improvements.
- Increased door trigger radius.
- Pathing tweaks on main floor & basement.
- Changed lighting in dining room.
- Performance improvements. Overall frame-rate remains the same, however the frame consistency has been drastically improved, and users should no longer get massive frame drops when confronting large swarms of zeds.
- Added cloth drapes to dining room & boathouse, also added plastic shower curtain around upstairs bath tub.
05/12/2016
- Updated Map to "B2"
- Darkened lighting across whole level, with minor tweaks to individual lights.
- Small tweak to spawning logic in upper level of house.
05/11/2016
- Beta 1 "B1"
- Initial Release
Spoiler!
Spoiled
Spoiler!
Well apparently there is a limit of 10 images allowed per post, so i am unable to link any screenshots until this is changed.
In the meantime here is a link to the Imgur Album Link
Known Problems:
Spoiler!
- Basement Door swings into stairs (Not sure if there is a way to fix this)
- Due to the faster paced gameplay of KF2 compared to KF1 the map can become very "busy" on the high difficulties, I've done the best I can however be warned that becoming overwhelmed on Suicidal & Hell on Earth is a very real possibility.
- Last wave "Boss Cinematic" can sometimes glitch out in dining room.
Why is the map as big as it is? This is a pretty long read, so get comfy.
Spoiler!
Disclaimer: I'm going to try and explain things to the best of my ability; however this is a pretty loaded topic. Things might get a little complicated at times, but please bear with me.
Alright, so first things first; this is not Killing Floor 1 and because of that you can't expect the map sizes to remain as small as they did in KF1. Now I'm sure someone in the room is going to tell me "but, but"¦ there are loads of maps out for KF2 that are 50MB or lower, so why are yours so big?â€
Short answer *TEXTURES*
Long answer; UE3 uses multiple texture maps to make up the in game materials that you see plastered on geometry. In KF2's case the game primarily uses three to four texture maps to make up a material; Diffuse, Normal, Specular, and on occasion Emissive. UE3 can however support many more than the four I just listed off.
In comparison KF1 primarily uses just a Diffuse with the odd Specular located in the "Alpha Channel", and on occasion a Bump map might be thrown in.
This however is only just the tip of the iceberg, there are many other factors that contribute to the increase in file size from Killing Floor 1 to Killing Floor 2.
Next up on the list is Texture Resolution. On average KF2 uses textures that are twice the resolution of KF1, however doubling a textures resolution does not mean the size doubles as well. More often than not the images file size will increase exponentially this increase can be anywhere from 3x to 5x the original size, this is due to how texture compression algorithms operate on pixel information as well as how complicated that information is.
For the sake of simplicity I won't go into any specifics on the different types of compression methods out there, however I will provide some links at the bottom for further reading.
There are a few other factors that also contribute to the file size increase such as, but not limited to; the different compression methods used by UE3 Vs. UE2 and total amount of Unique non-referenced textures used in a given level.
To put it simply the overall level quality and complexity has drastically increased from KF1 to KF2, so an increase in file size is not only expected, but necessary as well.
Now that you understand why my maps are as big as they are I'm sure many of you are asking. "Why are other maps so small?" There's actually a very simple answer to that, and it all has to do with referencing textures & assets already created and loaded into the game by Tripwire. If all you do when you create a map is reuse the assets that Tripwire has created then your total file size will remain quite small, since at that point all you're left with is geometry, light maps, and level data/scripting. All of that information can easily be fit into 20MB file.
In my maps however I will seldom if ever reuse any of Tripwire's assets from the base game, thus the much larger file size.
A prime example of this can be found in your games map folder. If you take a look at the size of all the default maps they average out to around 100MB~ each. HOWEVER "Black Forest" is just over 500MB, this is because Black Forest uses primarily unique textures that aren't found in other maps and it's also a perfect example of what I just talked about.
So that basically covers why the vast majority of custom maps currently available for KF2 are so small.
A personal note from Me.
I understand that my maps are large when it comes to file size, but that doesn't mean that I'm not trying to compress things as much as possible. HOWEVER until Tripwire enables full support for custom Master materials and some sort of compression for map packages passed through a redirect there is only so much I can do.
Also for any of you who are knowledgeable about common types of texture compression used in games I have tried to use "DDS" images with BC1, BC3, and BC3n texture compression (formally known as DXT1, DXT5, and DXT5_NM). However the UDK won't accept them since it already applies this type of compression on texture import. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but I have noticed that when applying the same type of compression in engine as I do with the NVIDIA texture tools plugin for Photoshop I experience considerably better results in Photoshop than I do when using the UDK. I can only assume this is because the compression algorithms being used by Epic and the ones being used by NVIDIA are slightly different. I believe that this might very well be the case, especially after reading NVIDIA's documentation which states that the "Direct Draw Surface" (DDS) format in particular can support numerous types of compression.
Hopefully all of you who read this found it useful, and now you have a better understanding of where things are at in the world of Killing Floor 2 custom maps.
Links for additional reading:
DDS Compression settings for export (Great tutorial by "DieByZer0" on the CryEngine forums)
Garage Games Texture compression Guide (Very good read)
Normal Map Compression
High Quality DXT Compression
Programming Guide for DDS
Reference for DDS
Compressed Texture Resources (Direct3D 9)
Block Compression (Direct3D 10)
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