Description:
This once abandoned factory is now occupied by the Horzine blue-collar workforce. For years Horzine has kept this facility a secret, and kept it off public records. They've been producing chemicals and weaponry for their private military and stock piling for something evil... more evil than what they've already unleashed on the world.
This map is a 1 to 1 port from the Killing Floor 1 version.
The map has however received a major bump in graphical quality in order to show off the power of the newer Unreal Engine 3 platform.
Lighting as well as material shaders have been improved to meet current day AAA game standards.
(At least with what's possible with UE3.)
Spoiler!
04/16/2017
- Beta 2 "B2"
- Trader doors now only open for active trader.
- Material shader adjustments and optimizations.
- Zeds no longer fall through metal pipes.
- Players can no longer jump through windows in main hall.
- Added pathing for zed spawn above third floor. (Zeds will now also drop down to third floor instead of dropping straight to the ground floor)
- Set up Precomputed Visibility.
- Added various particle effects around level.
- Door Adjustments
- Increased Max health pool of doors (4000 to 100000000)
- Increased max weld integrity (1500 to 1700)
- Reduced the amount of time it takes to weld a door while it's being attacked (40% Longer to 25% Longer)
- Increased the velocity at which broken doors fly off their hinges (750 to 1500)
- Added Opening and Closing SFX to doors
04/07/2017
- 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!
- Culling is a tad aggressive in some areas.
- Level is missing most SFX.
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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