First off it's 2:40 am. Stuck being awake due to back spasms. Tho the meds got me pretty messed up I'm still unable to sleep. 1. Empires ships ?? There is still fragments of this in empires. Why was it never finished and is this something we could work on ? 2. Aircraft ?? I know this question has been asked so many times but.. If someone made "modeled and scripted" aircraft and it worked without being gimmicky would it be considered ? 3. Who the fuck is James ? Don't get me wrong I love what he has done with the forums But where did he come from. What ever was done to get him on the team keep it up. Screw besid..Bejames he gets shit done. 4. Wiki ? Who is in charge of the Empires wiki ? It really needs some updating. I think that is one of the main reasons people don't contribute more. There is very little documentation. So it's pretty much starting fresh. Like vehicle scripts. It would be helpful if maybe every one who has worked on them could document what they have learned and add it to the wiki. 5. Sketches ? I know out of all the people in the Empires community some one has to be able to draw right ? Can we get some sketches of what we need modeled ? Vehicles, weapons, infantry. 6. limited public Code ?? I know there is talk of making Empires open source..But until then can we have parts of it public ? As in weapons, Classes and vehicles. It would kind of give people an example of how things work the way they do and might get people playing around with them and help produce more content for Empires. Just want to end this with a thank you to all the developers. Your hard work is appreciated.
Map size is only an issue if your going for fast and height. So there is 2 options slow low flying, or Bigger maps. Bigger maps mean slimming down other resources to keep the servers from crashing.
We have maps at max size already. Fighter jets are off limits, but slower VTOLs are feasible in the sense that they would have space to move around. You'd still bump into the edge of the map though...
VTOL would work on certain maps. On most it wouldn't though due to skybox, gameplay and size issues. As for ships: Some people have mentioned the idea of adding some type of hover chassis for water maps. James btw, is a co-admin from my other community. The Wiki is or was being moved. I and someone else will be rewriting and updating it. As for concept art: I'm going to try and get in touch with some concept artists. I can also draw myself. I'll try and practice more . Once a new GUI has been implemented we will work on making parts of the code open source. Hopefuly this can be completed by next spring.
Dunno if you guys ever played Codename:Eagle but that skybox was tiny yet planes worked great. It was just down to clever map design. If the valleys on MValley were exaggerated to be actual valleys then it would be a great fighter plane map.
You sure they didn't abuse perspective a bit? That's how eternal silence did it, The flight part of the game had all the models much smaller, so it looked like you were flying fast or whatever. Empires doesn't have that luxury, ground fights have to happen in the same space air flight does.
It was the very first game of the Battlefield series so everything happened in the same area. It just comes down to map design. Like obviously you couldn't have planes on slaughtered as there's nowhere to dogfight. I think people get confused also about the speed of planes. Most people imagine planes from post BF2 when the fighter jets would zoom all around the map. If the planes were slower biplanes then you end up with much more manageable options. Anyway my point was that map size shouldn't make people think aircraft are impossible as tiny maps in other games have done it fine.
But battlefield handles maps differently. You have to remember that even if it's slow prop planes there was still large areas for planes to turn around, they can't really turn on a dime. And yeah you could just make a heli so it's slow and agile, but there is still the issue of bouncing off walls cause we can't have a noboundry zone due to lack of space. It isn't even just slaughtered that you shouldn't have it on, nearly every map shouldn't have aircraft because none of them were designed with them in mind. They would simply break so many maps, probably nearly all of them. Air combat is something that needs to be designed in when you are implementing the other vehicles, it can't come as an after thought.
also source isnt refractor 2 (bf42 engine) ... empires maps pretty much are the exact opposite of what every hl2 mapping tutorial tells you.
1+2. aircraft sucks. vtols and boats are cool 3. as an aside im laughing how long ago people were upset that trickster got access to the forums and website because he then had complete control. and then we handed it off to a personable enough guy we never met 4. i updated the wiki when useful stuff needed to be added, stats changes were too time consuming to update though cl_drawhud 0 cl_leveloverview 10 copy and paste res files from other maps and paste picture into paint to fit into 1024x1024 picture 5. modelers are working on stuff. they know what is needed 6. fuck open source. bring back script_manifest
Most of the Empires maps are already the max size for Source 1 maps. It's hardcoded in the engine and you can't change it with the SDK. MValley, Slaughtered, and Duststorm come to mind as maps that span the maximum entire playable space in Source. The thought was to make everything half or quarter size, effectively doubling or quadrupling the map size. Problems came up doing that on the edges of the map where float precision in vphys made movement, shooting, and other major things impossible. Eternal Silence did do it this way though. They got around the precision issue by creating a 1/16th scale area for space combat in the center of the map, teleported players there, then teleported them out when they boarded the ships. The area was in the center of the map to increase number of significant bits available for the calculations at 1/16th scale. This segmenting of the maps is obviously wouldn't work for Empires.
I'm very confident something hacky could work. It'd be fraught with issues and wouldn't play well, but it would work in a technical sense. I think someone did it with Func_Vehicle once (Shandy maybe).
