Empires urban maps architectural style

I would like to see more elevated walkways along roads.. giving tanks a serious disadvantage for taking that particular route

 

The maps can be just as big vertically as they are wide, so really big skyscrapers shouldn't be a problem. ....I just hope the engine and peoples PC's can handle the size I'm going for....and if there is any hope of me finishing it this century......heheheh

Great minds think alike.

 

Psh, just go to the Distillary district if you're tired of Toronto gray.

There you have Toronto red.

 

I got a similar feeling when I went to university in the city. I mean I've lived near there my whole life and I know what it's like, but I'm still much more used to the more rural areas, my home town has an old ruined priory and all the large buildings are at least a hundred years old.

In the city it's more new, the town hall is obviously old, but most of the buildings are new and look more contemporary. I'm guessing you could use a similar contrast for the jekotian cities.

I'm guessing the brenodi didn't simply raze every city to the ground and rebuild it entirely, so any ex-jekotian city would still be laid out in a similar manner to how it was before the amalgamation of the factions, ergo it would have a different design to the BE cities.

 

I have more ideas in case you run out

 

I'll get back to you. The sheer size of the map I am attempting is just dawning on me, so it could be a while I took a jeep for a drive around the streets and placeholder buildings and it's.....big....I'm seriously worried that it's just going to be too much for the average PC to run once I flesh out every building...if I ever get it finished. Ah heck if I get bored of it I can just take what I've done and use it to make a smaller map.

Heres a thought. Everyone wants buildings you can run around in, right? But once you can go into a building you are kind of obliged to make it quite detailed. Say you have a ten floor building, are you gonna have the player have access to every level? Every window? I can see why most buildings just have roof access by ladder, maybe a balcony too. having the city blown apart a bit helps, you could conveniently block most of a stairwell with rubble, only allowing access to one or two floors that are heavily damaged (so not too many separate rooms. Basically you need to limit the unnecessary detail of a buildings interior without it feeling unrealistic. Am I making any sense? I just find some of the buildings in Cyclopean, for example, feel too abstract. (no disrespect to the mapper though, it's better than anything I've ever done!) Though they may be great game play wise I look at them and think 'Why would an architect design a building like that?'

 

It's the future, buildings can have lockdowns.

 

Yeah, as long as the doors arn't made of wood! How many time in HL2 was I like 'What do you mean I can't get through this flimsy interior door??!? I have freakin' shotgun! grenades! AN RPG THAT CAN BLOW GUNSHIPS TO HELL! WTF IS THIS DOOR MADE OF?!?!'

But seriously, your right. The indistructable doors seem to be the only answer.

 

Don't make your doors 10 feet tall like Grizzly though, they look silly

 

regarding performance, as long as you're careful with vis etc I'd guess you should be alright as other than long streets (tricky to avoid if you're on a grid basis I suppose, unless you have a city on a hill). More of a problem may be the limits in the mapping tool on vertices and planes etc. Someone suggested making buildings out of models (could have even been Krenzo) at some point, if you have a lot then that could be a handy way around it.

No idea where free model making tools are though.

without going too far off topic hopefully, will 16x maps have 3d skyboxes like usual? I was assuming so, but given that the contents would be scaled up by 16x more than the 16x main map, will it be horribly hard to have any detail?

 

I just got this message while playing my map: "up vertex buffer size". Surely I haven't hit the vertex limit yet?

 

probably you did
you should run around the map with showbudget on and see where it maxes out..
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Showbudget

 

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VERTEX_BUFFER_SIZE
Optimize your map, check if any materials or models are bad, etc.

 

Thanks guys. I look into it.

I can't have hit a vertex limit yet. There just isn't that much detail in my map yet. I've used the entire full grid size but the city is filled with placeholde buildings, literally single blocks. I can't have used even 300 brushes yet.

 

If you have any faces that are huge, as in covering the whole map, then you can get the issue.

 

Ahhhhhh....like the skybox? Do you just stick two faces together to make the sky then?

 

All tool textures are not rendered, so they can't cause it.

 

I just figured it out lol. I wasn't running VIS on compiling. D'oh!

 

Start small, work outwards. Starting big and working inwards will probably leave you with an unfinished map.

I'd love someone to be able to grab last_city and do it up

 

Yeah, I've realized how ridiculously ambitious making a massive urban maps is. I've just been messing around with Hammer since, checking out all the new features. I'm getting an idea for a simpler map to start with.