OperaHouse

[GLoups!]

***Moved from this thread***

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- the name is OperaHouse, and the only Opera-ish thing in it is that grey unnamed building in the middle
- many map flaws, such as invisible blocks, non-aligned textures etc
- bad global design - so much space, so many places to use - and so little space is actually used. You can never tell if that ruined house contains a node, a superweapon, a path to core, a clown from far space or just nothing. You can let 32 players there and they can wander around and never see each other
- bad local design - you can never tell where you are without a minimap... everything is alike in the bad meaning of this word...

I think I have add some consistency...

All the static-meshes were treated in 3dsmax, re_textured, optimized, adding smoothing groups, manual re-triangulation, enlarge somes entrances and somes walls, sometimes decomposed by material id, modify at somes points... short history it take months...90% of seams are fixed.

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- A hard one, but still: change internal buildings architecture. The good example is Call of Duty 2 Russia multiplayer maps - even with many doors, windows, holes in the walls; even with many corridors, rooms and multiple floors - there are almost always only so many entry points in any given location, or the location is of "arena" type. What is the use of 20 randomly placed ruined buildings on 100x100 meters square if they do not offer anything in tactical sense but, well, using them as obstacles? ...

We reach the limit of our old (but so good) engine, optimized a map like this take much time than doing the map itself in the purpose that all the players can play without a war machine, make a simple door in a wall can take 200 triangles, multiply by one hundred for a city, you must add the building of static-lights for all theses triangles..

P.S.: I really thought the Opera House is the *insides* of it - all the seats, curtains et cetera, not the outsides

Hehe, now there's an interior, knock at the door!

Of course I was looking for Superchaz during severals days and send him e-mails but he seems to have disappeared from the net.

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Vehicles are difficult to use since the ground is so uneven and there is so much rubble around everywhere. I think raptors (more of them) and some mantas (since they hover) would be more suitable for this map than badgers...

...Having the primaries (3 and 4) connected to 3 nodes each is a bit much, especially because one of the secondaries (1 and 2 respectively) is so far away and hard to reach. How about connecting 1 and 6 (instead of 1 and 3) and connecting 2 and 5 (instead of 2 and 4)?

Well think, the link setup needed two mores nodes for working well, so much hard to defend the bases and makes comebacks, so the cores are now in the buildings, unfortunately (or not?) vehicules are become facultative (minimum).

I change the position of nodes and add a minimap, improve the sky-box, Relics, better bots support, replace ladder volume by physics volume and jumppads.

Useless to make the list of all changes, i even can't recall all of them.

Ons-Operahouse-V2

[Miauz55555]

[...] Hehe, now there's an interior, knock at the door! [...]

The Opera looks nice inside.
What do you thing about a Manta at the Core? And a ramp so you can hover over the rooftop?

Edit:
The Core in the building is good. Maby a litle hole at the top to get inside from above? Or the whole building a bit more away from the map boundery. Then you can get inside through the window with a jump out of a raptor.
But thats not so importend because you can get inside through the window with a jump from the top and then jump to the keg. You can also get in with a jump from the near building (you nead two shield-jumps).

[Maniac]

Great work GLoups!

We reach the limit of our old (but so good) engine, optimized a map like this take much time than doing the map itself in the purpose that all the players can play without a war machine, make a simple door in a wall can take 200 triangles, multiply by one hundred for a city, you must add the building of static-lights for all theses triangles..

You've got me wrong here. I'm not talking about increasing poly count, it's about putting existing ones to good use (and maybe reducing the count a bit).
E.g. here is a view on part of the map from Blue Core to Node 4.
The part near Node 4 is OK: there are 3 ways to get from Node 4 to the wide street (1 way along the map border, 1 way via the roofs and 1 way via the side street). But after that the attackers can take one of 4 paths (1 along the map border, 2,3 along the red rood building, 4 to the left from Raptor building). And the Raptor building is hollow inside, so the defenders have to expect attackers from 5 points: 4 abovementioned paths and the Raptor building itself.

I suggest to create an elevated path from the red roof building to Node 4 roofs.
- Elevate building (2) to be the same height with the red roof building (-polygons)
- Add wall at (3) to close the passage to the core area here
- Add a walkable wall at (1) so the player can move between the roofs without going down
- Reduce the height of stones at (5) to small heaps so they provide no cover
- Position stones at (4) to form a slope from the edge of map to the roof at (2)
- Add ruined walls along the right side of (4)
This way, the (1)-(2)-(3) roof becomes a good control point for both attackers and defenders, the path at (5) becomes clear and wide so you can't just spam it to kill everyone inside, the path along the map edge becomes "stealth": many places to hide but nowhere to go if you are under attack.
There are 2 main and 2 side points of these changes:
1) The passages are no longer all equal (gameplay includes more planning and less guessing)
2) This map part becomes more recognizable (much harder to mix up the wall, the roof and the slope parts)
*1) The map becomes more pretty: it's easier to come up with good decorations for a wall or a building than for another heap of rubble
*2) The total triangles count goes down because of more walls and less multi-faceted stones

I'll try to put it all into UED later today

[Maniac]

Something like this geometry-wise


EDIT:
File: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c64dmi2wbo8my ... s.ut2?dl=0

[GLoups!]

Well, it's a good idea, i will look at it, beside the BSP geometry can't be use in this crude form, to many risks of instability and performances issues, i have to transform them into static-meshs before.

[Maniac]

Well, it's a good idea, i will look at it, beside the BSP geometry can't be use in this crude form, to many risks of instability and performances issues, i have to transform them into static-meshs before.

Sure it can't, I placed it there only to provide a better understanding of what I mean. Besides, I'm almost sure even core UT2004 libraries have some good meshes to place there.
If you want, I can spare couple of hours to try to make it better or to search for more such places on the map, or both - but we'll need to sync the updates. Please PM if interested.

[Miauz55555]

Hey,

I really like the edit from Opera. I don't like the original but this version is excellent.
The details about the differend ways you can go over, though or half under buildings are very nice.
I played it twice and one in spec.

I made a Demo when I was in spec. The quality is bad .. very bad .. but I don't want to keep it back.
When there is another possibility, I can now rec a serverside demo.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q78wcx2xbt48q ... a.rar?dl=0

May the meow with you.

[GLoups!]

Thx MiauZ, I have just realized that the link-setup is a little destabilised (primarys with three links), i will ask to cat when he have time, i will send a new link-setup.

[Pegasus]

You may also want to consider taking another stab at the radar image, because, from a quick look, the current one seems to've been taken in Lighting Only Mode, and seeing as the node graph is white itself, this can easily make deriving information from it a pretty confusing proposition, especially in the middle of a battle.

Btw, the evolved explosive decorations seem like a good intermediate step towards making the environment a bigger n' more active part of the gameplay that, for reasons I can't understand, mappers rarely seem to experiment with or even consider (only other example I can cite is ONS-Agamendon, even though its equivalents are a bit more nuanced); that said, their range and damage in this particular edit might lie a bit on the excessive side though.

Just a couple of very quick thoughts there.