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new approach to mapping a big city

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 14:48:37

RambOrc

I've looked at some screens from early versions of the city map (2001 or so) and found that some of the places looked better in early versions than later on and that what's been missing from the big laid-out city (besides the acceptable frame rate) is the feeling of the little corners like in this one: [img:2tpnyyfx]http://www.korax-heritage.com/images/history/history-28.jpg[/img:2tpnyyfx] I guess you don't see what I see in it, this is a half-finished scenery, but the point is if I'd redo it now, it'd retain this same cozy little-town feeling but would look way more enhanced. OK the point I'm trying to make here is that I want to restart mapping city locations but this time as small units in themselves (i.e. a couple of buildings together with a street or two, and from nowhere in that unit can see into any other city unit, this should immensely help frame rate problems). Whether there should be several "walled off" units within the same map or whether every such unit should be a map for itself (or a combination of both) is more of a technical question depending on several factors, but what I'd like to ask your opinion on is the player/world perspective on this setup, i.e. how to make the units feel like parts of the same city and give you a feeling of continuity, and not to make it feel unnatural. The outside wall is no prob, it should just be something like in the original city version, maybe a bit more enhanced so that from down from the streets it looks more like there's something on the other side too and it isn't a dummy, but what about the in-city walls? I thought about things like making districts or whatever they are called (like one for miners, one for the nobles, one for the merchants and so on) and those would be walled off from each other with only a couple of gates between them, but that might look too strange with high walls and would defeat the purpose with low walls. Or maybe making the streets so runaround that sooner or later every street would end into a building (buildings are good, they can be essentially an outside wall and still not look unnatural), or I don't know. If any of you have ideas, please post them, sketches and small Hexen maps to show what you mean are very welcome too.
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:05:09

Firebrand

Hmm, if I remember correctly the problem with framerate was that the whole town was in a big square like thing and the game had to render the whole square and that was the thing that slowed it down, what I would be suggesting would be to make "town units" (i.e. smaller squares), separated from each other in the same map, that way the engine only has to render a small square and connect it with a silent teleporter line that moves the player to another "town unit", that used to work with the fake room over room in the old doom days, before Vavoom really implemented the room over room thing, I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make it, just copy paste a small amount of the next "map units" on the actual one, and then connect them through silent teleporters to move and make the world be more real to the player's eyes, that of course is my aproach to this, if anyone else has another suggestion it's welcome here. EDIT: What I mean is that to avoid the framerate drop, we need to have at least an impassible line to separate the "map units", that way the engine doesn't has to render the whole square, that's the main spot that we should take care when building large open areas.
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:28:55

RambOrc

That would of course be the coolest way, but very difficult to implement with moving NPCs and stuff. If we want to ever finish KH, there are some shortcuts we need to take, even if it reduced the coolness somewhat (like using sprites and not 3D models, not making a seamlessly connected world etc). So while it'd be best to use the way you described and I wanted for years, I think it'd greatly complicate things. To a small extent it can be done of course, e.g. you've got a 2-3 meters high wall in the middle of the street separating merchant and servant districts, and while you can't see through the wall or through the gate (which does not open, if you space on it you go to another map), you can see how the houses on both sides of the street continue on (that wouldn't take much, since you'd only see the upper floors of the houses closest to the wall and even less of houses further down the street). Actually, now that I say it it does sound like a rather cool compromise, or?
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:34:37

Firebrand

Then another solution would be to make some walls (as you say here) that are not very high and copy just the first structures of the map you'll change to, that would be a lot easier but the side effects would be that we would have to make the maps smaller to a certain number of sectors to avoid the game to slow down also we would have to use just sprites for everything (which I don't think it should be bad for it), I'll keep thinking on another solution for this issue, if I come up with something I'll post it here...
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:41:37

RambOrc

That's the point, you don't have to copy over the real buildings from the next map! You can save lots of sectors and textures by implementing only those parts the player can actually see, i.e. if the wall is as high as two stories and the buildings are three stories high plus roof, then for the houses right on the other side of the wall you can make a blank shit for the first two stories or even nothing at all (making the floor start at the second story), and for houses further down the street, even the roof might be enough, and starting with the 4th or 5th or so house it could all just be scrapped, the map can end there with a wall that has no texture on it i.e. you see the skybox... Also, the houses need to be only a single dummy wall, or the rooms inside them don't need to be built. Modern games like DOOM 3 use this kind of cheating too, so why not us? <!-- s;) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" /><!-- s;) -->
Mon, 04 Jul 2005 15:56:41

Firebrand

Yes, I think it can be done like that, also we could combine all the things we said here for different towns or maps too, heh! <!-- s:) --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile" /><!-- s:) -->

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