"Darren New" <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote in message 
news:489b10f2$1@news.povray.org...
> St. wrote:
>> that is. Some of these young guys can produce professional maps in like - 
>> a
>> couple of months or less!)
>
> There's one thing I wondered about game creation.  (Hey, Warp! :-)
>
> How does the planning and design go?  I mean, take a game like Thief or
> Halo or Half Life or something, where there's all kinds of complex 3D
> stuff going on.  It's not like you can whiteboard such a thing very 
> easily.

      True, but it can be done. I mean, I'm pretty sure that Crytek do this, 
and of course some of the mod teams do this too. I didn't with my map, but I 
now know that's a path I could take if I wanted to make a new map. I just 
built my map as I went along, and there is no storyline as such, but you do 
get ten objectives to accomplish, which all work, and some of the map is 
linear, but it really doesn't have to be as you can go over most land to 
complete an objective in a different way.


>
> I'm thinking maybe a group of people get together, think about the
> story, describe stuff that should be in the level,maybe draw a map or
> two, and then hand it to one person to put the whole level together,
> laying it out and all?  Then they go to the talent to produce the sounds
> and voices and all that?

      Well, the way that it's been working in the mod teams at Crymod.com is 
that a group of people will get together that each have their own 
'speciality' if you like. One guy will be really good with flowgraphs, (I'm 
crap lol), and then another guy will be good at modelling, and another guy 
will be good with texturing, and another will be good at storyline/game 
balance, etc. And if they're *really* lucky, they might just have a guy 
that's good at programming either C, or Lua, or both.


>
> Basically, how do you get from "next in the story, we have the secret
> lab level" to "here's the 3D mesh for the level"?

     If you're not making a mod, (where you introduce new elements, models, 
whatever), then it's basically all there for you in the editor, so it's then 
just a normal bog standard map and not a mod. So really, it's as I explained 
above. But, I don't think there's anything stopping me adding a new model to 
my map, and still call it a map other than a mod.

    See the attached top_down image. The big blue bounding boxes are called 
AINavigationModifiers, and as far as I know, they don't interfere with 
anything other than the white paths that you can see in the middle of them. 
You use these paths to give your helicopters and boats a path to follow. 
(There's a wedge shaped box to the right for my only boat). You can put both 
a heli and a boat in one AINavMod if you want and as many as you want.  The 
red lines are 'ForbiddenAreas' - an AI won't go in that, you use it to stop 
them climbing over objects, and the yellow lines are 'ForbiddenBoundaries' - 
the AI won't walk out of it. The light blue lines are land vehicle paths. I 
don't know how you programming guys do this, but to me, I've got more than 
enough respect for those that do.

     There are *many* other things that this image just doesn't show, but 
the attached screen2_pub shows just how beautiful Crysis can be, (and this 
is crap compared to what some of the youngsters can do! Lol!)  :)

     The only problem with my map at the moment is that I've got a nuke 
going off right at the start of the game, and I don't know how to fix that 
yet. It's really the ending of the map! (But it still works at the end too).

   I'd love somebody from here to test my map, but I don't think anyone here 
plays Crysis.  :o/


     ~Steve~


>
> -- 
> Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
>  Ever notice how people in a zombie movie never already know how to
>  kill zombies? Ask 100 random people in America how to kill someone
>  who has reanimated from the dead in a secret viral weapons lab,
>  and how many do you think already know you need a head-shot?

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