Map Requests

[DaveW]

If we are going to be doing that kind of thing I very much recommend that one be made for the payphone. A texture on a rectangular box simply doesn't look that much like a payphone.

I also feel like it might be a good idea to do the jet engines as models rather than geometry because really good looking jet engines would, I think, go a long way towards making the 747 look like an actual plane. (Plus, the jet engine is cylindrical, so the collision thing would probably not be a problem.)

I have to resist the urge to say we should make everything high quality models ("But the coffee makers could look so nice." "Shut up.")

Yeah, the payphone is one of the things I want to do. I've got various lights, then the bench - maybe another bench in Battery Park (they're some weird style, I'm not sure if it's worth it though), and a large concrete barrier since that's used all over the New York maps.

Smaller things would be nice too, but I feel like we'd be trying to polish a bit too much.

[nerdenstein]

...we have a coffee maker model?

... I'm sure you guys had a coffee maker model...
Maybe not.


@Dave. Polish the game too much?!
Nonsense.

[Jonas]

... I'm sure you guys had a coffee maker model...
Maybe not.

We had a very nice coffee maker, but I think ZeroPresence made that out of CSG, the crazy bastard.

So uh what are you planning to do about collisions, Dave? You're gonna use invisible brushes for all of these or what? I guess the lamp post will be all right, it's an upright cylinder anyway, but the bench is going to be a problem, especially if there's any benches in the game that have items lying around on them.

Oh and Chris: it's not enough that an object be cylindrical, with reference to your jet engine idea. The cylinder has to be upright - you can't rotate the collision cylinder in the Unreal engine, and yes that is precisely as big a problem as you might imagine.

[DaveW]

Well, I'm guessing at invisible brushes for the benches - since it's just us using them, it's not too much of a problem. Hopefully if we make them far enough away from the model it'll avoid the disappearing model issue.

I think what causes the disappearing models is where the character's collision hull touches the mesh, which is why if you go to the lion statue in TNM's first area and walk into it, as much as you try it will not disappear. Walk right up against a nearby tree, and it vanishes. So as long as we keep the collision far away from the model, we should be fine.

If stuff lying on benches becomes an issue maybe we can just throw the items on the floor or something.

[nerdenstein]

If stuff lying on benches becomes an issue maybe we can just throw the items on the floor or something.

Or change the items physics to 'None'. Then it'll just float there. We line it up so it looks like it's actually sat on the bench and voila.

[Jonas]

Or change the items physics to 'None'. Then it'll just float there. We line it up so it looks like it's actually sat on the bench and voila.

Well you can't place them inside another collision cylinder, then the player wouldn't be able to ever pick them up.

[DaveW]

I just started playing Deus Ex for the PS2, I had it lying around from where I bought it ages ago but never got it to work. I finally got a reasonable setup with my 360 controller and damn, some of the new levels are cool. Some of the improvements they made to maps like Battery Park are awesome.

[chris the cynic]

Oh and Chris: it's not enough that an object be cylindrical, with reference to your jet engine idea. The cylinder has to be upright - you can't rotate the collision cylinder in the Unreal engine, and yes that is precisely as big a problem as you might imagine.

But that's ... ugh.

In that case I guess I advocate for invisible brushes.

[DaveW]

Oh and Chris: it's not enough that an object be cylindrical, with reference to your jet engine idea. The cylinder has to be upright - you can't rotate the collision cylinder in the Unreal engine, and yes that is precisely as big a problem as you might imagine.

But that's ... ugh.

Welcome to Unreal Engine 1.

Not that that specific limitation means much to us, since we can could get around it by rotating the model 90°, compiling it, then rotating it back 90° in the editor I'd imagine. I'm not so sure about doing the 747 engine anyway, though - mostly because no matter what we do (aside from re-modelling the whole damn thing), that level is going to look like shit.

[chris the cynic]

I can be somewhat slow sometimes.

I noticed that looking out of the windows of Versalife you see Tonnochi Road, which is an important thing to know because it means that I have to make sure to make the same changes to the Versalife map that I make to the Tonnochi Road map otherwise the two will not look the same. With this came the thought that maybe it would be a good idea to have it so you could see the Versalife windows from Tonnochi road. So I loaded up Tonnochi road, looked int that direction, saw the building there, and started to think about where the window would go on that building.

If right now you're thinking, "Wait. Isn't there a canal between the two?" then you're a quicker thinker than I am.

The canal itself isn't the problem. In fact, if you look out the window from Versalife you see a copy of the canal map (with Tonnochi Road beyond it.) The canal itself isn't actually in it (the map's defense, for the most part you can't see down that far) but the buildings surrounding it are. As near as I can tell there's only one major difference between the buildings you see from Versalife and the buildings in the canal map: The building in front of Tonnochi Road. It is much shorter in the Versalife map.

In both the Tonnochi Road map itself and the canal map it looks like the added height of that building was a last minute sort of thing. I'm not sure why they decided to make it taller in those maps. It might have something to do with one of the ledges in the Tonnochi road map which goes right to the edge of the map significantly above where the original building end. (The original height of the building was only somewhat taller than the billboard.) Or, it could have to do with not wanting to have to the canal and street maps so that you could see parts of one from the other. (About a quarter of the points in the Versalife map are from the reproduced parts of the canal and Tonnochi Road.)

Whatever the reasons behind it, as it stands the building in question is in three different maps where it is three different heights. Maybe we want to ignore this fact and leave the varying heights of the building as they are, we certainly can't introduce consistency into Deus Ex maps as whole without changing the gameplay* (among other things the outsides never match the insides.) If we do want to make it consistent then we'd probably want to do it by knocking down the height of the building to it's original height (by removing the additions in the Street and Canal maps.) The reason for this is that the higher versions of the building would block the view from Versalife.

I was going to post screenshots illustrating what I'm talking about, but for some reason they didn't come out.

-

* There's also a question of whether or not people would really want to play such a thing. Consider the complaints about the size of TNM maps. There's a reason that the canal map isn't large enough to fit around the street and market maps the way it theoretically should. I'd probably play Life Sized Deus Ex, or at least give it a shot, but I'm strange.

[chris the cynic]

I was originally going to include this as a sidenote in the previous post, but I was worried it would get lost.

The Versalife map has in it a copy of the exterior portion of the Tonnochi Road map, which allows for a certain amount of comparison and discovery. For the most part there's not a lot to see there but one thing that it does provide insight into is gap called Street_1 in the Hong Kong Fixes file. It is not a bug. It's a hold over. A hold over from what I can't really say, but the alley is pathed all the way to the other side of the buildings it cuts between. Either there was a plan to have a larger Hong Kong Street Map, or that alley was supposed to be a map exit.

In the street map only a portion of the path remains (ending at the wall that prevents the alley from leading anywhere) and I don't think it accomplishes much of anything (yes, the pathing should allow the AI to go in there, but why would they want to?)

So for anyone who was wondering, that alley was supposed to lead somewhere at some point. Obviously it is no longer. Also a different texture was in use on the left side of it.

[DaveW]

I did notice that they patched the gap up in the PS2 version, so I don't think they really meant to leave it there.

On the changes to the street that you can see from Versalife, I don't think anything we're doing would really notice from such a distance. But it took me a while to 'get' where the Versalife building was, too.

[chris the cynic]

The weird thing is that, apart for the usual Tardis like quality of the Deus Ex maps, where the Versalife building is in relationship to everything else should be completely straight forward, they just stuck a massive building in the way from two out of three angles. Way to take something that should be 100% clear and make it confusing, Deus Ex devs.

[DaveW]

Ah, I think I see what you mean. Something I liked that they did in the PS2 version was throw a big Versalife logo on the side of the building in the Market level (you can't see it from the Canal/Street levels).

The Versalife building in the Canal map doesn't really make a lot of sense. It seems about the right height, but it has ledges on the side facing Tonnochi road, which obviously the Versalife interior map doesn't. Not that I think it's particularly important though (it's not something you see, after all).

[nerdenstein]

Chris, seeing as you're doing Hong Kong, I few bugs I noticed:

- The Neon lights on the columns at the side of the news stand in the market.
- And the 'Drink More, Think Less' Billboard behind it. Both are misaligned.
- Could the tyres on the Boat where you can buy the weapon mods be made to look a little more... tyre like?
- On the same boat, the wooden paneling on the roof could be a little better aligned. Picky I know, Sorry.
- I'm assuming this is the same grating issue that Dave pointed out a while ago. I think he said he could fix it in the textures rather than in the maps but I'm just making sure:

Uploaded with ImageShack.us
- I think this is the back of Maggies secret door. Once again, I think I'm just being overly picky though so feel free to ignore me.

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Also, Seeing as you're doing that, I actually fixed up some misalignments in Tongs Lab and Versalife Level 2. Want me to stick them up on the GoogleCode thingy? Instead of me just listing them.

I'm playing around with UNATCOHQ and decided to add a corridor to the Med Centre. Not sure what to think of it though. Thoughts?
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/84 ... ededi.png/

EDIT: Actually, those three ineditor pictures of the MedCentre aren't very clear. I must have clicked the wrong resolution without thinking.