Off Topic Productions

Okay folks, yet again I've cut down the Downtown map. It really sucks to have to do it, but we need a stable map.

I've cut out the large canal as well as that row of mostly non-gameplay related buildings. I'm not quite done yet; theres some overlapping brushes around the Noobs area, but I'm sick of working on it right now.

If anyone wants to check it out (ie: Jonas ), and maybe tweak a few things before I come around tomorrow, it's here:

http://www.thenamelessmod.com/teamftp/t ... own_V3.rar

(Didn't want to SVN it until it was actually ready)

fine by me.

I'll be around on the weekend...

Everything's underwater

That's just the usual waterzone error. Shouldn't be that hard to fix.

I'll take a look at it when I get home.

We just fixed the rain in that river . But yeah reducing the size of that map is definately a good move.

The rain in the river is still fixed

that guy wrote:We just fixed the rain in that river . But yeah reducing the size of that map is definately a good move.

You're... not really keeping up with this project, are you?

We fixed the rain while reducing the size of the map. The water zone problem was fixed a week ago.

I thought the river had been cut altogether. Looking at the map I can see its still there.

Behold! The following four images I call interest density maps. The first image is a birds eye view of the map. The second, the map with pawns highlighted. In the third, all the triggers are highlighted. In the fourth all inventory items are highlighted.

Ideally you dont want any areas with no interest and you dont want any dead ends with no interest.

As an example there is a section of map in the bottom right with nothing in it which should probably be removed.

What the hell, it looks like there's an inventory item floating outside the game area at the top of the map

This is really cool, Shane, the only weakness of your system I can think of is that it may not include containers with inventory items in them - does it? If not, one way to fix that would be to write a function that destroys all containers that you can use before you highlight inventory items.

I don't really want to remove every part of the map that has nothing. The area in the lower right that you pointed out as empty serves as eye-candy of nothing else, and adds a bit to the plausibility of the level structure as a city wherein people live. It might be an idea to add something there though, maybe a hidden item or a wandering civilian.

All in all, I think we have a pretty good interest density. Please don't make a similar map of the Corporate sector, I suspect that would be depressing, since Corporate is a hub to a far greater degree than Downtown is.

Ooh I just noticed the girl who's supposed to comment on the lack of public transportation is missing from the bus stop. I should re-add her!

The problem with eye candy geometry is that its only really good once which is frustrating for the player if it makes his journey longer more than once. This doesn't apply to that area in the bottom right but there are significant stretches with nothing in them

Doesn't look so bad to me.

Also you're not accounting for patrolling pawns, like the firewalls. Anyway, I'm pretty pleased with the way the map looks now

No I'm not though theres still no reason to enter an area just because an irrelevant pawn goes there sometimes. But if we're happy then cool.

Yes there is because most of the areas that are still empty (most of which are no larger than a single default-sized room, btw) are between relevant areas. Now, we could theoretically remove all parts of the map that didn't feature anything of relevance, but then we'd end up with 10 buildings piled right next to each other with no space between them.

I'd love it if we had technology like Grand Theft Auto to back up our city with believable traffic and realistically responsive pedestrians, but I guess we'll just have to make do with empty streets like Deus Ex.

I remind you we're modding a game where pretty much every map had a set of completely irrelevant run-of-the-mill empty toilets, simply because in real life, all buildings have toilets. I'm not saying we need to fill our levels with 40% uninteresting empty space - I definitely agree the higher interest density we have, the better, but right now, you're overthinking it. There will always be empty space, and there will always be irrelevant areas of a map. Downtown was originally modelled on Hong Kong which, though filled with a lot of nice details, had even more empty space than our Downtown map has after the nerf.

I'm happy with it. You can disagree with me if you like, but the map isn't changing again.