Map Requests

[Morpheus]

That would require someone making a model for a payphone because putting the current Deus Ex phone in there would not look realistic at all. (The phone model is one that is designed to sit horizontally on a desk, it would not magically look like a payphone if it were rotated into a vertical position. It would instead look silly.)

I thought of that, but I thought that would be fine because of the new model needed. I supposed if it looked better, a new model might be better than a flat texture.

Their texture says "WWW", indicating that they should provide Internet access?

I have never noticed that before.

Also thinking the lights, these two: http://img845.imageshack.us/i/shot0001d.png/ and http://img42.imageshack.us/i/shot0002fg.png/

The light on the top should probably be made into a hollow brush with a transparent texture around the outside and putting a light actor in the middle of it, make it look more like a realistic light, maybe have a lightbulb in middle. With other street lights, not sure if a corona would look right though.

[DaveW]

I'm sure the Hangar map can handle a lot more detail, and the 747 desperately needs some textures fixed.

Does anyone know how much work it would be to combine the smaller maps like the Ton, Bar etc. with the larger street map? I have no idea how missionscript etc. works so I'm completely clueless. I know it would also mean expanding the street map to fit in the interiors.

[Morpheus]

Do you mean having 'Ton, Underworld Bar etc... all in NYC streets map instead of a few maps? You could have your main map and import the map ou want to connect to the main map, such as importing the Underworld Bar map into NYC streets map and keeping the brushes seperare from the main map...using a teleporter to teleport the player from the streets to the Underworld Bar. Make the seperate area (like the bar) a zone portal.

I made a custom zoneinfo a long time ago that lets you define the music for that zone and shows startup text when you enter the zone and when in the zone only but music changes when you exit the zone and you can set the startup text to display once or everytime you enter the zone, so you can travel to different zones and have different music and startup text in one map to seperate areas, in this case it would be the Underworld Bar, 'Ton Hotel, Smugglers etc... I'll have to dig up my custom zone...have added more than that to it though. I suppose with keeping every area in a zone, you could set the custom zoneinfo so that each zone has its own mission script too.

I mean like this (pink boxes are zones) and teleporters mean there is two teleporters for each zone, the bar has one for font and back doors, smugglers has two entrances, 'Ton has front door and upper floor window teleporters etc... http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/848/zones.jpg/

[justanotherfan]

My geometry skills haven't atrophied to the point where I can't name polygons when paying attention, but I did forget enough to not be certain about the sides on that real tank truck photo. I'm fairly certain the curved section counts as a face, so it'd be octagonal as well, just not a silly regular octagon.

Phone booths are odd. Maybe it fits some sort of film noir aspect of DX, or maybe physical "phone booths" just weren't as obsolete in 1999. I figured the WWW meant VoIP. For me, stylistically, I'd be happy if that strange granite phonebooth was removed.

Major changes are Revision's job, but there's so much room for creativity and renovation. TNM did lots of detailed maps, any suggestions Jonas? I haven't played through in a long time, but I'm sure people who work with DX would have burning issues with the original maps. I was just looking through screenshots, noticing how angular everything was (tires, doorways (Area51), tanks, pipes), wondering "What was that supposed to be?"

Those teleporters sound awesome, since it's doubtful many interior maps would fit inside their "outdoor" counterparts. Still, maps like the Clinic would be great integrations.

[nerdenstein]

I never really understood the phone booths in Deus Ex. Their texture says "WWW", indicating that they should provide Internet access?

Those textures are a little odd. They fit perfectly into the The Nameless Mod though.

[Morpheus]

I never really understood the phone booths in Deus Ex. Their texture says "WWW", indicating that they should provide Internet access?

Maybe they give network access, same way as a personal computer would, they connect to the Aquanis hub to get online communication?

Had another thought, not sure how complex this might be but it came to me when replaying DX and was in Airfield and noticed how "flat" the skyline texture of the airfield control tower looked. If it doesn't eat up to much resources when playing the maps, could the skyline building textures be replaced with brushes that look like the buildings in the skyline are meant to look like? It would look more realistic though and be easier than trying to make 2D building textures look more realistic, if it doesn't as I said, eat up to much resources when playing.

[DaveW]

Basically I'd like to get rid of the huge loading times between maps - playing with standard textures is fine but when you add the high res textures, the loading times get a bit annoying. For me the loading times are a discouragement to exploration - if I want to go to the free clinic, for example, I have to go through the loading zone so I don't bother etc.

Some maps are going to have to be split up I'd think, like the Paris Nightclub would probably overload the engine if it got mixed with the main map + extra detail. But I'd imagine New York is possible, and maybe the Canal/Street of Hong Kong?

Teleporters could work - I'm not sure how they function ingame though (I have no experience with UEd). There was an interesting portal trick used in Unreal where you could see/walk into another part of the map through an invisible fake wall - but I recall it not working with hitscan weapons (though that was fixed in the fan patch). It screws with the sound, too - and the rendering could screw up so I guess that's not an option.

[Morpheus]

Teleporters could work - I'm not sure how they function ingame though (I have no experience with UEd).

See Tacks tutorial: http://www.planetdeusex.com/tack/LinkingMaps.html near the bottom.

I agree some maps would need to stay split up, but those that would not take too long to load could be set as one map such as Liberty Island and UNATCO HQ maps could be set as one map (except maybe the first mission since you get to go around all of liberty island then and its more detailed than other times you return to the Island and would take longer to load then) the second, third and fourth times you return could be set as one map.

[DaveW]

Teleporters could work - I'm not sure how they function ingame though (I have no experience with UEd).

See Tacks tutorial: http://www.planetdeusex.com/tack/LinkingMaps.html near the bottom.

I agree some maps would need to stay split up, but Liberty Island and UNATCO HQ maps could be set as one map (except maybe the first mission since you get to go around all of liberty island then and its more detailed than other times you return to the Island and would take longer to load then) the second, third and fourth times you return could be set as one map.

That's how the teleporters work at the moment though isn't it? I'm trying to imagine what the transitions between areas would be like if it was all stored in the same map, but in different areas.

Agreed with the later UNATCO maps - with the detail that Liberty Island needs adding to it I think we'd definitely break the engine!

[chris the cynic]

Some possibilities come to mind on the phones, in no particular order.

The first is that they're based on something that actually existed when the game was being made, this is in no way mutually exclusive with the below.

It may be that the dark square is a screen and the phone can in fact connect to the internet (one would guess it uses voice recognition since there's no qwerty keyboard (unless we were to assume that there is such a keyboard somewhere that's hidden, you could fit one one larger than any modern cell phone's keyboard on the underside of the handset.)) Mind you having a screen the size of a cell phone screen when said screen does not, in fact, need to fit in your pocket, makes very little sense.

It could be indicating that the phone is an internet based phone. I have no idea why one would indicate this, but why not? (Actually, since all electronic communications go through Aquinas, all phones in Deus Ex are internet based. The public probably doesn't know that though.)

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I see the conversation has moved on

Does anyone know how much work it would be to combine the smaller maps like the Ton, Bar etc. with the larger street map? I have no idea how missionscript etc. works so I'm completely clueless. I know it would also mean expanding the street map to fit in the interiors.

I cannot say how much work it would be off the top of my head, but I can say that it would completely change the map. There is literally no space for the bar in the street map, so to fit the bar inside would require expanding the the street map by a distance equal to the length of the bar.

I'm not sure if the 'Ton is equally problematic (mostly I know that inside of it you'd need to use warp zones if you wanted to try to turn those closed room doors into op enable room doors without changing the existing map.)

I have no idea about the various complexities and point amounts of these maps, but if you were looking to combine the street map with another map the easiest one would probably be the free clinic. I'm not sure, but I'd guess that by changing the number of twists in the hall or doing something similar (lengthening a segment of hallway perhaps) you could fit it into the street map without trouble.

I've just recently looked at the 747 map, which means that I've finally (at long last) realized why it is a separate map, like so many things in Deus Ex, it's bigger on the inside. Not absurdly bigger, but too large to combine the two. (well, too large to combine the two without making the plane larger or the inside smaller.)

Using warp zones to combine maps would be a bad idea. Warp zones are far from perfect (any carried object will be lost, bullets don't travel through them, stuff like that.) That said, if those two things could be fixed (coders, can they be fixed?) then there really wouldn't be any problem. Or at least there shouldn't be. If there's something glowing or the player is using the flashlight, that would make the seams painfully apparent, but ideally the warp zone would be placed somewhere where that would be very unlikely.

It suddenly occurs to me that given that what is being replaced is a loading screen, maybe things that break immersion somewhat aren't the largest prices to pay. The biggest problem with a warpzone is probably dropping carried items. That could be very annoying. A teleporter doesn't, have that problem (as far as I know) the worst it would do is make the player seem to jump somewhat to one side or another as he or she was teleported from one place to another (probably to the center of the hallway even if you were off to one side), it might be jarring, but not nearly as much as a loading screen

And now I'm going to post even if the conversation has moved on because if I keep on stopping to read the new posts I'll never get anything posted.

[chris the cynic]

Oh, and none of that addresses mission script. No idea what would happen with that.

[Morpheus]

I cannot say how much work it would be off the top of my head, but I can say that it would completely change the map. There is literally no space for the bar in the street map, so to fit the bar inside would require expanding the the street map by a distance equal to the length of the bar.

If you worked with zones the way I said above, it could work, you wouldn't actually attached the area (e.g. the 'Ton area of the map wouldn't actually be in the 'Ton building brush itself, but rather a separate area altogether within the same map, you'd get to it with internal map teleporters. This way you would not have to do any expanding the map like you mentioned.

[Jonas]

My geometry skills haven't atrophied to the point where I can't name polygons when paying attention, but I did forget enough to not be certain about the sides on that real tank truck photo. I'm fairly certain the curved section counts as a face, so it'd be octagonal as well, just not a silly regular octagon.

You linked to a screenshot of an octagonal tanker truck in Deus Ex, and your link was called "hexagon". You've either completely and utterly lost me, or you've lost yourself. Which is it?

Phone booths are odd. Maybe it fits some sort of film noir aspect of DX, or maybe physical "phone booths" just weren't as obsolete in 1999. I figured the WWW meant VoIP. For me, stylistically, I'd be happy if that strange granite phonebooth was removed.

VOIP makes sense.

Major changes are Revision's job, but there's so much room for creativity and renovation. TNM did lots of detailed maps, any suggestions Jonas? I haven't played through in a long time, but I'm sure people who work with DX would have burning issues with the original maps. I was just looking through screenshots, noticing how angular everything was (tires, doorways (Area51), tanks, pipes), wondering "What was that supposed to be?"

Well all of that could be made less angular by upping the common 8-sided cylinders to 24 faces or thereabouts - there are just two potential problems with that: one is that solid geometry cuts BS partitions through other geometry, and a 24-sided cylinder makes a hell of a lot of cuts. If it's something just hanging on the side of a wall, you can make it semi-solid and it won't make any cuts and you should be fine, but for something like the tanker you may have to go solid because semi-solids absolutely cannot intersect each other, and that may create BSP errors anywhere else in the map (CSG is a harsh mistress in that respect).

The other problem is when things need to line up right, such as that ladder on the tanker truck - it's much harder to line something up with a properly round object than it is with an octagonal object, which necessitates intersection, which... creates BSP errors as described above. Point being it's not just a question of what modern computer hardware can handle, it's also very much a question of what the 13-year-old engine can deal with.

I'm sure lots of extra detail could be added to most of the maps without creating significant problems, but many of the maps are probably volatile enough that adding new geometry will just fuck them up completely. The gas station for example has a BSP error right there in the final game we've all played, they put a burned-out car on top of it so you wouldn't see it, probably because it was relatively late in development and they were terrified of messing more with the irregular geometry of the map. The other BSP errors I know of are right outside one of the walls surrounding Vandenburg, and worst of all there's a big ol' fucking invisible wall in one of the tunnels in the Hong Kong Canals level.

In general we focused on functional details in TNM, rather than just ornamentation - sure we had levels like DXO that has so much visual detail crammed into such a small space that accidentally moving the camera in the editor out of the playable space pretty much anywhere in the level will immediately freeze the editor, but most of our levels have details that serve a purpose, generally to add more navigable space, more paths, and more enterable buildings with interesting content. I'm not saying it wouldn't enhance the game to add new geometry to the levels just for decoration, but it's not something I feel strongly about, and TNM does have a shit-load of those ultra-tiled highrises that Dave hates so much

The reasoning there is: they're just the backdrop, so who gives a shit? This isn't a modern AAA shooter where the skybox has to be captivatingly beautiful to conceal the fact that the actual playable level is a narrow corridor.

[Jonas]

Using warp zones to combine maps would be a bad idea. Warp zones are far from perfect (any carried object will be lost, bullets don't travel through them, stuff like that.) That said, if those two things could be fixed (coders, can they be fixed?) then there really wouldn't be any problem.

Both of these things are untrue. I'm not sure where you picked those up? We use warp zones for the voodoo booths in TNM, so...

The only real problems are the seam and some visual glitches in the skybox if it's rendered near a warp zone, and the fact that you may never render two warp zones at the same time, as that will cause them to start rendering each other's destinations instead. This is why the voodoo shop's hub room is laid out the way it is (portal entrances parallel to each other and with enough distance between them that you can't look through any two of them simultaneously).

[Morpheus]

hat's how the teleporters work at the moment though isn't it? I'm trying to imagine what the transitions between areas would be like if it was all stored in the same map, but in different areas.

At the moment, the teleporters take you to two different maps in the same mission where the details in the map have to stay the same such as a dead body when you kill somone or being shot at when you enter the map from last time (like 747 and the airfield maps using telepoters to get between maps), there isn't tow in same map that do what I suggested (not that I am aware though) these are unlike map exits where they are used to completely exit a map and its completely reset if you return to it (like it was when you first enter the map).

I could be wrong on this as I have only used these once, but you don't see much difference when you teleport using an internal teleporter than you would say turning a corner and area looking different. Just the same as using a telepoter to teleport to another map except its faster and you don't see the "loading" text as there is no need to load what is already there.

If I have time tomorrow (or today since its nearly 1am) I'll test my zone idea with NYC streets map and see how it looks.