WIP gears of war Single player lvl

NeoProfZ

Well, at this point I thought I'd go ahead and post some progress shots of the gears level I'm trying to put together. Overall things may be about 1/3 done depending on how you look at it since I find myself going back and forth between the scripting and object placement.

I've managed to discover most of the basic AI functionality, friendly ai's, snipers and turret gunners, music players, etc. etc. though alot of the more arcane elements like checkpoints and objectives still elude me (whoever left the level SP_embry_P.war in the game deserves a medal since thats where I found most of the useful stuff)

Anyway, here are some shots, I also tried to include an overhead view of the layout (theres an office building after the courtyard but its still just a bunch of blocks so I haven't included it yet)

Thaur

I like the first picture best because I start to get the feeling of mystery. I would suggest add some scaled up trees that are much bigger than the other ones for variety and to make it more vertically interesting.

Also are you set on keeping the Grey sky? It may just be a personal preference, but I prefer either beautiful skies or full on raining and thunderstorms. The MP map rooftops has a nice stormy sky that is much more visually pleasing than the plain Grey sky.

I've been trying to figure how to embed youtube runthroughs of my GOW maps but keep having problems. Can't figure out how to resize them without html and youtube has made them too dark so I am having to go back and brighten them. Check out my maps at http://myrm.deviantart.com and let me know if you get the chance to check them out. They have a bit of kismet and other things in them you might find useful.

NeoProfZ

Thanks for the feedback. As for the initial look of it a lot of it is still up in the air. Most of it was me trying to get used to the tileset provided to find the assets I wanted to use. The more I play it the less I like the grey sky, it was honestly more there as a default sky to have a backdrop for. I still haven't put anything down but I'm definately going to put a city-scape in the background to give the feel of being in a city park of some sort. One thing I've had a huge amount of trouble with is getting terrain to work in this version of the UT3 editor. I get really nasty stability issues whenever I apply more than 1 terrain material (literally spent a whole day banging my head against it). I'm definitely eager to see what other people have managed to get the scripting to do as I can't seem to find much in the way of tutorials online for gears anyway. (specifically with regards to advancing checkpoints and respawn locations for the player and friendly AI's)

Mil0

NeoProfZ wrote: »

Most of it was me trying to get used to the tileset provided to find the assets I wanted to use... ...One thing I've had a huge amount of trouble with is getting terrain to work in this version of the UT3 editor. I get really nasty stability issues whenever I apply more than 1 terrain material (literally spent a whole day banging my head against it).

I feel your pain. I don't know if you are aware of this already, but a significant number of stability issues come from having too many different packs of assets/textures open. If you unload a set after browsing it seems to help. Best of luck, it is looking good.

pliang

Just somehow the lighting seems a little darker than it should be...the level itself isn't bad at all.

NeoProfZ

Yeah, admittedly the lighting is just a directional light and skylight to help me get an idea of where shadows will be falling. After I get all the assets in and scripting done I'll do a nice lighting pass to brighten it up and make it look neat.

Thaur

http://theinterlock-gear.blogspot.com/

That guy has a tutorial on getting checkpoints to work.

As for the terrain crashing when you add layers I also had that problem. If I remember correctly the solution was not adding layers via the terrain editor but adding them through the properties box of the terrain. You double click the terrain info actor or the terrain layer setup or one of those such things and there is a menu option to add more layers that way instead of through the terrain editor.

Talbot

It is looking really good so far. I'm just wondering how much time goes into making a map like this. It seems like you would need more than one person to work on it for the development to stay exciting. But keep up the good work and I look forward to see more screenshots!

NeoProfZ

On that note, as you might notice...I could see 2-3 people not stepping on each others toes while building something like this. There's just a lot to be done. For the past week or so I've been doing nothing but scripting so visually the level is unchanged...until now

In all seriousness I just wanted to switch it up a bit and think more about the lighting and assets going into the final look. So, on that note:



Much thanks for posting some of the links to people who've already dared to tread this long and lonely path of gears level building. The checkpoint system in particular was more or less what I thought it would be but its refreshing to see something so well done ahead of time and know your on the right track. I'm figuring this level will be bound for streaming but that's an entirely different issue that I'm not quite willing to tackle until I get a few other things in. For the time being though, I'm going to spend the next week just bringing up the visual fidelity of the whole thing so I at least have something pretty to stare at.