Reality Factory

How can you make a realistic city level?

good question!

depends a lot on what kind of game you want to make
separate the city into several levels, restrict the areas the player can visit, also the inside of buildings (if they are needed) should be separate levels...

Yes breaking a city into smaller levels is the way to go, like the way GTA3 did things, RF can handle Incredibly huge levels, something in the editors doesn't however.

when you start getting beyond a certain point the editors become glitchy, so a big chunk of level should be seperated by a hill, a tunnel, a bridge etc,

this way you can have seemingly huge world, but broken into seperate maps. and by using the bridge technique displayed in GTA making the transistion is realtivly simple for mapping and controlling access to how the player jumps over to certain parts of the map, this is displayed similar in HL as well, but they used corridor's and doors.

i suggest building the terrain first, then going into higher detail at the end.
also, use gensurf for mountain terrain.

i have 2 games done that i never got around to releasing using RF:

- cold war crisis, and
- zombi city

cwc is a 3rd person example of a larger outdoor environment and zombi city is a resident evil ripoff in a large outdoor city environment...

what i did with zombi city is create a terrain with nem's terrain generator and then mapped out where i wanted the buildings to be - where the buildings are i added solid brushes to replace the terrain chunks...worked pretty well.

i didnt' get either game to the performance that i wanted from them but the main reason for this was due to me not optimizing texture sizes completely - for the world textures as well as actor & weapon textures...but i'll try to zip up the resources that each game used for the community to check out...they will be useful as examples, if not as fun games ;}

zombi city is a resident evil ripoff

Admiting it is the first step...

I hate how the editor gets all slow and impossible to work with when I am trying to move things around. Especially when I make something large.

Any way we can fix that error?

BTW, when can we download CWC and Zombi City? I want to sample your work, gekido!

If it's fun (I don't see how it wouldn't be except for hardware issues with me) then nothing much else matters. So long as my comp isn't *#$%ed up afterwards.

Gekido , that would be great, I was hoping you would put zombi city up for the community, I really want to look at that,
thanks

i have no idea how big it will be, but it definitely gives a good idea of how to start planning a city level at least

will try to get the resources organized this weekend.

hate how the editor gets all slow and impossible to work with when I am trying to move things around. Especially when I make something large.

YES, you can group parts of the and turn them on or off this speeds up the editor heaps!, just select the brushes you want to be in the group then on the lefthand side there is a button called assing new group ....or something along those lines, then down the bottom there is a box which you can choose whether to display the group or not.

hate how the editor gets all slow and impossible to work with when I am trying to move things around. Especially when I make something large.

YES, you can group parts of the and turn them on or off this speeds up the editor heaps!, just select the brushes you want to be in the group then on the lefthand side there is a button called assing new group ....or something along those lines, then down the bottom there is a box which you can choose whether to display the group or not.

You musta had a glich you posted the samething twice!

i have a building with windose in it, but i wanted the building to load up as a different level to keep the frps up high, i want to be able to look into the window and see inside but i cant if it is a seperate level, is there away around this?

No.

You could load it as a new level if you wanted but that is ridiculous, because levels aren't 'cached' and so if you were to go outside of the house the outside would be fully reloaded with all the the other things used for it(actors, bitmaps and so on). Also all the scripts are restarted and it will take you forever to ajust the scripts and player attributes that hold, for example, the positions of the pawns. And just think what would happen if the player forgot something and has to go inside the house again...loading screen, loading screen, and loading screen again. If something really cuts down atmosphere it is a loading screen. The player wants to play, not to read books(everytime i get a loading screen in a game, i decide to read a bit further )

But you can use for example area brushes. First you have to delete all windows, so that the house is 'sealed'. Make the door a model, animate it and then make it an area brush in the brush properties. Then when you're inside the game doesn't render whats outside and vice versa.

Another way to go is making the inside of the room a seperate room outside of the level in which you teleport the player once he reaches the door. This is, i think, the best way, because in the time the player opens the 'area-door' the frame rate goes down unitl it's closed again.

Anyways, if you want the fps go up you have to delete the windows, because if i am not mistaken, the fps slow down is caused BY looking into the house, so it would do NOTHING if it was possible to look 'into another level'.