A little more about my level design

Okay, so life strikes down another post in its prime.  I had a fairly busy weekend with little time to play in front of my monitor.  So the programming I was hoping to have done will likely wait until the next post at the end of the week.  As modeling goes, you can see the lack of pictures, so nothing major happened in that department either this weekend.  What I did do is pick up a few tips about level design.  Of course their was for a humanoid walking in an Action/Adventure or RPG style game and I am looking to make a multiplexer FPS, it did give some good tips.

The biggest tip it gave was to block out the scene before adding little decorative bits.  While another plan it to make all the little decorative bits then compile them into a level, I think this blocking out and seeing what needs to be made system works best for a single person project.  Once I finish blocking the entire level out, I will include a list of buildings I need on the "3d Modeling" page.  The map is going to be very varied in terms of terrain from city to small forest.  My hope is to keep a large number of the buildings fairly generic in structure, for example only use six or eight generic buildings in the city-scape in addition to the few unique pieces.  Then closer to release, create several additional textures for each building to vary them.

Now, onto more game background.  I needed to pick a unit to work in and normally it would be meters, but they have the same problem as yards.  Both work well under certain applications, but to keep fairly whole numbers, which is my goal for the moment, feet work better.  The map I am working on will be a 1000 foot square.  I divided the map into 9 regions (4 300-by-300 regions at the corners, 4 300-by-400 regions at the edges and a 400-by-400 region in the middle)and then decided what generally I want to add where.  The northwest will be more sparse with more trees and larger houses while the southeast will be a suburban zone.  This leaves a central band which I want to make more built up like a city.

So I started laying out the building for my city when I realized while the main avenues are twenty feet across, I was adding alleys between buildings which were narrower.  This could pose a possible problem if some tanks are larger than the alleyway (giving some tanks an advantage over others) or worse all tanks were wider since that would reduce the playable area (these alleys are similar to capillaries in the human body, while they do not take up much space, because of the amount of them, they provide a significant surface area).  Luckily most alleys should be about 15 foot across (I am assuming in buildings I mark as 30 by 30 for example will omly be 20 by 20, but will include the sidewalk in front, dumpster on the side and anything else in the five foot buffer area around) and most tanks should be under 12 foot wide.  I was doing some background work finding dimensions of large vehicles like SUVs as well as tanks.  I found a small tank is slightly larger than a large SUV, so my smallest tank will likely be about the size of a large SUV.  Width is likely eight to twelve feet, height is seven to nine feet, and length is the big variable at between eighteen and twenty-five feet.  None of these are set in stone, but the level I am working on now is being designed wit the upper values listed in mind.

While not really much to talk about, I hope this gives some insight into my thought of what are going into the level and tank design.  Hopefully more concrete progress in the next post,

~gunnah