Stay tuned!

Also watch for a preview of mp_ice_station_zebra out soon.
This map will be made for both COD4 and COD:WaW.

-Frittz

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I'm writing this under the shade of several myrica rubra trees on a wooden bench near downtown Hamamatsu. The name of the trees really doesn't mean much to me, but it's worth noting, as it's posted on a sign tied to one of the trunks.

Walking is my main form of exercise, and I do it a lot. Most of the time, there's a reason behind the activity--the need to get to work, the desire for a sandwich, the instinctual urge to avoid getting smashed by a car--but I try to walk as often as I can for the sake of walking alone. You can't sit at your computer all day. Someone said that once. Most likely an older relative.

Today, while exploring a part of the town I hadn't seen yet, I came across a wide road, much wider than most others in the area, with a center lane bordered by trees, benches every few meters and a small, landscaped stream on one side. The path itself was even a different color from the rest of the road, comprised of square brown tiles in contrast to the street's black rectangles. As I walked past the entrance to this path, all these elements that set it apart from its surroundings drew me in, and I abruptly took a left to see where it would lead me.

Walking down this path, with cars driving along both sides, all feelings of uneasiness one would typically feel while walking between cars were eliminated by the design of the street. Strolling down the middle of the around, I felt perfectly safe.

As I walked, I thought back to a presentation given by a level designer, who had discussed a few tactics for designing open-ended areas in which users feel free to explore, but don't get lost or confused to the point of frustration. He spoke very highly of archways--apparently, if a player spots a circular passage off in the distance, that becomes the player's goal, and no matter how unreachable it may seem, it will be assumed that the player must pass through it to continue.

The street I'm on doesn't have an archway at its entrance, but a couple well-placed stones, carved and polished to look less threatening than those found in nature, with Kanji engravings on the sides facing the street. Now, in the year I've lived here, I haven't bothered to learn much in the way of Kanji, but I can probably assume they say something to the effect of "No cars," or perhaps the name of the street or neighborhood. Nevertheless, they serve as the first promise that pedestrians will be safe on this path. Add to that the benches, the trees, the varying floor pattern and the stream running the entire length of the path, and you've got an unspoken guarantee that not only is this a safe place to walk, it's the best place to walk. You'd be crazy to make any other choice.

Now for the trees providing relief from the unbearable July sun: myrica rubra. I don't really care to know the name of the plants around me, and I doubt many people do. But the fact that someone put the effort into placing signs on these trees adds another element of assurance to the experience of this path. Aside from those issuing warnings in dangerous situations, signs prove that people are meant to be in the area. After all, someone must have been there to post the sign in the first place.

Signs play an important role in the direction many adventure and role-playing games take. The mere presence of a sign, regardless of its message, tells a player they're not completely lost, as the level designer must have anticipated that someone would end up there.

As I wrote this, a couple families played in the stream running along the side of the path for about half an hour, safe from the traffic around them. As it's been said countless times, good design should be as transparent as it is effective, and I'm sure the kids felt just as safe amidst the surrounding cars as they would have felt in a field somewhere, if not safer.

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Out soon...

-Frittz

Check out the new site about Realtime-Raytracing by Daniel "Elchtest" Pohl, who works for Intel:

http://www.qwrt.de/

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-Frittz

It was a weird feeling having something you think was solid and have it taken apart. The good I can take from this is that I could let it be taken apart. Broken down and commented on. I would have gained a lot less if i defended my ideas tooth and nail. The more we talked the better i could understand what I should be looking at. I have done graphic design work for clients and I guess that's how I got some of my skills at taking creative criticism.

You can try it here...

208.43.83.225:28930 907th Private Beta Server

pw: ccnew

All game types, helicopter, minimap and airstrike work.
Many more fixes in the pipe.
Spetsnaz vs. SAS will not work properly without
the updated _teams.gsc included with the zip.

-Frittz

The interesting thing about Crysis is its open world yet liner design. By that I mean you are free come at enemy's and objectives from many different positions and explore the world around you but you are still always kept on track and never get too far away from the mission objective. Early in the game I came across a beach resort that the KPA where using as a base of operations and it needed to be taken out. As i started to get close I could have ran off the road and into the sea to start the assault from behind or continue down and head in the front door.

Once you have decided which position you want to approach from you can run in guns blazing or play it like a stealth game. Take out a few guys quickly and then jump back into stealth mode before the rest see you. Its one of the few games where the AI is good enough to let you do this, you can run between walls and box's and they wont know you are their unless they make eye contact. Which can not be said for all games.

One of the most important things about a level is that everything looks natural to its world and theme and yet still has interesting gameplay situations. Some large rocks at the side of the road on a bank look perfectly natural but are also a nice advantage point to ambush the patrol making its way down the road towards you.

You could talk for a long time about the finer points of Crysis but its points like the one above that made Crysis/Warhead one of the best shooters I have ever played.

In both cases I have a central idea, a theme, that I'm aiming for and will come up with a general outline of the desired structure. Once I get started with the actual creation I work in an organic and iterative manner. I'll get the broad strokes of characters, and areas down first and build a complete work in very rough form. Then I'll go back and refine each element.

Often I'll find a character is acting inconsistently, or an area doesn't fit in a functional or aesthetic sense. In those cases usually the character or the area will tend to tell me how they want to develop, I'll let it grow accordingly, adjust the original structure to fit. If the new direction is powerful enough sometimes even the theme itself will change.

Over time I keep refining and adding more detail, adjusting the overall structure to compensate for new discoveries about how a character or an area is developing.

Even though I'm working on a vanilla deathmatch level it's interesting to see how I go about building a narrative into the environment in terms of architecture and texturing and how willing I am to allow the emerging shape of the level guide subsequent iterations. The overall layout of the level is similar to the original concept but a number of areas have changed dramatically as certain initital assumptions have been proved incorrect. I've scrapped entire areas because they simply weren't adding anything to the level, in the same way that I've had to rewrite entire scenes because they didn't make sense given the way the characters had developing since my original outline

At some point the level and the short story, take on a life of their own and I have to let that happen or they just fall apart.

It's fascinating to see how much I let the work itself influence future iterations; how subsequent iterations can see the finished form emerge in a way I didn't expect but that always seems to work better. No matter how attached I might be to a line of dialogue, a specific scene, or a specific area if they don't fit they don't fit and I have to cut them. Almost always the work is better for having made that sacrifice.

I'm sure my personal biases have some bearing on how I work, still it's strange to consider how closely the processes of two superficially dissimilar mediums match up.

Addendum: I've been considering including more of these style of posts, ones focused directly on things I'm currently working on and the processes I go through with each one. I don't know if I want to turn this into a progress diary, I'm not sure how interesting that really is to anybody besides myself. At the same time I do feel it's about time I validated my claim that I'm a Programmer, Designer and Writer.

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http://www.lux3d.com/mp_ccnew_v1.2.zip

And on this server...

208.43.83.225:28960 Custom Maps! 907th COD 4 Server

Password: ccnew

Again a great big thanks to all those who have helped and the 907th for their continued encouragement. >S<

Hammer is a world editor for the source engine, created by Valve corporation for Half-Life 2. Subsequently, many previous mods of the old modded quake engine(hl1) have been ported over to source. All these mods have since been turned into official games, and the developers then employed into Valve.

The Hammer world editor has been gradually re-defined and improved since HL2's release back in 2004, and a major update has come with the recent release of the Orange Box (TF2, HL2: EP2, Portal).

In terms of user-friendliness, hammer is quite an easy program to use. It's interface is simple, a basic map can be achieved through a very basic understanding of the editor, Unlike many other world editors(UT3 Editor I'm looking at you >:l ).

Hammer is described as a WYSIWYG editor, meaning What You See Is What You Get. While this isn't exactly true, (lighting cannot be previewed to it's exact conditions) the image in hammer is very similar to the image in-game, in terms of objects and world geometry.

Hammer uses the ".vmf" file extension (Valve Map file). However, the truth of the matter is that this file, is actually just a text file. It contains all the information on every single piece of geometry, entities, etc. Hammer simply interprets this code into a visible 3D form, for us to edit freely with ease. This is a good thing, because making a level simple out of coding is simply too complicated and time-consuming, considering even the most basic looking map's vmf file will be 50-100 pages long in a text editor. The vmf file of the map shown below in the screenshot opened in a text editor would probably be within the range of 500-100 pages or more.

Hammer is based on what is known as "additive" geometry. This means that the world space is like a infinite void, you could consider this as negative space. World brushes are the basic building blocks, they are like the foundations.( Roofs, floors, wall, etc.) World brush space could be considered as positive space, meaning that the dimensions of a world brush is solid. (Just a note: We will not always refer to positive and negative space)There are a few "laws" we must follow when we are making a map. First of all, we must understand the concept of leaks. Consider this analogy; just imagine that the level is like a submarine, and the water surrounding it is the void. We must make sure the submarine is sealed, so that or submarine will work properly. So all our world brushes must form a sealed barrier against this void, otherwise our map will not function properly. There are various reasons why this is, it has to do with how the engine itself was coded. Because of this "law", our map is transformed into a series of "rooms", which, through the many tools we have available to the source engine, will be transformed to look like a realistic world space.

There are a few more brush "laws" that we must know - they are smaller, more simpler laws that apply to the geometry of brushes themselves. Firstly, we need to know the measurements in hammer ( and indeed of the game) is this: 1 real world inch = 1 unit. There are a list of basic measurements which serve as a guideline for making correctly proportional game geometry with reference to the player. ( EG. door heights, window heights, etc. )

One "law" is that you cannot have a brush's dimensions less than 1 unit cubed. So, you cannot have a brush that is 0.3 of a unit long. It will create a "microbrush" error and your map may cease to work properly. Brush lengths are usually whole numbers, eg 32 units long/wide/high. This keeps things very simple, however, strictly speaking it is possible to have non-whole numbers as brush dimensions ( eg 64.2 units long). This can lead to errors and later problems, so we keep dimensions to whole numbers.

Now this may all seem confusing..but don't worry! Hammer makes it easy for us to create world geometry. Maps in hammer are made easier to make by use of a grid. The grid can be set by the user to show lines depicting various scales of units. This makes it easy to plan things on a grid, using a scale which is appropriate. Hammer makes things even easier by use of the "Snap to Grid" feature. This will automatically snap objects and world brushes to the lines on the grid- helping us make maps easier. So with this we don't need to worry about brushes having funny  decimal dimensions, everything is nicely organized so we have a sort of "lego block" style approach were all the pieces fit together nicely.

There is a process in which a map has to take to become playable in a game. The vmf file goes through a process called compiling. This transforms that txt file of ours into a .bsp file, which then can be loaded by the game engine. One thing to note is that ; while bsp files can be in the order of tens of megabytes, vmf files, only being txt files are in the order of a few hundred kilobytes. Compiling is in three stages:

• VBSP

VBSP deals with the entity side of the map, the things which make it playable. Eg. Player spawns, NPC's, physics objects, anything that is placed with the entity tool inside hammer. It deals with the Input/Output system which is the communication between entities.

• VVIS

VVIS is more of a complex process. For a map to be optimized for enjoyable play, a map must undergo VVIS to calculate what parts of the level to "draw" at what times, so that the whole level is not being drawn at once, without it needing to be.

• VRAD

VRAD deals with the lighting of a map. Environmental, point and omni lights are calculated and they give the world depth through tones and shadows. This is possibly the most complex process, as it usually takes the longest.

Maps, depending on how well they are made and what type of level it is, may take a very short time to compile to a very long time. Level designers will try to optimize the level as much as they can through the editor, using various tools to guide the compile process compile the level effectively.

So that's a very brief, disjointed post about the basic concepts involved with Hammer, and what needs to happen for a map in the editor to become a playable level in the game. There is so much more to making levels, a whole entire wiki is dedicated to it to aid modders and level designers.

In cinema everything exists within the confines of the frame, it is "truth 24 frames per second". This is at once both liberating and restrictive. Extraneous information can be edited out, but vital information can also be obscured. Tension is inherent in this ability to reveal and obscure vital information over time, this fine line between freedom and restriction.

If cinema is a sequence of images over time, then games are a sequence of spaces over time. The boundaries of games are not defined by the viewpoint of the camera so much as by the physical or logical boundaries of the space in which the action occurs.

When it comes to evoking drama and tension in both a narrative and ludological sense, the ability to not reveal everything at once is vital. When we are able to achieve that we gain the support of the most impressive of human faculties, imagination. It fills in the blanks, the events beyond the frames of the film, or the world beyond and between, the spaces of the game world.

Nowhere is this application of tension more important than in the humble doorway. A close door is pregnant with possibilities. Beyond may be something beneficial or something harmful, something disturbing or something wondrous. We can imagine what is beyond but we never know until we actually pass through the doorway. Standing there we feel a sense of anticipation. The space beyond the door is unknown, and therefore liable to provoke fear. However soon that space will be known all we have to do is cross the threshold. There is a battle waging within us between fear and excitement. There is tension.

At the heart of tension there is this dichotomy between fear and excitement. We naturally fear the unknown, but the potential of conquering that unknown, of gaining new knowledge and new experiences is exciting.

The levels, environments, of a game are a manifestation of interactivity. We take an action and elicit a response within that environment, even if it is as simple as taking a step forward. Faced with a closed doorway that ability to interact with the world in a direct manner is of profound importance. With one simple action we can dispel the unknown and conquer our fear.

Closed doorways provided tension because they often require that you open them in order to proceed. There is no choice, if you do no open the doorway you cannot proceed. So is choice in opposition to tension?

Consider an open space, a hub like layout. Open spaces are provoke apprehension as they provide choices. The greater the number of possible directions we can take more we fear choosing a specific one, we may miss something. Our ability to make choices is exciting, reinforces our agency and thus our understanding of what is possible within the world. It is also frightening as it forces a decision upon us, it is rife with the potential to make the "wrong" selection, either in terms of missing some narrative element or of choosing a sub-optimal strategy.

Good level design requires an understanding of the balance between the known and the unknown, the actual and the possible. An ability to provide the player with just enough information to be both excited and fearful; to know what do do if not always how; to promote tension and uncertainty. The levels of a game are where the core gameplay occurs, where player choices take form, where player intent becomes character action. Good gameplay, like good drama, requires uncertainty, tension. Good level design is as much about the space the player does not inhabit as the space they do. Tension exists in these void spaces, these undefined spaces.

Ras....

http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/62257

 
Cya later....

Ras

First and foremost I've got to thank you viewers for keeping my blog afloat the last nine weeks with little posting on my part.  Much appreciated, yet I'm sorry, as the last school term had me on my toes!  Secondly, I do have a handful of updates to share with you all covering my time in Game Design Process.  I've got a few great CERN updates and a painting I've been toying with during my seven day break.  New term starts Wednesday so lets get the ball rolling again, huh?

In Game Design we were introduced to the Unreal 2 and 3 engines, and it was my first experience with level design.  Initially it was pretty overwhelming, but I feel I've managed to get a great handle on some basic content.  UnrealED 3 is the newest, and it has produced some awesome games; Bioshock and Gears of War just to name a few.  I depended entirely on included resources from the Unreal Tournement 3 collectors edition.

Here's a little level I put together - and a little extra...

A separate assignment on terrain basics...

This here Logan painting is something I've been working on this week - originating from an anatomy study.  Hope to work up to a full body sometime...

LASTLY, some CERN updates.  This topic is becoming a sort of spectacle as 'time' goes by.  Usually I try to keep up with all the new information out of CERN and the LHC, which led me into running into something great today over at Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: here. (recommend his updates - and the CERN site too!)

This(old news) was a great FAQ with Michelangelo Mangano, a physicist at CERN, also on the Cosmic Log.

That's about it from me this week.  I'll do my best to post more regularly when the new term starts - really appreciate all the views and comments!  Until then; Safe journey, space fans, wherever you are!

PEACE.

I've been working on a Deathmatch map for UT3 and here it is. I'm still impressed by the engine and looking forward to making more stuff on it. Maybe even some Machinima.

On the ground floor the biggest change so far is the teleporter at each end, they really add a lot more depth to the gameplay. Another thing I am working on for the ground floor is jump pads. I want to get some nice vertical action going on from each side and over the middle. Its a bit early to share any screen shots yet as its still in the blocked out stage, but as soon as some details start to go in I will let you all see how its looking.

As you can imagine, my desk is full with books on architecture and I love to spend my time to read through these sources. It's especially exciting to find out about the lifes, goals and philosophies of various architects. And as I read through their lives I wonder sometimes: What would have a mod or level designed by Le Corbusier, Lloyd Wright or Ventura looked like?  How would they have approached their task? Form and Order? Modularity? Texture and Lighting? Functionality? Flow and Circulation? How would it have been to have these guys on your development team?

I lean back for a moment and try to imagine: A Grand Theft Auto city designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. A Need for Speed environment crafted by Robert Ventura. A Modulor system by Le Corbusier for First-Person and Third-Person Shooters. It's so intriguing, isn't it?

Maybe there is a contest out there? Such as "How would a Counter-Strike level by Le Corbuiser have looked like? I wish the game industry would care more about such things.

EDIT: Funny, just a minute after I sent this post I saw a job advert on gamasutra: They are looking for a level architect! Well, maybe Frampton or Tschumi will apply ;)

We push little cart!

Just thought I'd let the curious cats out there know that I'm currently working on a Team Fortress 2 payload map, the same game-type as the ever so popular Gold Rush. I've also been poking around in Radiant, Infinity Wards level editor for CoD4, though I probably won't end up creating a level in it, it was fun to see a different tool set.

Other than that I've been reading up on the DnD 4th edition core rulebooks and I'm rather pleased. Just as videogames have taken from DnD systems, now DnD takes systems from videogames. There are so many fundamental rule changes that simplify the core systems.

I've heard some opinions say how that simplifying them, they seem more watered down and generic. But I digress, it doesn't take away from the soul of the game, it just changed it in a way that is more logical and makes sense to a broader audience. Most of your favourite spells are still in there, you just cast them in different and more interesting ways.