A Bit Curious About Mapping For Fps Games
StormLiong
Join Date: 2002-12-27 Member: 11569Members
Join Date: 2002-12-27 Member: 11569Members
<div class="IPBDescription">did curiosity really killed the cat?</div> I;ve just became curious on mapping for a typical FPS game like Half-life or quake. I have been mapping for RTS games like SC, Wc3 and C&C for sometime but those I learnt it by myself because they seem pretty simple for someone knows basic foundation programming concepts (when it comes to the scripting part of a map).
What I am curios is how easy/difficult is it for a FPS map? What I myself see the main hurdles for someone like is the 3d Models I know need to worry about. Do all mappers actually have gone through 3D art/programming backgrounds that have made them enable to map properly? Sorry maybe I am not making any sense here but thats why i am asking how simple can FPS mapping be? (if a person just wanted to play around with it)
Note: I would had posted this in the mapping forum but the rules there said that part was specifically only for NS mapping stuff.
What I am curios is how easy/difficult is it for a FPS map? What I myself see the main hurdles for someone like is the 3d Models I know need to worry about. Do all mappers actually have gone through 3D art/programming backgrounds that have made them enable to map properly? Sorry maybe I am not making any sense here but thats why i am asking how simple can FPS mapping be? (if a person just wanted to play around with it)
Note: I would had posted this in the mapping forum but the rules there said that part was specifically only for NS mapping stuff.
Comments
making it aesthetically pleasing and strategicially viable are extremely difficult. i always had trouble getting rooms to connect to one another, and for an FPS you ahve to worry about "sniper's corners" or "chokepoints" or strategic points, and then for NS theres siege distances, you dont want a hive near too many secluded corners, its all kinds of hassles to make the map.
side note: i havent made an ns map, never even tried.
Making a simple map is actually quite easy. Creating a room, throwing a few textures around, adding a few entities - these are all pretty easy to learn the basics of. The difficult part, IMO, is taking those polygons you just added and making it look believable.
I've also done some mapping for games like Starcraft, and I can assure you that it's nowhere near the same idea. In Starcraft, you've got a bunch of blocks that you stamp onto a grid. In other words, it's two-dimensional and fairly straight-forward. In FPS mapping, you're working in three dimensions, plus you've got a dozen other things to take into account while working on the map.
If you want to give it a try, I'd suggest digging up a tutorial for Hammer and go through the examples. The tutorial won't teach you everything you need to know, but it should give you an idea of the scope and complexity that FPS mapping inherently requires.
www.qeradiant.com
Gtk Radiant 1.3.6 Dev
My single most important piece of advice: texturing takes time. Too much time. Making the world, putting lights and entities in it, etc. have never taken me <i>nearly</i> as much time as finding/making just the right texture for a wall or object, and just when you think you're done with an area you'll have to move/resize it for some reason -- misaligning many of the textures. Why do you think the mappers for HL2 make everything plain orange until they're absolutely settled on how everything will be shaped and scaled?
Hammer supposedly comes with some sort of texture locking feature to help with this sort of thing, but I have yet to find it. I may look that up later today...
Yeah - and as a player I feel pretty irked by single rooms linked by endless badly-textured long corridors.
I found getting it all configured correctly was one of the biggest pains in the bum, but from zero experience with Hammer I had a working ugly map, mimimaps, commander mode and all, within a few weeks.
It's just a big digital lego set, and it's free so you may as well have a go.
It can be incredibly frustrating, but there are also "W00t!" moments when something finally works.
Give it a crack, there are thousands of great tutorials out there, so get stuck in.
btw, VERC forums ( links in mapping ) is <i>the</i> place to find answers..just use the search button first or risk a flaming..
I think what I am going to do first is to put it all on paper. Theorycraft as some SC/Wc3 players put it. Put my idea on paper, play with on my head, adjust, rinse, repeat till i get a map idea i will totally like. Then I think I will definitely be more encouraged to learn FPS mapping.
The other idea was for me to do an actual architecture/interior design drawing for my map idea so that all that i would need to do with Worldcraft/Hammer would be to just learn how to actually use it since most of teh design is on paper. (I've taken some intermediatte drafting/architecture classes)
What you guys think?