HL2 map sizes

[Farrowlesparrow]

Nice to see you back Fenric...

Anyway, i suppose that extra bit in source allows you to create a little more than one road like you could in halflife, letting you to create the illusion of a large city. So, you might create one small city block, with a few buildings with details inside. This coupled with hopefully small loading times will let you create potentially huge cities....oh and the lovely 3d sky maps/boxes whatever its name is.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Nice to see you back Fenric...

Anyway, i suppose that extra bit in source allows you to create a little more than one road like you could in halflife, letting you to create the illusion of a large city. So, you might create one small city block, with a few buildings with details inside. This coupled with hopefully small loading times will let you create potentially huge cities....oh and the lovely 3d sky maps/boxes whatever its name is.

that skybox still requires entities/brushes

The only successful urbanised area's in mods will be the cleverly mapped out ones that are spread over numerous maps and were it not for the loading nobody would be any the wiser. It's mapping skills like that which will separate the men from the WWII, CS, Neo clones

 

[Shinobi]

what are you taalking about when you say large areas?

because the area's in that last part of the HL2 E3 movie with the car we're large and sprawling, they even had useless details rendered outside,,,


or are you talking about something that's just not possible on any engine? (huge sprawling city replica)

 

[The Dark Elf]

what are you taalking about when you say large areas?

because the area's in that last part of the HL2 E3 movie with the car we're large and sprawling, they even had useless details rendered outside,,,


or are you talking about something that's just not possible on any engine? (huge sprawling city replica)

There's these mod teams who reckon they can duplicate entire cities or more in one map. That can't be done, not in the conventional way. Source, Quake, the new Doom engine, even Unreal3 simply can't do an entire city in one map. Not if you want it to look good, Granted you could do it if you stripped all detail and used nothing but basic cubes for buildings with very few details. You'd screw up the physics though aswell.

The best way to do such things is across many many smaller maps and be creative about how their laid out. This all comes back to my curiosity that no mod team appears to be working on concept work for their mapping, just entities. Which is very worrying. Can't just load a new map in where you like, it has to be as seamless as you can make it for the player. If Source had been written better, ie: sod backward compatability it could have had continuous loading of map area's letting you move from area to area without really noticing its loading stuff in. As it stands it can't do that, and anyone who claims to be doing huge cities within a single map file is going to be dissapointed.

As for the large E3 map you mentioned. That looks like just a combination of clever 3dskybox usage and maps that loop on themselves, giving the impression of a greater size. And thats where the trick is. Use a small map and make it appear bigger by preventing the player from going directly from A to Z, make them go from A to B to C to D and so on to Z.

You could go and build an engine from scratch that would easily handle huge sprawling cities. But you'd have to do a lot of things differently, most notably the method used to load area's. So even then you as the player would still only exist in a small section at any given time, using seamless loading of area's or cells surrounding it as and when their needed. Thats how the MMORPG's and Morrowind work. Though its more complicated than just that but you get the idea.

The engine will be hard coded to only allow a certain amount of entities and brushes in a map. The larger the map used, the more area needs to be covered with the same number of entities and brushes. So if a mod wants their maps to look good, go with smaller sections linked together with well thought out transitions.

Course this might be fine for MP maps, where you can't use much detail anyway. But your also then going to find you've got huge maps that are probably very boring and involve a lot of running around and doing nothing. Unless the mapper knows what their doing that is.

So yeah to sum up, the E3 coast/buggy map looked huge, but I bet when it comes down to it, if you were to noclip around it wouldn't be half as large as it seems if you play it properly. Was the same with some HL1 maps, some of those seemed really big but they were still very tiny. Was nothing more than clever mapping. So the mod makers who can do that will have good maps, the others will have boring maps that are as bad as they look.

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

I wanted to do some conepts for maps...however not knowing anything about the story of hl2 or even OES (May it come back some day) it was hard.

 

[ComradeBadger]

With regards to the concepts of maps, I have a few sketches from about 5 years ago when I heard HL was going to ship with a level editor, I thought up all sorts of things

 

[Shinobi]

crap,,I forgot to post some map concepts from way back,, I'll do that this weekend,,

As for the large E3 map you mentioned. That looks like just a combination of clever 3dskybox usage and maps that loop on themselves, giving the impression of a greater size. And thats where the trick is. Use a small map and make it appear bigger by preventing the player from going directly from A to Z, make them go from A to B to C to D and so on to Z.

I understand that,, but it's pulled off great.. That's the nature of map design, tricking both the player and the engine

and yeah,, there's some mod team who think they can re-model a huge sprawling environment and still keep minute details,, they'll learn some harsh lessons soon enough.

 

[ferd]

there was a post about map sizes here once

 

[Epsi]

O' course, if you want to model a city, it all depends how big the city you want to model is. Ancient Rome was 8 square miles, so that would be somewhat easier than a sprawling modern city where population densities are kept down to sensible levels so people don't have to live in crowded squalor.

 

[The Dark Elf]

O' course, if you want to model a city, it all depends how big the city you want to model is. Ancient Rome was 8 square miles, so that would be somewhat easier than a sprawling modern city where population densities are kept down to sensible levels so people don't have to live in crowded squalor.

You still couldn't do it without sacrificing a lot of detail in a single map

Think about it, you've got a finite amount of entities and brushes you can have in a single map file. The greater the distance you spread that across, the less detailed, overall. The map becomes.

You've also got to deal with optimising the map too. Far simpler to get right on smaller more detailed maps than sprawling vista's.

Also there's the AI, nodes, lights (if not using texture lighting) triggers, brush entities, equipment, start points, save points etc. and so on. Those all take a huge chunk out of your available entities per map. And if your trying to fit loads into a single map, your going to be left with very little for actual detailing. Then there's your brushes, only so many per map, which will limit the kind of buildings you have. It will look lame if you have a few highly detailed buildings and the rest plain and boring. You'd have to balance everything up and have overall plain buildings rather than detailed ones.

Valve made the map size larger "incase" it was sometimes required, like for example a long road, you could make that detailed, but it would just be for that, jumping off into other area's would increase the overall size in both axis'. Also the increased map size allows for the 3DSkybox.

A good map wouldn't use all the available space, instead it would make use of the available space, lots of twists and turns that make sense, but not actually having to use the whole map. Though to play through a map like that would take some time, and appear far larger than the entire map space could if setout to fill it all up. But if you noclip through it, the actual map would likely be nothing more than a smaller area.

 

[IonGorilla]

O' course, if you want to model a city, it all depends how big the city you want to model is. Ancient Rome was 8 square miles, so that would be somewhat easier than a sprawling modern city.

City areas take are ridiculously hard to model, 1 large map would be difficult at best. Attempting to model an entire functioning city is probably immpossible for mod teams, no matter how many mappers there are or how good they are, cities are just too big and too complicated. Imo the team would quickly fall apart. The only guys who will be successful are the ones who create small closed in city areas similar to max payne.

 

[The Dark Elf]

City areas take are ridiculously hard to model, 1 large map would be difficult at best. Attempting to model an entire functioning city is probably immpossible for mod teams, no matter how many mappers there are or how good they are, cities are just too big and too complicated. Imo the team would quickly fall apart. The only guys who will be successful are the ones who create small closed in city areas similar to max payne.

Got it in one, thankyou

Though you'll go blue in the mouth trying to convince many mods that

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

City areas take are ridiculously hard to model, 1 large map would be difficult at best. Attempting to model an entire functioning city is probably immpossible for mod teams, no matter how many mappers there are or how good they are, cities are just too big and too complicated. Imo the team would quickly fall apart. The only guys who will be successful are the ones who create small closed in city areas similar to max payne.

I've struggled making my town and it ain't that big.

 

[Shinobi]

like I said,, it's best to just let them learn their lesson in sprawling city level design,, anyways here's some pics of one of the more successful attempts at making an outdoor urban map in HL1

those arent the best pics of the map,, but I didnt want to open it up, take pics and host them,,, they are for the mod firearmshalflife

 

[The Dark Elf]

those look very nice too

 

[Epsi]

Hehe, somewhat easier, and easy are significantly different things.

Anyways, this is making assumptions about limits in the engine like the numbers of brushes and the numbers of entities. We can't make any judgements until there are firm numbers on these. For all we know, the upper limit could be huge.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Hehe, somewhat easier, and easy are significantly different things.

Anyways, this is making assumptions about limits in the engine like the numbers of brushes and the numbers of entities. We can't make any judgements until there are firm numbers on these. For all we know, the upper limit could be huge.

Valve have replied somewhere and while they wont give exact numbers they've given estimates, and its more than HL1 but less than others so forget FarCry maps or Morrowind type vista's

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

Speaking of Morrowind...nice map by the way...Maybe i could try my experiement in HL2. I tried making a load of maps which would load like the morrowind areas would. It got very complicated and the size of halflife maps was limiting. It worked though, on a small scale and it was actually quite fun. I made lots of indoor areas where you would go to the outside door "use" it and it would load the appropriate map like morrowind, rather than just opening. It also meant you could put massive amounts of detail inside the buildings because they were only tiny maps...unless of course they were big buildings but i never built anything very big.

I can imagine if done properly, it could make for interesting gameplay, however it wouldnt work well with multiplayer.

 

[The Dark Elf]

Speaking of Morrowind...nice map by the way...Maybe i could try my experiement in HL2. I tried making a load of maps which would load like the morrowind areas would. It got very complicated and the size of halflife maps was limiting. It worked though, on a small scale and it was actually quite fun. I made lots of indoor areas where you would go to the outside door "use" it and it would load the appropriate map like morrowind, rather than just opening. It also meant you could put massive amounts of detail inside the buildings because they were only tiny maps...unless of course they were big buildings but i never built anything very big.

I can imagine if done properly, it could make for interesting gameplay, however it wouldnt work well with multiplayer.

There is a way to do it, the whole seamless map loading, but I'm not saying how exactly to do it, saving it for a mod of mine

and yeah, doesn't work for multiplayer

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

Go on...you can tell me. Ok, if you arent going to tell me could you answer me this.

Is it something done in hammer or are you editing some code?

 

[Shinobi]

let's just put it this way,, it requires absolutely no code,, and tim sweeny has given instructions on how to do this on an old unreal interview


I'll give you a one word hint: "overlapping"

 

[Shinobi]

oh shit,, I read the post wrong,,, the way I'm thinking of allows morrowind/HL type map loading,, IE:small pauses,,,

I can't think of any way to do seamless map pre-loading off the top of my head without heavy coding,, seems like you'd be better off using an engine that uses seamless pre-loading as a base feature..

 

[Farrowlesparrow]

Wait...there is a tutorial about morrowind type loading in hl? I went to all that trouble and there was something telling me how to do it, although to be true it wasnt much trouble...pretty obvious in fact.

 

[Lethal8472]

Im worried about how big the maps will be in MB...my poor 56k connection will severly hold me back from downloading huge 50 MB custom maps... ;(

 

[Delgarto]

You could pull of a GTA3/ViceCity style map pretty easily in HL2. None of those areas took more than a minute to cross by vehicle, and it was a kick butt game. imo.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

You couldn't make a full city in HL2, not unless you scaled everything down, and each building was a textured box.

GTA3 uses a custom engine (Renderware) with on-the-fly visibility culling. HL2 can't do that.

 

[ToddTheFrog]

You couldn't make a full city in HL2, not unless you scaled everything down, and each building was a textured box.

GTA3 uses a custom engine (Renderware) with on-the-fly visibility culling. HL2 can't do that.

HL2 has on the fly vis culling

.....

I'm new here, this being my first post I first want to say HI to everyone :-D

First off I have a slight problem with the negativity in this thread about how you *can't* do this or this is not possible, etc. Look at the best mods over the years and you'll see one thing over and over. They invent new ways to work around age old problems, they come up with new ideas that studios can't gamble on. I could go on and on forever. I don't want to come across as a horrible person or anything, this being my first of many posts, but I don't want to hear what mods *can't* do, lets think of how we can do this type of stuff. Be supportive! At least I know I want to hear that kind of thing. Nearly anything is possible, a detailed city being one of them.

- Todd

 

[JFry]

Your first post and you drag up a topic from april? Doesn't matter to me but people here seem to hate when old threads get brought back to life for some reason. Anyways I agree with your philosophy that just about anything can be done. The question is usually whether or not it will be worth it.

 

[The Dark Elf]

HL2 has on the fly vis culling

.....

I'm new here, this being my first post I first want to say HI to everyone :-D

First off I have a slight problem with the negativity in this thread about how you *can't* do this or this is not possible, etc. Look at the best mods over the years and you'll see one thing over and over. They invent new ways to work around age old problems, they come up with new ideas that studios can't gamble on. I could go on and on forever. I don't want to come across as a horrible person or anything, this being my first of many posts, but I don't want to hear what mods *can't* do, lets think of how we can do this type of stuff. Be supportive! At least I know I want to hear that kind of thing. Nearly anything is possible, a detailed city being one of them.

- Todd

The problem isn't that mods can't do something. It's that many are trying to do things that simply aren't possible.

Making a large city, in one single HL2 map can't be done, its just not made for it, if it could be done, don't you think HL2 would have all City17 in a single map?

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

HL2 does not have on-the-fly visibility culling. Visibility data is compiled into the map.

 

[Kadayi]

If it's possible to code in seamless map transition in HL using small maps, do you guys think it will be possible in Source? Or do you think that the memory requirements for loading maps will preclude overlapping?

 

[The Dark Elf]

If it's possible to code in seamless map transition in HL using small maps, do you guys think it will be possible in Source? Or do you think that the memory requirements for loading maps will preclude overlapping?

You can still do the transition thing in Source, its just highly unlikely to work in MP like that, without having access to the source via a licence to recode a ton of it to work that way correctly in MP.

 

[Viperidae]

Actually HL1 has a 1024 point-based entity limit and a 512 brush-based entity limit. The brush limit (if you ever put that many) is ~10240 (my binary's a little rusty).

Plus, in HL1 you can't actually make brushes on the map extremeties, it wont compile because it thinks the brushes are outside the map.

 

[Kadayi]

You can still do the transition thing in Source, its just highly unlikely to work in MP like that, without having access to the source via a licence to recode a ton of it to work that way correctly in MP.

I think Source is more of a SP storytelling engine anyhows, with MP you miss out on all the facial tech they devised as well.

 

[JFry]

Actually MP has it too, except it is simplified due to network reasons. In SP they use roughly 40 "muscles" in the face, in MP you would use maybe 10 or so (just a guess). Besides, the sequel to the most popular online game in the world is going to be on this engine, I think it will be suited for MP just fine.

 

[ToddTheFrog]

HL2 does not have on-the-fly visibility culling. Visibility data is compiled into the map.

Taken from the irc chat here

"<valve|yahn> Fifth, we have some additions to our outdoor rendering, including a realtime occlusion system for dealing with issues unique to outdoor environments. We still maintain a BSP-tree based system for dealing with more traditional indoor environments. So, you can now do extremely large outdoor environments which seemlessly transition indoors. I'm excited to see the mods go nuts on this stuff."

 

[PvtRyan]

Taken from the irc chat here

"<valve|yahn> Fifth, we have some additions to our outdoor rendering, including a realtime occlusion system for dealing with issues unique to outdoor environments. We still maintain a BSP-tree based system for dealing with more traditional indoor environments. So, you can now do extremely large outdoor environments which seemlessly transition indoors. I'm excited to see the mods go nuts on this stuff."

That is most likely for displacement map surfaces, like terrain and cavewalls, which are not brushbased and can have realtime LOD and occlusion.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Anything created as a brush (terrain, buildings etc) won't have any realtime occlusion done on it. THat's why a GTA3-esque cityscape isn't possible. My original point stands.

 

[ToddTheFrog]

Anything created as a brush (terrain, buildings etc) won't have any realtime occlusion done on it. THat's why a GTA3-esque cityscape isn't possible. My original point stands.

What exactly is the definition of a brush?

 

[JFry]

A brush is just another way of saying a polygon.