HL2 Map Sizes

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Hi, does anyone know how large maps in HL2 can be? I'm hoping to create some maps similar to the Operation Flashpoint islands, which are quite large, just wondering if HL2 could handle maps that big? :afro:
 
As I've explained before. Your likely to find, the larger your map, the less detailed it becomes. This is because of limits within the engine, you can only have a certain amount of entities and brushes

The example I use is this

Imagine you've got 20 wooden cubes sat on a 1m x 1m square of rubber sheet. You've placed and glued those cubes where you want them on the sheet, and its quite a built up area.

Now, stretch that rubber sheet to 100m x 100m. The cubes remain in the same positions, but the distance between them stretches a great deal. What was once a built up area now has 20 cubes placed far far apart from each other.

So in other words

smaller - more detailed

bigger - less detailed

--

mods set in deep space, or mods set on the open sea will benefit from such large maps, as they don't require bits of detail, or clutter every few steps to keep up the effect of a scene. However if your map requires loads of plants and buildings and tree's and grass and other details, its going to suffer because you'll only have a finite amount you can put in a map and a much larger area to fill.
 
Thanks for the reply Fenric. The maps I'd like to make would probably be not quite the size of the maps in OFP, but hopefully have more dense and varied forests, vegetation, larger and more detailed cities....The mod would have pretty much the same gameplay as OFP so lots of detail in the maps isn't so important...
 
Shim said:
Thanks for the reply Fenric. The maps I'd like to make would probably be not quite the size of the maps in OFP, but hopefully have more dense and varied forests, vegetation, larger and more detailed cities....The mod would have pretty much the same gameplay as OFP so lots of detail in the maps isn't so important...
Well if your doing SP or MP the rules sorta change

SP (single player)

Only one person playing, so you can make use of transitions between sections of the map, so you can make smaller area's which are more densely filled with detail and clutter, and have them join together with a short -Loading- message, and they behave like one single large map. You can also use a 3dskybox to give the impression the map is huge, when in reality the area your currently in may only be very small

with SP you don't have to worry about lag so can pretty much go crazy (within reason) with adding detail

MP (multiplayer)

MP is different, you can't properly have transitions, so everything in an area must be in a single map, AFAIK this still applies to HL2 as the basic engine is still the same in that respect. I may be wrong though but Valve haven't said either way yet.

with MP though, you need to use much less detail or things will begin to lag. So entity's and locations need to be lower quality. However this means you can to a certain point, get away with larger maps, because the nature of them would mean they'd be relatively empty anyway. So less detailed area's wouldn't look so out of place. But you still need to be careful, and ensure things run smoothly even then. View distances, occlusion etc. and so on.


So its kinda a double edged sword. You can and you can't kind of thing. Best advice is just to experiment once the game is out with all the tools and see what happens. Perform stress tests with friends online to see how far you can push the engine before it begins to fall apart.

Also bare in mind, the larger a map is, and/or the more you put in it, the larger the file size. So if people are Downloading it from the net to either play online or in SP. consider the sizes. If you do for example a SP island mod, with lots of detailed sections that use transitions between each one to make up the full island, and each of those individual maps are 30mb. 100 of those maps used to make up the whole island will be a bit of a bind to both get hosting for, and for people to download, and also the bigger they are, the longer they take to load. Though IIRC it wont be anything as bad as FarCry's map loading :)
 
Nice info Fenric, thanks for the response.

The mod I had planned would be single player. Basically I want to recreate the OFP experience but in a different setting. The OFP engine is getting old now and never looked that great to begin with, and with OFP2 no where in site I though HL2 might be the go, especially with the modding support it will have.

Anyways I guess I'll just wait until it comes out and see what it can handle.

Thanks,

Shim
 
If you want a more direct answer. The maximum dimension are +/-16384 from the origin. That's 4x the size of original HL in each dimension for a total of 64x the cubic space of original HL.

Assuming they keep the same unit to real life ratio (Gordon is 72 units tall) that works out to roughly 1.6km x 1.6km. Of course a mod could easily change this ratio, similar to what HLrally did, by basically making all of the players smaller. Of course with HL1 this posed problems of tiny players that kept the hull of a regular player. In HLrally, the cars are using the hull for a crouched player model. It doesn't seem to be as much as a problem for making larger hulls such as the one used for onos in NS. But Likely this won't be an issue in HL2.

I don't think we really know how many entities HL2 will be able to handle before slowing down noticably. I think they might have mentioned the hard coded entity limit somewhere, but you probably wouldn't want to get close to that. Anyways, it may be possible to fit quite a bit of entities in there.
 
HL1 4
HL2 64

or something like that represented the values
 
Please excuse my noobishness with such things, but are you saying that if I shrink all players down to say 36 units tall I could get a 3.2km x 3.2km map?
Or even 18 unit tall players with a 6.4km x 6.4km map?

My calculations are probably off but you get the idea. Of course these maps would be quite sparse but that's not much of a problem considering the terrain I want to create will be mainly large snow plains.
 
well I don't think you can shrink players through the map design. That would have to be modded in. Another thing that HL2 provides to create the illusion of wide open area is the 3d skybox. Set around the map is 3d sky that is actually built at a smaller scale and can only be seen. In some videos and pictures you see 3d stuff like apartments or whatnot very far off in the distance. You can't actually go into these without a level transition, but they are rendered behind the skybox just as though they exist beyond the edge of the map.
 
ive been wondering this too

fenric is very right, a lot of things are possible with the engine like giant maps, but it's just how the computer supports it

it's a new game, and were trying to stretch its limits with map sice, odds are there will be problems... just be prepared to have expansive tracts of barren land =P
 
Shim said:
Please excuse my noobishness with such things, but are you saying that if I shrink all players down to say 36 units tall I could get a 3.2km x 3.2km map?
Or even 18 unit tall players with a 6.4km x 6.4km map?

My calculations are probably off but you get the idea. Of course these maps would be quite sparse but that's not much of a problem considering the terrain I want to create will be mainly large snow plains.
It's not shrinking players. It's scaling the amount of real-world space covered by a WorldCraft 'unit'
 
My mod has been discussing this idea for like 1 week. If I hear it again I will commit suicide. We came to a conclusion but atm I can't be bothered typing it. No one has mentioned it but Fenric kind of did. Infact this post is pritty much irrelivant.

ARGGHHH!¬
 
actually, it would exactly be shrinking players. Of course you're shrinking everything else, but that's all map dependent. Players are normally the fixed size around which everything else is based.
 
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