Mapping roads, rails and rivers...

[Fluffy Kitten]

What's the best/your favourite way of "ending" things like roads, train tracks and rivers that in the real world would carry on for miles ?
People can only accept so many caved in tunnels and such...

That's one thing that always screws me up while mapping. I'll get a nice area done, then realise something needs to be "ended" and it all goes wrong.

 

[Hazar]

roadblock?

 

[Angry Lawyer]

In the case of roads, to limit exit points, you could make it as circular as possible.

Or roadblocks.

-Angry Lawyer

 

[StardogChampion]

Huge dinosaur or dragon.

 

[Dan]

a car or a train or a boat

 

[satch919]

Road block with thick wooden barriers or one of those Combine force fields.

:cheers:

 

[chestburster]

a custom texture that creates the illusion of depth like in studio street scenes of movie productions?!

 

[Ennui]

irregular buildings (streets not in grid pattern, I mean) car wrecks, destroyed bridges... stuff like that.

 

[Mr Neutron]

cliff

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

A giant pair of breasts.

 

[Revenge]

Do what crazy taxi did. Avoid having ANY straight sections of road and have all the roads loop back into each other. It was often very difficult to find the "edge" of the map in crazy taxi because the roads were so deliberately disorienting.

You can also for instance place a bridge that has had a large section fall away, place a small gentle ridge on the other side of the bridge and then have the 3d skybox fill in the rest. Or even have the side nearest the player as realworld bridge, and the other side of the bridge inside the skybox.

 

[indy]

make the road go around a corner that the player cannot go past.
use a clip brush to stop the player from passing.
then when they look past the corner it seems the road goes on more, but realy theres a dead end just past thier view.

 

[poseyjmac]

i was thinking it might be cool to have an invincible strider guarding areas you don't want people to go, and he has a 1 hit kill beam. but that would probably take a bit of modding.

 

[Fluffy Kitten]

...and be completely out of place in anything but a HL2-based map.

 

[Revenge]

But you can use similar methods to the same effect. For instance you could place perfectly accurate snipers round the corner and have no cover for the player to hide behind, or a couple of machine gunners, or whatever.

You could even have one entire side of a level embroiled in a huge 2 way battle, and make sure that the player wont survive long if he tries to take part in it or even go near it (meaning he can't get past it either). For inner city maps, you could have intense fighting all around on every side, and the further the player strays from his intended path, the more difficult it becomes to survive, so that eventually players end up taking the path of least resistance.... Though unfortunately most players are conditioned to know instinctively know that they are on the "right" track if they encounter enemies, and that they are on the "wrong" track if the enemy numbers start thinning out. It will take a bit of clever mapping and strong hinting in the prior levels to get the player into a state where they would know to run away from danger rather than towards it (this method could work in survival type scenarios).

 

[Andy]

Just try and avoid seriously open outdoor maps.

... says the guy whose toying with a desert planet mod

 

[commando]

with the new 3d background you can make it go on for miles but make it so there is a fence/ broken part of the road so u cant get to the other side.