The Spire (Gears of War MP)

    So, I finally managed to get back into custom mapping. Picked up GOW and started on a MP map.

    -WIP

    -Uses lots of GOW assets in combination with my own BSP, and I modeled all the spires and other surrounding stuff to get a unique theme to the otherwise pretty standard retail assets.

    -Will post insides later

    -Screenshots were taken in the editor viewport

    -What you see is just two days work...

    [Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/things/spire1.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/things/spire4.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://www.hourences.com/things/spire5.jpg]

    All screenshots:

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire1.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire2.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire3.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire4.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire5.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire6.jpg

    http://www.hourences.com/things/spire7.jpg

    Great turnaround time, looking forward to seeing where you take it.

    My comments thus far:

    Overall I really like the direction you're going. I -love- the central spire with the building on it. However, I really don't think the skybox spires hold up. I think there's a terrific opportunity here to do a more fractured earth sort of thing using the same sort of terrain you've got surrounding the structure. I'm imagining if you pretended that this building had lots more structure in the surrounding area, from walls to statues or even other buildings, and these objects are torn apart on smaller surrounding platforms. I think it'd be a lot more interesting and coherent than the random rock spires right now.

    Building itself looks really cool and the exterior layout looks reminiscent of the mansion level in the game, only less dark. The windows stand out a bit, perhaps literally - are they actually floating? I haven't actually seen those meshes in the editor yet (don't have the pc version yet), but I wonder if you might get better results sinking them into the outer walls just a bit.

    The interior shot you linked I think is by far the weakest of the bunch in all regards. The props are very nicely used but I don't think the lighting pulls off and the floor texture looks worth scaling down by at least 50%. Also, nothing in this room strikes me as very Gears combat-friendly. This is tough to judge from the screen but it looks like one entrance is where you took the shot and the other on the wall to the left. From the spot of the screenshot, that's a lot of space to cover with no cover, and what cover is there is just the breakable couches.

    I think you might get good results out of a couple columns in the middle of the room as well as some pieces of cover closer to each doorway and around the perimeter of the room. Right now I just have a really hard time imagining the Gears combat flow of coming into a room, picking an initial piece of cover, then pressing forward from cover to cover.

    Very iconic look to it. Would be great with some rim lighting on the rocks to make them pop and give it even more depth. I seem to remember that being prominent in the GoW cave levels... (maybe not?) I do, however agree with KFS about the lack of a proper lattice work in the cover placement. For two days work though, great progress

    Yeah theres no cover inside, none of the rooms inside are done yet, and lighting inside isnt really done either yet, theres not even fire in the fireplace.

    I wanted to place destroyed stuff in the distance, but hold off as it quickly makes it overly complex, and the exterior already is really complex for something youre only seeing for about 5 seconds before heading in. I could try with some very low poly buildings tho, and see how it looks.

    I also cant find a better sky:/

    GOW keeps reusing the sky I use, every time with a different color overlay, but yeah, its a bit low res unfortunally:/

    If anyone knows a place where I can download 2048 res skybox textures that fit this style..

    Ill move the windows deeper into the walls, they dont float, but perhaps they are a bit too much on top.

    Ill get to the middle central room today, by far the most difficult area of the level.

    The only other thing that hasn't been mentioned is how the texture on the house facade is tiling. I'm talking of the actual entrance part, on the sides. Looks like the texture is applied horizontally and could be rotated 90°

    Obviously the interior isn't done, but there's definitely something awesome to do with these textures

    Well I'm not sure why the skybox looks so blurry. HL2 skyboxes are 512x512 yet they look a lot sharper than that. Can't you just place some moving clouds to hide the blurriness in the skybox then ?

    You can always use an high-res skybox from anywhere you can find on the internets, and give it a reddish/brownish tint on PS.

    That one definitely looks low res and blurry.

    So dude, how's the editor doing? Lots of crashs?

    What's your specs btw? I heard microsoft did a terrible job porting the game to PC, and this game runs at terrible low fps on "standard" machines

    The sky is a dome with a 2048 texture I believe, where as half life uses 6 times a 512 tex for a cube, no?

    The blurryness of the sky is hidden quite well ingame because of the depth of field, so perhaps I should add a more drastic DOF to hide the blurryness...

    Ill repaint the bottom of it anyhow, Ill see if I can try and get a bit of red or orange glow near the horizon, and perhaps experiment with the yellow imulsion lava at the bottom.

    Ill rotate the tex on the front of the house.

    The game itself runs great for me, but the editor does crash A LOT. Worst UE3 build Ive used...

    The game runs really well without any slow downs while the UT3 demo didnt perform all too hot for me. I run 4GB Ram, Intel Quad 6700, but a weak GF7800GT.

    Quote from Hourences

    The blurryness of the sky is hidden quite well ingame because of the depth of field, so perhaps I should add a more drastic DOF to hide the blurryness...

    I guess that's what's great about next-gen, hun?

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