The Forgotten

    You are making 1 level like 1 building\part of a building? Could make it into a really cool old school gameplay like Monkey Island and the really old Larry games

    Quote from st0lve

    You are making 1 level like 1 building\part of a building? Could make it into a really cool old school gameplay like Monkey Island and the really old Larry games

    Eh? Nooo, the apartment is one of a few buildings in the town that you can freely enter. Indoor locations will hopefully all be as highly detailed as that, whereas outdoor locations will be less detailed for somewhat obvious reasons.

    Busy finalising the game structure, polishing the apartment and working on layout and design for a manor. I also came up with new creature concepts so I'll be drawing those properly at some point.

    Heh, I'll mess about with some normal maps just to see if it works or not.

    Anyhow, finished up the condemned building:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/condemned_building01.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/condemned_building02.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/condemned_building03.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/condemned_building04.jpg]

    Once again the area is meant to be dimly lit because only one light has both strobes working, you use your flashlight to see where you're going mostly. I faked some source-like lighting in an earlier screenshot and came up with this:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev_lightmapped.jpg]

    Source's fancy lighting isn't necessary here because the room is meant to look dull and unsettling, pretty and bright lighting distracts from making the area feeling this way imho.

    I'm so tired of this area now , it'll be good to work on something else!

    Two weeks on and off, actual buildtime is probably just over a week, that's everything.. custom textures, geometry, and skins for the props I used. Textures are the bulk of the workload, as I edited them several times until I got them how I wanted them.

    If you guys want to see how it was done, I saved several WIP shots from start to finish...

    Well, that's a lot of time, the results are very nice but time!

    lets say your mod will have 25 areas like that.

    25x 2 weeks = 50 weeks =12,5 month

    + month of time when you can't work for random reasons = 13,5 month

    + time for scripting, coding and random stuff.

    about 1,5 year to finish it. And if it would be only 25 rooms like this then it would be small mod and play time would be like 1-2 hours?

    Not sure if it's worth it! I recommend you to sketch ALL areas before getting into details, I'm pretty sure you will want to alter the room you've just finished working on and it will add another 2 weeks and so on.

    And it might be next cool mod that you worked on and never finished! That would be a shame!

    But again,

    Don't get me wrong please!

    Best of luck.

    50 weeks is only 11,5 months since a year is 52 weeks. for a room like this two weeks or even one week work time is simply too much. honestly, move to another engine and you can save time not to mention effort. d3 please consider it, it feels wrong to see such a willful project take so much unneccesary time when you could do it in half of that.

    I've counted it thinking that avarage month have 4 weeks but that still proves my point, what I think is that you should be able to do this within a day or two (depending on hours) of work assuming that you know what you want to do!

    Plan stuff in advance!

    Heh, I have things planned out, structure, storyline, lots of dialogue and some layouts. I wouldn't have started if I didn't have things set out, I'm not exactly a friggin n00b you know! I'm not exactly sure about the build time to be honest, having looked through the file dates, I've worked on it for 2 weeks along with other bits of the mod and reading through Doom 3 tutorials. I think maybe if I slotted the hours together it'll be less than a week, I don't actually see how a room would take that long,( forgive me (hah) my memory is a little hazy). This apartment was mainly a structural test for indoor detail, wanted to see how far I could push it and I'm very pleased with the results. Now that I am all tooled up as to how to construct these areas, build-time will hopefully be quicker.

    Quote from Sentura

    50 weeks is only 11,5 months since a year is 52 weeks. for a room like this two weeks or even one week work time is simply too much. honestly, move to another engine and you can save time not to mention effort. d3 please consider it, it feels wrong to see such a willful project take so much unneccesary time when you could do it in half of that.

    Except that Source development is a lot longer and the method of building the environments would be no different. Storyline, gameplay and atmosphere are the most important factors for TF, this is about making a truly great horror game that can possibly become the best mod for Half-Life, graphics although high-def for the engine, are not nearly as important, SH2/3 style graphics is what I'm aiming for.

    Anyhow the moddb page is live:

    http://www.moddb.com/mods/10470/the-forgotten

    Go watch and comment

    Construction process:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev1.jpg]

    Most of these are from Hammer. Using very basic textures, I scaled the room to the right proportions and slotted the bits together, labling each part so I knew what was that. I started off with texturing the stairs as that was going to be the first thing I would make. Hessi's radiator model (<3) had already been reskinned from a previous incarnation of TF, so there was nothing new to make there.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev2.jpg]

    Built the stairs, added some more props.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev3.jpg]

    Started to texture the walls, created most edits in the PSDs, then combined the layers and painted some details onto the flattened images.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev4.jpg]

    Made a temp floor with combined photos, textured the most of the other surfaces, finalised doors, the window at the back and the lift. The stairwell textures were still being scaled properly here, hence why the rough name-tag is still visible. Added cardboard boxes under the stairs.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev5.jpg]

    Used the previous photo flooring as a layer to paint the proper ground, added proper shadows under the props, mirrored the floor onto the ceiling temporarily whilst the ceiling texture was yet to be painted. Finalised the stairwell wall and added a can as a piece of trash.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev6.jpg]

    Added the ceiling with light strobes, put a bottle by the lift, textured the can properly, added lighting and finished the last texture for the wall.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev7.jpg]

    Now in-game shots. Added fixtures to the pipes, glows to the strobes, experimented with graffiti tags.

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/ap_dev8.jpg]

    Darkened the lighting, completed all graffiti tags and torn posters, added shadows on the ceiling emitted from the pipes and light strobes. Completed

    Very cool D3adlode, I like the effort that's gone into it.

    Actually I was thinking about this today when I was going through my game collection (c'mon DMC4 demo, download already!). I know you've played Silent Hill (duh), Resident Evil, etc but if you’ve not seen it then Clock Tower 3 might be good for some inspiration. Of course this is just a suggestion, but it seems like it has ideal mechanics for a modification, because it's really good at making the most out of a small number of areas; some of the "levels" are only a few scenes long despite also being a good hour in length on first play-through.

    Basically you play as a little girl and are pursued by some big Nemesis style monster that you can’t attack back, but you can hide around the place until is passes by and/or stops pursuit – you also have to keep your avatar calm, or she'll scream and run out of cover and be harder to control (she'll become less panicked while out of combat, this just means you have to hide well, even if you're good at dodging the enemy). In normal survival horror style, you have to go around the different rooms/streets getting items and solving puzzles, and meanwhile the monster is walking around too. Of course then it's full of bad boss fights, cheesey cutscenes and silly magic effects.

    Anyway, of course you don't want to make your avatar a little girl, but the whole hiding/exploration thing reduces the content to game-time ratio. At least I think that's what my point was... ah well.

    Yeah, it's still being made, haven't done a lot of work on it due to the new job but this weekend I'll have a fair bit of time to make up for that, not that I do an awful lot of work on TF in the week anyway! Watch this space.

    Development for TF is coming along slowly, I don't have a lot of time to work on it due to working all the hours that God sends. However I have couple of WIP areas in the works, these are very early and do not represent any final images at all, but it's all I have to show at the moment.

    Part of the town:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/town_wip1.jpg]

    The forest walk:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/forest_wip1.jpg]

    A couple of finished vehicle props, truck model by e4g1e (anyone remember him?) with my skin and the patrol car is a custom source model by an unknown author converted to Goldsource and reskinned by me:

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/truck2.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v221/deathcrush/tf_new/police_car.jpg]

    Not a lot but I thought it was time for an update, I've got a four day weekend coming up so I'm going to very busy working on stuff during that period, stay tuned for a proper media release sometime in April

    It reminds me of good ol' SH2... keep going, nice to see it's still rocking

    Few Hurgs for you!

    edit: I looked again at the truck and i think that you could shrink the front a bit, it's too long.

    Some very promising stuff in the outdoor areas.

    I think you get nice results when texturing the BSP with unique sheets but I think you run into problems with reusable sheets, and wasting time making unique sheets. Would be worth building a few very generic sets (a 512x512 sheet with two 256x512 walls on them, for example; a generic ceiling and floor etc) to save yourself time and only use unique sheets where you absolutely have to.

    The reason that it'd be easier in source is you have more tools to allow you to detail places more uniquely without having to rely on very detailed unique texture sheets. However, it looks fine on HL1, has a very retro vibe to it. In a sort of ugly pixelated way <3

    Anyway, looks very nice, more screens please.

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