[CryEng2] TC_Mirage Remake, a Venture in Redesign

[KorJax]

Thought I'd finally post a topic on some stuff I've been working on (and get an avatar!)

Small BG: I've done some level design work here and there for the Mechwarrior: Living Legends mod (which is a mod you can download and play today for Crysis Wars) since a couple years or so ago. A lot of what I've done has been touchups or collaborative efforts, so after taking a break I decided to take on a project for the team that involved fixing up some problems for a popular map we have. Anyways...

Mirage was originally made and designed by someone on our team that went by "Rolke", partly as a test of a new terrain-making method he wanted to try out, as well as to make a neat, simple deathmatch desert map. Eventually after he left, we introduced a new terrain-control style game mode and the map was retrofitted with bases to capture, as well as another level designer decided to place a lot of man-made structures on the map (the initial version was pretty bare outside of spawns).

Here's a couple of pictures of what it looks like in the current non-dev version of the mod:

Now there were a few issues Mirage had that I wanted to address with the remake:

• 
  [*:2t0kauqn]The most major of issues was an occlusion bug, where randomly at random points in the map, all objects, players, etc in the distance would suddenly disappear, despite being in plain sight. Why this happened was never solved, but I do remember it being an issue from the very first version. I suspect it has to do with the map getting corrupted somehow very very early on. Especially since trying to just import all the objects into the remake caused the issue to happen again. This bug is what warranted the leads to look into a remake.
  [*:2t0kauqn]Gameplay problems, in the sense that the terrain control version of the map was way to congested with over 7 capture points all within close vicinity to each other... a problem when a large part of the combat gameplay involves large weapons of war able to cover a lot of ground.
  [*:2t0kauqn]Stemming from the above, very little of the actual "real estate" space was being used in the map because of this. There was a lot of cool potential with the terrain that was never used because of how the map was designed to only involve the center.
  [*:2t0kauqn]Aesthetic issues that impacted gameplay, such as how much of the traversable terrain tended to visually "blend in" with non-traversable terrain (mountains, cliffs, holes) due to the map predominantly lacking color contrast and the overall color pallet of the map being analogous. This can be an issue when you have to pilot complex machines that can easily fall into stuck spots, off cliffs or traps with a complex terrain.
  [*:2t0kauqn]Non-gameplay aesthetic issues, such as spotty terrain textures and a lack of discernable landmarks to make each area of the map feel unique.

In any case, here's what I've got done so far. So on that note, some things I've wanted to do in the remake was rework capture point layouts to promote wider map usage, make each part of the map feel solid and unique in some way, redo the lighting and terrain textures to bring more beauty and color contrast to the map, create contrast and easy to read landmarks with the level design, and do something to to the gameplay/flow to have it play less like a deathmatch, and more like a creative spin on the terrain control gametype we have.

Okay enough blabber just going to the fun picture stuff now

One feature I've implemented so far was a dynamic time of day that goes from very early morning to late morning by the end of an hour-long match. Here's what that looks like as it progresses from start to finish:

Well that's all for now. I still haven't really touched anything with particle effects yet, decal work, scripting, sounds and need to develop the center capture point... but gameplay is pretty much done, which is good! I feel like from playtests I've done that it plays much better than the old version we current have in the mod, so I'm satisfied there.

[2d-chris]

Looks pretty cool there, visually though deserts can be one of the most varied and interesting settings ever. Not just sand and rocks

Notice the salt plains, really cool for breaking up flat areas that you'd need for structures.

Death Valley!

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= ... 80&bih=935

[KorJax]

I actually just got back from visiting Deathvalley a few weeks ago It's a great park.

Good idea on trying to incorperate stuff like the Salt Flats It might really benefit some of the areas of the map to give them a visual distinction to put something like that in.