"Vast locations from underground caverns and forgotten cities to acid wastelands"
- Thread starter Sir Lucius
- Start date
L
Limbo
Guest
That would be cool and all, but I hope they would have a function to disable those settings, just incase if it ruins the fun.
Sir Lucius
Veteran XX
Shinigami said:Dynamic and scripted aren't opposites.
I think it'd be interesting if the day/night changes were timed, but the fog random.
Scripted in the sense that after X ammount of time the fog rolls in. You know what I ment ;P
Sir Lucius
Veteran XX
It would kind of be cool if maps could have random weather when they load. Like Raindance, it could be raining one time you play it, overcast another time, sunny and clear, night -- so it would look a little differnt everytime. Just something to spice up the pubs a bit. And I don't mean it would change from day to night, that would be cool of course, I'm just saying that it'd be neat if everytime the map loaded the enviormental effects randomized.
Harlequin_Jester
Veteran X
Lightning rarely became an issue in T2 and several maps had pretty frequent lightning strikes.
It was usually a "once-in-20 matches" thing to be struck.
Underground maps would be cool, but if T1 and T2 have shown us anything, no one will play them.
(T1: King Under the Hill, T2: Gorgon and to a much lesser degree Minotaur)
It was usually a "once-in-20 matches" thing to be struck.
Underground maps would be cool, but if T1 and T2 have shown us anything, no one will play them.
(T1: King Under the Hill, T2: Gorgon and to a much lesser degree Minotaur)
Just want to add my voice to this-hear discussion:
I'm at work and I don't remember the exact map, so bear with me: but remember the Tribes 1 map, I think it was by DOX, where there's a hill with a tunnel/hanger that goes all the way through it? It was a winter map as I recall.
Ok, that kind of underground stuff is pretty cool, because it doesn't *have* to slow down everybody -- you can ski in one side and out the other with the flag.
I was wondering about how practical it might be to extend that to bases that are underground but allow you to ski right into them. The big challenge there would be to still A) keep the base to a manageable size, and B) allow people to ski in and out with no problems without confining them to a single entrance/exit, which would make the defense too powerful.
Still, a lot of very interesting ideas can be presented. Tribes 1 had some maps that were good for skiing and some that weren't, but really, some of the most playable and consistently fun maps ended up being those that had a mix of both. I'm thinking of Raindance in particular here. In a different sense, Rollercoaster also fits this bill -- anyone can quickly learn the straight base-to-base route, but without touch you're a juicy plum waiting to be picked out of the air by defensive snipers, and of course they will almost always see you coming and be ready for you. Learning the back-cap and side routes -- while not exactly rocket science -- took quite a bit more practice, at least for me.
Or look at Stonehenge (I love to hate that map). Sure, it's a non-stop clusterf*ck, but the terrain is NOT very natively ski-friendly. We're all used to it, but look at how the map packs have progressively dumbed down skiing -- no one wants to learn another stonehenge, so only the easy-to-ski maps get chosen. Still, which one tends to be more fun and have a longer life span -- a super-high-speed, made-only-for-skiing simplistic map, or a map with really unique and varied terrain like SH?
The cool thing, to me, is this:
This is the first Tribes game where the maps are being designed with skiing in mind.
That means there is a truly awesome opportunity here. For instance, what kinds of terrain obstacles are we going to have? Tribes threw in a rock or two every now and then for variety -- but with the Unreal engine at our disposal, we can do more.
The Tribes 1 rocks and other obstacles serve a very different purpose now than when Tribes 1 first came out. Now, you may use a big rock for a half-second's worth of cover if you get plucked out of a route, or maybe to occasionally give you some cover in Heavy when you're taking out the RT on Raindance. But generally, we just zip past them. Small obstacles that are out in the middle of the battlefield, away from the close dueling surrounding objectives, serve very little useful purpose, since we're moving so fast.
I have a hunch that, as always, the dev team is way ahead of us here.
But I'll say it anyways:
What could serve a very real and dramatic purpose in T:V are much bigger midfield obstacles. The Unreal engine, thanks to its multitexturing/detail texturing abilities, is well-suited to creating much, much larger environmental prefabs than we saw in Tribes 1, and the content creation tools allow the designers to make much more aesthetically pleasing and detailed prefabs than the ones found in Tribes 2 (worldcraft -- ow). I'm thinking whole cliff overhangs and an assortment of rocky, canyon-style walls. I'm thinking those cool huge rocks, where the top is pretty flat, but the whole thing is rounded, and underneath the top rock the wind has eroded the rock's support, creating fields full of vaguely mushroom-esque, lopside flat rocks with an overhang (just because it would be cool to see the ski routes that develop when you could ski completely on top of the flat rocks, or on the terrain 10m below, or come up with routes that use both).
Heh, yup, more daydreaming.
I'm at work and I don't remember the exact map, so bear with me: but remember the Tribes 1 map, I think it was by DOX, where there's a hill with a tunnel/hanger that goes all the way through it? It was a winter map as I recall.
Ok, that kind of underground stuff is pretty cool, because it doesn't *have* to slow down everybody -- you can ski in one side and out the other with the flag.
I was wondering about how practical it might be to extend that to bases that are underground but allow you to ski right into them. The big challenge there would be to still A) keep the base to a manageable size, and B) allow people to ski in and out with no problems without confining them to a single entrance/exit, which would make the defense too powerful.
Still, a lot of very interesting ideas can be presented. Tribes 1 had some maps that were good for skiing and some that weren't, but really, some of the most playable and consistently fun maps ended up being those that had a mix of both. I'm thinking of Raindance in particular here. In a different sense, Rollercoaster also fits this bill -- anyone can quickly learn the straight base-to-base route, but without touch you're a juicy plum waiting to be picked out of the air by defensive snipers, and of course they will almost always see you coming and be ready for you. Learning the back-cap and side routes -- while not exactly rocket science -- took quite a bit more practice, at least for me.
Or look at Stonehenge (I love to hate that map). Sure, it's a non-stop clusterf*ck, but the terrain is NOT very natively ski-friendly. We're all used to it, but look at how the map packs have progressively dumbed down skiing -- no one wants to learn another stonehenge, so only the easy-to-ski maps get chosen. Still, which one tends to be more fun and have a longer life span -- a super-high-speed, made-only-for-skiing simplistic map, or a map with really unique and varied terrain like SH?
The cool thing, to me, is this:
This is the first Tribes game where the maps are being designed with skiing in mind.
That means there is a truly awesome opportunity here. For instance, what kinds of terrain obstacles are we going to have? Tribes threw in a rock or two every now and then for variety -- but with the Unreal engine at our disposal, we can do more.
The Tribes 1 rocks and other obstacles serve a very different purpose now than when Tribes 1 first came out. Now, you may use a big rock for a half-second's worth of cover if you get plucked out of a route, or maybe to occasionally give you some cover in Heavy when you're taking out the RT on Raindance. But generally, we just zip past them. Small obstacles that are out in the middle of the battlefield, away from the close dueling surrounding objectives, serve very little useful purpose, since we're moving so fast.
I have a hunch that, as always, the dev team is way ahead of us here.
But I'll say it anyways:What could serve a very real and dramatic purpose in T:V are much bigger midfield obstacles. The Unreal engine, thanks to its multitexturing/detail texturing abilities, is well-suited to creating much, much larger environmental prefabs than we saw in Tribes 1, and the content creation tools allow the designers to make much more aesthetically pleasing and detailed prefabs than the ones found in Tribes 2 (worldcraft -- ow). I'm thinking whole cliff overhangs and an assortment of rocky, canyon-style walls. I'm thinking those cool huge rocks, where the top is pretty flat, but the whole thing is rounded, and underneath the top rock the wind has eroded the rock's support, creating fields full of vaguely mushroom-esque, lopside flat rocks with an overhang (just because it would be cool to see the ski routes that develop when you could ski completely on top of the flat rocks, or on the terrain 10m below, or come up with routes that use both).
Heh, yup, more daydreaming.
Uncle Silas
Veteran X
The Morrowind sand storms were fucking dope. Anyone else see that? It would be terrible for a high action FPS but it sure looked good.
aScotiA said:
Well, yeah.
An all-underground map would suck. And a partially underground map might suck too, depending on how it's handled.
I dunno, though. Really, going underground is the same as going inside a base -- you're trading the outdoors for indoors. As long as the underground areas are either a) large enough to be entirely skiiable and open in their own right, which isn't very likely because the whole thing would probably have to be modelled without use of the terrain system, or b) the underground areas act like an ordinary base does in Tribes. I mean, in the RD base you're going underground . . .
just a continuation of that idea.BlodBath-VuP-
Veteran XX
