I’m trying to make a first person shooter, and currently I am working on the map (or play area). The game takes place entirely inside a building, and it’s a long enough that it would take forever (and is taking forever) to simply ‘model’ the map as you would model a person or weapon, but it’s not so long that it’s really worth my time attempting to create a simple map creating script (which would come in handy for future projects, but I’m not sure if I could even pull it off). Does anyone have any tips or strategies to how I could go about making this more efficiently and easily? Is there a different way of doing this?
This is all I have so far, and it’s is about 10 hours of work (I’m not a very good modeler to begin with)
Thanks
Sure just look for the make-fps-map button, I think it is in the mesh tools extra panel next to the perfect-render button.
Sorry couldn’t help myself. Making anything good takes time, lots of it. 10 hours is a tiny amount of time compared to what I have spent on the environment for a simple still picture.
I am sure there are some nice level creators out there, but then you wouldn’t be doing anything original. I would look at Yo Frankie documentation to see how they went about it. I bet the answer is…lots of blood sweat and tears.
Do you mean models? So for example, I’d have a simple hallway model that i could put in and extrude, and a doorway model that would fit into the hallway model, and a room template model, and a stairway model, and things like that? I’ll try that. Is there a way to script these so that certain peices will snap together with other peices (eg. doorways with halls, rooms with doorways, etc.)? It sounds like a map editor, but I’m willing to try it. I’ll look over the blender API, but I’m not too good with python so if anyone has heard of this then please tell me. Also, more suggestions for my first question would be nice.
Thanks
You don’t extrude, use just keep placing more of the hall mesh objects, what I referred to as a module, to make the hall as long as you need. You need to make modules for doorways, intersections and corners, and whatever else you want in the game.
You can use the Array modifier to duplicate objects as well, if that fits what you want to do. But all in all, I never found Blender to be a very good FPS map editor… for that I use UnrealEd!
P.S Ten hours? There is a reason it takes months for a professional art team of dozens to even get some concept art down for a game!
Laying out the large-scale features of the map, such as hills, cities, rooms, tunnels, etc., for players and enemies to move around in.
Specifying certain regions where certain gameplay activities or behaviors occur, such as resource harvesting, base building, water travelling, etc.
Specifying non-static parts of a level, such as doors, keys and buttons with associated mechanisms, teleporters, hidden passageways, etc.
Specifying locations of various entities, such as player units, enemies, monster spawn points, ladders, coins, resource nodes, weapons, save points.
Specifying the start and exit locations for one or more players.
Adding aesthetic details such as level-specific graphic textures, sounds, animation, lighting and music.
Introducing scripted event locations, where certain actions by the player can trigger specified changes.
Placing pathfinding nodes that non-player characters take as they walk around, the actions they will take in response to specific triggers, and any dialog they might have with the player.
(Before you ask, I don’t normally talk like that, I copied-and-pasted this from Wikipedia.)
