Zombie city WIP (Image Heavy....)

[Bond394]

Hey everyone,

Right now I'm working on an zombie infested city set in a Brooklyn style environment. The environment is in the process of going into the Unreal editor so the screenshots are in 3ds Max. Currently the polygon count is at 56,000 but I have not fully optimized all of the buildings yet so hopefully I'll get rid of a few polygons before I texture.

Please let me know how I'm doing and things that I could approve on and maybe things that you think I might have missed.

My little backstory for the environment is that an old Catholic school building(yet to be modeled) is being demolished for real estate in the inner city. As a crane is removing a statue in the courtyard they find that the base of the statue is actually a coffin. When they go to inspect the coffin they release the spirit of a witch who immediatley places a curse on everyone. The curse does not allow anyone to die and gives them an eternal hunger for flesh. Now the city itself becomes desolated and the living must learn a new way to live.

[Natace]

Great work, I appreciate this kindof work since i'm doing pretty much the exact same thing, only all buildings have interiors as well (alot more work), and i'm on a different engine, plus the story is completely different.

But in case, I love to see city environments done in 3d modellers by hand. All I can ask though is did you do any measurements or are you just doing rough estimates.
I find alot of games that have street environments get everything out of proportion to one another and you end up with this mess or misproportion and unpracticality.
I've gone out and measured buildings myself, measured props, and measured just about anything that I would need to measure, and the end result looks far more appealing.

As for the detail in the map, surely the Unreal Engine 3 can handle more than 56,000 polys + your player model and a whole swarm of zombies which may end up being probably 750,000 polys IF THAT and if you were doing interiors.
But yeh, if you can optimize it without losing detail, go for it. Otherwise, don't take out detail to lower the poly count. Just polish the map, not detract from it.

I think the UE can have about 1.5M polys on screen at any one time anyway, but you'd have to consider limitations of peoples computers unless you're like me and are probably going to take a few years finishing the game/mod anyway, so it's best to have as much detail as possible since in a few years time, that detail is going to be very minor and people are going to have really up to date hardware that will play with that much detail without any problem.

Anyway, i'm tired, and trying to write something constructive (never makes sense), so i'll leave it there and say good luck to you sir, the gaming world needs better zombie games, and it's people like you and I that will make those games.

[Bond394]

Natace- I did measure the props for the environment but the building I kinda winged it. Early on I did bring one of the buildings into Unreal editor and checked out the dimensions. And thank you for your words of wisdom, it really it hard to find people who make actual zombie levels. I found it was hard to find any creditable reference. Most of the movies take place in a cheesy setting and its very stereo typical. Burning barrels boxes everywhere and people who don't know how to survive. What I think I'm going towards was ok they tried and stop the zombie hoards on the street level but of course that didn't work so what else can you do? Well I think that if that happened I would barricade the front door with bricks or wood. It would take work and a decoy but then I would live on the second and third floors and move about on the roofs of the buildings using ladders and make shift bridges. Anyways that was way too long but I would really like to see some of your work and maybe share idea's.

[Natace]

Well, I won't be showing my mod off publically just yet as I said before. (It's a "When it's done" project ).

I do have some stuff to show you if you'd like to chat via messenger however.

I'm always interested to talk about games, game development, and zombies aswell as the general chit chat.

I'll send you a pm with my email address.

As for the city environments in movies, I don't necessarily think they are cheesy, except maybe land of the dead and resident evil.

I liked 28 days/weeks later because it wasn't all doom and gloom, it was like what it would be like to walk out into an empty city one afternoon...pretty creepy.
I liked dawn of the dead as well. It used contrast really well in the way that the shopping mall was o' so clean and the environment wasn't this grim looking place.
I thought the movie was well done aside from a few "stupid survivor" moments, but otherwise it was pretty good in terms of how I would want characters to act (in some cases they seemed too casual to be acting).

Anyway...rambling on here. With your city, with the barricade across the street using the bus and the flipped trailer...if you're like me, you'd get rid of those straight away and brain storm some other barrier other than an invisible wall.
OR, you could just position the bus differently and get rid of the trailer and make it something else.
If you can reposition the bus and whatever else to something more realistic (plan it as if the bus was moving up the street and has crashed along it's path, or in the case of your level, it would have been carefully parked.

I think that a crashed bus and truck would be suitable, an oil tanker or simply just a truck with a covered trailer that has collided with the bus and spun and flipped over or something. Then you could put broken props in the path of destruction and skid marks etc.

It just creates more of a reason for "why on earth would that trailer just happen to be flipped there", it creates a small story that people can read straight away and there is no "that's wierd" feeling in the gamer then.

EDIT:
BTW...for the love of all zombie games and mods, backup your work >< I just lost some work I'd been doing for the past 12 hours *urgh* at least it's better than losing the work I'd done in 3 months and then having to recreate the whole lot...

[Briamond]

Hey Bond394 thats some nice work you got there nice and clean looking forward to seeing it textured.

I apologize in advance for going off the point slightly but Natace i was wondering what engine you are using and in what way you modelled the interiors of the buildings for your map.

Did you model the interior as a seperate model or was it all as one?

I will have to tackle interiors of buildings myself eventually and i was just wondering what your thoughts on this were.

I'm using the C4 engine which uses full dynamic lighting but i don't think flipping normals of a box inside a building would be a good way to go... i'm using MAX 2008 to model my buildings.

Cheers if you can enlighten me in any way.

Good work Bond394 looking forward to more.

[Bond394]

Briamond- Thanks for the comments.I totally don't mind moving off the topic a little. I like people discussing how that make objects or buildings, thats how we learn.

Natace- I actually had a dream about my level last night. Thats when you know you've worked on it to long. Anyways so going with my idea of practically blocking off first floors of most buildings. How would you get across the street? Well my thought is that since you already have the blockade why not put a similar one on the other side so you have a safe zone in the middle and then take some of the scaffolding and put that in the middle as a makeshift bridge. That way you can get across semi safely to the next side. Anyways I'll try some stuff out and save my work and make sure that I back it up and then post some new shots up.

[mmcleo11]

This is looking pretty good dude.

I would agree with the crit about the trailer at the end of the street. Why not have a street light or electricity pole fallen over onto the bus with electricity wires n whatnot blocking the road instead?

I'm not sure if you would want all your buildings all interconnected. Its a game design thing but imo would have only small groups of buildings connect in some fashion. Dont go over elloborate.

But cant wait for more updates!

[Frubes]

Hi Bond,

I like the idea for the environment but one thing i would say is that its absoloutely demorilizing creating everything first then facing a mountain of unwrapping and texturing. Also i see a LOT of redundant models in your scene. I know nothing about Unreal engine but if its anything else like working in the industry im sure it must have some way of recognising duplicated/instanced geometry.

For example, in your first picture you have duplicated three buildings along the street. It would have been a better idea (imo) to make one building, texture it and place it in world and then move it along. That way you would create an instance of that mesh and the engine only reads it once (in lehmans terms). You can take modularity to an astonishing level and by clever placement of accessories you will be able to reuse models over and over again. Like you have done by placing scaffolding in front of the buildings it can make them look completely different. Currently your polycount is relitively high because everything is a different mesh. Instancing this and reusing models will reduce this greatly. Things like windows, pillars, walls pretty much anything can be reused. If you are worried about repitition make a couple of differently versions. Make your textures in such a way that just moving the UVs right or left will change the look of the model completely. Theres hundreds of posts out there about modularity and texturing.

UDN - Two - WorkflowAndModularity - modularity for ut

Modular Design - modular tutorial in general

http://poopinmymouth.com/process/tips/thirding.jpg - Tutorial on texture usage

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/gd...aki_maatta.ppt

The last link is a powerpoint on level design and reusing items, also contains some handy stuff on scale. Keep going, you have made a good start and it will be nice to see where you go with the texturing

[Natace]

Originally Posted by Briamond

Hey Bond394 thats some nice work you got there nice and clean looking forward to seeing it textured.

I apologize in advance for going off the point slightly but Natace i was wondering what engine you are using and in what way you modelled the interiors of the buildings for your map.

Did you model the interior as a seperate model or was it all as one?

I will have to tackle interiors of buildings myself eventually and i was just wondering what your thoughts on this were.

I'm using the C4 engine which uses full dynamic lighting but i don't think flipping normals of a box inside a building would be a good way to go... i'm using MAX 2008 to model my buildings.

Cheers if you can enlighten me in any way.

Good work Bond394 looking forward to more.

I'll send you a PM instead of posting in bonds thread.

As for bond dreaming about your level, wow! That has happened to me too isn't it funny, lol. Such a strange feeling as well.
And looking forward to seeing new shots with your new idea Keep at it mate

As for texturing. I wouldn't worry about it at this stage. The best thing to do is get a feel for scale of your level and get the layout all down pat. If you have repeated buildings, you know where they will go, do all you'll need to do is texture the building you want to repeat later on, and then repeat it.

However. word of advice on repeated buildings, since I think you're aiming for a more linear experience, you shouldn't use repeated buildings at all unless you're doing a housing area where realistically, there will be repeated designs. HOWEVER, do not have the same contents in the buildings, as do try to use a bit of texture variation as not all houses will be exactly the same.
If you're doing a huge non linear area like me, then repeated buildings helps, but I don't like the idea of players seeing the same thing in one area as they saw in another area, it kills the atmosphere, so i'll be modelling every building individually so that they are all unique and different which lends higher exploration value than repeated buildings do.
I mean...just look at games like Boiling point: road to hell, Assassins creed, or Hellgate: London.
All which are meant to have huge exploration value, but all they really offer are big environments of nothing with a few important places thrown in for some spice.
Of course it's extremely difficult to re-model jereuselum or london, but after seeing Hellgate: london, I was wondering what developers are doing in games no days. The environments in that game were absolute utter crap.

Anyway, I won't ramble on.

My whole point here is to NOT use repeated buildings or landscape if you want to make a quality product. The time you spend making the game/mod unique and different the whole way through, is equal to the amount of fun people will have exploring your hand sculpted game world.

[Frubes]

I dont think you could be more wrong Natace. Games MUST reuse assets in order to be playable. You just cannot have 100% custom content of free roaming games of this nature. Engines just cannot handle it. If every building in Assassins creed was unique the draw calls and texture budgets would be shot to pieces and you would probably be running round at 1 or 2 fps. Its all about the limitations of your engine. Every game i know of reuses assets in different ways, its how you reuse them which will define your environments. Carefully placing accessories and disguising buildings you have reused is so essential. I really think you should take a look at the ppt i linked. Your environment would either have to be tiny with 100% custom content or your gameplay absoloutely rubbish with piss poor performance. You need to strike a balance between the two and often its art assets which get culled first. The reason objects are instanced and duplicated is because it saves on many technical areas and important processing capabilities. Its good to get into those habits early on before you get into the industry. Nothing worse than creating lots of assets only to find your engine cant handle them lateron and all your work has been done for nothing.

Sorry for derailing this a little.