Evaluation
1. Problem Solving & Methods of working
To be honest I’ve experienced nothing but problems, despite having quite an extensive blog after going back over it I’ve only found a few cases of documented problems so ill go over these and how/if I got over them and then go into additional ones.
Some Examples of problems Found in the blog:
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/01/why-did-i-want-to-do-lighting.html
This was the first problem I remember experiencing, basically it shows how the light didn’t seem to work properly, after spending ages trying to figure out the problem was that foliage layers handle lighting really quite badly so the grass was staying permanently lit and ignoring the rest of the maps lighting, which as you should see be pitch black as I took the skylight away to test.
I consulted some Unreal books and read online and came to the conclusion there was no real way to fix it so I had to delete the grass layer which I thought I was dependant on because the grass material underneath wasn’t very good. On reflection this actually was quite a good idea because the foliage layer was millions of triangles to get it as dense as I wanted and it was almost unplayable in places from having to render all the grass instances.
So I deleted the layer which resulted in a massive performance boost but needed to change the material to something more high quality, which gave me the opportunity to push myself and create my own texture, the grass was my first custom texture and doing it made me realise I could make some others.
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/01/3d-and-back-to-paperwork.html
This is the first model I imported I believe or one of the first. The problem was I imported the model and then applied the right material to make it look pretty much identical in the photo you can see, the problem was after building the light you see how drastically it changes to a really dull washed out blue which looks nothing like how it should.
I to this day am not entirely sure why it came out like this, I think it may be something to do with the way the model accepts textures as it was never unwrapped probably, as well as the height fog and distance affecting it. I was tempted to delete it numerous times but eventually I got round the idea by instead of trying to make a metal looking material I made some emissive materials in the material editor and applied a blue one to the structure and then made some light shaped brushes and applied a white emissive material to them. It was quite a rough way to do it but I had no idea how else I could fix it and in the final map I don’t think it looks too bad, perhaps a little strong but better than looking washed out how it does here.
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/02/big-ben-update-wrapping-makes-quite.html
This post shows my first attempt at making my own uv template, I wasn’t sure how the concept worked at first so I just made any old layout with the default settings in 3DS, as you can see in the images it looks like something from the 1980’s because I used so little of the image the texture was extremely stretched and lost a lot of quality. As you can see I get round this by understanding how to better use the space available and make another version which although is rough it’s a huge difference in quality in comparison.
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/03/some-updates.html
This post contains a rant about runtime errors. Basically I could build the warehouse map and cook the map and it would play on my computer but if I sent it to a friend or tried it on another computer it was instantly crash as you launch it with a runtime error and not much else in the way of information. Multiple days browsing Google didn’t get me much closer except it reminded me about the logs unreal creates on launch, so I went through them and read the output at the end which led me to the problem that the skydome was somehow corrupted which was causing the crash. To fix this I was able to delete the existing skydome, insert another and rebuild/cook which fixed the problem. I have no idea what caused it to corrupt but it cost me a good few days wasting time trying to get to the bottom of it.
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post_21.html
This is one of the many problems I couldn’t really fix but I think are worth documenting, this is a generic building I built in Google Sketchup, its mentioned elsewhere about how you have no control over the polygons in Sketchup as it’s not really designed for game models and this blog shows exactly what I mean, glitches and stretched triangle shapes messing up the lighting. I spent ages with the model in 3DS trying to simply the faces in some way to remove the problem but came to the conclusion the only way I could get round this would be to make the model in 3DS from scratch which I didn’t have time to do but I at least know for future reference.
http://venomfmp.blogspot.com/2010/04/i-think-i-broke-it.html
This is a quick time out to complain at an error not related to Unreal. Basically it’s as it says, I spent a week or so learning how to use Crysis Sandbox for my jungle level and then I got these weird graphic display error where it’s constantly redrawing what’s on the screen whenever I move it. Reinstalling wouldn’t fix it and I even reinstalled my graphics card drivers but I wasn’t prepared to format my C drive and reinstall windows as I’m useless and backing up and I currently have work spread over about 6 different drives and would probably lose something important. Luckily the UDK tech map was released shortly after which gave me the option to make the same sort of map but back in unreal albeit an updated version which was much more stable.
General Problems Encountered:
I’m not going to go off on a tangent here but I’ve experience a hell of a lot of problems over the course of this project and 99% of them stem from Unreal 3, I have asked other people and it seems I’m not alone on the matter so it’s not just user error the engine is incredibly unreliable and unstable as well as limiting in what you can do without being prepared to script and recompile your own versions of the game. So this is a few problems experienced that I didn’t dedicated a blog post to but will probably be mentioned somewhere.
There has been problems with terrain editor where it wouldn’t let u paint on it which was one of my very first problems which I fixed by moving the terrain slightly either editing it or moving the entire plane and then trying to paint again, sometimes I would need to reopen but this usually fixed it.
The next problem I had was that the water materials stayed lit no matter what lighting was used so made them look out of place. I had to fix this by either editing the water/making my own version or adjusting the surroundings so they didn’t stand out too much.
Early on in the map when I made it incredibly large I started to get crashes as I would build, I would monitor the process in the task manager and noticed when it reached around 3.2gb ram being used it would just crash and close itself (it wasn’t my pc’s fault as I have 8gb of ram and it still did it). I learnt that what I was asking was too demanding and I realised a lot of it came down to tessellation size of the terrain and the lightmap resolution on surfaces/meshes being set too high which gives more defined shadows. After adjusting all these down to lower settings I did notice I could build a lot more and started to carry on decorating the map until it would crash again but I would reach the limit of how low I could drop the quality and still experience crashes. This caused me to reduce the borders of the map substantially and is partly the reason for it being so foggy the finished map is around 25% maybe a 1/3rd the size of the original map any bigger and it would crash on building.
I had a lot of issue with light which I think is in some way related to the previous error I played with dynamic lights and changed numerous settings it took me about 1 month solid trying to get some shadow in my map to add some realism, which I ended up achieving by adding a directional light to represent the moon. In comparison to the UDK map it looks quite low quality but it’s a massive improvement over what it used to be.
Aside from these which could be partly my fault I experience a whole host of crashes that cost me weeks in lost work due to sometimes it decides to auto save and other times it doesn’t for ages and although I realise I should save more it doesn’t change the fact this engine is very temperamental. I experienced crashes on building, crashes on cooking, crashing on copying and trying to paste a copied mesh, crashes on opening the material editor, crashes on saving the map, crashes on trying to preview the map as well as even a few random crashes on trying to open the editor which would require me to delete the folder in my documents and let the editor rebuild itself. A lot of these may be my problem but after spending a couple of months making something in UDK and experiencing one crash and one error over the whole time I’m convinced a lot of it is due to it being an old buggy build of the engine.
2. How the product works – Construction/How to
The most through way to explain how I constructed my FMP would be to read over my blog as I’ve gone into great depth and posted whenever I’ve done something new which is why I have around 100 quite detailed posted spanning over the past year but for evaluation purposes I can summarize how I’ve gone through the process to reach the current state of the project.
Once I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do and which software I would be using I set about learning some of the basics that I thought would be essential before I got any further into the project.
I decided which section of the game would be feasible to create and began developing map layouts and other concept art so I could get a better feeling of how I wanted the map to look. Once I was satisfied with a layout I thought would be actually possible I set about starting to work in the Unreal Editor using brushes to block out rough shapes of buildings and start to work on the scaling of the map which is quite an important feature to get right. After getting a rough outline of the building area I added some borders to block off the map and give it a shape so I knew the workspace I had to decorate.
For the next few weeks/month I fully developed the London Environment, from the park area to the building section as well as trying to make all the borders look realistic with large meshes which just left me with alleyways and small sections that needed decorating, but I had a final shape of the map completed. Before decorating further I spent about another month working on lighting and trying to make it atmospheric while still being able to see as it was meant to be set at the night time during a storm. I had lots of issues with lighting getting it to look right and being able to build it successfully without the editor crashing but I eventually got majority of the lighting in something how I wanted and moved on.
The way I worked after this was constantly passing over the map adding more and more fine detail/meshes and focusing on areas step by step till they all gradually came together. During this time I was also thinking about the story more and started developing some more concept art for other parts of the game. I’d spent so long on this map I needed a break and to do something different which was why I decided to make a new map with some of the tips id picked up from the previous work. I focused all my attention on this map for a few weeks following the same pattern of blocking out the shape > adding large meshes > lighting and then decorating in much more detail.
Once this map was “finished” to a standard I was happy to leave at I did the same with my Subway section which left me with 3 almost completed maps. At this stage I realised id neglected a lot of the other aspects of the project and since id admitted defeat to UIScene which limited me a lot in what I was going to do I spent a good 5-6 weeks doing nothing but concept art, I drew NPC's, weapons and all the environments as well as getting some rough mocks up for in game menus that id later develop in Photoshop.
After this I tried to learn Crysis Sandbox which was obviously cut short after only a week or two so I then started playing around learning how UDK worked and how it was different to the UT3 build, I was quite happy in it due to it being much more stable so I set to work making a 4th map in this editor. This was quite different layout and something new for me but I still followed the same pattern of getting the rough shape together and adding large meshes then making passes through constantly filling up area with greater detail. I spent a considerable amount of time with the terrain editor as id used it previously but had a lot of issues with it, however the time spent using it the UDK was much more successful and I made something look quite realistic for a landscape. I obviously didn’t have to spend much time with the lighting due to the lightmass feature which saved me a ton of work which left me with 4 near complete maps.
At this point I did the Photoshop mock ups for shops and weapon screens as well as the PDA interface which add some depth to the prototype instead of just bare maps and completed any final artwork. Finally I went back and “finished” the maps to a standard I was reasonably happy with. I finally made a simple flash gallery right at the end to contain all these pieces of work as in total there is around 45-50 in total and I wanted an organised way to display them
How to use the project is quite tricky to describe. There is a video which shows some of the elements I’ve created as well as running round the maps, the matinee system was too unreliable to make something how id initially wanted but in a first person view you can still see the map layout and design.
The maps will also be fully explorable for anyone who wishes to look for themselves, although there are no bot paths they work perfectly fine as 1 player.
The 3 Unreal Tournament maps will be accessible through launching the game as usual and selecting a regular Deathmatch, unfortunately there is no way to get to one another without quitting the previous without using command lines. But they go in the following directory:
\Documents\My Games\Unreal Tournament 3\UTGame\Published\CookedPC\CustomMaps
The UDK map has its own installer that can be installed to any pc just like a proper game, the machine doesn’t need UDK installed either as everything is pre packaged. Once install you just launch the .exe like any other application and from here you can select Deathmatch which will only have one map in the list which is obviously the correct one.
There is also a flash gallery of my artwork for presentation purposes which is straight forward just using the simple navigation on screen to browse different sections.
3. Testing & feedback
In regards to user testing and feedback the main source of this was from my weekly tutorials as well as asking a few people to run around my created maps and offer any suggestions or improvements that I may have missed or overlooked by spending so much time working on it.
I’ve created a detailed blog that has all my development shots step by step as well as keeping literally hundreds of save files so it’s always been fairly easy to get feedback and make changes accordingly. The main feedback I received was that my main map didn’t look too much like London which is why I decided to add a few iconic structures and area. I created a Big Ben model, Nelsons Column, a London Underground Sign/Entrance to the subway and the London Eye is also in my map, these were the main icon things that came to my mind when I thought of London, there were a few others such as the millennium dome and the tower bridge but I consulted a map to see the location of these structures in London. Big Ben and London eye are right next to each other which makes my map quite accurate however the other mentioned structures are much further down the river and I thought it would look stupid if I just crammed every iconic place into one relatively small map (in relation to the size of London itself).
I researched more photographs of London and made some benches and roadside guard rails that seemed to appear it photos which I think helped add some realism to the scene this combined with making the subway section I think demonstrates that I took suggestions into consideration and did change my project accordingly.
A few other suggestions I had were also realism related. I had thousands of litres of water cascading off the apartment blocks and it was just falling into the road which didn’t look right at all and it was suggested to change to make it look realistic. I did change it a few times to adding a plane of water covering the entire map which unfortunately detracted from them detail and in the end I changed it to look like the water had crushed the concrete and was forcing its way underground into the subway network which looked much more realistic.
Other forms of testing I’ve done on my work are by cooking the maps and then trying them on other computers to test performance as well as if they even work. I thought this was quite crucial as it would give me time to try and figure out any problems before the end of the project and I did encounter a considerable amount. My main computer would be classed as quite high spec so it wasn’t enough presuming my map would work fine on other computers just because I would get 200fps and it was quite surprising to see how bad they run on other computers but I’ve tried to make some alterations and optimizations to at least make them playable.
4. Evaluation & Appraisal
4.1 Self Appraisal
In my Proposal document I wrote that I would submit the following:
· One large London based environment developed in Unreal 3
· At least one large concept art image showing the other levels that would be in the full version
· Numerous concept art of the map I was actually creating
· Menu and basic navigation created in UIscene
· Character concept art
· Weapon concept art
· Enemy concept art
· Storyboard some important story sections.
In my year 2 studies I created a map using the UT2004 engine so although I knew the basic elements would be similar I wasn’t entirely sure how much would be new or changed so I wasn’t too confident on how my map would turn out as I would need to spend the first month or two getting to grips with the new engine additions.
As well as this I had never used UIscene until I was informed by another student that it even existed so I wasn’t sure how feasible this section was going to be and to end I have never been particularly great at drawing and don’t enjoy it so a lot of my proposed ideas would need some persistence and quite an amount of self learning which I think was a good challenge to set myself.
Before going into detail on each section in summary I have fell short in 1 department due to engine and user limitations which I don’t think has affected the outcome too much but on the positive side I have done a lot more work than I planned in another section which I believe more than makes up for it overall.
· One large London based environment developed in Unreal 3
In regards to Unreal work this is where I’ve done a lot more than I planned, I’ve created a large London based environment in Unreal 3 including a small subway section which although is quite small in comparison to how I envision the real game I think it’s quite an achievement for one person as in total it’s a lot bigger than most unreal maps.
I spent a month or two over the previous summer relearning the engine and scanning forums for advice and tutorials before I set to work on my map I think it shows that it’s my first map in UT3 as looks quite bare in places as I was running out of time and I overestimated the size of the map and how much id need to put in it, but regardless it’s what I initially planned to complete in my proposal.
As well as this map I also created some assets in Google sketchup, I believe 12 in total including bins, benches, guard rails and a few iconic structures such as big Ben, nelsons column and bridge street. Although I’ve never made my own models before and although this isn’t the correct way to make game models I believe I needed to do them to make the map feel more like London as built in assets packaged with Unreal didn’t really give the desired effect. Not only did I have to learn how to use Google SketchUp I also had to learn some basics in 3DS Max which I’ve also never used to unwrap the models to be able to render a UV Template to texture them correctly before learning how to import them into the game. This process was quite a learning experience and consumed a lot of my time as everything was something I’d never done before so had to research every step and although they don’t look particularly great in game they do make the map appear more like London, especially the iconic structures.
The Map overall took months of work due to having to learn new techniques previously mentioned as well as trying to make it realistic as things such as lighting and scale are usually an issue, for me anyway. There was quite a few weeks where I was spending up to 20hrs a day in the editor which was much more than I predicted it would take and although the map may not reflect the time spent on it I’ve at least learnt a lot more which enabled me to do extra work for this section.
As well as the outdoor London area I created a small subway section which I needed to make as another map due to the way I designed the main map. (I added a height fog to add murkiness to the water to give it more of an impression the water wasn’t meant to be running here so it’s flooded over parks and fields as well as structures so it’s mixed in with water etc.) Which meant if I put the subway in the correct place the whole area would have a deep brown fog making it almost impossible to see, I also couldn’t put it somewhere else in the level and have a teleport as I had a black height fog covering the entire zone to fade out the sky and make it look light night time. The subway map is pretty small although I wanted to make it I didn’t think I would have the time but I found a spare week or two to make a compressed version of its which I think turned out pretty well and has a few new techniques used that id learnt from my outdoor area.
In both the above mentioned maps (London Underground and Outdoor area) I have about 30-40 custom materials as well to help in making the map look less UT’esque. This was something else that required a considerable amount of self learning as I had no idea about how to import custom textures (much like the models) and how to give them depth using the material editor which is of course something new in the Unreal 3 engine which needed some research into. Some turned out better than others and I realise now the proper way to do it would be to make normal maps in Z-Brush but I didn’t really have time to learn another application. Regardless they help add a more realistic theme over the more sci-fi based unreal materials.
Apart from these I created a 3rd map in Unreal 3 which was more of an experiment to go a bit more nuts with meshes as it was only going to be a small area and wouldn’t take too much of a performance hit. This map was an old robotics warehouse which was meant to be the Tephra main headquarters. I took some techniques learnt from the previous maps which helped me in the visual department and I think this map looks the best out of the Unreal 3 developed maps. In this map I’ve taken full advantage of lightmap resolutions and post processing effects which I learnt more about as I developed the previous maps which enabled me to ramp up the quality with better looking shadows and meshes. I’ve also managed to make the map look quite decorated in comparison to the other maps as I had a small space to fill in which gives it a more realistic tone if not a little cluttered to look at but overall I like how this map has turned out. This map doesn’t have any custom assets or materials I kept them for the London maps which is more of a showcase of iconic structures whereas the warehouse doesn’t really need anything to give it a theme which I think was a good choice as it makes the map more uniform instead of having something stand out and possibly detract from the scene.
As I learnt more about the Unreal 3 engine I also learnt its limitations and a lot of this was down to the fact this build of the engine is around 4 years old now and I had the idea quite late into the project as I was getting quicker at developing maps that I could maybe produce another map, one of the outdoor rainforest type scenes. Unreal doesn’t handle vegetation very well as it just doesn’t have the tools and the terrain editor I found temperamental at best however I knew Crysis Sandbox could work a lot better and it defiantly wouldn’t look bad on my portfolio to show that I’ve been able to create levels in different editors so I decided to learn how to use the Sandbox and make a small portfolio piece but it apparently wasn’t to be as it corrupted somehow (as mentioned before) making it unusable for unknown reasons.
I had previously been looking into the UDK engine (which is just a much more up to date version of Unreal 3 which lots of new features and less bugs) and I had played around with it slightly, the April build released a GDC tech demo showing off some new foliage meshes and effects which although wasn’t up to the standard of Crysis it was quite an improvement. After looking at this map I thought I could make my 4th map in UDK instead, so I set to work making a jungle type forest which would represent the South America level. This was quite far into the project and I didn’t know how viable it would be as the meshes were more of a demo and far from optimized but I thought I could make a small prototype regardless to show a differing landscape and if I could make it look more attractive than the Unreal 3 maps.
I quite enjoyed making a map in UDK due to having virtually no crashes or bugs and with the new features (the lightmass primarily) I created something which I was quite pleased with. Again there is no custom materials or textures as I didn’t have the time and wasn’t happy with how id made my previous models but I was able to play with some new features in the UDK and build up my skills in this engine and I think it was a good addition to show something a completely different landscape showing how diverse Tephra is meant to be.
· At least one large concept art image showing the other levels that would be in the full version
I completed this task as described. There are 10 environments in Tephra and I have drawn 10 differening full A4 sized images giving a feel for each zone which are all described in the design document. I drew one months ago and spent days on it trying to make everything square, even and correct but it was completely draining and I wasn’t prepared to spend the same amount of time on the other images as this isn’t something I really want to focus on so the rest are a little more rough but still, in my eyes meet the criteria I initially proposed.
· Numerous concept art of the map I was actually creating
This was another part of proposal that I successfully completed. I’ve drawn about 10 different versions of my London map both as layouts/design to more concept art that the player would see in game. I’ve also drawn a couple of images in the same way for the Warehouse which although I wasn’t going to create in Unreal I did draw a long time ago which gave me a good idea what to base my map on. There is one subway image drawn which influenced how the actual map would look and although I haven’t drawn anything extra for the South America map I wouldn’t say this is strictly negative or not fulfilling my proposal as the map was a complete bonus towards the end of the project.
· Menu and basic navigation created in UIscene
This is the one point where I wasn’t able to do as much as I’d have liked, but it wasn’t from lack of effort if was more a combination of user and engine limitations.
I have created in Photoshop a considerable amount of prototype/mock ups for various parts of the game including:
· 2 Intro screens
· 2 Loading screens with information on about the game or helpful tips
· A shop screen showing the main menu
· A shop screen showing navigation through some stock
· The PDA system, containing 6 different screens with appropriate information on each
· The Weapon upgrade screen showing a weapon being selected
· The Weapon upgrade screen showing an upgrade being selected and confirming the change
· The World map screen showing the level select option
Unfortunately mock ups are all they. I spent quite some time with UIScene and following tutorials figuring out how to use images to demonstrate how these would look in game and basically found numerous obstacles, it would appear it doesn’t really like images or not in my experience but prefers you type out menus and clickable buttons using a font imported. Although this could have worked you are very limited on what you can do with the above mentioned text, changing size/alignment and colour was about all that’s possible unless you want to start looking into Unreal Script and although I did briefly look over it and see its quite similar to Action Script I was not prepared to learn it as it would involve creating my own builds of the engine and need recompiling which would have been extremely fiddly to get working on other machines so I decided to not bother at all with adding these screens to the maps and left them as prototypes for the document. I didn’t really want to create a flash file as I didn’t want a separate piece besides the Unreal work but I found it to be the only realistic alternative I could think of and although not what initially planned I think it’s an acceptable substitute.
I did have minor success with UI scene in showing an example of NPC Interaction I was able to place an NPC (Which again is ridiculously limited unless you are prepared to use script) and on approaching him you are given a chat box with 3 examples. In old mock ups you could press numbers corresponding to the answer choice and one would reward you with a rocket launcher as an experiment in learning Kismet, something else new for Unreal 3. In the end I took the rocket launcher feature out as it gave the player a way to die which I’ve been trying to avoid for the prototype.
In regards to the UIScene section, although didn’t get too much of it working I did at least learn how to use the application as well as learning some basics of Kismet which as mentioned was something else I had no idea on and needed self learning and a lot of what I wanted to do was limited by the engine which I didn’t know when I made the proposal so I’m not too disappointed as I think I far outweigh the downside of this point with the extra work I did on the maps.
Also, as I never got a working shop example in my document to offset this I have completed detailed lists of all guns, upgrades, ammo, armour and tools which would be available in the shop. This is about 10 pages worth of tables giving names, credit cost and rank (level) required to access these parts which I think is a another good substitute.
Similarly I’ve done the same for the weapon upgrade system, although I only have 2 prototype mock ups in the document is a list of all upgrades for each of the 7 weapon class as well as the cost and the level requirement of the level to tie in with the game mechanics which although took a while I think was worth it.
· Character/Enemy concept art
I fulfilled the section as much as I was prepared to do as drawing takes me a considerable amount of time and I’ve had to practice a bit just to draw art I found more acceptable even if I’m still not totally happy on the outcome. I have drawn the main character, 5 friendly NPC’s who are all important characters found at the Warehouse and 4 types of Enemy NPC’s. Although 4 enemies doesn’t sound too much, the game would work on classes of enemies increasing as you progress through the game and what I’ve drawn is an example of 4 different classes. Within these classes there would be maybe up to 30 different versions which could be created by an in game editor which would essentially just be reskins with the same weapons or inventory roughly so I found it unnecessary to draw anymore and the 4 I have drawn are quite differing.
To add depth to each character they also all have some information/story about themselves which is available in the document and shows that each character was through through more thoroughly. In regards to this I think I’ve succeed in meeting the criteria I set in the proposal.
· Weapon concept art
Another section I think I’ve completed to a satisfactory level. In my document I have drawn 14 concept images of different weapons, 2 from each of the 7 classes. Each weapon has a small section of information as well as stats which are relevant to the game. I think they fit in well since I’ve created all the possible upgrade options tabled in the document so they don’t look like I’ve just added them at the end and I’m quite pleased with this. Most of the guns are taken from common guns today but advanced a little to give them a bit more futuristic theme where appropriate which fits in nicely.
· Storyboard some important story sections.
I can admit I haven’t spent too long on the story as you play through Tephra, there is a prologue of events leading up to and including the volcanic eruption, there is a plan developed which gives the player a goal and reason to advance through the game but there isn’t strictly an ending wrote down anywhere nor is there much in the way of depth to the story as you go through the levels or any documented side missions which complement the main objective.
I don’t have any storyboards as such it would have been more drawing, and as I already have drawn about 40 pages of other things(at least) I think would have taken up too much of my time.
In the Document for the game environments next to each environment there is a page of information, half of it is describing the dangers of the level and the general layout while the other one gives an example of a side mission that could be found as well as noting where the main objective of the level could be found or at least describing what the goal is. Also for the London environment there is a couple of pages which outlines the main story for this environment and how you would progress through the level in steps towards the end goal as I had more time to work on this level as it was initially the only thing I was going to be working on.
There is also a 2 page prologue which outlines the story and how the game begins so I haven’t neglected this aspect entirely I’ve just gone about in a different way and although it’s not as developed as id may have liked I underestimated at the time how large the game would really be. 10 large environments with a main mission spanning 1-2hrs gameplay plus a whole host of sub missions from other less important NPC’s or found items in each, there is no way I could have made up and detailed all these so I think I’ve done an reasonable amount.
Self Appraisal Summary
To conclude on this section I’m quite pleased with what I’ve accomplished, as I mentioned before I fell short on 1-2 sections but greatly exceeded in the main section. I went into this project knowing not much at all about any application and from self learning by reading tutorials online and books I’ve improved my skills in the following areas.
· I now know how to use Google sketchup, which could be useful for making prototypes/mock ups of layouts in the future; I’ve learnt some of the more complex controls that you wouldn’t usually need to in basic mock ups.
· I’ve learnt how to use certain features in 3DS which back last year overwhelmed me totally, I can use it to flip faces, unwrap models and create UV templates to export and create custom textures on and preparing both to be imported into a game engine.
· I’ve improved dramatically within Unreal, from only knowing how to place meshes and lights in UT2004, I’ve learnt more about optimization (although not incorporated too much) I’ve learnt the basics of kismet and what you can create in it, I’ve learnt how to make my own assets and materials for my own levels. I’ve learnt how to use the material editor for more than just 1-2 instructions to make things a little more complex. I’ve learnt about light settings and how they can change shadows and performance. I’ve learnt about post processing effects and how to get some interesting effects which you can’t do without as well as becoming quite comfortable with the terrain editor.
· I’ve taught myself how to use Crysis Sandbox, albeit I would have needed to learn more to make a map of the quality of my others but I learnt about terrain and vegetation which is quite a large part of Crysis.
· I’ve taught myself about UDK which although is similar to UT3 does offer some new features that need learning which enabled me to make what I think is my best looking map of the 4.
· I’ve developed my drawing and Photoshop skills more while designing all the concept art and prototype mock ups for various menus.
· I also think I managed my time quite well as although I’ve had to make a final push at the end to get things to a standard I wanted them to be at it hasn’t been a mad rush of getting no sleep I’ve budgeted enough time to get everything done relatively comfortably which was a bit of a concern of mine when we started this.
· Some knowledge of the Speedtree application (although it was never applied the work I’m actually submitting but just an extra piece)
4.2 Improvements
Despite being relatively happy with what I’ve achieved overall I can see quite a few things that I could have done to improve it.
The main thing I can think of is the size of the London map I created, how it’s been submitted is about 1/3rd of the size I initially planned and it’s still way too big which means there are a lot of empty looking alleyways and areas which bothers me as the main map I was planning to create has, in my opinion turned out to be the worst of the 4. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t be bothered although after spending weeks solid on it that did start to become an issue but also I seemed to be hitting the engines limitations. This could have been a combination of the age of the engine and that fact I may not have taken optimization into consideration in that is was becoming increasingly more unstable to build and I didn’t want to add any more items to it and risk it not even working anymore. I’m not sure how accurate the source is but I read that the limitations of one map using Unreal 3 was around 8000 assets, this would include all meshes, brushes, sounds, particles etc, at the end count I think my map was around 7900 but I deleted some borders and unnecessary objects and tidied it up to get the count down to about 7100 but it’s still incredibly unstable. This as mentioned could also be down to optimization issues on my part, too high lightmap resolutions or too many different meshes, too low tessellation terrain etc, there are numerous ways I may have messed up the map but as it was my first map in UT3 I was still learning a lot of how the engine worked.
Ideally I would have made the map a lot smaller as more of a prototype instead of trying to be the full thing, which I haven’t achieved anyway it’s sort of ended up in the middle. Making the map smaller would have let me spend more time on decoration which is why I believe the warehouse and the UDK map look better. It would also run better.
Another topic that goes hand in hand with the size is the custom assets and materials. In an ideal situation I would have made a lot more custom work to really pad out the map and make it look a lot less like Unreal and more like London, obviously if the map was smaller I could have modelled a greater % of the overall map, although I have 12 custom models and around 30 materials it’s still probably only about 10% of the map which is custom and they do stand out which is a shame and probably wouldn’t have if a lot more was my own work.
I’ve never made my own models before, never used a modelling program, never made my own textures and never imported them into a game engine. I picked Google Sketchup to make my models and it seemed quite simple and it did work for a few of the models although I found you have no control over the shape of the polygons which leads to some very odd stretched triangles when you import the model into Unreal, the material can only cover it so much and unfortunately it means a few of my models don’t look very good due to weird shaped shadows and lighting. If I knew now what I knew back then I would have forced myself to learn 3DS Max, I did look at it and was overwhelmed and in the end I only used it for rendering UV templates and face orientation/exporting for unreal. If id made my models in 3DS they would have looked a lot better in game.
Although I don’t want to be a 3d modeller and me really don’t enjoy it I think my map could have looked more “London” if id made it smaller/more custom content and created them using a proper program and it would have been nice to demonstrate more skills on my portfolio. However I don’t dislike what I’ve made this is just an observation.
I Obviously would have liked the UIscene sections working but without learning how to script it wasn’t really feasible, this would have offered a minor improvement I feel to give the map more interaction but if I’d spent so much time learning something I didn’t want to I wouldn’t have had time to create my other maps and I might never have got it working properly anyway.
Finally some enemies would have been nice, again adding to interaction, my maps are good (some more than others) but they are nothing but maps, no bot paths or anything. I guess I could have added bot paths and shown the London map being played as a deathmatch but the idea is that you would be able to use buildings as sniper spots and as I’ve not created any interior to buildings the bots or indeed the players would have no real places to hide and I don’t think Unreal’s AI really suits the environment I’ve created. Although it would have been an improvement I don’t think it can be helped, kismet didn’t seem to allow what I wanted to do, and Unreal 3 is very limited in making a single player game I found without coding, which I never realised back when making the proposal.
4.3 Future Scope
The next part for Tephra would be for it to be taken up by a development team and made properly, depending on the budget as either perhaps a mod of an existing game but realistically would work better as a next gen stand alone title.
The team which would create Tephra would mainly have to focus on the real world locations so would probably need to visit the location to gather a lot of reference material. The general themes of each level need to be architecturally accurate which would require a lot of work from the modelling team. Hundreds of models would need to be created to span the entire game including real world iconic structures (Big Ben or The Kremlin for example) as well as many generic buildings of the correct theme which wouldn’t need to be precise due to the game being set slightly in the future but at least recognizable.
Although I created the prototype maps using the Unreal 3 Engine I would suggest that another engine is picked to make the game for proper as the levels would need to be much larger than the engine can realistically handle without a lot of level streaming. I would consider using the engine that created Fallout and Oblivion as they have similar systems and does a pretty good job at general terrain and buildings as well as vegetation as can be seen in both games. It would also work well as in these games when you enter a building you get a loading screen which presumably teleports you to another level which works fine for a game of this size and gives the player a small break. I don’t think it’s too reasonable yet to expect a game of this magnitude that can seamlessly go into buildings and back out into the open world without a noticeable performance hit as lower spec computers need to be taken into consideration despite Tephra looking to rival the top graphical looking games currently on the market.
Depending on time and money constraints the modelling team would probably be better off creating quite a detailed character creator something similar to Oblivions or some of the newer MMO’s such as Aion or APB which offer millions of options as you are able to change every little detail like how far the eyes are from the nose or how thick the lips are. The reason for this is from that the team can then create hundreds of different NPC’s to populate Tephra instead of modelling each character individually which would take months in a game of this scale as you need to take into consideration that the game spans the entire world so would have many different races and cultures instead of just having a few generic NPC’s like other similar games.
They would also need to create hundreds of different guns although in numerous instances these can just be scaled or reskinned in a way to make them look different from each other. A lot of custom assets need to be created for Tephra but the mechanics of the game itself and all the interface and actual gameplay elements are pretty simple and have been done repeatedly in the past in one way or another so the rest of the game shouldn’t take too long to complete.
Appendices
The only worthwhile thin I can I can mention here is some additional work I did that has nothing to do with my FMP in the form of a simple UDK map. It was never finished but it was how I learnt some of the features that helped me achieve a more visually appealing Jungle map including using the terrain editor a lot more and getting to grips with the lightmass settings.
I tried to create a gothic looking castle which was incredibly hard due to the amount of meshes bundled with UDK which I think is quite an important skill to have as a level designer, being able to make something appealing with what you have. It also means you can use much less in the way of resources making the game run more smoothly. As well as this the tree in the screenshot I created myself using SpeedTree, an application that lets you create different kinds of foliage. Although I never got any of my own speedtrees into my FMP maps I felt it was good to learn as I enjoyed making the jungle map more so than the others and it means for any future work I take part in its another application I can make use of.
