hppav's Town Development Thread

[awesome24712]

Nice door...

It looks like it's from the summit facility at TC Isle to me. . .

[hppav]

It's actually a slightly modified version of the door from the retail gas station, the one on the ground. I just cut in a window, darkened the texture, and moved the door knob. I didn't bother to look to see if someone had already made a similar door

The gas station door is also on the generator tower, but without the cut out and on the outside it has a "Danger High Voltage" sign on it.



However the way the terrain is at the moment it makes it very hard to open. It hits a small hill that's just inside the door. It can open out just fine but not in. However if the player has too much difficulty then they can just crawl in the hole on the opposite side of the building. I did test repeatedly to see if the player can and they indeed can.

Once I did manage to jump up to where Ian jumped when trying to get away from the raptor in the tower but ended up falling down when walking along the beam the raptor stood on before it got kicked out the back window. I haven't managed to make it any higher than that and it seems it would be impossible to go much higher than one more level anyway since Sarah's remaining climb was on the wall itself and Anne can't really climb that way. I bet there'll be people trying to get as high as they can though just to show off.

[awesome24712]

What is the final goal for this project?

[hppav]

Well it was intended to be a part of a much larger movie accurate remake of the entire game based on the 1997 Trespasser walkthrough, which I was going to call "Trespasser Revisit." I may still make more Revisit levels if the Town gets popular enough.

The plan is that the level starts just outside the place where the hunters camp for the night before heading into the town. You then pass through the long grass, the dinosaur graveyard, and enter the town through the same gate as the movie. Your goal is to get through the gate at the opposite corner of the town that heads north. I am intending to try to implement all the unfinished puzzles in the town as outlined in the walkthrough.

The southern entrance, which is blocked by a landslide, is supposed to be a part of what would have been my Plantation House level. In that level you would be able to climb a small mountain and see the town - a low poly rendition of it anyway - out in the distance.

[awesome24712]

I can't wait for it. I don't think the Long Grass has ever really been recreated. Not very much of anything else outside the town either.

[hppav]

I started updating my newest Ops Center to include the details in the massive amount of new references we have in the Town Set thread.


In this front shot you can see the height of the overall building has been lowered. This is because I had the building sitting too high and had the stairs way too steep. I lowered the balcony and the floor down slightly and decreased the angle of the stairs so now it looks right and Anne doesn't get injured anymore when you try to walk down the stairs

I've also changed the rafters to align with the window frames on the front of the building as they do on the actual set. This was a detail that bugged me to death when I saw the Sliders screens.


machf pointed out a nice collage of images of the set that showed this corner. Of course by the time of the photograph the set was converted to the Embryonics Administration building and the rear hallway was leveled and walled off except for the part of it that was closest to the dome. I think it's because it was more open to the elements and was probably less stable than the rest of the structure. I also changed the rafters themselves to match the rafters on the set and added in a door that wasn't quite seen in the movie but was present on the set.

I did not change the under structure to match the set as it was obvious that the way I have it was how it was meant to be perceived and the set is actually held up by some rather thin poles (it is essentially nothing but plywood that's dressed up afterall).

Another thing that I noticed in the new Sliders screens is that the balcony did not extend around to the rear of the building (except for around the dome area). The helipad stairs were connected to the building by a small walkway instead.

Everything in these screens has physics except for the roof and there is an occlusion object for the building as a whole.

EDIT: And now I've gotten a small amount of work done on the "Boarding House" as JPL calls it... I don't think there's really any known name for it, it's just a hollow shell dressed up to look like a building. In fact the gap between the tower and this building and the small room underneath it was a completely different set from the main worker village set, which leads to a small height difference between the different versions of that small room that can be easily overlooked.



Here's the building in location. I'm going to have to make some LOD meshes for those stairs. The main part of the building has no interior yet as I'll have to design that myself.



Here's the far side of the building. The stairs and doors are new as they were revealed by Sliders. Once again, I need to make LOD meshes for the stairs.



And here's the small room Sarah falls into when escaping the raptors before she reunites with Ian and Kelly. The UVWs still need work but the main modeling work is done. The only things that have physics are the shelves under the window and the light fixture, which you CAN climb up so you will be able to go up to where the two raptors were fighting, once I have physics in the roof.

The old DVD version shows this room a little bit better than the remastered DVD, which I find interesting. Of course this room is really only shown for like 2 seconds in the entire movie anyway.

[TheKritter71]

Looks very good, hope to see full release soon

[awesome24712]

<insert comment which I have said many times before and refuse to say again>

[hppav]

Welp, I did a little more work on the building and got a bit of an interior in there. Still needs more work. I'll let the interiors not seen in the movie be a surprise

I had misjudged the windows on the wall facing the tower when I first made this building in the alpha version and I have changed them to match the set. I also added in some doors. Still need to make physics and occlusion meshes for the building as well as LOD meshes for the stairs on the exterior.

I have the next two nights off though so I hope to get the movie section of the town done here in the next couple of days so I can move on to the other structures in the town. Shouldn't be too hard as the bulk of the modelling is done for this area, it's more getting the models in the game and working at a good framerate

EDIT:



I retextured the fence from East Dock and reduced it's polygon count in several ways to make the fence from the movie. There's no wires strung from the poles yet, I'm thinking I'll do them with 3 sided cylinders opposed to the 4 sided ones we used in East Dock. I also took the gate and reduced the poly count of the part where the circles are cut out (My modeling wasn't as efficient 5 years ago I bet those polygons gave machf a heart attack), then I went and deleted the bars that weren't necessary and edited the roof to look like it's drooping. I also removed the concrete and lights that were on that gate.

The sign I had made before in the alpha version that I had released so I just had to reimport it with mip maps set to false. The interesting thing about the sign is that it's not present when they first arrive at the town but it is there when the helicopter leaves. The letters were taken off the sign and are now hung over the tram ride in Universal right before it takes you passed the vehicles from the movie.

[machf]

I retextured the fence from East Dock and reduced it's polygon count in several ways to make the fence from the movie. There's no wires strung from the poles yet, I'm thinking I'll do them with 3 sided cylinders opposed to the 4 sided ones we used in East Dock. I also took the gate and reduced the poly count of the part where the circles are cut out (My modeling wasn't as efficient 5 years ago I bet those polygons gave machf a heart attack),

There were so many things that could be changed there to get higher framerates...

[General Kenobi]

I love the fence. I wish you made it before I started WTP, the one i have looks too new now.

[hppav]

I love the fence. I wish you made it before I started WTP, the one i have looks too new now.

Thanks I think this is the 3rd or 4th time I've made the main gate itself. Outside of some severe polygon reduction on all parts of the posts, the main difference is that the metal textures have all been replaced with the rust texture from TC~Isle's elevator and the concete texture has been replaced with the one I'm using on the Ops Center, which I forgot to mention that I switched back to the old texture because it looked like the set in Sliders more than the newer one.

EDIT: Oh and looking back on your WTP thread, I'd say your sign's logo is more like the one on the EA from JP3 so you could get away with saying that the fence there is slightly newer than the one around the town as the town was likely built before the lab as it housed the construction workers

There were so many things that could be changed there to get higher framerates...

So true. Draco wasn't one to make his levels be more enjoyable for people with lower end hardware... and he was the one in charge of making my models more efficient in the engine. Ah well, I learned a lot of things not to do by that experience, being yelled at by someone constantly and repeatedly for several months about what you should do to keep the poly count low is not fun. And oh the string of comments about that Jeep that he kept sending my way...

It really helps that my Trespasser Modding computer is a 4 year old laptop that was low end back when I got it If it runs on this beast decently, it should run well on most computers, since if I remember right East Dock gets like 5-10 FPS on this computer when it doesn't crash to desktop.

I'm half tempted to do a Silent Hill style thick fog just because I think it looks cool and it would make it a little more difficult to know where the raptors are... We've been having heavy morning fog every morning I've been driving home and it's quite scary seeing the headlights of oncoming traffic when it's only about 100 feet ahead of you.

My town level will also have very few weapons unlike the retail which will make it more interesting, difficult, and realistic. Combine that with somewhat heavy fog...

EDIT 2: Oh and here's something you might find interesting, the level loading screens I've used during development up to this point.







Really shows how much the area has changed since I started, Gotta love the temporary buildings I used

[machf]

I should send you some of the changes I started to make in ED...

[Hilwo]

Looking good!

[vagrantart]

I like the loading screens,the look really crisp and clean compared to Trespasser which sometimes looked a bit muddy overall.What texture size is it you have to use/can it be made bigger or does the engine not accept it?