smart mapping

(Joe999) #1

has mapping become easier now or harder? i think i’ve read a few months ago that there’s more work involved in mapping because of smart. but today i read this:

BG: Looking at the demo running it would be a nightmare to have to flag each surface as mountable or not. How would you flag each area? Does SMART help you out?

NA: We don’t do it. Well it wouldn’t work to have to flag each of those areas as we’d be making mistakes. This is how traditionally all other games I’ve worked on have been that way as well. To have anything like that you have to pull up a little editor next to a box and say that means you can go into cover there and hop over it. We don’t have to do any of that as basically [SMART] does a compile and puts all the collisions in and calculates it all automatically.

(tokamak) #2

You need to separate two things here. There’s the map design and the map development. Design is all about arranging the geometry according to the map ought to be played. SMART makes this more difficult because a player has more options. It’s the difference between designing a maze for rats that can’t climb and a maze for rats that can climb.

Map development, or the building aspect, is easier because as Neil says, you don’t need to identify every object as interact-able any-more. So all in all there’s less manual work and more thought.

All this aside of Brink maps no longer being a collection of cubes anymore. The maps are entire models now.

(.Chris.) #3

Harder but that’s got nothing to do with SMART.

(AnthonyDa) #4

Old news are old. We know this month/years now that you don’t have to specify for each surface how it should react when you want to “SMART” it.

(Icemonkeyjr) #5

Dont mean to be pedantic but i thought you meant mapping in the sense of texture maps, diffuse, specular, ect. though i usually create characters if there were one game id want to create multilayer maps for it’d be brink

(brbrbr) #6

smart mapping become smarter.
usual was usual… hard and boring[if you mean HQ maps, not “gimme a minute” maps].

(xTriXxy) #7

just imagine all that smart glitchest… snipe.asmo’s heaven:)

(Weapuh) #8

Like .Chris said, it will become harder but not because of SMART (with its system of predetermining what is interactive, instead of Hammer style “this surface is and this one and this one and this one ect”). It will probably be hard because of the balancing, you’ll have to balance the map as smartly as the classes/body-type/gameplay is balanced which should be really fun.

(ducks) #9

It’s true the work involved is slightly higher, but one of the great things about SMART is that it does all the hard work for us. The bulk of our time working with the system is making sure that players can perform certain manoeuvres and adjusting the position of map elements for better player flow or to fix small bot oddities (since they use SMART too they can sometimes use some rather left-field routes getting from A to B…)

Of course, the greatest thing about SMART is that rather than spending an hour making a staircase or another stack of crates so players reach a higher platform, we can just let players mantle up :slight_smile: …and then wall-jump to an even higher platform without a contrived jumping assault course…

In fact, I dare say SMART makes the level design process quicker rather than harder.

(.Chris.) #10

I meant more that you had to spend longer these days working with models and such to achieve a high standard, brushes and patches just don’t cut it anymore, bet Brink maps look pretty bare when you filter models off in editworld. Guess it’s not actually that harder for those who are fine with making models though, unlike brushwork dinosaurs such as myself.

I don’t think the smart system would present too much trouble in the design process in terms of map balance, the same ‘rules’ still apply just that you now have think differently in terms of how you set up your routes to and from objectives and spawns.

Can we expect some tidbits of information of how you gone about creating the maps in Brink at some point? Like the diaries you did with ET:QW.

(Weapuh) #11

It wouldn’t be weird at all to not have stairs or stacks of insert random thing here (I meant as a tool for flow, lol :S)? stairs kind of add a sense of flow to a map. Hats off to you if you can make it work without.

Edit: Certain is really exciting to think about new ways to balance maps other than chest high walls. Unders and overs, arounds all have to be thought about. Makes me think of Radar map in W:ET backdoor is away from forward spawn, defenders can retake, but then attackers get command post. Things like that are really missing today, Brink is going to be SO fun to map and moreso PLAY!

(.Chris.) #12

I doubt he meant they have removed all stairs from maps as they are not needed rather that they don’t need to ‘force’ this stuff into there maps when creating their layouts, giving more freedom to try different approaches to accessing a secondary route or so.

(ducks) #13

Precisely.

(Weapuh) #14

Well yeah, it does sound like i think there will be no stairs lol… What i SHOULD have said was since we’ve all learnt to follow flow so intuitively I’m excited to see how they make these other routes also be intuitive. It looked pretty good in the container city trailer when the operative leaps the wall. Brink is also going to use lots of color, wonder if that will play a part.

(xTriXxy) #15

finally perfect thread. With no stairs, or no crates, it will be visible for players, where they can use smart to reach secondary route or upper levels?

(.Chris.) #16

By looking upwards.

(Weapuh) #17

way to say what i want to say but way more concise lol… :slight_smile:

(brbrbr) #18

idea for seamlesly-integrated ambient exterior[vegetables, Animals, NPC&anything else] is not new.
on game engines, allowing to do its procedurally “from box”[ie w/zero overhead], few mods persist 4 such things.

(.Chris.) #19

Nice to know Basil but I fail to see the connection with this thread.

(xTriXxy) #20

looking upwards?

[QUOTE=tokamak;254677]You need to separate two things here. There’s the map design and the map development. Design is all about arranging the geometry according to the map ought to be played. SMART makes this more difficult because a player has more options. It’s the difference between designing a maze for rats that can’t climb and a maze for rats that can climb.

[/QUOTE]

so when creating custum map i need to setup smart reuters too, or as chris said looking upwards is enought for players where they want to climb , so map maker dont neex to setup smart?