Game Design Geek

Well, whilst I waited for the bugs to floodlight be get fixed and I can compile a Release Candidate for Crenshaw I got bored. I took Proving Grounds by Dragonne and decompiled it. Needless to say it was a very simple design. And when I decompiled it, just like docks, it was a total mess. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,500 triangles total geometry.

I played around with things about the level I didn’t like over the years of playing it in CTF, like the fact that you could be spawn camped rather easily from your own rooftops overlooking the spawn. This was because you spawned in just one room and all 3 exits faced each other. one or two players could sit on the rooftop above and basically hold down the entire spawn area. So, I added two more routes and two more spawn rooms that interconnect from the original room. These new routes now go up to the left and right parapits. SEE DIAGRAM HERE. I think this will greatly improve the level and discourage people to spawn camp.

I also made some other slight changes, and a few major ones. One of the major changes is that the level is now going to be built in the same Mesh-over-Hull technique I’m using on Crenshaw. The other major change is that I have removed the concrete floors outdoors with terrain. I think this feels a lot more natural and gives the level a different flavor. The level always suffered from a realistic atmosphere, and thats one of the major things we tried tackling with Urban Terror 4.0, was to bring a little more realistic locales to the game.

As we wind down to the final days before release, I have been trying to clear up the remaining bugs on my list for Crenshaw. I still have a few that are out of my hands, like the lightmap stretching problems in corners with floodlight. but for the most part, the ones that are in my control are getting handled quite nicely. I will probably release another version again very soon with all the known bugs taken care of, plus an additional 2 areas that are not in the playable space. One has a rusty old car, and the other is a basketball court.

I would love for more people to play the level during testing, but I have found the majority of QA seems to be of the TS crowd, and thats the gameplay mode they seem to want to test in, and the maps they seem to gravitate towards testing the most. So, it would appear that I am going to need to go in myself and test the level more thoroughly for things like missing collision, etc.