@Shark: I hardly know anything about programming too, which is why I'll need a friend to help. However, nowadays, a good portion of the budget going to game development is for graphics and game art, which is a huge part of game development these days. Also, by using the UDK, a huge ton of work can be saved than by building a game engine from scratch, which I don't know anyone who remotely has the ability and time to do so.
I guess we can split potential story ideas into 2 areas:
- Monster/Robot/Zombie Invasion (Zombies can't swim after all.)
- Any campaign focused on CWW, including the RP
Campaign levels will have to be derived from this. The CWW idea will be odd to do.
That said, I still have yet to make progress on improving LOD modeling. Perhaps I should do what Bungie calls a "mass-out", putting the general, basic geometry in. I could shape up the terrain and import just the models needed to get things started. Either way, I will need some level of organization if I ever hope to finish just the first multiplayer map. Once my friend is on break, I could probably enlist his help on looking into getting the basics of gameplay sorted through. (i.e. working with player meshes and actors, guns, basic stream behavior and physics, etc.)
Of course, once there's progress I'll post about it.
Edit: Actually, Bungie used a
self-generating LoD system in Halo Reach! You model everything at the highest detail and it takes care of the low detail for you! Of course, I would say that this very well explains why some low detail objects in Reach look downright awful, but it sure saves a lot of work!
I wonder how difficult it would be to implement this into the UDK. Maybe too difficult as there are intricacies to making low detail models still look correct that no shader or program or whatever can figure out.
Edit Again: I probably took LoD's too seriously. Most of the time, lower level LoD's are done fast to save time, or even more often not at all.
Anyways, I'm slowly making progress on ASS-HQ (Aquatic Soaking Squad base) of our map. The basic mesh of the roof is mostly done, though quite sloppily. I'll be able to get to doors and windows soon. Then I got to worry about more details, materials, UV maps, etc. before finishing just that house.
There are four other houses that I have to model in high detail. The rest will be considerably easier as a ton of detail can be omitted from the houses that fall outside of the map boundaries.
I won't post screenshots yet as I hardly even have anything worth mentioning, but this is what I'm going for:
http://hbww.fateback.com/briefing/map.html
The end result map will be as close as I can get to the actual map, and the boundaries will be similar. I'm hoping to have a combination of hard and soft boundaries. Fences and thick foliage will be hard boundaries, while soft boundaries will be those that give the player a warning before the game soaks the player manually. There will be hard kill(soak)-bounds outside to ensure no one ever sees missing details and faces on objects at the edge of the playing area.
I'll update when I have more progress. Probably once I'm done with the windows/doors and get a rough, low-detail mesh of the house finished. I will probably do low-detail houses of everything first and get the most important geometry of the map setup before doing the pretty graphics and details. This ensures everything is to scale, and most map developers work this way. (They often don't even seen to reuse assets used to create the rough map, or the block/mass-out as its called.)
Here's an example of block/mass-out maps; pictures Bungie posted when developing the Noble Map pack for Halo Reach. I will be happy if I can make my map(s) look as good as the block/mass-outs shown here. =)
http://www.bungie.net/News/content.aspx ... &cid=29828
An iconic element of our playing area is a garden bobblehead owl we got to scare some birds off the roof. We always blast at its head with water guns and hoses and it's hilarious every time. The map for the game will not be complete without featuring this owl, complete with ballistic bobbling head animations when shot at! (And when blasted at very close range with very powerful water guns, its head will fly off... hopefully... once I learn how to do all that stuff. And the head should respawn after 30 seconds or something.)