Get Rid of the invisible walls

[Neophoenix]

they could permanently have 'bad weather' - bad enough that you/your vehicle wouldn't survive for long in there?

I like that Idea, would add to the illusion of realism and be cool as hell to watch a raptor get torn apart by sever whether.

Once you hit the "force field", you're instantly translocated to the other level.

There are better more fluid ways of connecting two parts of a map that are not connected. I've see maps where when you keep flying you fly back around to the other side, or come upon a new part of the map. It is some sort of teleporting effect without the feeling of a teleport. Some of the DM- Morbias remakes utilize this effect of which I refer. I'm new to UED so I don't know what it is called.

I would like to see you hit the force field and an electrical effect occur on the shield while at the same time your raptor gets an LG hit effect to it and blows up. That would be mad cool.

 

[NeoNite]

This was, in a way, already implemented in Unreal Tournament.
There are some levels with (please, let me have the name right) recursive design.
I think it works with zoneportals, I'll have to check in the editor.

I clearly remember this urban styled map for UT. The name escapes me.

-> Dm-urbannoir, but I know I have better examples...

Anyway, as you walk around the block it never seems to end. In a way. Sure you can exit to the subway station.
But as you walk around the city, it just keeps going on. 3-4 streets.

The subway section has the same effect. The tracks never seem to come to an end. You could ride the train forever.

It's an almost seamless transition, on some graphics cards you may notice some small black squares as you pass the zoneportal.

(I really need to check that map in the editor to be sure of the names, but I think I'm right).

 

[->Sachiel<-]

endless maps, Ion cannon, slow damage, gravity pushing you back when you exit the limits.....its all good. Teleporting to a new map would be a pain;
A) it gets too big and you'd spend most of your time playing hide and seek.
B) people could abuse this, teleporting back and forth making it impossible to hit them, telefragging, and grenades appearing from thin air and blowing up your Goliath.

 

[Xaero_UT]

endless maps, Ion cannon, slow damage, gravity pushing you back when you exit the limits.....its all good. Teleporting to a new map would be a pain;
A) it gets too big and you'd spend most of your time playing hide and seek.
B) people could abuse this, teleporting back and forth making it impossible to hit them, telefragging, and grenades appearing from thin air and blowing up your Goliath.

i dont like the idea of teleporting to other maps, and feel its gimmicky but
A) yes
B)make it a damage thing, say take a third of the health the player has at that time or something, that would stop a lot of abuse

 

[Neophoenix]

They might have maps like previously discussed, in UT2007, because they are going to have seamless maps. This means that ALL the maps are going to be connected. I'm not sure how they will do this, but it should be interesting to see. And the "recursive design" that NeoNite and I were talking about I'm pretty sure you can see and shoot things that are on the other side. I could be wrong though.

 

[->Sachiel<-]

Originally posted by Xaero_UT
B)make it a damage thing, say take a third of the health the player has at that time or something, that would stop a lot of abuse

Or you could just not have it at all.

Multi-Map teleportation seems to be a very unpopular and annoying idea, even with certain restrictions. On the other hand, the seamless level transition promised in UT2007 is fascinating and might turn out to be a great success.

 

[Checker]

The endless hallway is done with warp portals. It is really cool technology with one major drawback. The drawback being that line traces cannot go through them. This is how you set up the warp portals, from a side view:

Warpzone01 | Normal zone, your hallway | Warpzone02

The lines being the portals. Now if both warpzones are exactly the same size and in opposite directions (if you walk from left to right, you walk into warpzone2 to walk out of warpzone1). Now link the two warpzones and your done.
A rocket that comes flying in actually is a physical thing, it has a position in world space that can be transported from warpzone to warpzone. A sniper rifle on the other hand uses a line trace, from the gun to where it should hit, and then instantly hits that spot. Line traces ignore portals though, so it will hit the backwall of the warpportal instead of 'going through'

But I am getting carried away haha. Yeah I really wonder how the seamless loading will work myself! Seamless loading would be awesome to keep a player emerged in the story line / gameplay, but brings a lot of other problems with it. Pretty much the same as mentioned above, how would a bot from lvl 1 know you actually moved into lvl2. Programmers are magicians I tell ya.

 

[->Sachiel<-]

Originally posted by Checker
The lines being the portals. Now if both warpzones are exactly the same size and in opposite directions (if you walk from left to right, you walk into warpzone2 to walk out of warpzone1). Now link the two warpzones and your done.
A rocket that comes flying in actually is a physical thing, it has a position in world space that can be transported from warpzone to warpzone. A sniper rifle on the other hand uses a line trace, from the gun to where it should hit, and then instantly hits that spot. Line traces ignore portals though, so it will hit the backwall of the warpportal instead of 'going through'

But I am getting carried away haha. Yeah I really wonder how the seamless loading will work myself! Seamless loading would be awesome to keep a player emerged in the story line / gameplay, but brings a lot of other problems with it. Pretty much the same as mentioned above, how would a bot from lvl 1 know you actually moved into lvl2. Programmers are magicians I tell ya.

You can't do this in the U2 Engine but in the U3 engine you could just model the hallway as a circle and apply radial gravity in the centre of it, then you simply apply an inverted circle distortion effect to make it look like the hallway you're walking through is straight and not curved...much more convincing, the way to solve the hitscan weapon problem is to make it a projectile that travels at 99999m/s (that way it would look like it's hitscan). Finally, you make it so that in that map all projectiles' fire is curved into a perfect circle rather than a straight line. This may seem like alot of work but the end-product is flawless....just make sure to dodge your own projectiles cause they'll come back straight at you (also, when you see a guy in front of you and you turn around you'll see his back to you). I wanna see someone actually make a map like that in UT2007.

About the streaming technology, I think it loads each level as you walk through the one before it. Say you walked 10 metres north from point A to B on map 1, the game would have loaded 10 metres north, east and west 1 kilometer away from you and would have unloaded 10 metres 1 kilometer away from you southwards, once you have walked far enough that the loader has reached the end of map 1 (meaning that you're standing 1 kilometer away from the northern end of map 1), it would start loading the next map metre by metre as you approach it, this way the game would always have 1 kilometer of terrain loaded in each direction from you.

NOTE: 1 kilometer represents fog distance in my example, I don't know the exact measure in Uspace.

 

[JohnnySix]

I'd just like to see most is far more consistency with static mesh karma/blocking volumes - the thing that turned me off the most to UT2003 and I still have horrible paranoia about in UT2k4 is what you see isn't what you get, and what looks like a perfectly walkable surface turns out you can fall through or a rough, snaggy looking wall turns out to have a smooth, flat blocking volume. It meant the learning curve for maps was much steeper because you couldn't rely on visual cues to know what was playable and what wasn't - if they can make things clearer/cleaner in the new game so you'll know for certain if a wall is possible to slide/dodge from etc - that'd go a long way to improving the gameplay.

Reading the 1UP article though, it's nice to know that they are (so far) working on gameplay first and building the rough geometry of the level before the art. Here's hoping they don't throw in a load of half assed junk in last minute and clutter up gameplay with snaggy eyecandy stuff.

 

[->Sachiel<-]

I know what you mean, it pisses me off every time that it looks like I can land in between those 2 rocks and get my LtG out only to run into an invisible wall, it's BullSh!t.

 

[Draco73]

to Mina_Hew, these "invisable" walls that u talk about when u fly to high and hit are impossible to get rid of, they are usualy the map limit. obviously your not a mapper which isent a bad thing but let me explane so you have a better understanding, every map is set inside some sort of cube, even if its ouside, such as torlan...its inside one huge cube. then you would create a "skybox" to simulate a sky, u would then set the outside walls of that cube to be able to view that sky box instead of seeing the actual wall its self. if they dident have this, then every time u played torlan you would have this dirt map set inside one huge cube that u saw all the walls, but since u cant see the walls it gives the illuson of it being a real world. so when u hit something from flying to high more times than not your are just hitting the roof of that massive box that the map is built within, and thats the trade off to having the illusion that the map has real life sky, and that the map extends out and its not placed inside of a box. like sure they can get rid of the sky box and set the walls back to normal, so u see the massive box that u are in so you dont fly into the walls but what kind of map would that be. i mean sure maybe they can code a volulme that forces you back into game play without the "wall slam". but you have to take the good with the bad some times. there are also such items as blocking volumes with are very important to game play and in no way could be removed from the game. blocking volumes are mostly used around static meshes and other items that u should not be able to walk/drive though. ok ill round up this book and stop typing lol but atleast hopefully you now understand a little bit on what u are actualy hitting when u hit it.

 

[NeoNite]

I don't like those visible walls. Remove them please, Epic. They keep distracting me.

 

[JohnnySix]

to Mina_Hew, these "invisable" walls that u talk about when u fly to high and hit are impossible to get rid of, they are usualy the map limit. obviously your not a mapper which isent a bad thing but let me explane so you have a better understanding, every map is set inside some sort of cube, even if its ouside, such as torlan...its inside one huge cube. then you would create a "skybox" to simulate a sky, u would then set the outside walls of that cube to be able to view that sky box instead of seeing the actual wall its self. if they dident have this, then every time u played torlan you would have this dirt map set inside one huge cube that u saw all the walls, but since u cant see the walls it gives the illuson of it being a real world. so when u hit something from flying to high more times than not your are just hitting the roof of that massive box that the map is built within, and thats the trade off to having the illusion that the map has real life sky, and that the map extends out and its not placed inside of a box. like sure they can get rid of the sky box and set the walls back to normal, so u see the massive box that u are in so you dont fly into the walls but what kind of map would that be. i mean sure maybe they can code a volulme that forces you back into game play without the "wall slam". but you have to take the good with the bad some times. there are also such items as blocking volumes with are very important to game play and in no way could be removed from the game. blocking volumes are mostly used around static meshes and other items that u should not be able to walk/drive though. ok ill round up this book and stop typing lol but atleast hopefully you now understand a little bit on what u are actualy hitting when u hit it.

Unless you're on a mobile phone, a little punctuation, capitalisation, grammar and spelling would've gone a long way to improving that post.

I think most people know what and why they are there, it's just that in a lot of instances they were poorly executed.
Problems ranging from excessively large collision shapes for SMeshes, BSP/Terrain/Meshes that Ragdolls would fall through if going fast enough, and other many and varied collision anomalies that had a detrimental effect on gameplay - mainly the lack of visual feedback on walkable/blocking structures.

 

[Xaero_UT]

Or you could just not have it at all.

Multi-Map teleportation seems to be a very unpopular and annoying idea, even with certain restrictions. On the other hand, the seamless level transition promised in UT2007 is fascinating and might turn out to be a great success.

took me out of context ><

i dont like the idea of teleporting to other maps, and feel its gimmicky but

i dont want it to happen, but for those who do want it, its possible