Mapping for Crysis felt the same way, treating it as I would play Garry's Mod or Minecraft. 

That's an easy trap to fall into, I think. I can see how that could happen.

It's pretty easy to make some terrain (you can even autogenerate it), throw a lot of palm trees and rocks around and the engine will make it look pretty. That's what Crysis does best - making simple things look pretty with its lighting and time of day and fog and atmospheric effects and alpha blended foliage and even damn sun rays and volumetric clouds.

You have to admire how the Cryengine on a suitably high graphics setting can basically make crap look pretty.

It's also super easy to put tanks in and scatter a few buildings around, or a bunch of explosive barrels, and proceed to smash up the buildings with a tank looking at the pretty lighting (or explosions). :)

You have to have a plan, basically. Much like in a corridor shooter, you must guide the player from objective to objective and not leave too many routes open to them. Hence, all of the vanilla Crysis maps are "giant corridors" where roads run between the ocean and an impassable cliff, or some variation of that. Just like Far Cry. Pretty boring actually, and certainly not the advertised "sandbox" gameplay.

There needs to be pretty strict pathing/routing in the map and you can't give the player too many toys. Everything between those routes must largely be blocked in a more or less obvious way, or you'll have the player running around aimlessly.

Ideally, an area will quickly be "cleaned out" by the player so they are always motivated to move on. Crysis uses a lot of radio transmissions to urge the player on, as well. There's a psychological thing there - most people will want to be led instead of left alone. So if the radio says "go to the beach, Nomad", a lot of people will luckily do that.

It's only a sandbox in name, after all. Most stock Crysis maps are pretty linear - out of necessity. They even use "clip brushes" to keep players from jumping over cliffs using the Suit. There has to be meaningful progress.

I didn't show the sunrise because it looks pretty terrible - everything is orange basically. I'll tweak that later since it has nothing to do with the actual level - you can even import other map's TODs (time of day). I did tweak the sun colour to be more yellowish and modified the sun's height to be more Northern than Pacific. I might start using one of the European nature sets that the community made. No palm trees so far. :-P

I found that since it's hard to be sure how the player moves, I had to use "radius triggers" around the target instead of Quake-like box/line shaped triggers (linedefs...). Thus, enemies might spawn when the player is a certain distance away - regardless of direction...

You can do a lot more of "picking your fights" in Crysis. Triggering stuff etc. has to adapt to that.

When I started, it drew me in because it's easy to make something. Then it drew me in further because it's hard to make something meaningful, I guess. You quickly notice that you have to plan the routes even before creating the terrain. Since terrain usually serves to guide the player, or determines where they can go in what order.

The mapper decides how much "sandboxiness" the player is allowed. 

It's pretty easy to make some terrain (you can even autogenerate it), throw a lot of palm trees and rocks around and the engine will make it look pretty. That's what Crysis does best - making simple things look pretty with its lighting and time of day and fog and atmospheric effects and alpha blended foliage and even damn sun rays and volumetric clouds.

pretty much. i did that a few times at the start-- auto-generated a huge map with trees and stuff. didn't touch it at all beyond plopping a jeep in at the level start. then i just drove around looking and exploring.
it's surprisingly addictive. 'i'll just top one more hill, then i'll stop' 

honestly, if it wasn't for the clip brushes/impassable terrain + all the radio clips urging me on, i'd probably have just stayed in the starting area. XD 

http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/demotest_18_06.jpg
http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/demotest_18_19.jpg
http://shadowsdomain.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/demotest_18_21.jpg 

shot 2 rules. 

looks very good 

ye looks really pretty... I will never downloaded becuase my only love is Quake :)

but look really pretty! 

http://spawnhost.wordpress.com/2011/03/09/sunrise/ 

that looks nice, the sun even pops up a little above the water instead of just appearing over the horizon line. 

Can you remake the E3M4 platform area, except with the platforms sliding across lava rather than floating mid-air (aka how it was in the beta version of Quake) and stuff it into the map, somehow? 

Don't know how many of you remember me posting shots from my map before, but anyway, it's time for an update. Progress is pretty slow but steadily going forwards, and I'd like to hear what you might think of the following areas... I consider them pretty much finished when it comes to architecture, just missing entities, therefore (still) fullbright.

http://i.imgur.com/cJgH1.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/icbs0.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/HcFtK.jpg

Cheers 

WE FORGOT NOTHING

also, sweeet :) 

Looks great. Excellent brushwork and texturing. :) :) :) Wish I could give more constructive feedback, but I can't!

Now hurry up and light it! 

Yes yes good. Only thing I can criticise is the curved ramp needs trim on the corner as the panels are too abruptly cut off at the mo. 

Got bored of working on Base maps so I've been laying out some Medieval themed levels. Started five or so, these three actually have a fair bit of gameplay now.

Ruined castle, entities missing in the shot, sorry

Dungeon thing

Big lava thing. Too open to really run properly so needs some chopping


Seriously if anyone who likes doing architecture wants to help me finish some of these sometime I'm totally up for that. :E 

The problem with that kind of maps is that good lighting is way too much work. Might work with some radiosity, not sure. 

Careful with big open areas, those can easily get out of control. Otherwise, try compiling without doing a lightbake or get brighter lighting - map looks huge but hard to get a sense of it. 

Careful with big open areas, those can easily get out of control.

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/outofhand.jpg
'i'll just make a little canyon...'

i get a little nauseous when i open it up in the editor now. i'm determined to finish it though. 

Necros looks like you have a real piece of art there! Hurry up and finish it!!! 

yeah, i'm going to try to finish it for real. i was saving it for qexpo, but i don't think there's enough interest this year. 

Yeah atm just lighting big stuff with a sunlight + ambient. When basic geometry is finished will then switch off the ambient, dim the sun and put in torches and such.

The ruins one I was actually thinking about VIS when setting it out so for the most part it works okay. The only problem is the lake of slime just suddenly stopping at the edge, but nothing I can really do about that. 

Also Necros what grid size were you generally laying out your brushes for terrain there?

I still can't get the hang of terrain at all :( 

16. for the super far away stuff along the edges, you can maybe get away with 64, but if you do too much 64, you can tell even when it's far away-- things just look very coarse and mechanical.
so you should remember to occasionally put in minute details even on far away terrain to make sure that it doesn't look like 'far away' terrain.

for making tri-souped terrain in general;

if you don't have the patience to do it by hand, you can always give a terrain generator a try. of course, that has it's own problems as you now have to make a height map image for the generator to use, and that's an art in it's own right. or you can use a fancy generator like the one in bryce to get access to crazy cool fractal generators and erosion and such and then export the height map and plug it into the generator.
my beef with terrain generators is that they will output the trisouping in a uniform manner irregardless of terrain features.
this makes things a little less efficient (smooth areas can be made with larger brushes, but a generator will just make a lot of brushes with small height differences) and if you're trying to make specific things like cliffs and such, you'll have to tear out the generated brushes and rebuild it which sort of defeats the purpose of generating in the first place.

if you want to do it by hand, first, make sure you actually have the patience. it's very long and can get boring.

next, depending on the type of terrain you're going to make, you should lay out the 'key points' in the terrain first and work out the height differences.
so make all your peaks first, even if they are a single brush.

then you'll want to lay down the player path next.

finally, you just connect everything together while trying to make it look interesting. this is the long and potentially boring part.

it helps playing games that use outdoor terrain a lot. it can keep you stoked about your own terrain and stop you from burning out whilst working on it. lucky i got borderlands. ^_^; 

Make your brushes triangles (two triangles per one square on the grid) and play with their vertices accordingly?

not-a-mapper talking, so feel free to disregard.