making a level, how
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/making a level, how
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| i am building a game and my artist friend is doing the level design. what i am wondering is should the level be created in a 3d program as one monolithic object? or should it be broken down and saved as separate areas? i am not certain what reason to do it in particular ways, if i'll need to break it up for speed reasons, or if i should do the level as one file and just show/hide the pieces as needed? |
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| You really need to search these forums to read how people have done it previously, their experiences, the pitfalls etc. Also look at the various level creating tools in the Blitz forum Toolbox, go to the author's sites, and read up on how and why they create levels their particular way. There is no 'best' way - do as I say above, then try to decide what kind of game structure you're creating. For example, my last program - I wnated a wide open terrain (the South Downs) populated with villages etc, so I fine tuned my systems to have look-up lists which effectively made all the buildings in village A disappear and all the buildings in village B appear as I walked from one defined area into another. But if you were wanting a totally enclosed indoor game then you could use an entirely different method. If this is the case then some level builders/world builders include systems which make this judgement and generate an include file which will take care of this for you. |
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| Remember the original Half-Life? You would walk into a very small enclosed area and HL would then load the next area. All Valve did was to create one big level design and break it down into smaller files. The areas you walked into which were inbetween, they existed in both files. They did screw this up a bit and had slightly altered lighting between certain areas, but the continuity of space still existed. The reason Valve broke the areas into separate sections was primarily to conserve RAM. This was back in the days where 128MB was common. 3D levels with their accompanying texture files still are quite large datasets, so it's something to keep in mind, unless you are aiming your game for the 'I can play Battlefield 2 without stuttering' crowd ;) |
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| I go with "John Blackledge" with creating outdoor levels - I basically only ever have one type of any building and literally move them to new positions when arriving at new places. However, you can do this with indoor geometry too. |
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| >i am building a game and my artist friend is doing the >level design. what i am wondering is should the level be >created in a 3d program as one monolithic object? or >should it be broken down and saved as separate areas? It depends on the size of your world. If it's a small indoor world, then there's no need to make it overly complicated and a single model would suffice. On the other hand, if your world is a worldscape, then you need to implement tiling, dynamic loading and managing of numbers(centering the camera) etc. I generally opt for the latter because it gives you much more freedom, but on the other hand, I have done much research into how to do weird and wonderful stuff, but haven't released much. Andy |
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| I am creating an adventure type game and have been working on the following level design. I create a relatively large, low polygon model for an entire scene and texture it. I then load a few additional more detailed entities within this as well as the "hot spots" and pickable items, etc. All variables are declared globally for the entire game. One a level is complete I remove all level objects and load the next level. If you want to go "Back" then you can as the variables are global and once a key for example is gone, its gone. Generally I dont allow going back though. Not much help but thats what I do.. |
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