How do YOU border your maps? Thread

I find one of my largest dilemmas when I map is when it comes to sealing off an open area. It was bad enough when I was a Source Mapper but now that I'm given all this power with CryEngine 2 makes my problems that much bigger :p

The environments in which the player will play in with my mod include deserts and boreal areas. How would one go about keeping the player in while keeping it natural?

Physical barriers work well. Mountains, Forests (might not apply to you) oceans etc, all act as physical barriers.

I haven't got crysis yet, but I'm dying to try out the editor. As for a desert area, the only thing I could really suggest is make it really obvious where a player has to go. That way, it will look like the only interesting place to go in a pretty much barren landscape.

I know if I was playing your map and there was nothing but sand and a few dead trees and rocks, I wouldn't exactly be compelled to explore if that was all I was going to find.

The only other thing I can suggest is go back to physical barriers, lots of sand dunes sounds like an idea...either that or find a way to implement a sandstorm which stops you from moving...

Hope that helps.

Create a huge, open, utterly empty expanse of sand for your desert areas. Players will look at it and be too bored to go out there.

Small 'cliffs' of earth work quite well in boreal areas.

Edited by: Varsity

Heh, I like the idea with deserts.

As for Boreal areas I'm still unsure, but I will try all mountains, dirt etc. Luckily enough the first mission's map is have blocked by a river anyway, just not sure what to do with the other half... the player arrives to the area by truck and I don't feel the whole secluded cirque would work out with me in this case.

--

Ark

If you can't work the physical barriers, the old invisible wall works wonders .

Seriously though, perhaps you could just make the area that large that it will allow the player to deviate from the path a little bit, but still make him follow a certain route.

That is how it was in far cry, and I'm sure it is like this in crysis too. For example, have a road through the forest, but have a fairly large area around it which starts off being lightly forested near the road and becomes more dense as you proceed away from the road. That way you can hide lots of fallen trees and stuff that can block the player's movement realistically. Plus they might think it is getting too dense to continue and will turn around.

Something along the lines of that might be of use.

Invisible walls work. You don't get the visual clutter, and you keep Bad Things from happening, like having the player walk off the edge of the map.

Heh, but if you want realism .

I'm not aruging they don't work, they are great and gameplay doesn't have to rely on realism, however I have found it definitely does break the flow of the game. If used right however...

Making the desert look boooooring would work.

Just make sure you don't give the player a fast moving vehicle, though.

Or somehow slow down their car as they head too far off the map =P

Use a bit of both soft hints and the hard invisible wall. Have a long and boring featureless plain as a hint that nothing exciting exists that way (possibly reinforce it with radio dialogue or similar telling players there's no point going that way from a character the player should trust). Then if players insist despite the hints they hit the wall eventually.

Other options would be too have the world loop back on itself, so if they go far enough one way they end up back where they started but from the other direction. Not every engine supports this though If your engine of choice doesn't, tough luck. You also have to watch out for expoits where you can skip key events by looping round the long way, but for some designs this isn't a problem, and for other designs you can make it big enough that anyone that desperate to find a cheat probably deserves to get away with it. If your engine is really clever, and you have a suitable world layout, you can do a Mario staircase, where you loop forever going one way, but find you haven't gone far if you turn back the way you came.

Final option I can think of is have a boundary before the end of the map that kills the player. Needs to be signposted well before the player hits it, either with literal signposts, or via dialogue or similar, else the player will probably think they died from a bug in the game and be very annoyed. The other issue with this is building it into the backstory for the level. A minefield would be one option, or dangerous weather that intensifies the further into it you go. Anything that causes gradual damage is good, so they get a warning shot and a chance to turn back before it kills them fully.

Best option is to combine a few different ones if possible. Have a desert bordered by impassable mountains on one side, quicksand on the others. Mixing it up hides the artificialness a bit

For my forest map I'm going to try a combination of invisible wall, unclimbable dirt-cliffs, dense forests and the damage thing; our gameplay design already has mutated organic things showing what hazards lie in the the area, and I think enough Chernobyl mushrooms or mutant cows in one place would worry anybody. :p

My desert is based of the Bledow Desert in Poland:
So I don't know, whatever works here.

--

Ark

Invisible walls are a tricky thing. Many games use them the wrong way. If the player suddenly hits a wall out of nowhere it is very annoying. Invisible walls though are useful if it is clear for the player that there is nothing or the character tells him while hitting the wall why there is no sense going there. Especially make sure you don't tunnel somebody into an in-fight using cone-walls ( invisible walls running towards a certain point you have to pass through ). Cone-walls are the next to most annoying thing. Players like to take their own ways to approach enemy groups so tunneling them to go through one place to trigger a combat is really annoying.

You could do somthing similar to what was done in the Original B&W Game when an area hadn't been unlocked. When the player hits an invisible wall, make a 'Ripple' Effect.
It lacks realism, but it looks good.

Deserts can have sandstorms and duned sand work really well. Depending on how much this is needed you may want to consider putting something into the game code to allow for things like loss of traction (so you physically cannot get up dunes without the need for invisible walls, you just slip back) or sand getting into an engine causing it to audibly splutter and affect control (a clear indicator of 'this is bad').

Whats with all these reality based ideas, invisible walls psshhh....If I spent the money going taking courses to learn how to rig a game world then I'd have giant rabbits strapped with laz0rs to kill wandering players ( players phear laz0rs).

Hmmm invisible walls are great. For desert regions I'd do cacti and such. Since you're using crysis you can do the old lost shark trick. Just have them die of dehydration for wandering too far, instead of getting insta-gibbed by an ubershark.

Ubershark ftw, invisble walls ftl.

Penalise players and put them back on course, invisible walls just don't make sense. The UT way works nicely too - clever volumes that deflect player movement. Torque AGE has a nice system wherein the game area loops in all directions - so if you're stupid enough to walk for eight miles the wrong way, you end up on the other side of the game area from where you started.

I don't like this endless loop system neither since you have no clue that you walk in a direction the game designer does not want you to walk. Can really piss you off and make a game slammed on the wall if you notice after a quarter hour that you walked again in circles due to lack of clues. In that case better invisible walls or ubersharks so you know at last that you are not supposed to go that way.

I've always liked the idea of having automated turrets killing you if you head out too far from a central area. Works great for MP, not so good for SP.

Actually a multiplayer map that looped back upon itself (like, not just the terrain, but more portal-like) would be pretty neat.

You could sneak up on people by running away from them. It would keep everyone watching their backs...actually, all their sides.

This sounds fun, actually. Anyone know of a game with MP that has this =O!?

UT2004 can do it - in fact I did a test a while back and it can do it really well. I would have liked to bring it to UT3, but the feature required to do it wasn't there

Dragonlord wrote: I don't like this endless loop system neither since you have no clue that you walk in a direction the game designer does not want you to walk. Can really piss you off and make a game slammed on the wall if you notice after a quarter hour that you walked again in circles due to lack of clues. In that case better invisible walls or ubersharks so you know at last that you are not supposed to go that way.

If you're running around some kind of industrial facility, and then wander off into the desert, it's probably pretty obvious you're going the wrong way. If your level design is so bad that the player is wandering off into nothingness, then you have a much more serious problem that can't be remedied with invisible walls or ubersharks.

Rather then bordering the maps, maybe the use of objects to attract a player's attention may be a better bet, like landmarks in the distance. If I had the choice of a flat desert and a massive pyramid, I'd go for the pyramid.

This would probably still require invisible walls though, but it might stop player's from running off in the wrong direction, thus, eliminating the need for barriers .

ambershee wrote: UT2004 can do it - in fact I did a test a while back and it can do it really well. I would have liked to bring it to UT3, but the feature required to do it wasn't there

Dragonlord wrote: I don't like this endless loop system neither since you have no clue that you walk in a direction the game designer does not want you to walk. Can really piss you off and make a game slammed on the wall if you notice after a quarter hour that you walked again in circles due to lack of clues. In that case better invisible walls or ubersharks so you know at last that you are not supposed to go that way.

If you're running around some kind of industrial facility, and then wander off into the desert, it's probably pretty obvious you're going the wrong way. If your level design is so bad that the player is wandering off into nothingness, then you have a much more serious problem that can't be remedied with invisible walls or ubersharks.

That's correct but unfortunately more common than one might think

omg most obvious thing ever... give him an npc to follow to the next location and have them constantly shout at him to keep close. cant be that hard!

stonecold23 wrote: omg most obvious thing ever... give him an npc to follow to the next location and have them constantly shout at him to keep close. cant be that hard!

Sounds like a good idea in theory, but what happens if player doesn't listen to NPC? What happens after they keep walking, and the NPC just starts to rephrase and repeat themselves?

Quick question, The criteria for bordering your maps should be different for signle and multi player mods right?

I use invisible walls because I can't map worth shit. ^____^