Lost Dragons is a multiplayer total modification aiming to bring out a new thrilling gamemode for Arma3 . Our concept is futuristic objective based team warfare with randomly generated map elements to ensure every game is a unique experience with completely new set of units, weapons, structures and terrain.
Map progress continues
(view original)
Post a comment
Description
30 wall pieces left. The inner wall of the outer rim is now in place and all the pieces have snapped together without any major problems.
The complex is getting too large for the buldozers camera to see its furthest end even with max view distance.. :D
Looks great! Can't wait to see it all in game
I have got a question about the production design. Does the develoment of this scale justified because you imagine specified gameplay scenarios in the various parts of this metropolis, or do you want to lay down a very detailed map, which can be freely explored and used by mission makers? I mean do you have a vision and a designer-plan about the kind of action will be encountered in the different districts? For example the bottom left "alley" (which I think could be a highway as well), will support infantry movements better, or will be better for vehicular combat? Is the higher ground accessible for footmen? I remember an older video where you flew through the skeletal beams of the architecture, detailing your plan, that you will put "buildings" inside of it. Right? With interiors in some or in every cases. The heights are great, and if you can acces some offices on the twenty-ish level, the strict layout of the city will obstruct you to simply run to the other side of the street. You have to decrease to the street level, across the wide street and up again. This is a great distance. I just imagine it is not combat-friendly, if you won't install heli-pads or skywalks on the walls, to be able to picked up by transport-aircrafts. As much I want to explore this, I can't belive I would like to run out from a skyscraper for 10 minutes just to reach the other side of the street. So I imagine mission makers would create a level which would be staged on the same side roughly. And everything else would be a scenic view, although they are fully modelled and randomly generated. Or is it simply a high scenic design, and the players can move and acces interiors only on the ground levels? I am asking this, because as I see now, you put an insane amount of work into the design, which will be neglected by the players. Not when they have the chance to explore, but when they will make missions on your great map. So I am really interested of the perception of the player: you show us awesome pictures about the city, but viewed from the bird's-eye. I still think this is a great work, it is just the first time for me to put some thoughts in the game-design. I hope it is all right if I message you here, in front of the others. If not, you can delete this comment and maybe we can elevate this to the level of PM. Cheers!
I personally think this will lead to the most awesome CQB fights of the whole video games history !
The only thing I would do is adding jetpacks... With this I can imagine soldiers flying from one side to another of the streets.
Think about a scenario where your fireteam is walking down the street, watching the skies and the high buildings, and then they get ambushed by some sort of hidden heavy weapon that suppress them ! They yell, run behind cover : wrecks of futuristic cars and tanks that crashed, walls pieces that broke and fell there !
Man I can imagine so many awesome things that would use the whole map, both horizontaly and verticaly ;)
Absolutely, however I spoke about the production-cost. Which is the time in this modding situation. Does the amount of work worth to design everything accesible, even when players overlook them propably? Additionally, regular fps games has rules how to design maps. They are CQB games. Arma is an open field-experience. And this mod would be something different, something real new. A scientific warfarfe can be shown here. Still, design and visual-wise it has some issues. Bohemia interactive designs smaller than real life cities for a reason:
1. Distinguishable parts of the city makes the map aesthetically nice, and easier to navigate in.
2. For combat, they dont want you to travel half an hour in a city. The map is huge, and yet they cut it into several pieces of interests. So you can oversee the combat situations, and with relatively small ammount of running, the scenery changes around you more often. I think HorribleGoat is about to achieve this. I don't oversee the development.
3. Not to speaking of optimization. Everybody has different computers.
So You look out of your window, or walking on the street amidst car wrecks, and you can see only this huge city. You feel small. I am really interested how would that look like! Would it feel repetetive? The dev's are making a great city with interesting parts. Just how many can bee seen from the street? Only the offices and condos, And the even taller central tower? Wow I would like to see some concept arts. :)
Did you play Oblivion ? Imagine the Imperial City 1000x bigger in proportions... I believe it'd feel great.
Images.google.fr
Images.google.fr
Images.google.fr
I think it'll completely change the way you play ArmA. You'll have to consider the whole open map not to be an open ground landscape but a huge city. That's what makes it exciting IMO.
I asked the dev about how well it would perform (I was a bit sceptic about this point) and he told me it'd be OK. Still it might be a problem in the futur, not sure how he'll do this...
By the way we're having some interesting debate there... Wondering what they'll say when they see this ^^
I have never played Oblivion, and I share your enthusiasm. :) It has the potential to be a game-changer, yes. I'm not sure about the AI though.
Woah! I see we've piqued your interest big time! :D Ok lets see if I can answer your questions and I assure you they are always welcome!
The answer will be long and I try to keep it coherent, but please ask again if I miss something! And it will also be in 2 parts as there is 5000 char limit on comments... xD
""Wall of text warning""
PART I
To bring some perspective to the image, the circle is about 6km in diameter right now. the width of the straight alleys is 300m between the walls and the bottom trench width is 50 meters.
The side walls are about 200 meters tall. So the dimensions are pretty immensive. The whole city is about the size of Stratis in Arma3.
Straight answer for the first question about production-costs is no, I would imagine there will be huge amount of details that no one might never see. But thats the beauty of a moddin as a hobby. It does not have to be cost effective and we dont really do it for players (sorry ;D) but for ourselves. For someone else to want to and be able to play in the map is a bonus. (Well no not really 100% but partly true. We hope people will also want to play the map :D but you get the idea)
I personally kinda treat the project also as a piece of art that I really enjoy working on. And wheter or not no one ever sees for example some secret garden or some fun easteregg I know its there and I get the kicks from the possibility that maybe some day someone will find it and enjoy it. That also drives me to create them.
What most drives the whole mod design though is the story we want to tell about the Old War and the Dragons and all that, we are not making just a map for Arma, but creating a new living universe with interesting and detailed history and the planet of New Eden and the city now under work play a big role in the story.
Our scenario and gamemode, the "Treasure Hunt" will take players to various locations in the map with all the different ways to win, but as it is so huge, no one will never see everything at one play. If anyone ever even finishes the mission... xD but to support that the plan is to make the city layout very accesible with lots of bridges, walkways, helipads and hangars. The people who lived in the city have used numerous different flying vehicles to move around, so there will be both land and air vehicles easily available and it will hopefully also ease moving around. Tall buildings will also have elevators to assist with the vertical traveling with all the floors there will be. There will be places where you can see the whole city, but at the very bottom there is not much else to see than the walls. But think of this, we have such immensive metropols today where all you see is skyscrapers on both sides of the street.
I would say we dont really think of the design from player perspective as games are maybe usually developed from. As .Eol said Arma offers a chance to play in immensive open map and we want to use that to the fullest and to tell an immersive story of the people who lived there. For this the city (and the rest of the map) is designed as a complete working infrastructure where just about everyhting has a meaning (big nono on the cost effectiveness.. :D) and that the details and scale of things make the place believeable and maybe even realistic. We want to go beyond what games offer today.
The huge dimensions of the city will make travel times long though, that cant be helped and its one reason we use Arma. The possibility to create something massive like this is really inspiring. The scenario is also designed to be long by default (with options to make it shorter) due to the size of the map and all the objectives needed to achieve victory. It is not player friendly approach I addmit, but we want to offer a true challenging game experience that, yes needs a time investment from players to finish it, but its the tradeoff for the time we use to make it.
PART II
As said the map and the city are not designed that much with players in mind, but to support the story we want to tell with the scenario. Thus The city might not be very combat friendly, as it is supposed to be an impenetrable strongold as much as a immense shipyard and so combat in the city is not supposed to be easy.
This means there will be habitat sectors, industrial sectors and agricultural sectors all topped with strong military precense to give the feeling that the city can provide self sufficient resources and to support the production the Dragon starships. Which means that road and other travel networks are accessible and efficient and that the city feels like it "works".
The scale will probably make some places feel more repeating, but I think it also adds to the realism of the place as a whole. There are also ways to break repetiviness too with multiple building front designs for example and by having some of the structure spaces as open "green" areas with parks and outdoor activity areas. And the planned building random generation will bring another layer on this so that If wanted, no game will ever be the same and with well set up rules for the generation, we should be able to eliminate most of the repetiviness altogether.
This brings us to the interior accessibility and our goal to make everything accessible (again cost-effectiveness nono) BUT as Arma might not be able to handle it, we will create as much accessibility as we can. There is new object occlusion tech coming to Arma that may well help with this goal so im still optimistic about it.
Thanks for reading and sorry for such a long answer. I hope I managed to answer your questions though and do always ask when you want to know something. We do want to be informative about our designs and goals, but its not always easy to put in writing.
I will put this up in the next news post too, but please feel free to continue here until I do!
Thank you very much for your time and your explanation! I understand now.
Thanks too for the answer. For me ArmA is the only fps game that allows us to do things that only rpgs would be capable of, and that's what makes it a great game ;)
You're both welcome! We really appreciate your engagement with the development and your patience with our slow progress!