Urban island (w/ screenies) in production

[McDoom]

Here comes some pics of my urban island. Any comments/suggestions would be appreciated, however I have 2 particular problems that need addressing:

 (1) I wanted the island to be fertile for urban development, but made it too damn flat. The tide comes up the flat beach and there's no shelf wherein to plant a dock area. I don't know how to rectify the situation without screwing up the rest of the map and starting over (NO!!!!)

 (2) I haven't bothered yet how to config/package the damn thing, so I'm using (intro) island for now, but would eventually like to package it as its own thang and restore the Desert Island to its former lack of glory!

thanks and i hope you like it much MUCH more than i enjoy hunching over my keyboard and mistyping coordinates over and over and over and...

anyway, here's the first one:

[McDoom]

sorry, here it is:

[McDoom]

another random street-level pic:

[McDoom]

a crappy chopper shot showing how the stormy weather i selected doesn't do the true scope of my progress so far, but suffice to say its coming along nicely and its big enough to goof around with finally... um, here it is:

[McDoom]

another intersection or whatever. honestly, i just ran around my big dilapidated city and shot screenies. it all looks pretty good and so far uniformly devastated. this is to be the downtown area. it will fade out into suburbs and drought-ridden farms and (if i can alter my terrain somehow) docks (Grrr!!!) and soo on.

[McDoom]

ok, so time to vent a little beef and dole out another screen.  my beef is this: by and large the Resistance buildings are urban enough but too damn unbombarded and whatnot, and the original buildings are perfectly blownout and craped up but are almost entirely residential.  it is infuriating.  so here you go:

[McDoom]

ok, last one. another street-level shot on account of what a terrible chopper pilot i am, hehe.
 no i just like the look of it all up close.  there's a lot of details i plan to add it later, like the scaffolding stuff from Resistance, fountains, more streetlights, street signs, etc. etc.  i might make a non-Resistance-friendly version someday too, but i wouldn't count on it. here's another shot of nothing in particular:

[Leone]

Looking good  ;D ;D Can you put up a WRPEdit shot of the whole island, so we can get an overview. Cheers!

[Raiden]

M8 its looking great   , no i have a question to ask, as i was looking at the pics i saw the screen name, its mog, i was wondering if you were basing the map on mogadishu or just a coincidence?   ANYWAY NICE MAP M8

[McDoom]

Originally I was going to try and recreate Mogadishu from maps and any info I could find on the internet, watching BHD a 1,000 times, etc. but I settled for " generic, wartorn city".

I have some editor screenies for you, some with notations.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

(Note: I know the road system is blocky and composed of nothing but evenly spaced right angles; that's the only way to try and knock this out in quick time, I'll cut in and make some more complex roadworks later, time permitting).

[McDoom]

(remember... work in progress)

[Raiden]

its a great map with a great city, are you ging to put anything on the other island to the southeast. i think you should make a large airfield with a army base to the north of it named. FORT RAIDEN lol but i think you should put a airfiled and a training area, like with phaedens island with the metal walls that collapse.

[McDoom]

I may end up redesigning the island from scratch, because I know I made it too small for the daunting size of the urban areas.  But I'm using mathematic shortcuts to more quickly and easily place roads, city blocks, etc. so it shouldn't take me too long. If I knew how to raise up the area between the two islands I could make the whole thing much bigger, but unfortunately, I can't figure out how to do that efficiently in WRPEdit.  If anyone can help out, I'd appreciate it.

[Planck]

Just select the area you wish to raise by holding Shift-Ctrl and drawing a red rectangle round the area.

Then choose the Up/Down tool and raise the whole area by the desired amount.


Planck

[PFC_Mike]

Perhaps someone with modeling skills and access to textures will make some new war torn buildings? hint hint

[McDoom]

that doesn't seem to work for me, i get a square crazy area.  but i fiddled around with a simple outline of madagascar that was bigger and imported it to see if i would be able to fine tune the land "around" my existing buildings and it seemed to work.

i have to mess around with different greyscale values of island maps, but i'm going for a size more like in the following screen.  it seems a little ambitious, but it seems stupid to pack a gigantic city on a little island.

[TkKivi]

Very nice, but you should try to retexture the apartments, they need to be more.. well... muddy  

as for the land textures how about using Resistances land texs?  

[mattmayhem]

mabey make some sector of the town that are not destroyed. And dont forget to add things like fences, shrubery (this is desert terrain i hope ) and all those little things that add to realism, houses placed randomly isint very realistic. Good work !

[McDoom]

Thanks for the input. I'm going to be trying to move all I've finished so far onto a newer, larger island.  It will eventually sprawl out and fade into suburbs and farmlands, so there will be more fences, and variety of lots, etc.  I also plan to put together some militia and government compounds in and around the city.  Right now I figure I'll go for quantity over quality and just try and fill up as much space as possible.  It doesn't seem to slow up my processor any more than my sad sack computer normally is, so I figure I want to make this thing as big as possible then iron it out and freshen up some spots.  I do plan to make some parts of the city undamaged and use some of the nice clean shopfronts and so on from Resistance, but as far as textures go, I don't have a clue how to put in new ones to work with the map.  Anyhow, I'll update whenever I accomplish anything of note or get a big enough section finished to show off.

[mattmayhem]

another idea, it would be cool to have a walled coumpoud containing some of the low reistance apartments and mabey a few other buildings and a helipad, then you could have rescue missions and senarios like in the Movie Rules of Engagement.  

[mattmayhem]

Make some 4 way intersections and other areas large enough to land a blackhawk ! i noticed in some maps i have with urban sections its hard to land troops into the town... well i do have the BAS little birds  ;D , but some senarios call for larger payload   .

[McDoom]

I reworked the whole island to about five times the size it was, using a skewed outline map of Madagsacar.  I've put in a docks area with a military outpost, and I've started working on the airport, although fencing it in and adding details is going to take awhile.  I'm going to be filling in some more generic city blocks before I get ahead of myself, but I will be making some more military complexes, undamaged parts of the city (including apartment complexes, markets, etc. whatever I can work in).  The roads are (technically) wide enough to land choppers in, but everytime I test it out, the AI tries to land on roofs, etc.  So it may just be impossible for the AI to figure it out.  A player-controlled bird shouldn't have too much trouble though (and landing on the roof of one of the tall buildings is a kick too!). OK, so I'll post some screenies of the docks and some of the newer areas.

Here's the docks area from down the beach...

[McDoom]

here's the foefront of the docks and a little military compound thingy...

[McDoom]

here's the new and improved (or at least enlarged) island from the editor with notations...

[mattmayhem]

Any updates? I can't wait to see this island, mabey for some landing areas, just make a park or sports feild and we can just place an invisible H , ai shouldint have trouble in that case, i mean it wouldint have to be a big park.

[McDoom]

Sorry i haven't updated in awhile. I was in NY visiting friends for Thanksgiving. I started working out some new areas to put in with the older ones.  I had to lower the water levels, so I'm kind of stuck re-inputing things. I made a little fenced in industrial area and a few newer undamaged looking blocks.  Plus theres a little bit of details thrown in (streetlights, stop signs, withered foliage, etc.) but I'm not stressing the detail just yet, working to bulk up the island a bit.  I'll post some screens now...

here's the first one, of the south entrance to my little manufacturing complex or whatever...

[McDoom]

here's the western entrance of same...

[McDoom]

a newish, rather undamaged street corner...

[McDoom]

here's a "nice side of town" shot with some of the Resistance wealthy urbane buildings...

[McDoom]

and last and probably least, an outlying farm area...

[McDoom]

Any updates? I can't wait to see this island, mabey for some landing areas, just make a park or sports feild and we can just place an invisible H , ai shouldint have trouble in that case, i mean it wouldint have to be a big park.

That's a good idea.  i think for now i'll make a few parks of various sizes. I know somebody made some playing field texture addons somewhere, so that would be a good way to land a chopper, but i'm hesitant to use unofficial addons as i don't know how to account for them.  i still haven't researched how to "config" the island so i'm working on "intro.wrp" and i know that adding custom textures, addons, etc. may require me to learn that stuff eventually.  I'll put in a civilian airport and some other stuff soon, but that's giving me texture problems (flat as a boar land but my "runway" textures are all crooked and goofy and i can't figure out why?)

If anybody can think of anything else that can be implemented in the game that a big old city would have, let me know, and I'll try to put together a few parks and open areas wherever they seem to fit. If I can figure out how to implement it, i'll get to work on a "sports arena" or something like that.

[ntstlkr]

Good going,
I like the Massed urban area look but agree that it doesn't quite match the Mog. That would require special addons to be developed. But I tell you right now that its a pretty good start for a section of Stalingrad! Maybe add some winterized textures and there you go, WWII urban assault or some post-apocolyptic battle field set in central europe. Either way good stuff!

NSDQ!

[Leone]

I think the best way to think about what would be in a city is to imagine what the people in it do. Where do they work, sleep, eat, shop, go for entertainment...etc? A city is ultimately people...not buildings...so if you start to think of it that way...you'll work out all sorts of neat things to put in your island.

Keep up the good work!  

[unkie]

whats happened to this island? it was looking great...

[CODY2622]

Yeah. What happened to this island.