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Enemy Territory - Battery
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The original plan behind this map was the Axis had to destroy Allied ships out at sea before they could get
within range and fire back. In order for this to work, the Axis had to get ammo from the back of the bunker, transport it
down to the gun and then fire at the ships on the horizon. While this was going on the Allies had to land on the beach,
assault the bunker and then stop the Axis from firing the gun.
Unfortunately this was going to be far too complex for an online Multi-Player (MP) map and would require
a lot of co-ordination which often does not exist on public servers. So the objectives were simplified, the
roles were reversed with the Axis defending and the Allies attacking and the map went in a different direction.
I spent a long time studying bunker designs and watching classic films like
The Guns of Navarone. One of the central features of this
map would have to be the gun room, which needed to be a circular design and I knew that would be difficult to
create with brushwork alone. I spent a long time testing various brushwork ideas and eventually found a way of creating circular
rooms that could be scaled outwards, while still being on the grid.
In order to get the scale right for the gun room and bunker I took the original reference image (which was a 2d floor
plan) and placed it on a brush as a texture. Using a player start entity as a reference for game scale,
I increased the size of the brush (with 2d floor plan texture) until the player entity looked correct in relation to the
floor plan. This method was really good at removing the guesswork from the 'block-out' stage of the map.
Once the gun room was created the rest of the base had to be scale outwards using the same circular pattern and this
is where the design got too complex for its own good. After I creating the first two chambers outside the gun room I discovered
that nobody could tell while running around the map that the rooms were built at strange angles. The excessive work needed
to create more chambers so that they spread out from the gun room at the right angle was not necessary and this was a bad tangent
to be caught on.
This map taught me something very valuable about human perception and angles. In order to see or appreciate odd angles there has
to be contradicting angles present, either next to or within view of the existing angles. To compound this problem
further the map had to be worked on by several people and not everyone appreciated my desire for creating unnecessarily
complex brushwork.
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Once the internal layout was finished the back of the bunker was created so that the Allies had an alternative route in.
I still wanted to maintain some realism of the bunker being functional, so a small railway line was
created for ammo transportation reasons. The external design of the bunker was very bland and was suppose to look
nondescript so that it blended in with its surroundings. One of my favourite design elements for the bunker was the
machine gun nests with the inset windows for defence reasons.
With time running short I quickly created a couple of corridors to give some ideas of what sort of
detail could be added. The one thing I loved from all the reference images was how the ceiling space
was really high and full of pipes, ventilation and cables. Perfect for Multi-Player maps because all
the excessive detail can nicely be kept out of the players foot space.
The front terrain of the map was created from an extremely large triangle mesh because so much of it was visible
at once. This caused no end of problems because the triangle resolution was so low that I struggled to create
any kind of terrain detail from it. With the first pass created, the map was moved on to several more
people to be developed into the final version.
I always loved the internal cramped space of the bunker with its many twisting corridors going off in different
directions. Sadly this worked against the design of the map because people were always getting lost
and signs had to be put up all over the place to guide the players to objectives. I really liked the shader technology
that was done for the sea and the fog blending to the horizon, it gave the map a nice sea feeling.
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