Maniaplanet Forum

anything like that in SM? maybe speed boosting power-ups for soldiers

Things will have to be scattered around as items, I would think, rather than trackpieces, of course...because, unless they're going for a destruction derby type deal...it would be more an open world, right?

each block would be specific to the environment (environments would be expansions)

military-type blocks
-sandbag blocks
-nature blocks like trees

space-type blocks
-walls
-windows

snow-type blocks
-snowy nature
-sandbags with snow on them

What I'm very curious about is if Nadeo is going to use the same block-based building system as in TM, and, if so, how they are going to design the blocks.

By that, I mean that there's an obvious focus in TM--the road (whether "road" means actual road, or parking lot surface, or platform, or whatever). The focus is the surface the car will normally travel on, and everything else is secondary to that.

I've been making shooter levels since Doom, and I do it for a living, and the block focus for a shooter is much more difficult to define. In a shooter, the equivalent to the road is simply "where the player can go", and that's a HUGE range of potential places, even if you start by being very specific regarding time period and environment.

Let's say you decide one block set will be modern-day, and subway (which is pretty specific).

That still means that (if you're going for at least semi-realism) you need flat floors, subway tracks, subway cars (moving?), tunnel walls, stairs/escalators, flat walls, curved walls/corners (convex and concave), lights, benches, payment booths, railings, pillars/supports, some sort of waist/chest height objects for crouch cover, and mantling over, alcoves in the walls to break up gameplay and to duck into, wall decorations, and so forth.

And that's just all the normal boring stuff. Any good shooter level will have risk/reward areas, sniper spots, tighter passages (maintenance areas?), and level-over-level areas (which means a second floor of some sort, or at least a raised walkway or observation area, and just some things for eye-candy (glass walls? neon signage? maybe even a small fountain or some central statues or monuments?).

I have trouble imagining how to create the block flexibility to allow building an "infinitely" (yeah, I know) different number of these environments, while still keeping the granularity of your block set large enough to make building relatively quick and easy, as in TM.

That's one thing I love about making TM tracks; it doesn't take days or weeks or even months, like making a modern shooter level. You can make something very cool in an evening, and have fast iteration and no compile time. I hope we don't lose the quick flexibility combined with awesome variation that TM has when SM and QM are relased.

Again, the goal is not quantity but quality. Funny thing is that we have made a quite nice subway for test, but that is less our focus right now. We have found something else, that we think will be better.

yay

Hylis wrote:Again, the goal is not quantity but quality.

Thats the way, mate !
Cheers

I find this so called "leaked" picture of the armed vehicle interesting.
It's build on the same engine as TM2, which is definitely a vehicle game, and all that is said is that it's a shooter....
But I don't remember seeing somewhere what kind of shooter, so vehicles are a possibility as well as "humanoids".
Which, coming back ontopic, has a lot of influence on possibilities for the environments too, as vehicles are a lot less agile as humanoids, they won't climb trees or swim etc.

Knutselmaaster wrote: It's build on the same engine as TM2, which is definitely a vehicle game, and all that is said is that it's a shooter....
But I don't remember seeing somewhere what kind of shooter, so vehicles are a possibility as well as "humanoids".

They've said it's an FPS

Hylis wrote:Again, the goal is not quantity but quality. Funny thing is that we have made a quite nice subway for test, but that is less our focus right now. We have found something else, that we think will be better.

Any screen shots of this subway you can post?

maybe they handle the environments just like classes for e.g. tf2.
one environment has a type of class.

for example if there were a moon/ space environment , the players would maybe be humanoids and could jump a lot further or run faster. Another environment would have a slower gameplay then, maybe with heavier wepons etc.
And of course every environment should have it's own weapons. (lasers etc for moon, revolvers for wester sytle etc)
that would be awesome