Naastika's Blog

I have a big portion of the outside of my map completed. As I was looking at it, it didn't look quite right. I wanted to have the outside be as accurate as possible, so I needed to learn how to import a Google satellite image of the area. I managed to get it in there, but I'm still unsure of why it sometimes shows up and sometimes it doesn't. Whatever, it's in now. When I lined up all my buildings on the Google map, my level grew to 3x it's original size. Needless to say, I put it back to the way I had it. So much for Google. I totally screwed up my map and broke the nav mesh. I've done this several times now. First it was when I was trying to get breakable ceilings to work. I tried everything I can think of to get this to work. I'm going to make it work somehow. I'll just do this later and work on gameplay first. I managed to fix the nav mesh, so now I might just leave this level alone for now and work on the harbor level. It's going to be interesti...

So now I have windows and doors and all sorts of stuff, and my outside is really starting to come together. Its getting to be way bigger than I thought it was going to be. But...I got tanks and witches working!

I got a little ahead of myself here and did some stuff I probably shouldn't have. I went in and added glass windows, then boarded them up. I put in a couple of lights, and a ton of props. I also learned how to make weapons spawn in random different places. I also made my first functional safehouse...in our kitchen. Unfortunately through all my testing, I couldn't get a stupid tank or witch to spawn.

At this point, I have a climbable ladder going to the roof, and the front angled windows are blocked in. I finally figured out how to get a brush working like a door. I needed working bathroom stall doors! There was a lot of door-work on this iteration. A lot of the doors needed to be removed or changed due to how many there are. Maybe some will go back in. We'll see. I also started cutting out windows and building an outdoors area. Somehow the outside of the building just came together like its supposed to. Started working a bit on the outside details of the building.

So now I have gone through and detailed the rest of the top floor with new rooms and doors. I have also created a path using barricades to guide the player through the level.

At this point I have made the entire top floor of the building, as well as the stairwells and part of the lobby. My wall connections are still dirty, but at least I had made a nav mesh and gotten to actually play through the top floor of my map...with zombies! I was so excited.

5-21-09 I finally decided to learn Valve's Hammer engine. Of course the first thing I wanted to make was the SemiLogic offices. Who doesn't want zombies where they work? This is the first iteration of the SLE map. At this time, I had a very rough layout of the top floor. Nothing real cool yet.