[WIP] Abuja Sunrise

EJtheK

It's just after dawn in this West African urban neighborhood, and the extraction is about to go down. With a healthy mix of close quarters combat and long range sniping, the battle promises to be intense. Watch your angles, use your cover effectively and work as a team and you will achieve success. Subscribe on Workshop here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540215428

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Inspired by all the great UMMs on the Beer_Me server, I decided to try and learn UDK by assembling a medium sized map. I've used 99% stock meshes that are included with AA:PG... a little limiting, but I need to improve my mesh creation skills first. So please be gentle on me, this is my first map for AA.

I'm releasing an Alpha version (still needs a lot of spit and polish) and I would appreciate it if anyone could play test it for me. That's my biggest concern...whether it is balanced, and if it's interesting gameplay. I've only previewed it in editor, and still can't get it to [Test Gameplay] without crashing the game loader, even after the update. It needs sound, more foliage, landscape tweaking, etc. But I think it should be playable. Thanks for your attention and patience.

Goodvibe

A link to it would be nice and a few pics.

[ENG]Uni-Sol

Http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=540215428

Welcome EJtheK

=[101st]=Wolverine

Looks good EJ, welcome to the forum.

4DChessGenius

Looks good, hopefully get to play it soon. On another note, while using only stock meshes does limit one's creativity a bit, with the amount of assets available these days you can still do quite a lot. Hopefully as the Dev team puts out more maps we'll get more assets to play with.

Bashar_al-Assad

This reminds me of "Delta force Black hawk down" game I used to play!

EJtheK

Thanks for the welcome. Updated OP to include a pic (more on Steam) and make the link clearer.

The challenge with the stock meshes is that most were purpose built for a specific scenario, and have distinct themes. Due to optimizing or lack of need, a lot have missing surfaces or collision, and weren't designed to be universal. It really forces you to be creative, especially if you are going for more of a sim map than the typical army base.

DELTATHUND3R

Looks great EJ.
And Welcome to AAPG forums..

4DChessGenius

EJtheK wrote: »

Thanks for the welcome. Updated OP to include a pic (more on Steam) and make the link clearer.

The challenge with the stock meshes is that most were purpose built for a specific scenario, and have distinct themes. Due to optimizing or lack of need, a lot have missing surfaces or collision, and weren't designed to be universal. It really forces you to be creative, especially if you are going for more of a sim map than the typical army base.

Agreed, but at least textures can be imported really easily. Making custom meshes is something that takes more work. Blender isn't super difficult to learn, I just don't have the patience to make a model every time I want something that's not a completely straight angle.

EJtheK

In an effort to hopefully entice some interest and feedback, I'm posting this walkthrough video. Starts with attack spawn and then switches to defense spawn, to get a sense of the flow.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//sendvid.com/embed/9524zlmw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

On another note, which screen recording software is the best? Also, has anyone figured out how to get "Test Gameplay" to work without crashing?

[ENG]Uni-Sol

I've never been able to successfully use the 'test gameplay' function in the editor so I just copy my map, place it into any of the map read locations (either UMM or official) open the game then console and type open [myexactmapname] and test it out in the actual game

I used to have a handy .bat file that I could use launch 2 instances of the game on my PC, and have a player spawn on attack and a player on defense to test gameplay and it would do this all in the click of one executabale .bat file, but I lost it in my switch to Win10 and embarrassingly can't remember how it worked to do it again

Liking the look of you map sp far, I'll sub and test it out later

[ENG]Uni-Sol

After running around on it offline I like it, infact the onlr real noticibale thing I saw were that you should look to add a physical material to the road surface meshes as the devs didn’t use one on it for some reason.. And some of the terrain where you have raised it to look like rubble piles are quite clunky for the pawn to walk up so perhaps a little smoothing on them will help?

Great start I'd say, well done!

EJtheK

Thanks Uni-Sol. Ya, there is a bunch of tweaking and polish to add like you mentioned. I just didn't want to go to all the trouble of refining the little details if players found the gameplay is off too much and I need to re-jig the geometry. Of course I won't know til it gets played on a server somewhere. Unfortunately I don't know how to run a server myself. It would be good if the devs sponsored a UMM server seeing as they are looking to foster development now.

[NoL]W_a_t_c_h

Well I put it on the [NoL] UMM server (217.23.5.189) if anyone wants to try it out.

Couple of things I found just from searching for glitches.

1) Near assault spawn you have a blue trash can.



You can vault onto this, then onto the wall



Then vault into the house



You will need to add a blocking volume to the house to stop this.

2) Near defense spawn, you have a car with missing glass texture. Check the second texture on the mesh and add a glass texture.



3) Also near defense spawn, where you have to road meshes, they are overlapping and glitching. Either move the mesh apart so they don't overlap, or move one mesh down 1px.



Hope this helps, and good job for a first map.

IO_i_OI

Thumbs Up!

EJtheK

Thanks Watcher!

1) Thanks for catching this. I had put a blocking volume on the other end of the house already to prevent climbing through over there. Missed this side.

2) That's strange, the texture works fine for me (see the video). I have avoided modifying stock meshes at all because once I did, the editor started crashing. Unless there is a better way ? Either way, could the texture have been corrupted in publishing?

3) I knew about that one... I changed the angle of the road slightly and that end didn't line up. I'll fix it though.

Thanks for the feedback... it is very helpful.

EJtheK

UPDATE -- Posted a Beta version, cleaning up some of the things pointed out and tweaking other things.

Please let me know if you find any bugs.