Modular Design

I've started building walls that I can use all over the city in a modular fashion. One of the main reasons for creating my walls this way, apart from the reuse-ability is the because of the way the Unreal engine renders. If I make a whole house, and let the player walk about around inside, if the player is in the basement and only looking at say, the floor, the whole house is still rendered. Instead, building the walls, floors, roofs and other accessories inside separate allows me to improve FPS while also giving me more flexibility.

Anyway, this is what I'm working on at the moment.



After doing a lot of research into the way buildings look in steampunk images, which is really a mix between modern day technology and Victorian architecture, I've come up with this kind of design.

Deus ex machina

I was doing some more research today, trying to extend my story even further and I remembered the phrase "Deus ex machina". I had a quick google and found that Deus ex machina meant the following:

A deus ex machina (pronounced /ˈdeɪ.əs ɛks ˈmɑːkinə/ or /ˈdiː.əs ɛks ˈmækɨnə/,[1] literally "god from the machine") is a plot device in which a person or thing appears "out of the blue" to help a character to overcome a seemingly insolvable difficul

I thought this would be an interesting aspect to introduce to my game, with the players character taking the role of A deus ex machina. I don't want to go down the lazy path with can sometimes follow suit with a plot of this statue and just have the end of the story go, " It was just a dream....".

Revitalized

I decided that I should take a couple of weeks off, well it is a holiday after all, before I start 100% on my Final Major Project. In this time I've been putting together ideas for my game and hoping to get the UT3 books (no luck).

One idea I came up with, well it's already in other games, but I've been trying to work it into my own, is the idea of karma, good and bad or gangs. I want the possibility for the player to choose his own path, or at least the illusion. I've worked out a way for this to be implemented in the game, by using Kismet to add/subtract points from variables for doing things like killing certain people or doing certain tasks. If the numbers in the plus, then your good, for example, negative means that your bad etc. Expanding further with this is the option to make NPC's friendly/hostile with you because of your actions, open up new shops/missions or basically become the most feared/loved butch killer around.

The NPC's could be spawned on a certain team, depending on what number was in the variable. I could also have an indication for the player letting them know how good/bad they are doing, or even if killing or doing a task will give the player good/bad karma etc. It's something I definitely want to look in to and implement if I can get it to work...which I should if these book's ever get bluddy released by Epic!

Bridge el completo!

Well, that's another asset done! I'm pleased with the bridge, it just needs a very particular lighting setup to get the effect I want, that's going to be fun! The blood has a very high specular which I didn't like at first, but when you see the bridge from a long way off the blood glows, which is actually pretty cool.

Mt.Doom?

A bit further, I'll be working on Specular and Normal maps soon to give the model some life!



edit: Oh yeah, I added some blood although the lighting in this shot doesn't really pick it up that well

Doom Updated

I'm very pleased with the walkway texture, now its just trying to get all the other textures on without any of them looking out of place which is proving quite hard due to the difference in tones.

TEH BRIDGE OF DOOM!

Well, not exactly. I've started work on a bridge now, trying to stay with the steam punk theme and the fact the world has fallen in to chaos. This is what I've come up with so far.