It's been a while since I've posted a standalone WIP; in fact it has probably been about two years since the last one. Thematically, then, I think it's fitting that I continue on with the Battle of Endor (for those of you keeping track, this now includes all three parts of the battle - Space Endor in the Conversion Pack, Endor ground campaign in Dark Times II, and now this as a standalone).

Anyway, this one should be pretty self-explanatory. I wanted to try my hand at making a more detailed, movie-accurate map. I think I did a decent job. This map is of the observation spire on the second Death Star (as seen here:) It's a pretty small map; it includes the four cardinal-direction rooms (throne room, shuttle docking room, map room, and Royal Guard room) and of course the pit and everything part and parcel with that.

There are a few different planned modes for the map. For those with the vanilla game, there will be three (maybe four) modes:
GCW(/CW?) team deathmatch
Hero Assault
GCW Hunt (Two-player, Luke vs. Vader)

There will also be additional (as yet undecided) content for anyone with Dark Times.

And fun story, before the pictures - I am fairly certain this map is over the maximum amount of tris that world geometry can handle. I ran into this pretty early on (there was originally even more modeled detail than is visible), and so I had to cut down on a lot of physical detail. There are still notably more tris in the scene than what I estimate SWBF2 can handle as world geometry (my guess is ~40k tris is the limit for world geometry), but I skirted around this by loading basically the entirety of my map (less a few dummy placeholder objects) through the script as spawned objects (the game can handle significantly more detail from spawned objects; my guess is that this is because the game was built to handle a lot of detailed playermodels/vehicles/etc. at once). The pipeline was a funny thing this time around.

And here are some relevant pictures:

OMG , new wip by the great Mav , that's awesome , epic .

Oh my God...

I can't find words to describe that... So I'll make a new word:
It is... It is... It is...

Looks sweet, especially the star map. Just curious, but how did you do it? Looks like the stock Coruscant Holo Starmap effect with a larger core for and some kind of plain texture.

I love the Emperor in the first pic, just sitting there and watching the show.

Great Job as always Mav!

OMG a new map by mav? this is not a dream?
so i say :AWESOME!

Darth_Spiderpig wrote:Looks sweet, especially the star map. Just curious, but how did you do it? Looks like the stock Coruscant Holo Starmap effect with a larger core for and some kind of plain texture.

It's pretty similar to the Coruscant effect - it has a cloud of perpetually spawning particles (for the stars), a glowing core particle effect, the projector effect at the bottom (animated billboard effect), and a piece of geometry for the galaxy itself.

The level of details is impressive .

Darth_Spiderpig wrote: I love the Emperor in the first pic, just sitting there and watching the show.

Lol, he doesn't imagine that he wil be eated by a reactor

PURE AWESOMENESS
awesome map idea and looks great too

[Padawan]Helkaan wrote:

Darth_Spiderpig wrote: I love the Emperor in the first pic, just sitting there and watching the show.

Lol, he doesn't imagine that he wil be eated by a reactor

Funny you should mention that:

wow, that looks really great! i love the many details!
in my opinion it may be a bit too grey all around though, letting the objects cast shadows may break it up a bit.

DarthD.U.C.K. wrote:in my opinion it may be a bit too grey all around though, letting the objects cast shadows may break it up a bit.

They are already within a giant shadowvolume (see window shadows). I could put a region-bounded directional light inside the walls and generate shadowvolumes for the interior objects as well, but having that many shadows (as well as trying to work shadows from two sets of light) is more of an investment than I probably want to make in light of the fact that it may make the game explode (I'm already pushing a lot of detail).

Edit: Yeah, tried it out. It doesn't cause any performance issues, but it mucks up the operation of the lights and shadows that are already there.

wow, awesome reactor

Impressive .
OFF TOPIC : there will be a Dark times 3 ?

I love movie accurate maps, and this is looking extremely good. Just like the film

Agreed with the above statements. Awesome job, Mav. Like Jendo, I always do love movie-accurate maps.

Looks amazing. Does it have standard conquest mode? I don't see that listed.

Good lord Mav. That looks amazing! I seriously love the looks of it, It brought a tear to my eye.

That must've been extremely tough to make. This inspires me to make something as good as this. Me and 27 were discussing to make this but never got to it, i'm glad you did.

I wish you best of luck on this.

Very impressive, as always.

but I skirted around this by loading basically the entirety of my map (less a few dummy placeholder objects) through the script as spawned objects

Spawned objects = pilotless aircraft?


Just a question on the tris, do you get objects flickering on and off when you get close to the limit or does it just go straight to crashes?

Sky_216 wrote:

but I skirted around this by loading basically the entirety of my map (less a few dummy placeholder objects) through the script as spawned objects

Spawned objects = pilotless aircraft?

Just a question on the tris, do you get objects flickering on and off when you get close to the limit or does it just go straight to crashes?

No, they're spawned objects. I loaded the classes (.odfs) directly into my world's .req file and then used a CreateEntity callback to create each prop individually post script-load.

As far as I've seen, as you push towards a limit of polies the game can render in your field of view, you'll get props flickering on and off. The crashing, however, is separate from that - you can have too many objects in a scene (or more simply, too many tris) without getting individual view rendering issues. Neither of these appears to be an issue with the map as it is now, though. I dodged a bit of a bullet by asking the game to treat my objects differently.