Well, I've been working on the habitat ring some more. The air locks on the prominade take you to different sections on the habitat ring where there are 6 shuttle bays and several corridors and some conduits you can crawl through. You can go completely around the habitat ring. There's one room that has a blast door that opens up to a sweet view of the station. However, the habitat ring is sooooo huge that it slows down the battle quite a bit. Also, if you go down a certain corridor and climb 4 stories up a latter, you end up in a room with a couple of vehicles. You can then take those vehicles through a transporter which takes you to a MASSIVE race track on the outer ring where all the docking ports are. The race track goes completely around the outer ring and has several obstacles. But again, it's soo massive. It would take several minutes just for your character to run completely around the outer docking ring. I didn't realize how big ds9 space station was until working on this project. Anyway, with the outer ring so huge, the textures that would be required would eat up way too much memory.
The promenade seems to be the perfect size for the battleground and so I'm going to switch my focus back on that and get rid of the habitat ring and the outer docking ring. Not having an explorable habitat ring or outer ring will free up more geometry and such which means I can add more to the promenade. It's not a complete waste of time either because I learned quite a bit.
I hate to get rid of the habitat ring and outer docking ring but I need to cut the umbilical cord because I think in the end it will hinder the battle instead of making it more fun. I think it would be great for an exploring type game but not for a deathmatch battle.

Originally Posted by Perfecto

You are able to load separate scenes by programming it in. Would be triggered by a proximitytrigger and then load. As for the textures you should be able to define the resolutions within the engine depending on what geo you select. That way the things that are the farthest away can have the least amount. Also the idea of occlusion culling could be utilized to keep the draw calls down and have your fps running much higher.

Silverfeather. You might want to look into using proxies to lighten your solar scene. Within C4D if I have a lot of objects within one scene I have multiple versions of a object that I externally reference with hi and lo settings that I trade out prior to rendering...

Originally Posted by Chavfister

I made another learning mistake haha. I put the latest udk version on my computers. However, when I tried to test it out in multiplayer, to my surprise, it didn't' work.

In the december release, the multiplayer start game button doesn't work. At least not on my computers.

Unfortunately, you can't play maps in older versions of udk if they were created in newer versions. My november release of udk has no trouble starting multiplayer games but I've made alot of changes to my map using december's release. I'm not very willing to redo all the changes either.

Hopefully, when they release January 2012 version, it will be working again. Next time, I'll check out the newer releases thoroughly before making any changes to my maps. Lesson learned.

Originally Posted by Perfecto

Yeah, annoying but that's ok, they come out with a new release every month. Also, I'm not very willing to redo everything but I'm even less willing to wait a whole month to be able to multiplay test it so I'm going to redo it all in the November release.

I've been mostly focused on the game play and not so much on visual. I figured if it looks good but plays lousy...failure. I also believe that if it looks lame but plays good, then it's still somewhat successful. That's just my opinion.

I'm totally sastisfied with the current map layout and I'm enjoying this so much that I think I'm going to go all the way with this one (at least the best I know how). I'm going to create normal maps and emissive lighting, etc.

I do have a question already regarding textures. If I have 4 different crates to model should I create 1 texture to cover all 4 crates, or should I have 4 individual textures (1 for each crate)? Is there a general rule to follow when deciding what should be included for each texture?

For example, the airlocks have a door, steps, and inside walls/floor/ceiling as well as a few items attached to the walls. Would I create 1 texture for all that? Or would I create a texture for the door, a texture for the walls/floor/ceiling, a texture for the objects attached to the walls, etc? I'm totally clueless.

Originally Posted by Perfecto

First normal map of the project but it's only partial as the rest of the turbo lift needs adjusted. The normal on the rest is too strong. I'll finish it tomorrow and post a final of the whole thing. It will all be 1 texture.

I'll need to adjust the door as well because there's a rivet near the top that's too close to an edge for my taste.

Originally Posted by Perfecto