[Map] Al Harithah (2km) [WIP]

[JonnyC]

Map Name: Al Harithah

Map Size: 2km

Map Region: Iraq

Google Map Link: 30.67812,47.752072 - Google Maps

Map Factions: Brits vs MEC (Possibly)

Map Focus: Infantry

Minimap:
Here is the full scale one http://amokzz.am.funpic.de/pr/mm.jpg
and the ref pic http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ref.jpg


Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Dfvd9qN5I

Screenshots:



















http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov1.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov2.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov3.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov4.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov5.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/ov6.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/pp1.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/pp2.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/silo1.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/silo2.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/slc1.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/slc2.jpg

http://home.pages.at/jonnyc/pr/slc3.jpg


Hi.
I guess this is my first post ops:
Been lurking for a while and decided to give the bf2 editor another go, the map is an early WIP as you can see.
The sky, water and lighting are default, the roads are for the most part just placeholders.
Don´t mind the random walls that are everywhere they are just helping me to see the different terrain heights and will be gone once the terrain is finished ^^;

Im trying to stay as close to the real thing as i can, right now I'm working on the town so i can get all the statics in and get ready for texturing the terrain.


Feedback would be nice, thanks.

Edit: Added the Minimap and a video.

[Wilkinson]

Uhm... wow.
that is really really good for an early WIP.

Minimaps are king though.

best to post your minimap.

[Tannhauser]

****, now the launghing man makes PR maps.

We're dead... but awesome start for a map, this looks hella promising!

[Zeno]

damn this map has super potential!

keep going

[JonnyC]

Thanks guys.

I will update the OP later today and add the minimap, so far the cooling towers are connected to the power plant and 2 of the processing plants i will add some shots for that.
I'm not sure, on the satellite photos they could either be cooling towers or water towers, the 2nd one from the left defiantly is.


Do you mean the mezzanine(s) in the silo building shots or the pump house ?
The pumphouse has valves on top that connect it to the tanks, a water tower and to the main water pipeline so its not totally pointless, its just to big^^; but i might replace those with the custom walkways i made, about the cornsilo I'm not sure right now i just put it together so i have the landmarks down its likely to change the silos are not connected right now so i might need the mezzanine to place the valves and so on, again i could prolly use my smaller custom walkways.


Right now i have a few of that walkway meshes, with 4,6,10,20,40M length and 2m width
plus 2 pillars 2 and 4m high, oh yea and a 4 and 10m spacer.
They are the first statics i made for bf2 so im still getting used to it, if performance starts to dip i will look into making 1-2 per floor but i didnt use that much of them the thing is 80m on on the front and around 40-60 on the backside, i would guess i used around 24-30 parts for each floor so around 100 for the whole thing, i think it has more railings than walkways.

[=(DK)=stoffen_tacticalsup]

Reality is good, now that said, take it easy. It doesnt have to be 100% in accordance with the real-life sites. One or two statics changed wont make a difference and the players arent engineers and so cannot hope to comprehend the facilities required to make a powerplant. It looks industrial, thats the purpose, and thats perfectly fine.

[JonnyC]

Oh damn thats quite interesting, you got a good eye, mind deciphering some more spots for me?
You prolly noticed already that i forgot to mirror the image before i used it as my colormap but its to late to fix that now, (at least i know better for my next map <.<) anyways i think i left enough room around the cooling towers to change the terrain.
Right now they are around 1m higher than the rest so it shouldn't be a problem to make a ditch like i did for the water towers.
Right now the pipelines go into the ground close to them not into the towers but if i make a ditch (would be nice cover) i will remake the connection too.

I was thinking the whole thing might be a gas power plant but it could be sharing the place with something else looking at the oil tanks it might be a fuel processing plant of some sort, i couldn't find much about the place aside from it being on the way to al basra.

EDIT:
Ignore the guy below me, the details that come with staying as close to reality as possible should not be dismissed as unimportant. You can swap entire buildings around without people noticing, but remove the rubbish from the streets and the map lacks atmosphere and feels ****. The details make the map.

I think he means that the thing don´t has to make 100% sense, like most of my water and gas pipes aren't underground because i want them to help infantry to hide behind.
But the image is way to good to not go nuts on details i mean you can even see the small terrain details on it.
Im going to stick as close to it as i can, i cant wait to get to the "junkyard" you can almost tell whats laying around there from the pic.

Im going to update the OP , adding the minimap and a quick video to show how the pipes are connected and a bit of cqb hell...


Edit: some more shots of the power plant.

[Zeno]

ohh lawd the details!
how longhave you been working on this map?

[H.sta]

very nice work, keep it up

some very clever solutions there

[Amok@ndy]

thats the problem if you play Sandbox in the editor ! i see some glitches yet this will be a big problem on your map

but nice details
keep it up

[A_Grounded_Pilot]

These:

Are NOT colling towers. They are huge oil containers.
The shadows you see in the second from the left are due to it being open at the top, as its being maintained.

Slight nitpick - I believe those are probably floating roof style tanks. The roof floats on top of the product, which eliminates any enclosed empty space in the tank. This prevents the buildup of the extremely volatile vapors that would otherwise form in the air space above the oil, reducing the likelihood of an explosion. The second one from the left is just nearly empty, so the roof is floating very low inside the tank.

And JonnyC - listen to Jonny. Attention to detail like his makes or breaks a map for me. It's looking good, keep working on it.

[JonnyC]

Actually I'm not sure how long i have been working on it i think I'm closing in on ~5-6 weeks.

You´d expect it to glitch more for the amount of bastardized statics I'm using ^^; right now the only thing I cant fix is the stupid cement block thats on the valves, its going through the walkways in 2 places (you notice one in the vid).
I will make a frame to cover up the pipes/ends without proper entry points that lead into the buildings, btw... i was sure there used to be a static thats just the ring/endcap of the water pipes but i cant find it for my life.

ATM I cant decide if i should keep going with the city or start on replacing the cooling towers/reworking a bit of the place, i think i will go with the towers first, and change a bit of the layout.

I was thinking about the housing block thats close to the industry compound to be realistic the map will be very static heavy and i don´t think i can afford a 2nd city because i can barely use any of the vanilla city buildings, they are to high for such small towns.
On the video you can see i put warehouses in front of the cooling towers and left the office buildings in limbo, maybe i should place the office buildings where the 2nd housing block should be and ignore it for the sake of performance. It looks pretty boring in the pic anyways just like 100 small huts (are those even huts?) in tights blocks.


Right now i cant really check the map ingame because my custom statics are not showing up, i guess i need to put them into the server and client.rar , can you just add them into the archive or do you have to pack the whole thing up for them to run ?

The pipeline rig is not high enough for lots of my stuff and i was wondering if i could just open the original one and make em longer or do i have to remake one from scratch because its not allowed to modify the bf2 models ?
Same goes for the waterpipe rig its not even close to what i need in hight.

Will tpaint mess up the image colormap if I run it now because I'm getting black detail maps or if I should just wait until I can get rid of the colormap anyways and ignore the black terrain ?

@Jonny
Nice post I will look into that.
I'm used to modeling small stuff so its a long shot but some custom machinery is defiantly a very good idea.
For now i will keep the walkways as a placeholder if the map turns out to have nice gameplay it can be refined.
I still need to knock out some flavor and deco statics like rubble piles and the stuff I mentioned earlier that should help me to get used to the workflow before I start on something big like a factory.
I need to learn how to get buildings ingame eventually because i wanna build a city map badly but the vanilla buildings are way to restrictive.


Right now I'm working in this order (more or less)
1. get all landmarks down
2. finish the city
3. get the terrain 90% done
4. deco and flavour statics
5. get the terrain done
6. texture
7. more custom statics

[fuzzhead]

Great looking map so far

And as always, Johnny with the keen eye, hehe nice feedback. You can be prety blunt with feedback sometimes but overall I think very good attention to details.

[*APG* <=130192=>]

Haha! Very nice.
I had a practical training in a chemical plant and your map looks very detailed and have this "factory-feeling"

[JonnyC]

Haha! Very nice.
I had a practical training in a chemical plant and your map looks very detailed and have this "factory-feeling"

Me too, don´t tell me it was Schering haha


Thanks again for the feedback guys.

@ Jonny
Nah your not blunt, must be the name but i like your point of view.

About the housing block, right now I'm trying to concentrate my destroyables on the compounds in the first town so you can breach walls to flank buildings but that could be a nice contrast because your pretty much trapped in there.
It looks like i would have to build most of those houses with the north/afghan walls too, do you think the game can handle that? I don´t mind going nuts with statics.

If you are going to do rubble piles, see if you can get them to pass for this one:
Ministry of Defence | Error | Page not found (Error 404)
As it can be used in another community map and will help keep the DL size down if both end up in PR.

Yea those are nice i saw the pic in the other thread too, ill keep it in mind.

Dont try to work in any particular order. You are likely to get bored if you do, and then the map will never be finished. Work on whatever you feel like working on at the time, it will all have to be done eventually anyway so you might as well enjoy doing it.

Its just my normal pattern sure you end up jumping around sometimes but in general that works pretty good for me. I only released one of my maps (Requiem) but i have a ton that i ditched over the years because i was busy mapping for another game. (but that died now)

Thanks for the help i will try to run the map like that so i can finally check if the walkways look right.

Edit: oh yea i nearly forgot again... is it possible to use the wrecks of the destroyable village buildings and walls, i was thinking about having a few destroyed compounds.

[=(DK)=stoffen_tacticalsup]

It is quite obvious Jonny knows his buisness, I meant no offense. I just mean that it is your map and you should do the things you feel comfortable with. That ofc includes listning the excellent advise Jonny offers.

The point was that we (the players) are very subtle in our demands and we dont expect everything to be perfect. That (ofc) doesnt make it worse if it is

The map looks stunning and realistic and that is what matters to most.