Over the past week now I've been working on some a new Wooden Fence series of statics to replace the old "broken_fences" which where very buggy and didn't offer everything mappers wanted from a fence static set.
(Pictures of Shijia Valley (WIP) with the new fences, courtesy of [R-DEV]AFsoccer)
This new static series in total includes 22 new statics (although 3 of them are the old "broken_fences", fixed up and improved) which includes the following statics:
- wooden_fence_004m
- wooden_fence_004m_beams
- wooden_fence_008m
- wooden_fence_008m_break01
- wooden_fence_008m_break02
- wooden_fence_016m_broken (old "broken_fence_20m" fixed up)
- wooden_fence_020m
- wooden_fence_040m_broken (old "broken_fence_40m" fixed up)
- wooden_fence_060m
- wooden_fence_100m
- wooden_fence_100m_broken (old "broken_fence_100m" fixed up)
- wooden_fence_beam_broken_1m
- wooden_fence_beam_broken_3m
- wooden_fence_gate_metal_4m
- wooden_fence_gate_metal_4m_dest
- wooden_fence_gate_posts_4m
- wooden_fence_gate_wood_4m
- wooden_fence_gate_wood_4m_dest
- wooden_fence_post
- wooden_fence_post_broken
- wooden_fence_post_broken_ends
- wooden_fence_stile01
New Gameplay Features
As mentioned above, these new fences include a series of new gameplay features. This includes:
- You can now crawl under the fences so you don't have to jump over them and loose all your stamina in the process, although you still can jump over the fences if you choose to.
- Vehicles can now drive "though" the fences, but have to go over a sort of speed bump which slows most vehicles down quite a bit, which is the best alternative that we can think of other than having destructible fences, which we can't have as that would mean we would exceed the networkable limit when used a lot.
- Added Destroyable Wooden and Metal Gates in to the mix which vehicles can smash though.
- Added a Stile which a placer can climb over the fence with without having to loose any stamina via jumping over fence. This is archived by using a stair material on the stile so its just like climbing up some stairs ingame.
New Features & Improvements
On top of the new gameplay features, I've also added many other features and improvements to these fences over the old ones.
- Centred the pivots to the models which will mean that the fences will not stop drawing when viewed at odd angles/distances and will also mean LODs dont switch too soon/late and generally improving how the object is drawn. Also Anchors have been added to the statics so they still can be placed easily by the mapper.
- Crated non-broken versions which can be joined up and make a complete fence. Before there was only broken versions of this type
- Added much more verity to the mix including non-broken fences so mappers can really be imaginative with how they use the fences.
- Added Custom Lightmap UVs that minimize the amount of wasted lightmap space while keeping the quality of a high-rez lightmap by using non-square lightmap sizes, like 512x128px sized lightmaps. Also these Custom LM UVs also come with LM samples for use with BF2 Editor LMing that support the new LM sizes, although 3DsMax LMing scripts have yet to be modified to support the new LM sizes, that should be with us by the time we need them. This is something that to my knowledge has never been done in BF2 before and will save a huge amount of lightmap space, really just this is probably worthy of its own blog post
- Made the Splinters double sided so they look more realistic.
I hope you all will like these new statics.
Cheers,
Rhino.
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