What Darren is working on Part 2
I've decided to write about what I've been working on lately - this turned out to be more than I originally envisioned so I have a series of posts about the things that I'm working on, broken down into these:
Here's Part 2.
Unreal Tournament 3 Miscellany
Lava Material
I had an idea for a map the other day which was basically four circular platforms arranged vertically with lifts between pairs of floors, a central lift from the bottom floor to the top floor and some sort of structure around them which would have ramps inside it to allow a different way of moving between floors. I quickly made up a sqaure version of the platform system with BSP to see if it played okay and decided to go with jump pads instead of lifts to avoid any waiting around. Turns out it's quite good with the right player count so I continued developing it and swapped out the BSP for some meshes. The map needed a setting which justified the structure aswell as its enclosed nature so I chose a stripped-out geothermal power plant which would be underground (allowing me to close it off easily) and would explain an odd structure like the one I had in mind. The story is that the vast majority of the piping system for pumping water underground to be heated has been stripped out, scrapped and reused elsewhere - leaving the platforms it used to run between and the outlying installation built into the cave wall. I needed something interesting for the ground around the bottom platform that would mean a player couldn't go there and wouldn't want to anyway, which lead me to lava. Oddly for a fast deathmatch FPS Unreal Tournament 3 has no lava material so I had to make my own, which is what these two screenshots and a Youtube video are of. There's a plane with a panning lava material, a plane with a panning fog material, a plane with a rotating distortion/heat haze material and a particle effect of some embers floating upward.
Youtube Link
Flame Thrower Weapon Test
Sticking with hot things - everyone likes a bit of virtual arson (flamethrowers and zombies seem to be the in-thing at the moment) so I did a very quick test to see if making a projectile weapon with a fire particle effect would work. I didn't make anything new graphically for this, it's basically a Shock Rifle which fires a projectile that has a fire particle effect as its trail and explosion, and it worked better than I was expecting. The fire sticks around a little while on the ground and, more importantly, on players but there's no damage over time functionality. It's absolutely awful on performance aswell, putting the particle count high enough for it to look good results in serious slowdown but I'm sure an optimised custom particle system would both work better and look better. Here's a YouTube video.
Youtube Link
This has gone in the "Interesting, come back to it later" pile.
Blue Thunder Model
I was going through some older models of mine and noting, then correcting, their poor geometry structure when I came across a vehicle model from quite a while ago. I tidied it up a bit and made the window/interior geometry so you could see inside (not that there's alot to see at the moment). I have the older version of this in C&C3 and Unreal Tournament 3 with varying levels of functionality, I should really get it completed and released for UT3.
