Sunday, March 13, 2011

Strasbourg, beta 1 release

I've wanted to build a city level for a very long time.  I attempted it a few times and just couldn't find a design I liked.  One day I was playing Modern Warfare 2 MP (I think I'm one of the few mappers who actually liked this game despite the lack of servers & mod tools) and felt great inspiration to attempt a city map again after playing "Invasion" (screenshot here).  

The level started with a simple 5x5 vertice terrain mesh textured with an asphalt texture & blended with dirt, rubble and trash textures.  I built a long stretch of road, added a few Case textured blocks for building placeholders, then wondered what it would look like if I built sidewalks on the roads and constructed the layout in realistic city blocks instead of just a blanket rubble strewn mesh between buildings.  The idea to divide the middle by adding bridges definitely stems from my love of bridge maps in Company of Heroes (such as "Lyon"), destroying the center bridge was an idea from a friend of mine and, in my opinion, makes the map what it is.

I made up the layout of the map as I went along, I usually seem to work best this way.  Nearly all buildings were modeled after real photos of Strasbourg, France, and surrounding areas.

Originally, I had planned to make this map massive.  I wanted to have most buildings open & fully detailed inside, as well as have very highly detailed off-map buildings to really give the impression of being inside a large city.  But near the end of the first detail pass I ran into many "max" engine limits, so I had to remove a lot of off-map detail and leave most buildings closed.  So the level didn't turn out exactly as I intended, but nevertheless I'm still extremely proud of the final product and consider it my best work.

"Strasbourg" was started on May 15th, 2010 and first released on August 13th, 2010




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Downloads

 CoDUtility (download)
Moddb (download
Filefront (download)
Clan 8> Helipollos (download) 
DVC (download)

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Servers

Cornrow's Classic Maps Server
208.167.250.216:28960

ZeRoY's ERM Classic CW Maps
89.234.66.114:28980

DVC*OWModHC Random
78.46.75.69:29999

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Information

This is the first beta (1.0) release of this level, if bugs are found feel free to report them to me directly here on this blog or via the email address included in the README in the zip file.

If you are hosting a download site and/or server for Strasbourg, pass along the link/server IP and I will add it to this post.  

Thank you!

Monday, March 7, 2011