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[mendonca]

I'm not quite sure whats going on, but I like looking at the pretty pictures.

Awesome work deserving commendation. Bravo old chap.

[Lord Dullard]

Intense. Posting to follow.

I can totally understand your feverish love of SotN. That game sucked up WAY too many hours of my life.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Did someone say intense? (click to show/hide)

I made it too godamn big. Again. ><

On the plus side, the repetition gives my mind time to wander, and I'm getting all sorts of ideas for how this could work as a game.

[MaximumZero]

Yes, that hedge maze is intense. Holy crap it's going to be fun to navigate when it's full of undead horrors.

[nenjin]

Spoiler: Muwhahahaha! (click to show/hide)

[MaximumZero]

That's awesome. And maybe you shouldn't have given that away.

[Lord Dullard]

It's impossible to export this thing to any sort of 3D game engine, huh? That makes me sad.

[burningpet]

why is it impossible?

you can export from sketchup to .obj

[nenjin]

To be fair, the margin for error doing that is huge. I'm flubbing some stuff in the map specifically because I know it's not going into a game engine.

Sketchup requires all objects and surfaces to be co-planar to create solid objects. When you're working in a free-floating, 1500x1500x1500 cube, getting stuff co-planar is harder than it sounds. And if it's not co-planar when you load it into an engine.....kerplooie.

It's ironic. Working on this reminded me how much of a nightmare mapping in UT2.5 was.

[nenjin]

Updates!

This is the music that keeps me going.

Spoiler: Maze, 50% Done (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: The Underground, mostly finished (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: The Cathedral and Library after another pass. (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: And example of nice models that will really enhance the look. (click to show/hide)

With the few textures going down, several thousands lines created by half the maze, and some imported models, Sketchup is starting to pull tricks to keep the frame rate up. Saves have gone from pretty much instantaneous to taking 5 to 8 seconds. Should be interesting to see how far I can push it before it melts.

[Soadreqm]

Taller?

TALLER?

I actually agree with the "not tall enough" sentiment. Gothic style is all about being tall and narrow. This might be tall in absolute terms, but it's too wide. Looks more like what you'd expect from an actual medieval castle than a castle built by the Lord of Darkness out of evil magic. If you squeezed it horizontally so that it was taller than it was wide, it could loom and tower over viewers from any distance! I think the games usually show the castle perched atop a cliff, overlooking a body of water. Completely flat lake, with a cliff, and the actual castle squeezed in what space was available on the ledge, built vertically rather than horizontally. Makes ANYTHING look tall.

Another way would be to make the curtain walls lower, and only have it spike upwards in the middle, in a dense cluster of towers, keeps and parapets. Which might still mean that you'd need to start over, but hey, something to remember if you ever do decide to start over.

But anyway, this looks great. Posting to follow more than anything else.

[nenjin]

In my design's defense, this is actually meant to be playable. My first castle, I did everything by eye and how it hit me aesthetically. That's why it ended up wrong.

There is a large disconnect between how people want it to look from 2.5 miles away....and how it actual functions at the eye level. If suppose if I wanted to just make something that looked like Castlevania, I would have painted a picture in GIMP instead of using this.

Completely flat lake, with a cliff, and the actual castle squeezed in what space was available on the ledge, built vertically rather than horizontally. Makes ANYTHING look tall.

The castle already "exists" on a plateau. I haven't had the time (nor the inclination, really) to try and map out the entire freaking countryside around the Castle, and the mountain it sits on. I do plan at some point to build the mountain down, and add the aqueduct area off the side of the mountain.

That said, I too am wanting more spires and less thick towers, so I have adjustments to make.

[nenjin]

So after some brief experimentation, I see that having the curtain walls being 50' lower does a lot for the visual impact of the center. It will....a fair amount of tinkering to make the changes without borking everything up, but it should be doable.

Makes me glad I didn't go about make crenelations yet. That would have made making changes a serious pain in the ass.

[burningpet]

With the few textures going down, several thousands lines created by half the maze, and some imported models, Sketchup is starting to pull tricks to keep the frame rate up. Saves have gone from pretty much instantaneous to taking 5 to 8 seconds. Should be interesting to see how far I can push it before it melts.

how many faces/edges do you currently have?

[nenjin]

11, 221 faces and 34, 620 edges as of now.

I would call that about 30% of the total I will be going for.

I'd guess that at least 40% of those edges and faces belong solely to the Hedge Maze. At worst, if it is preventing me from doing detail else where, I can rip out the hedge maze into its own map. Which might be preferable all around for any area meant to be appreciated and played at the eye level....so I can cram more detail into it.