just starting on a level and needing some feedback.

[orion5175]

I am still decorating but seeing how much room I have after I add the player and enemies.
story behind the level:
The character sees the town as the lesser of two evils, If he stays still then the group in persute after him will surely kill him, But they avoid this town like the plauge do to it's unknown nature and that it has been told that they do not like outsiders and have been known for there vicious approach towards them. The start comes up a narrow pair of stairs that the character follows up from a barely visable trail leading up the mountains forgotten corner. The tall,grey,narrow walls suggest the towns feel of being very tight knit and wanting nothing to do with the outside world, the lack of anything modern reflects that fact and that they are doing a pretty good job at it.An occasional person darting by in the distance to take shelter from not only the player but possibly something else lurking around you get a glimpse of the monochrome colors that completely cover the resedents of the town from head to toe. The air is filled with strange kackling and shreeks that suggest that even a traditional language is no longer in use.Although they are farmers the lack of fertile feilds and anytype of food hints that they may have consorted to cannibalism and this might be the reason for there violent outburst towards outsiders.The fog that engulfs the entire mountain side never really goes away and constantly drops a sort of ash that lightly frost the tops of everything in sight. All signs point to it, this is not a friendly place and why any body would want to stay here is just as puzzleing as the towns own existance.

[STRIMIX]

The textures look really low res i think you should try to upgrade them also maybe try to use a bit more color it all seems a little grey and plane and i know maybe thats what you wan't to have to make it feel kinda evil and dark but i think it would help if you add a little bit of color.
Also what are the weird red spots(pixels) on the pictures it looks weird.

[Black_Stormy]

Kind of sounds like call of cthulu, a bethesda flop. You need to look at your texture alignment on the buildings and definitely up the resolution. As for colour I think the base you have would be fine as long as you add some dramatic lighting. Keep working on it.

[White Paper Games]

Yeah for sure. Textures and lighting letting you down on what potentially is a really cool environment. Think of focal points for lighting and definitely throw in some higher res textures!

[orion5175]

thanks guys I am going to redo the textures
I was having problems with the floor because it was so large, I would bump up the resolution in photoshop but udk wouldn't let me import it in with a high setting so I had to settle for this. The buildings and wall can be remapped and I thought about doing the old style street lights with candle light. I think that would fit in with the original concept.
as far as the weird red spots I have been trying to figure that one out for a while, they went away when I added the fog but if the object is close to the camera they show up. I have been asking around and no one seems to know how to get rid of them.
it's something in udk because I also use maya and can easily render hdmi images with no problem.

[White Paper Games]

For that floor texture you would only need a 1024x1024 sheet max and UDK definitely lets you import those kind of sizes. If your unsure how to UV meshes I would recommend following some tutorials and learning some techniques.

As for the red spots..never seen those before. Are we sure its not a graphics card issue or anything? Lets not go blaming UDK now

[STRIMIX]

also if you have a big model that uses a texture that could be tiled! then what you can do is just make your uv layout bigger and go out of the positive uv space.
Then bigger you make it the better the resolution of your texture but don't over do it or you ill get really small floor stones.
Make sure that your texture is tileable tho.

[orion5175]

redid the floor and did away with the tiles all together and did it in a 1024x1024. reconfiruered the texture- material set up and that got rid of the dots, Know I am adding street lights in a pale sickish green color, and some of the buildings I am going to remap now that I know what the problem is. I will post new and improved pictures in a couple of days.

[orion5175]

Okay I have refigured the texture/material settings and that got rid of the red dots, and took the advice on using a 1024x1024. The two focal points in the game couldn't be seen in the last shots because of the fog so I lowered the density down a little. I still have to add the lights into the streetlamps and add a glowing bulb. I am in the process of creating nine different enemie ai's that will be patroling around.

I might raise the windmill up a little bit more so you can see it over the buildings after you first come up the stairs.




once you make it to the windmill the second focal point (tower) comes into view, I still think I could do better on the floor texture so I might play around with that a little more.

over view sketch of the entire level.
I welcome any type of comments,suggestions,feedback, critiuque etc..

[neurosys]

The first pics you posted, look exactly like Call Of Cthulhu (<3)
The level layout, I think its pretty decent, but they were right about the textures.
The new pics with brighter, sharper tex's looks 1000 times better(buildings).
The ground, is hard for me to texture properly also, with non organic tile-ables like stones and such.

[Black_Stormy]

I don't understand the problem with the terrain, are you using a big brush? You should be using a terrain mesh. That will fix your resolution problems plus then you can use alpha masks to give the texture some variation so anything that doesn't quite tile won't be that much of an issue.

[orion5175]

all of the textures were done in photoshop because I really don't like using terrain brush in udk, it's hard to control and always ends up looking odd or out of place. even if I dedicate a number of hours just on one texture.

[orion5175]

thanks now I am working on the dynamic lighting and I want to add more junk and debris around the endges of the walls on the floor.

[orion5175]

I have worked on this for the past week but I have kinda hit a road block with the "program and script" forum questions that have either gone unanswered or lead to dead ends.
I feel like I can not do my full potential with this project until I figure out how

1) to get the enemy AI's to do a close contact attack, like the zombie pawn but have them strike at you. I am trying to stay away from the default shooter bots and stay in the original storyline

2)why the game pawn reads "ElapsedRegenTime'; Bad Command or Expression
failure 1 error 0

//calculate elapsed time
ElapsedRegenTime += DeltaTime;
//

3) I know how to customize/hide the Hud but how do you customize the players navigational map (top right of the screen?)

I am not expecting a whole write out but a tutorial link or a point in a decent direction without having to go through pages and pages through a bunch of websites only to come to a dead end.
I am not a programmer and would like to get at least one full level done for a demo reel, I have plans to build more around the environment and end it in a cinematic cut scene that supports the existing story line. The player will be in the third person with the camera following close behind the charater. I have the nine enemys and player animated and ready to be added to their animsets. All of which I can do and have the knowledge but I can not continue on unless I can figure out the answers to these three questions first.

[Black_Stormy]

If I ever get issues with scripts the first thing I do is comment out the calls to the broken function, d see if that breaks anything else. It sounds to me like you just need to check over your pawn class to see what the problem is with regentime and commentb it out.