Planetary Environments

[Cogburn]

Ok... PlanetSide has desert, lush, swamp, desert, lush, volcanic, snow, lush and snow.

ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZZZzzzzz

We've got some artists that need something to do... So let's give them something.

Let's get a list of the kind of OVERALL environments we want for maps. We want each map to have an overall theme, although there will be a variety of environments on each map.

I'll start it off with a few ideas for OVERALL map themes:

Swamp
Urban waste
Arctic
Aquatic (mostly covered in water, without a navy this is an air-based map)
Mountain range
Volcano
Forest
Foothills

Again... OVERALL themes... Let's pick ... 10 and we'll use those for each one of our continents. I can't say this enough.... each map will have elements of some or all of the other types, but one type will be dominant.

Whats your list?

[br011i]

urban society eg
- villges
- towns
- city's

6 islands with 2-3 bases on each but no bridges, surrounded by water

Alien environment
Space enclosure


my fav

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Tournament Island
- (depending on how many empires) if its 4
empire 1 and 3 are allied
empire 2 and 4 are allied
empire 1 and 3 are full out war against empire 2 and 4
- but if theres only 3 empires its
1 on 1 on 1 full out massive warfare, not like normal warfare but has access to enemy vehicles and weopons for the 3 day tournament island event
also - theres no pop lock this island maybe requires its own server to keep up with the 10's of thousands explosions every second
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Suburban warfare
- houses, building, cranes everywere
- not all houses and building are accesable ( this is to minimise the lag issues ),

Underground Cities aka Planetlantis ( atlantis ) lol
- mostly everything is underground fighting theres is above ground warfare with somebase thats linked to above and ground facilitys eg

ABASE 2 ------------- ABASE 3 ABASE 6-------------ABASE 7------------------------------ ABASE 11
- - - - -
- - - - -
- --------------BBASE 4 - - -
- - - - BBASE 8------------BBASE 9 -
- - - - - -
- - - - - -
BBASE1----------------- BBASE 5----------------------------------------------------------- BBASE 10

BBASE = Below base
ABASE = Above base

[abathur]

Most importantly might be our ability to accurately portray physics and weather to sell the environments. IMO the snow environments were pointless in PS, because none of the combat changes like it should. So, rather than looking at the ice-cream selection and picking a flavor, I might be asking, "which flavors can we make so perfect that they're a guaranteed hit?"Of course, I'm stilly itching for lunar landscapes with new physics and stuff...

I don't think the WHAT matters here as much as the HOW (I've said this before): Not, "what" color is the terrain, but how well can we do a frozen tundra environment? can we slip on ice? can the snow blow around instead of just fall? Can we have frozen lakes hiding beneath snow instead of real lakes? Can these provide an absolutely comical combat arena? Can we get bogged down walking through deep snow? How well can we do a swamp? Can the water be clearly water, yet clearly murky? Can we sink into the muck while walking through it, making sucking sounds as we go? Can vehicles be lost to the muck if they don't stay on the goddamn roads? Can we swim through the deepter water? Can we build a base under the water level but surrounded by a levy?

I'm not particularly excited about throwing out multiple skydomes/atmospheres (visibly murky swampgas/fog anyone?) but to some extent the sky *is* still going to be different in various areas (certain environments being more prone to constant but more benign cloud cover, others to no cloud cover, others to frequent large thunderstorms, others to a really hazy/wet atmosphere, smoke etc.) blaaaaarghle I think too many environments early may make it less practical to expand into more fun environments later.

[Aftiel]

I think just go with some standard terrains to start with and lets see about making those as immersive as possible. So you'd have:

- "standard terrain" think Army Green BDUs
- "desert terrain" think Desert Camo BDUs
- "artic terrain" think Artic Camo BDUs
- "urban terrain (so a more builtup map)" think Urban Camo BDUs

You can then go from there later and have subdivisions after we get some basic stuff done (start small):

- European forests as opposed to more American
- Sahara Desert as opposed to Iraq
- Antartica artic instead of Alaskan/Siberian
- Swamplands (what's that bigass swamp in Russia?)
- Dirty Urban (Mogadishu) instead of a cleaner city type

[Cogburn]

Ok... something brough up here that needs addressing... Camo.

I'm not a fan of camo FOR INFANTRY in this type of game... why? A few reasons...

1) LOD tends to wash out camo patterns and uniform details at distances making one empire hard to distinguish from another at range. Bright colors easily identify friend from foe, but the tradeoff is realism.

2) I had envisioned that you would NOT see enemy names, except in the killspam. One thing that consistantly ruins tactics in PlanetSide is that when you see a well known player coming at you, you may already have an idea of what to expect. Killspam is ok because we ALL enjoy the kudos we receive on the good runs and I'd like to keep that aspect of gameplay. The downside here is that once you kill an enemy, your presence in the area is known (via killspam), although which trooper you are will not be immedately apparent.

Combining the lack of enemy names in reason #2 with the detail loss in reason #1, camo becomes more of a bear than a boon. One thing PlanetSide did correctly was the empire uniform design and colorscheme... Even at low LOD you could still tell one empire from another.

Vehicles are the exception here, because they are so large that low LOD textures are still quite distinguishable. I always thought that black TR tanks rolling around on white snow made them easy targets.

(FYI about #2: You will always know who friendlies are.)

[Aftiel]

I was only using the camo as a reference as to the type of terrain, not actually advocating camo in this game, that only works in small scale games (GR, etc.). Just to clarify.

[UGoBoy]

...well...if you always know who friendlies are, what would be wrong with camo? Process of elimination and all. And having variable camo would make having goofy contrivances like cloak suits somewhat less neccessary.

If the character designs are destinct enough, a soldier might learn to pick out their enemies by silhouette, even at low LOD. I mean...I can distinguish a Vanu MAX running at a distance from a TR MAX fairly easily, just by the run animation and body shape.

[GreatMazinkaiser]

Names above heads is not a bad thing, per se, but yeah, I understand where you're coming from.

One thing, if we should have some type of cloakers, PLEASE, let them be visible to friendlies while cloaked. I have no idea how many times I've griefed cloakers just because the names didn't immediately appear above their heads.

Cloaker != goofy contrivance; they're annoying as hell, but damn useful too, so I can't complain.

[abathur]

Part of the problem with camo is really distinguishing the armours and creating the "wow" factor with color choice and armor design...

Do players really want to search for each other, have some camo, but no eye candy? Don't they want to look cool?

I might support some more methodology for camoflauge to create ambushes out in the field, but not really for everyone to run around hidden all the time, and really not for snipers to have a commanding radius with a FOV over most of a battle and able to fire shots out of the unknown. (though there could be some compromise here if the camo suit doesn't have the capacity for anything more than a sidearm, a box of ammo and a gun...)

[Iceonix]

For terrain I would like to see the following:

Volcanic soil (dark with possible steam?)
grassland (little cover and great for vehicles)
thick forest (infantry only. Think between Tara and Tara tower)
caverns
and, of course, a blown-out city for urban terrain

[Cl2v2r]

I like Ab's idea. Moonbases for the win! :P

If we can make a terrain feel like the terrain it's meant to be, put it in.

If it's just a grassland painted brown for a desert, then we can leave it out.

[UGoBoy]

Do players really want to search for each other, have some camo, but no eye candy? Don't they want to look cool?



If the camo doesn't "look cool", it's a failure of the artist. There have been tons of "cool" futuristic camo suits designed. Even look at something as simple as Quake Wars or BF2. Their characters look "cool" because they're believable and coherent, as well as detailed.

I'm a bitter high-BR NC, so sue me. I think it's pretty damned stupid that when I'm in the field trying to do my AV roll from what little cover I'm afforded by PS' trees, that I'm a huge obvious target because my superiors are some sort of dandied-up Queer Eye Guys who decided that my tush would look the best in gold plating. I may get unilaterally ignored, but I'm going to continue to fight against uniforms that don't look like uniforms, and are completely impractical.

Camoflaging vehicles (which are already huge and obvious) but not camoing troops (who are tiny and need all the help they can get) just seems bassackwards.