Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
I thought id post here about how my adventures into the HL2 engine are going.
The map making tool is called hammer, this is very different to the bf style of editing, you effectively start off with a blank space, and then can create a number of objects, and by merging or sculting them you can theoretically create any shape going.
This is great for detailed areas like rooms and buildings, however when it comes to open terrain, as far as I can tell you are expected to create the land from scratch, which is very time consuming.
So in came in a terrain editor from http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=9 where I was able to create a terrain up to 8192x8192 ( regardless of triangle size ) units in size before I started getting errors when opening it in the hammer editor.
This was pretty big but not BF big. Im sure your supposed to be able to go much bigger, and its more a limitation or bug in one of the tools.
The advantages over BF are that stuff like tunnels and underground passages ways can be truly formed, and not faked by having a model ontop of the ground.
The problem is that this realism makes large areas overly difficult to do ( if anyone is a budding HL2 mapper then let me know if im wrong here )
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On the coding front, lots of working code in Visual C++ format is provided and allows for customisations in great detail. I was succesfully able to do some basic modifications to weapons and the buggy and have them working ingame.
Again the difficulty of C++ over the BF format is much higher for beginners, but if you are a programmer then its actually easier.
You do however have to have a copy of Visual Studio 2003 or go through modifying stuff to get it to work in a free compiler.
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I have decided not to venture much further than this as far as interstate is concerned as at the moment hl2 has been designed for more small to medium sized areas with lots of detail and realism. While im sure that it could be adapted for larger areas, BF2 is more likely to be geared towards what is needed.
Yea but im not feeling the driving simulation...... And also it seems the maps are not as big for a interstate feel if you know what i mean. Bf2 i think we should lean toward i wonder if you can convert interstate 82 to bf2 in some ways. Now if we made somthing for Hl-2 i can build maps no prob.
Foxdie
[ 05:41 ] [ 28 Apr 2005 ]
Guest
In terms of the scale of things I started work on scaling down models and player sizes, it got to a point where it was working, but the only problem was I'm not a programmer, just a code hacker.
If IS05 for HL2 is going to get anywhere then a). Michael Siebert needs to organise the team better and b). they need an experienced coder.
There was one guy I knew who was a HL Coding God (anyone ever play on the TFC SillyZone / Vipers SillyZone server? You'll know what I'm talking about) but sadly real life took over and he stopped programming for games altogether.
Registered Member #80 Joined: [ 14:01 ] [ 14 Mar 2004 ]
Interstate is far more suited to the battefield generations of games, the ease of editing the first bf1942 is what created this unique community, whihc looks to be repeated in battlefield 2. Physics-wise both seem to be very advanced, but hl2 vehicles seems very basic, theres no accleration, and racing i think would not be as good, plus getting 16+ vehicles on a server will be nigh on impossible. Battlefield i much more action based and the size of the levels lets you create much larger races. The upgrades to the battlefield formula could be a great addition to interstate too, such as the destuctable objetcs, whihc means creating something closer to the original interstate game or other influences such as twisted metal, and vigilante 8. Overall the battlefield 2 engine is clealy the option to go for, the source engine is too complicated for the job.
Plus i'd rather see Battlefield 2: Interstate 82, than Interstate 2000(and whenever its going to be finshed) <span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited 28 Apr : 16:21 ]</span>
still gunning for both BF2 an HL2, BF has the advantages of easy and quick coding(maybe even familiar), however HL2 offers the use of the source engine, which although slightly more complicated to code than BF2, does allow a lot better game play like realistic suspension and as rich said it allows us to make realistic tunnels. however the drawback of the map sizes may be the only real point against it.
I think its a case of wait and see how BF2 turns out, for all we know it could turn out crap.
It does mean that its atleast two months away, you know how game release dates get constantly pushed back.
There are some large beach areas on the single player HL2 game, so either the mapping team took a long time or there must be an effecient way of creating terrain.