All the meshes are from stock UT3.

It's actually kind of dictating the way I have to build things. If one is capable of making his own meshes and textures, it's quite easy to just map out the entire raw layout with very few CSG brushes and then just fill out the entire map with custom meshes as you see fit.

However, if you are incapable of making your own meshes and have to rely on the ones available to you, this doesn't quite work. You need to have every room and every corridor filled with at least SOME major mesh detailing pretty much from the start, because they will give you a sense of scale and since you can't make your own, you will at times be building your map around the available meshes instead of building custom meshes to suit your map. 

The editor is lacking a ton of support for custom assets, so I am limited to the assets that came with the game, and also limited by the terrain material shaders to an extent (the terrain shaders are combinations of a 'dirt' texture for horizontal areas of terrain and a 'cliff' texture for vertical areas of terrain). It's fine for this, being that I am limited on time as I intend to enter it into a contest, but I hope in the future they'll extend the tools a bit so I can do some custom models or could give a better texture selection for a more unique theme.

http://h.imagehost.org/0313/Detail.jpg

As you can see here, I stick to grass around the grey cliffs, as there is no blend shaders to go from sand to that specific rock (only to rather ugly brownish red desert rock cliffs) but the grass and grey rock have blends.

Also, started to add more little details with decals, which are quite nice since I can modify their opacity and color on a per decal basis. Also help alot in hiding some of the 'pixelation' of textures blending between each other at odd angles 

"The editor is lacking a ton of support for custom assets"

Sorry, but what do you mean here? UT3 doesn't support importing of custom meshes? I'm 99% sure that it does. It won't let you create those meshes inside of UnrealEd but that's not unreasonable. 

Oh, sorry, you're talking about DoW2. Never mind. :P I should have clicked on the screen shot... 

It won't let you create those meshes inside of UnrealEd but that's not unreasonable.
Actually it will and can. You can convert a bunch of brushes into a mesh inside UnrealED. Never had to use that feature but it's there :) 

Willem: worked with UE3 for the past few years, know all about the wonderful pipeline you guys made for it. Sorry for not calling out that I was talking about something radically different than the subject at hand.

DoW2 editor... it's really just a terrain editor, which I'm suprised to find is actually quite limited (no per vertex editing to make cleaning up edges easy? come on), with features to paint materials and place models and decals.

No nice asset pipeline like UE3... haven't really done much real investigation into how they handle any of that, though I likely will after this map is finished, since I suspect I could at least hack around with their files, which shouldn't be too bad for publishing a completed map either, since maps are considered 'mods' and are loaded much like a Quake mod from their own directory (which does limit the ability to play custom maps in the game quite a bit as you have to start the game with "-mod XXX") 

There's really not all that much use of making models with brushes in UE3 except for prototyping things (or if you just need a simple model for an interpactor or something) 

Shots 1 and 2 look pretty nice but the others exemplify what I don't like about UT3 and similar games - architecturally bland, conceptually dull, with some meshes slapped around the edges to hide it. Let's see some actual brushwork, eh? Or something that will actually stress the engine. As it is, you could build it for UT99 and I'd hardly tell the difference.

Of course, that's just my crochety old-schoolness talking. 

@Jago, cool thanks for the info. The brush export thing is something that was added to D3 and was perfect for artist/modellers to get the scale of things right. Sort of standard practice nowadays to export blockout brushwork for artists to create meshes from.

@Scampie, I imagine like most games nowadays, the modding is something of an after thought which is probably why the loading system is so awkward. With decals thou the terrain should really shine and look good. Decals are awesome for covering up crap terrain edges.

@Grahf, I really don't understand the mesh hatred because even good old Q1 had meshes/map models (torches) which I see constantly used in screenshots from others work. Bashing someone because they detail their rooms with meshes is crazy and infact using meshes is more efficient in most engines because of caching/draw reasons. I understand there is a certain pride with creating things from brushes the 'old school' way but the end results are the same, IMHO it seems pointless to argue about the method. 

he's talking about how the amount of meshes makes everything look too uniform and doesn't allow for interesting room layouts?

e.g. if you'd want to have a torch on every wall in your level, you couldn't do angled stuff (well, i'm oversimplificating here). 

actually looking at the shots, maybe he's refering to the contrast of meshes to walls. it looks basically like a box map with some models slapped in :) 

I get the impression that people are thinking that having to use existing meshes limits creativity. I strongly disagree. I don't create meshes from scratch - I use whatever the art team comes up with. All it takes is some imagination and creativity and you can come up with stuff that the art team never imagined.

"Huh, so you turned that light fixture over, scaled it up 3X and put a flower bed in it? Neat! That looks cool..." 

but try creating a roman style castle out of that sci-fi light fixture :P 

Oh well, sure, if you want a completely different style of map I agree. But that's true of textures as well. :P 

makes the point, or rather thats what I see to be the problem. In lots of screenies for newer engine games, rather basic architecture seems to be made up for by inserting lots of meshes when I think (purely from a non-mapper view) that meshes should augment the architecture rather than replace it. 

Meshes ARE the architecture these days. I understand that as Quake fans we are brush fiends but that doesn't fly for current gen games. Meshes are what allow you to add the necessary detail to a scene. 

http://necros.quaddicted.com/temp/cath2_1.jpg
after turning about 25% of the map into func_walls, and cutting off about 250 hours from estimated vis time, this map will still take about 700 hours. :(

looks like i will be forced to split this map up again (it was already split into 3 before this) to separate the outdoor area from the indoor one.
such a shame because it's really cool being able to see tall landmarks while you're exploring the cliffs and such, but the map is pretty much unplayable without proper vising, so fast vis only isn't an option. :S 

The sky cut off - the brush touching the tops of the geometry?

Even if the towers in the background are higher maybe use an angled brush to close everything in.

Only seems dumb when firing rockets or grenades into it (or bumping your head from a RJump) but concessions always have to be made . . . 

Um ... that looks ... how do I put this? FUCKING AMAZING! Holy crap, man!

I assume you've tightened up the sky as much as is possible to reduce the amount of open air? 

Or, what ijed said. :P 

i've been trying all sorts of stuff and yeah, sky brushes are as tight as they can be, unfortunately, i think it really just comes down to the nature of the map itself.

in some places, you can literally see about 16000+ units far. (the default fitzquake gl_farclip of 16384 was creating gray flash).

i think i've pretty much isolated the main problem though. behind the camera in that shot is a very tall and wide tower, which has a complex interior. unfortunately, fastvis doesn't discard that interior when you're outside the tower. after my previous post, i started to realized that it's pretty much impossible to split this map up without redoing the entire thing so i'm going to try a few more things to try to block out the interior area...

in order for me to do this map, i need to have my vis time to about at the maximum 100 hours. some previous maps i've done had vis times in multiple weeks and i refuse to work like that anymore. what happens is the vis process takes so retardedly long that you just don't have the guts to make any changes and fixes even when you notice some serious problems because you know it will be another 3/4 month before you can take another look. 

Make the tower door a teleport?

If it's already a doughnut corridor or c-bend then it shouldn't be causing so much trouble, but vis has mysterious ways.

If it's not using such a layout I'm guessing it'll be a headache to change because of the limited space. Taller with a spiral staircase maybe, although a ramp / stairs will still kick you in the vis sack.

And yeah, looks very nice. 

could some "floating 1px away from surroundings" tricks help? I never used that as it seems a bitch with lighting but maybe if the seams are in hardly visible places it might help. 

 

looks like i will be forced to split this map up again (it was already split into 3 before this) to separate the outdoor area from the indoor one. such a shame because it's really cool being able to see tall landmarks while you're exploring the cliffs and such

After you split it, you could re-create the distant landmarks in less detail for the indoor map, then when you arrive at those same structures in the outdoor map, you will recognize them.