08.08.07

Extremely random TNM shots

Posted in The Nameless Mod at 22:26 by Jonas

I’ve been crunching almost non-stop on TNM for the past 3 weeks, pausing only to go to work, play a bit of KotOR2, or get my alloted 2 hours of sleep each night. It’s slowing down a bit now as we’re pretty much done with the first 4 of our 5 missions and Nick, who is currently our most active coder, just went away for 2 weeks. Shane, our lead coder, has a university education and a girlfriend to take care of, so he can only spare about an hour each day for TNM, which is definitely not enough to keep up with me.

Anyway, yesterday I played through our third mission. I played pretty deliberately to just see if the main storyline flowed the way it should, and I didn’t explore anything at all. It still took me about an hour and a half, so that’s nice. Playing through that whole mission for the first time without having to cheat to skip missing levels was a fantastic feeling, and it filled me with a strange pride that, well… I’m simply compelled to share with you all. Below is a random dump of non-spoiler images pulled directly from my DX screenshot folder.

The first screenshot simply shows the final position of our menu map. The TNM menu map is actually pretty elaborate because it was originally created to be used as the Corporate sector, but gameplay-wise it was simply much too open to provide a fun experience, so it was re-imagined as a brief, flashy introduction to TNM. After the OTP logo has soared past the camera, you are taken through a set of doors that open up into a large and impressive cityscape. At the end of the camera path, which shows a few neat little scenes, you come to rest on our logo, designed by Dazza and modelled by Larry.

Recently I’ve started using the HDTP pistol to shoot things when I’m testing TNM. It’s a bit more complicated because I need to type “summon hdtpweapons.hdtpweaponpistol” instead of just “summon weaponpistol” to obtain it, but its sheer style more than makes up for it. I know it sounds perverted, but getting the feel of the weapons in your game right is enormously important. It’s a combination of timing, animation, and sound design. And of course how detailed the weapon is. HDTP has added visible weapon mods to all their weapons, so if you add a scope and a laser sight to your pistol, it actually shows up in-game. This was originally my idea and something we started doing in TNM before it was done in HDTP, but the technique is too awesome to keep to yourself anyway.

This is an elevator. A big one. It was mapped out by the stylistically and technically brilliant Chris “ZeroPresence” Potts, but the reason I took a screenshot of it (apart from the fact I thought we might use it as a POTW a few weeks ago, but we found something cooler to show off), is because I spent the better part of a day scripting it. Usually elevators are very simple to set up, but this one goes between two levels, and I wanted it to actually move. That meant using the mission script to coordinate between the two levels, which turned out to be quite a mess to arrange. But it’s working now, and it’s a very nice effect, so I think it was worth the trouble.

I just took this screenshot today, when I finally managed to get the two hologram recordings in our second mission to show up with Shane’s help. I really like these recordings, together with old datacubes and emails, they’re a nicely System Shockesque way of conveying the background fiction of the mission to the player.

And finally, the datavault map I made of the Downtown district, the first part of Forum City the player gets access to. It’s no spoiler, because you actually start the game with this, but it’s still sort of selfish to show it here, as it’s sort of major and it probably belongs as a POTW on the TNM website, but I just really wanted to post some proper bits from TNM here for once. Just to reward you guys who care to check my blog : )

The Downtown district was created by Chris and based on a previous map by Kevo-Sama. It’s one of my favourite maps from TNM, and heavily inspired by Hong Kong. It’s very large for a single map and very detailed, and clocks in just below the size limit of what the engine can handle. It has everything you’ll want from a city level: Open areas, cramped areas, a nice ratio of enterable buildings to backdrop buildings, height differences, water canals, and hidden caches of good stuff. It also has four side missions at the start of the game that tie into a larger mission but can be avoided altogether if you’re clever (and wish to avoid them, of course). It’s a good map to let the player loose in at the start of the game, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

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