Making a map for Red Orchestra 2: Part 1

Well, seeing as I haven't really been playing that much new stuff lately, what with exams and the like, and with the recent Red Orchestra 2 mapping contest announcement, I thought I might give it a shot. I also thought it might interest some readers of this blog, and as such I've decided to chronicle my design process for creating the level.



So the maps are created in the Red Orchestra 2 SDK, which is essentially a version of the Unreal Development Kit, which is a tool used to create games and maps. The initial base for the map i'm going to base on the Hill-400 map from the Darkest Hour mod for Red Orchestra 1 (review here). Essentially there's a small town, then an assault on a large hill. It's not going to be identical, and I plan on having a fairly complex tunnel system in my hill, but the basic principal is the same.

Alright, so UDK is actually a pretty easy tool to use. This is what it looks like when you boot it up, but trust me, it's not actually that difficult to use or understand:

Click for larger. It'll probably help.

So, the bottom left is a free camera, the top one is a top down view, then the two sides of the the map. The first step is to create some terrain for the map, which is pretty much the easiest bit. This shot I took after adding the initial steps for the main hill, which will evidently be the focus of the map and thus what I'll be spending the most time fiddling around with in the terrain editor:

Obviously the wireframe won't be there in the actual game, but when there aren't any shadows or anything, it makes it much easier to see what's going on. This looks OK from up here, but when we actually go in game, I'm much less happy with the result:

That's not quite the imposing monolith I was hoping for if I'm honest. So I messed around with it a bit more, mostly raising the peak and then smoothing the edges down to create a gradient, and came up with the next iteration:

That's better I guess, but still not really high enough to be good enough for the map. When there are buildings all over the place, you should still be able to see the hill from most areas, and I'm fairly certain you would not be able to see this. So I keep trying, and after a while I realise that I've been taking the wrong approach. There's a tool which lets you flatten the ground to a certain height, which I should have been doing all along. Still, I start using that and come up with this result:

Again though, it looks good in the editor, but when we get in game, the result is still a little disappointing:

By this point the terrain had been edited so much that it had all started to kind of meld together, so I made the decision to just start afresh. I use the flattening technique again, and this time make sure to have the peak a lot higher than it was previously.

After smoothing I had the following, fairly decent hill if I do say so myself:

I wasn't a big fan of the stepped look, and if you've ever seen a hill I think you'll agree that it's much less well defined than that. This next step probably took the longest on the whole. I reduced the differential between flattened heights from 750 Unreal Units, which it was before, to 250 UUs. I then went round the hill, and added additional steps where they seemed appropriate:

That's a pretty cool looking hill, but unfortunately doesn't really look like a hill, which is even more obvious from the ground:

So I started smoothing and refining, and after another 30 minutes or so, I produced pretty much the final version of my hill:

I still need to add craters, trenches and the elevation for the road, but on the whole that's pretty much it for the basic terrain.

Next week: making some buildings.