Making a map for Red Orchestra 2: Part 3 (Arsenal 1)

Part 2 and what this is about.

Alright so it turns out that all of the work I did for the post last week was moot, as the RO2 editor already includes village houses, and I just didn't know how to get them. But I found out, and made a decent amount of progress on the map. The first thing I did was paint a road onto the map (super easy in UDK) in order to get a basic layout for the map itself. Unfortunately I totally forgot to screenshot any of that, but you can see it in a few of the shots included here.



After I did that I set about putting together the church which comes in about 10 separate parts in the editor, and takes absolutely ages to put together so that it all fits correctly and looks decent. But I eventually managed it, and you can see the results here:

The inside is literally just a stone texture painted onto the floor, and as such looks a bit crap, but I'll probably do something about that at a later time.

So then I took stock of the buildings available to me:

 It's not a huge choice, but when you're fighting in a map you generally don't pay too much attention to what your surroundings actually look like, so with some judicial copy+pasting, I put together a sample street:

About half an hour more copy+pasting and rearranging left me with a fairly sizeable little village:

That big rectangle at the top of the screenshot really bugged me though, as it didn't really seem how an actual village would ever be laid out, but it also led to an idea for another control point, as well as the church:

That there is a park, and a mighty fine park at that. After a bit longer, the park was laid out, and I set about fortifying it with barricades and sandbags and the like, to create a more defensible position for the defenders:

Adding trenches is up next, but they're pretty difficult to do without crippling performance. You see, the terrain is split up into little triangles (you can see them on the wireframe views in part one), each of which can be individually modified. You can increase or decrease the number of triangles, but decreasing obviously gives you less detail, whilst increasing has a fairly sizeable performance hit associated with it. The best solution I can think of at the moment, is to create additional terrain levels, which are individually more detailed. The only problem is that I'd need a lot of them, and they could add up to a lot of performance. We shall see I'm sure.