Stage 2 - Environment

Environment

I got a bit confused at the beggining of this stage, to get used to play arround in Quark wasnt easy at all. Although the program is quit simple I found it more difficult to use than GTKRadiant (dont ask me why..??).
But after a while I got in to it and stuff started to come out...

After downloading Quark I went through several tutorials (Documentation and Mapping) and after I learned how to move arround I started to sketch a map based on the idea i had for the game:



Birdseye view and topography for terrain.

This is actually a map of a place I used to live
in.(Portalegre)


My old neighborhood will be the map itself[ (image from google earth)

The main reason that I decided to give Quark a try was because of its map2dif converter and its documentation, which I think is a significant advantage over GTKRadiant (although I still perfer GtK!).

The first problem I faced was a lack of size reference in Quark. Basicly I modeled everything without knowing on which scale I was working on... Somewhere in GG foruns there is something about this topic (something like 32 Quark Units = 1 Torque Unit) but I wasnt shure about it and developed the whole map without a proper size reference.
I ended up getting this for a start:


Torque birdseye view


LOD at work: Church0.dif and Church1.dif


Map details: Church and street...


Map detail: Roof tops...


Another map detail: Church...


reference picture of the place...


Another reference pic...


Real church (detail)




This is the map I will use for now on. Its still in a 'raw' shape, the textures are temporary (I dont need them for now)and the overall lighting is really primitive. I made this base map a single .dif file, and later on the project I will add a lot of .dts shapes for the details and texture the whole thing properly.
I made LODS for the church because I want to use this building (along with a couple of others) part of the story for the game.

Im still considering to use some .dts shapes as buildings But I will decide that matter later in Stage 5.


Im happy for now about the environment stage. I learned how to bring bulidings to torque and this is what most of this stage was all about. There are a lot of other things I want to include in this scenario like particles but to start think about that I really need to go into torque script...

Next step: Stage 3 - Torque Script