Wanton Hubris

I’ve taken a real interest in Left for Dead 2 lately. Something about that game has utterly grabbed me and I think that it’s a few key points.

1. Zombies.
2. The look of the game. I really like the art direction and the cohesive look to everything.
3. The Director. The idea of an AI system that spawns monsters automatically to challenge you is very appealing. It means I can focus on the level structure and flow and not have to worry about when to spawn specific monsters.
4. Hammer. I really like the Hammer editor. For games like Half-Life and Left for Dead, it’s ideal.

So, I dove in and started making L4D2 levels and met with dismal failure. The scale was wrong. The areas didn’t connect well. Everything was just – wrong. So I decided that what I needed to do was to take a step back and do some research first.

This research consists of two primary things:

• What do the various entities in Hammer do?
• What does proper geometry feel like in L4D2?
• How do you create geometry that is easily editable and maintainable in the context of this game?

That last point may sound funny but it’s really not. It’s the difference between your staircases meeting the next floor properly and your doors and windows feeling like they’re in good positions – or not.

I found this great post over on World of Level Design that allowed me to get a grasp on the specific dimensions that L4D wants to use.

I then saw this reference link posted for ‘art deco’ style architecture around the USA and it got me to thinking. A lot of those buildings look like they would work in a video game. So let’s do that!

My current project, before trying to create a real L4D2 level, is to just create geometry. By referencing those photos as inspiration, I’m going to create a series of buildings in Hammer that feel good in the game. Once I do a few of these I think I’ll will be on a solid footing to create an actual level.

So, here’s my first attempt. I saw this building and was immediately interested:

Working from those shapes I came up with this:

The signage is obviously just temporary as the building could be anything you wanted it to be. I just liked the way it turned out, even with the basic developer textures on it. The shapes are what is important here, not the visuals.

Now, which picture should I work from next…

So since I got LevelEd working again with my threading fixes, I’ve started reworking the interface a little. The texture browser is now a floating window that can be resized and placed wherever you want it. It also supports multiple WADs now which is really nice. This frees up that bottom right pane to become another ortho viewport so you now have 2 of those. Here’s a shot to show which direction things are moving!

I’ve also refactored the input code so that it’s very flexible now. I’ve changed the default controls for LevelEd to more closely match UnrealEd (which is what I use all day at work). This makes it easier on me and now I can add alternate control schemes without too much trouble since it’s all nicely abstracted.

The new input code has allowed for some nice features like allowing easy zooming in the texture browser. It works just like it does in the ortho viewports!

It’s hard to believe that someone hasn’t come to my house and taken away my compilers yet. I’m serious.

Remember how I said that LevelEd was broken under Snow Leopard and I wasn’t sure how to fix it? Right, well, it turns out that the problem is that I had the renderer running on a thread but there were multiple threads making calls into OpenGL. This causes major problems, including Kernel Panics (hard lock on a Mac).

So once it dawned on me that the threading was probably at fault, I put in an NSLock to control access to the OpenGL drawing routines and now the editor works again.

What I don’t understand is – How did it ever work on Leopard? Why does Snow Leopard expose this problem where Leopard didn’t? It’s either software gremlins or maybe Leopard had a much more relaxed approach to threading or something.

At any rate, work can now continue on the endless project known as the ToeTag Editing Suite.