Aslong as we donāt think we are walking in another complex.
I thought we would see the complex just before the disaster, so with everything on the same place (walls)
But if u alter too much to the room, we gonna think itās a complete other facility we visit
If youāre referring to the white cubicle dividers, I just moved them temporarily for this one screenshot so that you can see the other desks. They will be back in their original places in the actual map.
With my first pass of Map B completed, moving on to Map A in earnest. Overall, extremely proud of the one room Iāve done so far:
Still looking for feedback on the brightness/color.
All right! Pretty much done with my first pass through A map:
I think Iāll spend some time on the special super-secret parts of Questionable Ethicsās brand new I map, as I am rather invested in looking at some portions of the facility that arenāt tan for a while (especially since I recently got transferred from the green section of my IRL lab building to one that has a color scheme pretty much identical to Office Complex and it is getting a little bit oppressive), but once thatās done I will be cleaning up C map and releasing it, followed in very short order by B and A.
All right! The improved C Map is coming out, andā¦ well, while itās much better than it was before, Iām still not entirely happy with it. Iāll probably be making more and more small changes to it as time goes on, but really I think the problem is that the underlying map is justā¦ kind of a lemon. Especially towards the end itās very blocky, and strangely lit, and doesnāt really have the cohesive institutional feel that the other two Office Complex maps do, so ultimately Iām not really sure how good it is capable of getting.
B Map is going to be fun, though.
So, B Mapās up and Iām super proud of it! Aās going to take a little longer since this is the first run and I need to do entity logic, but Iām still thinking itāll be out before Christmas.
Also, does the new media look reddish to people? It looked fine when I was taking screenshots in the game, but now they look a littleā¦ off.
Ah well, Iām still really pleased.
I went through the updated maps, and the lighting looks spot-on for the most part. I only noticed the red tint in the large cubicle room in the B map. Iām not sure if itās bad thing as it adds a bit of color to the offices, but maybe tone it down just a bit in this area?
Also, the maintenance hallway in the C map where you have the security guard next to the metal crates is very dark. Iām not sure how you could brighten up that area - maybe a few regular light entities, very dim and placed at regular intervals through that area could add some ambient brightness there.
Finally, this might just be me imagining things, but the hallway outside the freezer seems to be more yellow than everywhere else. Although I donāt mind it very much, it seems a bit at odds with the rest of the lighting youāve got going on.
- Iām not sure what the ālarge cubicle roomā refers to other than that it is in B map- could you maybe post a screen shot or describe whatās in or around the room?
- That hallway is one of the more difficult areas to restore for a number of reasons; I can look into making it brighter but was kind of going for that ābasementyā feel.
- There is a very good reason why that area looks more yellow. In the original post-disaster map, that is the only section of Office Complex to employ yellow lighting instead of blue.
Sure thing, hereās a screenshot of the area I referred to. This was the only area I really noticed the red tint.
Oh!
Yeah, I think Iāll be able to do something about that.
MEDIA- MAP A (DEV OFFICES, STORAGE HALLS, EXEC LOUNGE, AND LOADING DOCK)
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So, Map A is (finally!) up. Up next Iāll be working on general fixes for a variety of things, as these maps are still new and some areas are kind of rough- primary focus will be on B Map, as this is the first area I will be adding new areas to! Iāll also need to work with Digital and Hammer to add transitions to Weāve Got Hostiles and Unforeseen Consequencesā¦ but the future is looking very bright. What started out as a weekend project for me to work on in between fanfics has stretched a little over a year and a half, but I am in no way discouraged. Each iteration sees the maps getting better and better, and I have no intention of stopping until the entire BMRF (and Xen!) have been restored!
Next section of posts will deal with the architecture of expanding B Map.
So, how to expand B Map?
I think the first thing to look at is what might be around B Map- are there obvious places where some sort of connection leads into a new area? Well, on our accurate-in-spirit facility schematic pd_c1a2b is part of Sector D, which is adjacent to Area 3 Security on the north end, the large open cavern fronting the Area 9 Hub to the east, some other unknown section of the facility possibly related to rockets or missiles on the south, and the agglomeration that is dm_stack and bm_c0a0b (Inbound B)'s bunkers to the east. However, it is also substantially deeper underground than any of them. How do I know this? Tram lines.
A long time ago I decided that the tram station serving Office Complex would be located in Map C, as this level contains the cafeteria, the freezer, storage areas, and other things that I think make sense as the logistics āhubā or ācoreā of the admin center. Now, there are two tram lines that run around that wing of the facility- one the player is on, and one a fair ways below it:
Now, we established a long time ago that the officey area visible on the right side of that screenshot probably is in fact part of Office Complex, but there are some interesting bits to its design- the long, external lights, yellow color scheme, blocky design, and cream-colored concrete tile are exclusive to Map C- and not just that, but the upper part of Map C above the hub level:
Therefore, I think the tram station and most of C Map are in fact below this area, by either one or two stories. That puts it right about parallel with the second, lower tram track. The track the player traverses in Inbound might run to Weāve Got Hostiles, using the branch-off here:
Therefore, I can conclude that B Map is substantially below most of what the player traverses in Inboundā¦ but at the same time, itās at least one floor above the basement area explored in Unforeseen Consequences, possibly more.
Given this information, it might still be possible for pd_c1a2b to link up with whatever areas are below the security office, bunkers, rocket labs or transit hub (for the transit hub at least, I know that what is below it is more transit hub, i.e. the lower parts of On A Rail and Power Up), but I doubt it. The area seems, out of all the bm_c1a2 maps, to be the most dedicated to āpure officesā- there arenāt areas of another function that could possibly indicate a move away from the admin center. The lower level (pd_c1a2a) I think synchs up nicely with Power Up if we assume both On A Rail and the canals in Unforeseen Consequences are at the ābottomā of this part of the Facility.
Now, I am fairly certain that there is a road running (vertically, in a spiral) through all the different levels of Sector D- from the loading docks in c1a3b, through the maintenance area in c1a2c, all the way down to the storage halls in c1a2a:
Might this have another stop in B Map? I doubt it- the level is full of these little bottlenecks that wouldnāt pose much of a challenge to pedestrian traffic but would obstruct the movement of large freight and lacks the big, broad corridors that can be found one level below:
Given that it was apparently a secure office section, and the aforementioned office-centric nature of the level in general, I feel very safe in saying that the floor comprising bm_c1a2b is in fact pretty much isolated from other portions of the facility. Itās also one of the smallest canonical maps (I think c1a3c and c2a4h are the only ones that could legitimately claim to be smaller, both being pretty much only three āroomsā), but that just means itās got a lot of room to grow.
One last, unrelated thing that bothers me. Aside from the extremely broad āAdmin 1, 2, 3ā floor level indicators, Office Complex contains no identifying signage of any kind. How does anyone know where to file all of the paperwork the place processes? We donāt even know what department anything is, much less what individual peopleās responsibilities areā¦ even if thereās some central directory on one of the bulletin boards or something, finding a given person is pretty much impossible because the desks themselves have neither names nor numbers!
Map A looks great. Now for my map to transition into yours and vice versa, it would be cool if there was a way for Source to ācheckā if the next map is installed, and if not, disable the level transition (and therefore not crash).
Failing that, though, we could have some small floating text near the elevator button saying not to press it unless the next map is installedā¦ hmm.
Now, looking at an all-office expansion of B Map, itās fairly obvious how things are going to go down in terms of macroscale architecture:
Not sure how far these areas extend out from the main map, but judging by the big carpeted area visible up top I am thinking it is in fact pretty far- possibly they are even wider than the section we see.
In terms of the other little side passages and maintenancey bitsā¦
Obvious bathrooms are obvious. Iām going to try to go with a more horizontal-based design this time to prevent them from jutting into the additional office space so badly. Whether the other admin wings also have bathrooms in them or there is just one set per floor is a question for another day, but I am thinking there is just one set per floor- in the building where I work weāre lucky to even have that, as the bathrooms alternate male to female leaving any given worker with a bathroom every other floor. These could I suppose be another bathroom set, but I am thinking they are in fact at least partially part of a maintenance or service area linked up to the maintenance door on the landing:
There might even be offices back there, but I doubt it- itās too out-of-the-way. The maintenance closets I made for the original map actually didnāt look terrible, so I may just carry them over with relatively slight modification (sadly, the tram tunnel is going to have to go away as it is more of a C Map feature, but maybe it will reappear there?)
I had big plans for this interstice- it was going to be a maintenance area that had a ladder going down to one of the doors in the fan room on A Map. But looking at .RKās map which shows all the floors stacked on top of each other, the fan room is in fact underneath the opposite end of the map, near the barricaded red door. I didnāt like the pipe room I put in here originally, though, so I will probably be making this a supply closet or janitorial area of some kind, like the one with the lightswitch in the exec lounge, or the one with the chairs in the beginning of C Map.
Might this door lead (directly or indirectly) to the additional office space? Possibly. Thereās currently only one entrance when the other office has two, and while this is a prime candidate for the maintenance area idea I discarded up above thereās nothing to say that area canāt be in the new office sectionā¦ the bigger issue is that for the new offices to reach that far, they have to pass through this long section of wall where thereās no windows or doors, when typically the offices in this section are very āinterconnectedā and have a lot of doors leading into adjacent spaces.
Itās obvious that these two doors can interconnect- a long time ago I reached out to the guy who did the dm_office multiplayer map about including the maintenance area he put here in OCPD and he was onboard with it, but now Iām wondering if there might actually be an office or something more extensive back here. Iām also wondering if a maintenance area might connect to the doorway midway up the stair landing- I had that doorlinked up to Map A a long time ago, but that really did not work out very well.
Something worth noting about the āroachesā particle effect used in parts of A and C map.
Cockroaches are spawned at a rate of about one per 0.5 seconds, and disappear at a rate of about one per minute (?). Therefore, by turning the spawner on for very brief periods periodically using a timer, it may be possible to create roach densities much lower than the āliving carpetā produced in the canonical maps by just leaving it on constantly.
Work on the first section of new offices (the ones accessible through the red doors in either lobby) is coming along steadily. One thing I realize is that I might have gone a bit overboard with the size of the area:
Phff, itās the perfect size for Sakaiās private office.
Looks good tho