now that we have source mabye it's possible to make good forest maps and other non urban maps?

Good question. While Source does an incredible job of handling complex prop models and brushes you'll also notice that there aren't any extensively forested or flora dense levels to be found in HL2, in fact most are very sparse. The reason being that the polygonal count to properly reproduce a densely populated woodland themed map would simply kill the frame rates. However, there have been huge strides made very recently by third party developers that could conceivably allow for such maps if Valve were to implement support. I work for a small UK software developer and our 1st project is a golf title (easy now ;) ). You'd be hard pressed to find another genre that will stress a rig more than a completely 3D golf simulator. We use two IDVinc products called Speedtree and Speedgrass with our own game engine which btw are now included with the Unreal 3.0 engine SDK for new developers. The programs allow us to model and create virtually any type of tree, plant, grass that we need and then export to our propriety model format. However the real beauty is that you can assign a billboard level, similar to mipmapping, that the programs will auto create during the export process on the fly. Essentially the billboards levels are quality scaled versions of the original full res 3D model so if you set a level of 7 there will be 7 separate quality versions of the original model with the lowest being completely 2d for far distant views (500 yards or more) and each in between will offer slightly higher quality based on the distance from the player. We are able to achieve very good fps (above 60) with over 8,000 trees on a full landplot being fully rendered. Furthermore the model animations are control generated in the IDVinc software to react to different wind speeds/directions and also have diffuse, specular, ambient and emissive lighting controls. Of course HDR is a whole new ball game!!

Ok, enough with the mumbo jumbo. What I'm getting at is that for a DOD map set in a forest region you could get away with say 2,500 trees/plants in combination using a similar type of technology because the map plots are so small. This would offset the having to account for obvious factors involved in a FPS game (number of players, weapons, ballistics, etc). However, I do know of a couple Unreal 3.0 enginge based fps titles in development that are going to open a whole new can of worms when we see them later next year. The good thing for us is that Gabe and company always seem to be one step ahead and I'd be very surprised if we don't see an enhancement to Source sooner or later that allows for such support.

No biggie, fake it with polygonal planes with tree maps and alphas on them. Just like dod_forest.

I can handle some rough edges here and there.

Source is not FarCry, but I'm sure it can handle some decent looking forest maps. But expect a lot of fog, which clips the far trees for performance reasons.

Hidden & Dangerous 2 was able to achieve this and it's much older.

http://home.tiscali.de/cryogen/hd2/Bild11.jpg

The Battleground:Source mod shows some good examples for non-urban maps too.

Ahhh, H&D2, my one true MP FPS.

However, all the plants and trees in Burma 1 are pretty much low res I think. You'll notice that in the Singleplayer portion of the game there is grass but in the MP portion there is no grass.

*paging Waldo to thread*

He got a good forest in one of his maps, but its not playable but fore purely cosmetic reasons as the trees are not solid, good for a 3D skybox maybe.

conflict in nam has some god trees

http://www.planethalflife.com/cin/Magi/07_28_05/large/delta2.jpg

^ i think youve been fooled. they are usually the regular hl2 trees. but the used some tree branch textures to fill the sky above, to make it look more dense than it really is. if u look closely enough. if im wrong, oh well, but i think im right.

Yup.

I know how they did it, I've been following CiN for a while.

I'd definatly like to see someone here try, very curious to see what could be done. At a very minimum it would look better than dod_forest for dod1 haha.

Well my second map was going to be in a forest...no idea if that will work out yet...

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VGUI2:_Overview_Display

Is the idea I was saying that Waldo has used.

They look like sprites :-\.

Making good woodland map in HL2 is not easy IMHO, it's still BSP engine that allows much more models. Thanks to dynamic detail of models and with some intelligent design one could make realistic forest map but definitely no "Huge forest with lots of trees and no view obstacles". Even if engine could allow it, it won't be playable in multiplayer mode.

Originally posted by Craftos
[B]They look like sprites :-\.
/B]

Thats because they are, reason? The playable area within the forest is about 4km square.

A good idea for the 3D skybox to beef the edges up though.