As usual, the big Jedi2016 long-ass-story-before-he-gets-to-the-frikkin'-point.
So I'm fiddling around on various forums and Youtube and listening to arguments about Crysis and consoles and such.
I'm more of a console gamer, so I go and hunt down a copy of Far Cry: Instincts: Predator on X360. So I can at least play Cry-something.
Anyway, among my playing around, I start fiddling with the map editor. And this thing is awesome. Shape your own land, drop objects, plant trees, etc. Very cool.
But, it didn't take me long to realize how limited it is. Especially as it's a direct port of the editor from Far Cry: Instincts: Evolution from the original Xbox. As near as I can tell, all they did was bump up the texture resolution, add more complex grass, and they let you have 800 trees instead of the previous 300. Otherwise, it seems unchanged from what I can tell (not having played Evolution.
800 trees might sound like a lot... it ain't. I just finished a map yesterday, designed for one-on-one deathmatch with a friend of mine from work. It's a big map, fills the whole area, but most of it is water. It's got a big "mainland", that's horseshoe-shaped along three sides, as well as a couple other small islands in the middle. Foliage is basically limited to the edges of the horseshoe, and a few patches of greenery in the sand. I used all 800 trees. The game won't let me add any more. Granted, the green areas are very lush and full, but they make up only a small part of the map as a whole.
The other annoying thing is that the selection is very limited. I get four different bushes, two palm trees, and two big trees. That's it. Needless to say, the environment isn't as varied as I would have liked, since you see the same frikkin' thing over and over again all over the place. No doubt this was a limitation of the Xbox, that they didn't bother to correct when they ported it over.
But, all that aside, I really like the map editor.. it's intuitive and easy to use.
So now I want more map editors. I don't even want to play on them so much as just to make them and walk around in them and look at all the pretty.
So, I jumped headfirst into the Sandbox2 editor included in the single-player demo of Crysis. I've seen stuff online, and to say that the editor is "robust" would be a severe understatement. But it's also incredibly complicated compared what I've been using over this last week or so on the Xbox360. Everything's a menu, with a thousand options, everything has to be done manually (texturing and layering the terrain, for example), etc.
That, and once I managed to successfully generate some terrain, my computer promptly told me where to go and how to get there. (I don't meet even the minimum specs for Crysis).
Now, long story short, I'd like to mess around with some other good map editors, and I'd like to know what they are! What games, PC or console, can I quickly and easily create a bunch of worthless environments to wander around in for my own amusement? Don't worry about my system specs, I'm already formulating a long-term plan involving birthday money and tax returns to perform a massive upgrade on my system.
Follow-up post here in a bit...
So I'm fiddling around on various forums and Youtube and listening to arguments about Crysis and consoles and such.
I'm more of a console gamer, so I go and hunt down a copy of Far Cry: Instincts: Predator on X360. So I can at least play Cry-something.
Anyway, among my playing around, I start fiddling with the map editor. And this thing is awesome. Shape your own land, drop objects, plant trees, etc. Very cool.
But, it didn't take me long to realize how limited it is. Especially as it's a direct port of the editor from Far Cry: Instincts: Evolution from the original Xbox. As near as I can tell, all they did was bump up the texture resolution, add more complex grass, and they let you have 800 trees instead of the previous 300. Otherwise, it seems unchanged from what I can tell (not having played Evolution.
800 trees might sound like a lot... it ain't. I just finished a map yesterday, designed for one-on-one deathmatch with a friend of mine from work. It's a big map, fills the whole area, but most of it is water. It's got a big "mainland", that's horseshoe-shaped along three sides, as well as a couple other small islands in the middle. Foliage is basically limited to the edges of the horseshoe, and a few patches of greenery in the sand. I used all 800 trees. The game won't let me add any more. Granted, the green areas are very lush and full, but they make up only a small part of the map as a whole.
The other annoying thing is that the selection is very limited. I get four different bushes, two palm trees, and two big trees. That's it. Needless to say, the environment isn't as varied as I would have liked, since you see the same frikkin' thing over and over again all over the place. No doubt this was a limitation of the Xbox, that they didn't bother to correct when they ported it over.
But, all that aside, I really like the map editor.. it's intuitive and easy to use.
So now I want more map editors. I don't even want to play on them so much as just to make them and walk around in them and look at all the pretty.
So, I jumped headfirst into the Sandbox2 editor included in the single-player demo of Crysis. I've seen stuff online, and to say that the editor is "robust" would be a severe understatement. But it's also incredibly complicated compared what I've been using over this last week or so on the Xbox360. Everything's a menu, with a thousand options, everything has to be done manually (texturing and layering the terrain, for example), etc.
That, and once I managed to successfully generate some terrain, my computer promptly told me where to go and how to get there. (I don't meet even the minimum specs for Crysis).
Now, long story short, I'd like to mess around with some other good map editors, and I'd like to know what they are! What games, PC or console, can I quickly and easily create a bunch of worthless environments to wander around in for my own amusement? Don't worry about my system specs, I'm already formulating a long-term plan involving birthday money and tax returns to perform a massive upgrade on my system.
Follow-up post here in a bit...
