Some live footage from the battleground :
Somehow I could hardly resist not to call this post “Welcome to the jungle”, cause that’s exactly what I thought when playing around on the game’s manual battlefield in the “jungle”-setting. I did a lot of postings about the new manual battles for “Phase 2”, and in several of those I mentioned that there is a lot of content that needs to be created for the different settings of the battlefield.
In “Phase 2”, every region of the globe has a setting assigned for when you attack it and enter the manual battle-mode. These settings are changed in the game’s data editor (called WeltEdit), and range from arctic, lushgreen, dry over to desert and jungles (there have been many more during development, but I had to reduce the number. And depending on the selected setting for the region you’re about to attack, the game loads different maps, models, textures. And every setting needs its own content, at least in terms of textures, trees, roads and all those things that change from setting to setting. You can’t e.g. use a jungle tree in an arctic or desert setting, cause that’d look pretty awkward, though on the other hand you can use e.g. the tank barriers in any environment. This results in a lot of content-creating work that has to be done for this specific part of the game.
So from time to time I sit down and (try) to create models (and content) for one of those battlefield settings. And this weekend I finally got around creating some models for the jungle setting. Mostly a half-way decent looking tree, something that’s used pretty often and has to look at least decent. And all of you that create 3D models themselves known that it’s pretty hard creating organic objects that don’t look bad (especially if you need to keep the poly-count in mind), so the jungle tree that you can see in those screenshots was a lot of work and is not the first iteration. I don’t know exactly, but I think I threw away at least half-a-dozen different jungle tree designs. And that has been the case for many of the 3D models I created, so over the last few years there have been dozens (or maybe even up tp a hundred) 3D models I created that were never shown to the public, though I’m pretty sure that this new model will make it into the finally game. And in the second shot you’ll clearly see that there’s still a lot of stuff missing, like buildings and other 3D models that’ll fit into a jungle setting.