Okay, some background; this is an update to my first megaproject, and most of the updates to it over time have been decently significant.
This is what the 1.5 release of Gravis City: Industrial Zone 7 (which I often just call "Zone 7" for short) looks like. Just so y'all know where we're coming from.
Right, so there was always something that made me feel a little weird about this track. Not all of the satire that I've had to continually replace once reality makes that shit look tame (the Cancer Wind sign seems to be holding up, though!), but that Gravis City doesn't look that unlivable of a place. There's not enough parking lots that face the street, parts of it look too walkable and too pedestrian-friendly. If we're going to be doing this dystopia thing properly, we might as well actually do it right.
So below, here's Carver Street, the stroad (kinda) that takes you back into the giant walled off industrial yard. These walls are admittedly like 10 times thicker than they needed to be, but tunnel entrances are cool. There's a number of objects-displayed limit I think that this track goes over, so some objects are invisible, even though Sandbox registers them as being placed and they show up in game fine. You might notice some of the buildings are actually W sections, and that's on purpose.
The buildings at 1 (there's a building south of that) and the parking lot at 2 might be flipped around, so that there's this hellish parking lot of awfulness facing the track. That being said, doing that might kinda ruin some of the easter eggs in that parking lot (in case I didn't mention that this track has a lot of easter eggs, as in, truly a lot). So what I might do instead is flip the buildings at 3 and the parking lot at 4, because the stuff happening in that parking lot is a tick more sinister.
Like this SUV that's on fire for some reason. These fire objects are from Age of Wonders 1, and they now billboard. If you don't know what billboarding is, it's how a 2D image rotates to always face the camera.
That police car you see there? That's the default NR2003 pace car model, because I didn't want to go find another one. Does it have LODs? No, I forgot to give it LODs, but I very well might (unless the LOD state switch turns into a lag-monster, which is a problem I've had before), because I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of this police car. There's two versions of it, one with a siren animation and one without it. The ones with the siren animations have a sound file to go with them.
Now to get into one of the more ... involved ... planned changes to this track.
If there's anyone who has played the original Deus Ex before, you might recognize her. Deus Ex models looked fine for 2000. Nothing special. She's been on the track since... I think the very first release, and has been in more or less the same place, too. She has 439 points. Reasonable, I think.
Of course, I am not a reasonable person sometimes. This is the riot cop (and MJ12 soldier, UNATCO soldier, Mechanic, and a few others... since Deus Ex only had like 10 or so character models) holding a two handed weapon, which would be placed where that rogue triangle is. I plan on putting a bunch of these guys around, because race organizersare extremely awful people uhhh... Care. About. Security. Yeah, that's it. Mmhm. This guy wouldn't be the second Deus Ex model on the track -- there's two doberman dogs hanging around. So yeah, I'm adding more Deus Ex models to the track.
One last thing, there's a lot of buildings that I borrowed from Surfer's Paradise. No idea who originally made them, but either way, I added reflection maps and rooftops to them. I like it.
This is what the 1.5 release of Gravis City: Industrial Zone 7 (which I often just call "Zone 7" for short) looks like. Just so y'all know where we're coming from.
Right, so there was always something that made me feel a little weird about this track. Not all of the satire that I've had to continually replace once reality makes that shit look tame (the Cancer Wind sign seems to be holding up, though!), but that Gravis City doesn't look that unlivable of a place. There's not enough parking lots that face the street, parts of it look too walkable and too pedestrian-friendly. If we're going to be doing this dystopia thing properly, we might as well actually do it right.
So below, here's Carver Street, the stroad (kinda) that takes you back into the giant walled off industrial yard. These walls are admittedly like 10 times thicker than they needed to be, but tunnel entrances are cool. There's a number of objects-displayed limit I think that this track goes over, so some objects are invisible, even though Sandbox registers them as being placed and they show up in game fine. You might notice some of the buildings are actually W sections, and that's on purpose.
The buildings at 1 (there's a building south of that) and the parking lot at 2 might be flipped around, so that there's this hellish parking lot of awfulness facing the track. That being said, doing that might kinda ruin some of the easter eggs in that parking lot (in case I didn't mention that this track has a lot of easter eggs, as in, truly a lot). So what I might do instead is flip the buildings at 3 and the parking lot at 4, because the stuff happening in that parking lot is a tick more sinister.
Like this SUV that's on fire for some reason. These fire objects are from Age of Wonders 1, and they now billboard. If you don't know what billboarding is, it's how a 2D image rotates to always face the camera.
That police car you see there? That's the default NR2003 pace car model, because I didn't want to go find another one. Does it have LODs? No, I forgot to give it LODs, but I very well might (unless the LOD state switch turns into a lag-monster, which is a problem I've had before), because I'm going to get a lot of mileage out of this police car. There's two versions of it, one with a siren animation and one without it. The ones with the siren animations have a sound file to go with them.
Now to get into one of the more ... involved ... planned changes to this track.
If there's anyone who has played the original Deus Ex before, you might recognize her. Deus Ex models looked fine for 2000. Nothing special. She's been on the track since... I think the very first release, and has been in more or less the same place, too. She has 439 points. Reasonable, I think.
Of course, I am not a reasonable person sometimes. This is the riot cop (and MJ12 soldier, UNATCO soldier, Mechanic, and a few others... since Deus Ex only had like 10 or so character models) holding a two handed weapon, which would be placed where that rogue triangle is. I plan on putting a bunch of these guys around, because race organizers
One last thing, there's a lot of buildings that I borrowed from Surfer's Paradise. No idea who originally made them, but either way, I added reflection maps and rooftops to them. I like it.
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