CoD Mapping

[Chris MacDonald]

Where I work, we're very much a sociable bunch and at lunchtimes there's nothing we'd rather do than get on the LAN and shoot eachother in Call Of Duty; it all gets very competetive, especially when capture the flag is involved. It has been suggested several times that it would be amazing if I modelled the office and imported it into CoD.

 

I'm wondering if we have any people on here that have experience within the games industry, or perhaps just modelling assets for games? Upon first inspection of the interwebs I've only managed to find people/sites that use "radiant" to model their maps, which appears to be an official CoD tool - but it all looks incredibly basic and very clunky.

 

Any ideas here how to build a map in max and get it into call of duty? Presumably the developers use max/maya to do it, so surely I can... Right?!

 

Any help would be much appreciated. Sorry if this should have been created in the off topics.

[xEndlessxUrbiax]

I had posted a similar thread about trying to take some of my already built sketchup models into any FPS (with hopefully only minor tweaking). You might be able to get a little information from there.

 

I tried remodeling one of our buildings in Sketchup using a plugin that Valve uses to import that Sketchup model into their modeling program so I could theoretically play games like Half Life, Counterstrike, Portal, and Left 4 Dead. Unfortunately, it got way too time consuming and I was forced to give up after getting a decent "trial" map that I could roam around with a gun shooting walls and windows. The map was still unplayable in any real sense of the word.

 

I would also love to know if there is an answer to this. CoD would be great to play custom maps in, but I'm guessing their map making software is much more complicated than for Valve games.

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/71982-3d-model-video-game.html

[Scott Schroeder]

They used to release map tools for COD games, then IW decided having a supporting game community was pointless and killed all map editors. I think COD 2 was the last one to actually have an IW supplied mapping tool where you could build levels and import assets you created. The tools were actually quite easy to use and most of the community would implement or write tools to bring in objects from Max/Maya. It's really unfortunate that IW killed the mapping community for the COD series. It made the game much more replayable when you have a never ending resource for new maps. But hey, if they had that then they couldn't charge $$$$ for their stupid new map packs of just old levels that are re-used.

[Chris MacDonald]

Well as it happens, we've just switched back to CoD2 simply because more PC's here can run it than the new ones so that more people can get involved (not that the 3D team ever have a problem when it comes to computing power haha), and because the older gameplay is far better.

[Scott Schroeder]

Ahh, well you are in luck then. There are plenty of mapping/modding tools and tutorials. But as you have seen, the version of Radiant they have is pretty clunky to get used to. It's not too bad once you figure it out. I think the supporting community is still around, I haven't touched it since a long time ago.

 

Generally you try to build most of your map inside Radiant, such as the terrain and any sort of blocky elements, that's where it's a pain to do it. For the custom models, generally you'll need to have them UVW unwrapped and make sure they are polygon efficient, usually in quads as quads are best handled in real time.

 

From what I can recall though, it's a long work around for 3ds Max to get into the COD2 map maker. You may have to go from Max into Blender, then into the map maker. Normally you could go through Maya 6, but that's a little hard to find these days. Off the top of my head, I don't think there ever was a direct link into COD2 from Max.

[Chris MacDonald]

Ahh, I had seen quite a few exports from blender and assumed that might have been the only way. Perhaps it's just too much of a tall order then, as I don't much fancy having to learn Radiant. I shall break the bad news to the office.