I believe your way is better for gameplay wise, just wanted to put my dollars out

Yeah, sure, good to make sure we all know what we mean.

I guess another thing I could do is make them irregularly placed/spaced, so when you're above it's hard to find them so it's harder to grief them than if they were spaced regularly.

@nothings (post #42588): I'm sure people will just grief that gridwork up with the SMG (or even the rifle), but time they spend griefing largely unimportant support gridwork (that sounds backwards, I know) is time they don't spend griefing the actual floor.

Plus, it just looks cool. It's a shame it's causing you some technical difficulties, I've found that the basic voxel programs can be a bit Gremlin-prone myself.

If anyone is set up to host pyspades and wants to test whether garage3.zip (vxl) on the previous page works in it, that would be good to know (it doesn't work with the official server, which crashes when the first player connects, but I don't know if I have a bug or if it's a bug in the official server, and pyspades might provide useful data).

yeah, I can't atm I'm a lil busy working on a map via minecraft, and doing a (secretive) internet job to earn money to buy crap.

>earns money to buy crap

simply put

Yeah I earn money online to buy shit online.

Actually, nevermind about the pyspades thing, it DOES load in voxed so I think that's enough for me to pass it on to Ben.

If it's useful here's a car that was leftover from one of my maps that you're welcome to use. It seems to fit nicely in-between the parking lines. It's a bit of a classic Citroen but I could convert more modern cars if there was any interest.

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/0C9Vy.jpg
Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?gxkgcpuzsju3kp7

I set up a server, and it appears in the list, but when I start up the game server.exe closes. Meh.

Ok, here's a "final" version of the map without vehicles (unless people have other suggestions, or the server gets fixed so I can make the latticework denser). I ended up using both kinds of "trusswork" for supports. No screenshots since this is only intended for people who want to try making vehicles to fit (1337101 in particular).

http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage4.zip
http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage5.zip

In both of these maps, the open space from floor to ceiling is 11 voxels high. If you make a vehicle that's 11 voxels high, it will come into contact with the ceiling supports, which is unrealistic but might look ok anyway. Of course vehicle height needs to be in proportion to width/length anyway, so:

Garage4 the parking spaces are 18 voxels wide and ~28 voxels long. Garage5 the parking spaces are 14 voxels wide and ~22 voxels long. I can tweak this to better match vehicles, but the spaces can't get much longer without the ramps looking dumb.

Next I'll start working on a kvx importer so we can automatically populate the level.

wow, i was going to list my suggestions but garage5 is the result of all of them, spacings and all. very nice!

the only issue is that the interiors of floors don't have stall markings. is this intentional?

Yeah, I have to manually work out the layout for the interior of the floors since every level is differently sized, so I'm waiting until we have a final arrangement to do that work.

(When I went from 5 to 4 levels all the levels changed east-west length (since the generator automatically spreads them out over the spawn), and when I made them taller I also made the ramp area extend farther east-west so that the ramps would be less steep. Both of these changes would have potentially invalidated interior layout. And how many rows can fit will also depend on how long the spaces are.)

I have a kv6 loader working. My kvx loader doesn't work, but kv6 is the better format anyway (and the one AoS uses), so let's just stick to kv6 for the cars. (Buffet_of_Lies: I couldn't get your citroen to load using it as my kvx test case, but it would be too small anyway so it doesn't matter anyway. Thanks for offering it though.)

wow, this is cool. didn't expect it to look like this haha.

Good stuff. I'm going to laugh when some one on a server finally tics away the last block on the bottom level. so much time and effort to go into that.

@nothings I am not sure what you mean by "kv6 loader". KVX is what you'd use to load a model into a VXL world in Voxed using the U command so I am not sure what the issue would be. And it fits neatly into a parking space. Maybe you were talking about using it as a substitute for the intel or tent? Then you'd want a different, higher-res KV6 model in that case. I can do that too. Or maybe you're making this another one of your generator programs? Or maybe I just need more coffee because I just woke up... ;-)

Yes, the parking garage is made with a generator, and the plan is to have a few kv6 cars and have the generator place them at random automatically. It's kind of overkill because it wouldn't be that hard to place them by hand, but heck, anyone can do that already without my involvement (and they're welcome to if they want to). Personally it's easier for me to spend half an hour writing the kv6 loader than it is to try to learn to use voxed properly.

The way I understand KV6s being imported into voxed is that you import them and then hit insert and it is added to the map but the object resolution goes down by half, and so you wind up with a low-res ugly object. maybe, if it's different with your kv6 loader, you could write something that would let someone take an existing map and have your program add objects to it with some sort of random distribution. This would be exceptionally helpful for adding things like trees to an existing map!

Working on some cars for 11-high ceilings (I'll just let the height dictate the other dimensions, since how the cars fit vertically into the spaces will seem more significant to the observer). I must say that making cars look good with voxels is a huge pain in the neck.

@Buffet, you mentioned that in another thread (also about wanting some kind of automated destruction tool) and I told you to email me so we could talk about what exactly you'd want, but you never did.

Anyway, yeah, I dunno about how they come out in voxed but as far as I know in my importer the kv6 have exactly as many voxels as they do in slab6.

@1337101, that makes sense re: height vs. width/length. And yeah, don't kill yourself over this. I'd originally figured I'd just try stealing Buffet's tanks. They wouldn't make sense, but hey, it's a war game, why not tanks. So having anything at all thematically appropriate would be an improvement.

tat looks pretty good :D

I've got a sedan and a coupe so far. Not entirely happy with them but I've decided it's the best I can reasonably expect. By the way, do you want me to upload them pre-formatted as .kvx files or still in the .kv6 form?

kv6.

Here's a KV6 version. Maybe this'll work.
http://www.mediafire.com/?eyplsql2y2yigkb

Anyways... @nothings I'll send you an email rightnow... ;-)

a few of us have been playtesting garage5 for the past couple of hours, it seems to interest everyone who joins. i'm going to leave it up for the rest of the day.

i'm eager to see how it plays out with vehicles, i think it will be much better. if the loader isn't too much trouble to use, for testing purposes here's a quick convert of 5 vehicles in kv6, all ~30 blocks in length: http://aloha.pk/files/aos/vehicles.zip

i'm limited to laptop access right now and the small keyboard makes it very difficult to use slab6 and voxed, but i plan to make more vehicles that are more polished when i get back on a pc in the coming week. i'd love to see 60% or so of the stalls randomly filled with 20+ different vehicles. are you going to release the generator + loader?

I just played for a couple of minutes with about 8 people, and it worked surprisingly well for so few people on such a big map. I do wish you could tell whether sounds were coming from above or below, though.

I will absolutely be releasing the generator and the source. I hope to set the generator up so that you can just provide an arbitrary directory of cars to populate it with and the percentage-full that you want as well, so people can continue to experiment.

I'll try and get a version going with your cars.

I just played this and have to say it was pretty awesome. I don't think I like the idea of cars, actually... I liked the dynamic going on with the open areas, it cuts down on camping and encourages you to keep moving. It's one of the most fun maps I've played on.

Of course, I'll still provide the cars I mentioned. Here's a coupe, sedan, pickup, SUV, and two versions of a van (one solid, one with an open back and partial interior [check out the cargo!]). The filenames are pretty self-explanatory:
http://filesmelt.com/dl/Vehicles.zip

anti grief design seems to work, more than 12 hours later 4 floors are still standing:

http://i.imgur.com/0mJtk.png

of course it will be a different story on a full server but it's still a good sign

Cool. I'm sure if there's a concerted effort to take it down, the way there is to take down a mountain in the gen maps, that it can be done. But there's also no stopping that.

We're almost there! Here's three versions of the map populated with cars: http://silverspaceship.com/aosmap/garage_with_cars_v0.zip

- garage_izzy_100 -- izzy's vehicles at the original size
- garage_izzy_75 -- izzy's vehicles automatically scaled to 75% (they look terrible, but they fit better)
- garage_1337101 -- 1337101's vehicles

Again, these aren't intended to be hosted and played, which is why I didn't bother with screenshots; they're here so you guys who are making cars can take a look at how it looks in-game. (Actually, I only tried them in voxed, for all i know they crash the server.)

Work I still have to do:

- move the entire structure down one voxel so there's more height on the top level
- automatically generate an extra copy of the bottom row of voxels of the cars one voxel lower, so cars on ramps will be in contact with the ground on both sides
- add the missing interior parking spaces on the lower levels
- clustering algorithm so parked cars will appear in little clusters (i have one in there now, but it doesn't work well), which should be good for both the look and the gameplay
- use a convention in the car filename to determine if it needs to be rotated 0/90/180/270 to match the preferred orientation (currently it's a command-line option, which means you can't mix cars of different types at the same time)
- change the generator to make cars be parked facing the "pulling in" direction 90% of the time instead of 50%

i'm really liking this!

i guess conversions won't help much since the vehicles need to stay small. 1337101's vehicles fit and look way better.

clustering will be a nice touch.