Team Fortress 2 Getting New Environments

If you’re an avid TF2 player, you should be one of the thousands that have gotten tired of TF2’s same old “dust/industrial” setting. Worry not, VALVe is cooking up new enviroments for Team Fortress 2:

One of the things we’re looking at for the next update is the creation of a new type of environment for our levels to be built in. We’re pretty happy with the way our environments have turned out so far, but as we create more and more maps with these achievement packs, we want our level designers to have more to work with in terms of giving their settings a unique look.

The challenging part of this type of design process is in finding types of terrain and structures that provide an understandable, interesting set of visuals and at the same time staying within the constraints of what we want to do with gameplay. In addition to this, we want to be able to stay within the strengths of the engine that TF is built around.

They’ve also released some concept to get your engines going:

Burnout: Paradise - 3 New Screenshots

Criterion Games has released 3 new screenshots for Burnout: Paradise. One screenshot also compares the in-game image quality with SSAO turned ON and OFF:

We’re just implementing Ambient Occlusion (AO).

If you’re not familiar with this term, it’s an effect that uses soft shadows to add extra depth. Enclosed spaces naturally receive less light than open spaces and look darker – that helps us to see how close objects are to each other.

Some games already use AO but most rely on artists to build this into the environment. For Burnout this would be a nightmare, because we like to smash things up and move them around a lot! For this reason, we’ve implemented a dynamic AO system that affects fast-moving and destructible objects!

Screenshots after the jump.

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Valve Cooking Up 2 New Team Fortress 2 Maps

As anyone who played Team Fortress 2 knows, pretty much all Team Fortress 2 maps are desert/industrial and while all of them offer something unique, the feeling of monotony is still there. Steam forum member Sindex e-mailed Valve regarding the environmental variety in Team Fortress 2 maps and got a response from Robin Walker:

New map environments are always a tradeoff between the amount of new content in a map and the amount our players want to download. Obviously, re-using assets from other maps that are already on your hard drive means the download is significantly smaller. That said, we are working on a new environment for two of our maps in development, and hopefully you’ll see some of that soon.

CTF_snowfort, anyone?