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In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake III engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake III engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). The reason for this is that it is a lot easier to create realistic environments and at the same time limiting the amount of polygons drawn on the screen when you are indoors. Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake II engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake III engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
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In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake II engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In the later version of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault ( MOH:PA ), this was changed. The engine went through massive alterations to support outdoor levels with lots of trees and bushes and green stuff in general. But in doing so, the ability to handle indoor geometery was lost. So everything MOHAA was bad at, MOHPA handled with exelence, and vice versa.
The Torque engine.
Here are some games that I will ( probably ) use to exemplify points I will ( hopefully ) make later on.
In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake II engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In the later version of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault ( MOH:PA ), this was changed. The engine went through massive alterations to support outdoor levels with lots of trees and bushes and green stuff in general. But in doing so, the ability to handle indoor geometery was lost. So everything MOHAA was bad at, MOHPA handled with exelence, and vice versa.
[[http://www.garagegames.com/|The Torque Game engine] is based on the engine that Tribes was built on. It has both the indoor and outdoor possibilities, making it suitable for a larger span of level types. In doing so it will probably not be as good as a more specialized engine at either of them. So here perhaps level design is even more important. For the resulting game.
Battlefield 1942 supports very large maps. And with large maps comes the ability to use vehicles: both ground, ait and sea vehicles are used. This adds special considerations to level design, as well as balancing strategies.
Depending on the underlying technology of the game engine, some level designs may be a better idea.
In Medal of Honor: Allied Assault ( MOH:AA ), a game based on the Quake II engine, it is easier to make indoor levels, or levels with limited visibility. Outdoor levels where you can see long distances often suffers from bad Frames Per Seconds ( FPS ). Sure, you can do outdoor levels, but the engine is not really good at it.
In the later version of Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault ( MOH:PA ), this was changed. The engine went through massive alterations to support outdoor levels with lots of trees and bushes and green stuff in general. But in doing so, the ability to handle indoor geometery was lost. So everything MOHAA was bad at, MOHPA handled with exelence, and vice versa.
The Torque engine.
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After designing a lot of levels and analyzing even more levels made by others, I have collected a lot of opinions on good level design. Some of them are valid for all level design, some very specialized, and some may be wildly inacurate. Good level design is not an absolute value. You may love a level that I hate more than life itself. But I claim that there are lots of solutions that are better than others when creating a level that can be liked, perhaps even loved, by the majority of gamers.
I'm going to focus on level design for first person shooters. Partly because it is a big topic and I need to limit the scope, and partly because it is what I know.
As this is a Wiki document, my hope is that others will add to / change / comment this page using their own aquired knowledge on the subject. This is allowed and even more so: encouraged.
The game will dictate a lot of what kind of level design desitions you can make. Sometimes the game will even make some types of level design close to impossible ( after seeing some stuff that modders have done in games, I'm not saying there is such a thing as impossile ).
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