Sensor

Models and textures for players, weapons and buildables.
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Viech
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Joined: Fri Aug 03, 2012 11:50 pm UTC
Location: Berlin

Sensor

Post by Viech »

The sensor is a human structure that is supposed to increase their sense of map awareness.

Viech wrote:

Gameplay theory wise, the rough idea is that aliens have great mobility that allows them to maintain map control by patrole and reconnaissance and potentially spamming lots of small forward bases for short pathes back to battle in case they get defeated. Humans are much slower and most of the time the effort of maintaining more than a single (strong) forward base won't be worthwhile to them. (Ishq just pointed out that we shouldn't force them to do so either.) In order to balance map control given the human's general disadvantage in map coverage, there are mainly two things we can do: Allow humans to disrupt alien movement with area denial weapons and give them means of map awareness that doesn't require patrole. The sensor would do the latter.

This was the original assignment given to the concept artist, note that we deicded to also add a wall-mounted version of the same structure, which looks more like a surveillance dome camera:

Viech wrote:

Getting to the appearance, the Sensor should be a rather small buildable that you can hide in corners. It has a spherical area of detection around its center, so it should reasonably look like it senses in all directions at once. The feet shouldn't extend too far (as opposed to many real world sensors) so that the bounding box can be a tall cuboid. Speaking of real world sensors, it seems they are called Unattended Ground Sensors in military jargon. This is potentially a good source of inspiration. Another thing that our sensor should have and that you wouldn't find on a realistic one is a small control lamp, visible from any angle, that will glow up whenever it detects something. This will tell alien players when they've been spotted (in case they see the sensor at all) and tell close humans that they should have a look at their minimap (or message list) to learn about the enemy that is very close to them.

So this assignment includes two models with a very similar style (same materials, you may be able to reuse parts). Have a look at the finished concepts by alex_bo:

Image

(This is the concept for use on walls and the ceiling.)

Image

(This concept shows a sensor built on the floor. Banana for scale.)

Responsible for: Arch Linux package & torrent distribution, Parpax (map), Chameleon (map texture editor), Sloth (material file generator), gameplay design & programming, artistic direction

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