Battle of Huế (2017 - Scrapped)

This was a map I was planning to make in collaboration with another guy, with the idea being that I set the terrain and the rest of the map up and he would do the time consuming, but not so technical work of placing all the static objects/buildings and me supporting him in any way I could with also making new statics as required. Unfortunately, after I got the terrain all set up and ready to go he dropped out and I didn't have the time to make the map all on my own so it was scrapped.

The map was based on the 1968 battle over the city of Huế during the Vietnam War. The map is scaled-down (by 42%) of the real-life city/location and also rotated 35° from the north. This was down primarily so that the entire map area could fit into a 2km by 2km map area, but also because making the city as big as it was in real life would have pushed the Refractor 2 engine over its limits, also resulting in the terrain being 1/2 the detail, have serious terrain warping problems, and from a gameplay perspective, players would find it very hard and boring to fight over such a large area and 100 players wouldn't fill the city. The map was rotated 35° from the north primarily to allow the terrain to work better with the city, since the Refractor 2 engine is limited to 2m x 2m terrain grid detail for a 2km x 2km map, so any terrain features need to be larger than 4m at least and anything not on the grid doesn't work at all well. That and it is much easier to build when the city block grids line up with the terrain grid. Muttrah was very hard to make with none of the map being on the grid and was partly the reason why the inside the city had very little terrain detail.

I also created a very extended plan and terrain data for eventually adding the Phu Bai Airbase to the South of the City where players could get air support from, and fly in helicopters/supplies. This would have been done by creating a "Mesh Terrain" in a similar fashion to how I created The Falklands map, which would include the Airbase and some low detail terrain around it, leading up and around the main map's surrounding terrain which players would only be able to fly over. This was part of an experiment I had done a little on The Falklands map, but I had wanted to expand the concept into other areas of PR by locating Airbases far outside the main map, to not only give aircraft much more room to manoeuvre but also to increase the time it takes to fly back and forth and resupply etc, making aircraft less powerful if you had to wait for a long time for them to get on the scene.

The main reason I'm showing this in my portfolio is to show the terrain work I did for the map, with gathering all the terrain data (for 20 x 20 km around the city, with a detail of 945px/km), references etc, putting them all together, and adding lots of detail such as the waterways etc, all of which was done over the period of a month (project started on the 10 July, scrapped on the 15 Auguest) while juggling other projects at the same time.