"I can't just do that..."
"Why not, you're a Policeman, aren't you?"
Environment coming along nicely, and fairly satisfied with the trade off of clutter-versus-space. Too open and it'll look empty and sterile, too cluttered and there's no point in having large view distances and weapons that can reach 400 metres.
Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad (rhyming slang)
Having all of these streets with avenue style trees, street lights, telegraph/telecom poles, signs, roadworks and other ... well street objects, parked vehicles were somewhat noticeable by there absence. And they make good, large obstacles to use as cover.
So I modelled a basic, low-poly car (just 600 tris and then gets sharply LODed at 205 and 46) which comes in a police and civilian flavour - neither of which are textured as of yet beyond a basic UVmap. The car is basically the same for both versions, the civilian type just missing the lights off the top and the intercooler/radiator/bump-in-the-bonnet/I'm-not-a-car-nut/whatever-it's-called. Based rather loosely (as in unsueably loosely) on late 70s, early 80s Fords like the Consul-and-Cortina/with-a-heavy-dose-of-Capri.
British Armed Police. Not a musical about a serial killing barber
Policecar will have the old British "jam sandwich" colour scheme. I can't stand all the modern British police paintjobs - quite a surprise when I came back to the UK after living abroad. You wouldn't automatically think that they're police ... maybe some sort of bizarre doctor-on-call or just some boyracer (hotrodder) with a fancy paint scheme and strange bodykit. They're slate grey with day-glo yellow/green strips. Whatever happened to white/red/white layers? (hence "jam sandwich")
Though talking of music
Civilian version will be biege. Strange to think that biege is no longer considered a cool colour for a car. Oh the whims of fashion! Biege - the sort of awesome colour that should have it's own theme tune! Link. (There's a fleeting glimpse of a biege facsimile in the background of this clip at 0:0.27 - and check out the size of computers!)
Sweeney - dinner = a kicking
I'll also get round to a truck of some sort (a bigger thing to hide behind) which will come in civilian and military motifs. I've had a quick um-and-ah (that's thinking to most people) about whether to make these vehicles static obstacles or have them dynamically blow-up when damaged. I'm not sure the latter would really bring anything special to gameplay. Also wondered about making them driveable vehicles but aren't planning on it (though there is no boundary to feature-creep unless you set one).
After that it's a case of some road signs to set my fictional town in a factual location, two shop fronts (one a post office) and finalize a few textures for the big DIF (the town model). And after that it's a case of postmortem on how to build a level and lessons to be learnt. To be honest they're all pretty obvious and involve planning, listings, anti-faffing measures (as in going down the lists and not jumping back and forth fiddling with things) and less um-and-ah-ing.
And that's enough indulging '70s/80s British TV. .... I'm a child of my time .....
