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Ravenswood MC Campus pics
logandarklighter
Posts: 334 Arc User
This is a post for showing where the new campus is going to be in relation to everything around it.
These are NOT pics of the tutorial. That may come later.
For those worrying that the campus would displace the memorial - no worries. It's at the far end of the park.
Here's a wide angle aerial shot to show you the overall plot. Which is quite small.
Here's a slightly closer shot.
Here are some students.
Knowing the PNP Lore, one thing I was concerned about was the idea that this was the entirety of Ravenswood - and relocated from it's original location. They do have a teacher character there to spout lore info explaining things.
And... that's about it, really. None of the buildings have interiors or doors. You can't get inside of them. It's a logical place to log off for some younger characters and a decent location for some outdoor RP and nothing else.
I have to say - although the visuals are just fine and the buildings (3 of them) don't displace anything important - I'm really not all that impressed.
Even a remote campus extension should be a little bigger, I feel. Why not put in some more buildings and wrap the campus around the fountain?
How about designing some RP interiors? A library would be perfect.
Ah who am I kidding. This is the bare minimum "that'll do" that this game will get. And we'll never see anything else. Move along. Nothing to see here...
These are NOT pics of the tutorial. That may come later.
For those worrying that the campus would displace the memorial - no worries. It's at the far end of the park.
Here's a wide angle aerial shot to show you the overall plot. Which is quite small.
Here's a slightly closer shot.
Here are some students.
Knowing the PNP Lore, one thing I was concerned about was the idea that this was the entirety of Ravenswood - and relocated from it's original location. They do have a teacher character there to spout lore info explaining things.
And... that's about it, really. None of the buildings have interiors or doors. You can't get inside of them. It's a logical place to log off for some younger characters and a decent location for some outdoor RP and nothing else.
I have to say - although the visuals are just fine and the buildings (3 of them) don't displace anything important - I'm really not all that impressed.
Even a remote campus extension should be a little bigger, I feel. Why not put in some more buildings and wrap the campus around the fountain?
How about designing some RP interiors? A library would be perfect.
Ah who am I kidding. This is the bare minimum "that'll do" that this game will get. And we'll never see anything else. Move along. Nothing to see here...
Post edited by Unknown User on
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But that football field with the stands makes me wonder if something like that couldn't be added to Ravenswood as well?
Or - following the lore as stated above - maybe that sort of thing is back at the home campus and not here.
You cant say a sentence like that on a super hero forum and not expect someone to post Bane pics. Its like the law.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
So, is the Blackbird launchpad under the fountain? Or under the Super Jet pad?
Because, since being a secret school for supes, it should be spreading underground.
Where old Detroit is....
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
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Silverspar on PRIMUS
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Well yeah that's what I said in my post several hours back.. looked like it was copied from VB.
Also, putting it in an out-of-the-way place would make ravenswood more suitable for building a quest line around in the future.
-Ogre
as someone pointed out. no public transport or parking.
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Does seem small. One building for a dorm, one for the administration, one for all the class rooms, labs, library, etc. There are some parts of the MC map that are currently unused. Maybe these buildings, and a few more, could go in one of those spaces.
Epic Stronghold
Block timing explained
I've gotta agree with this 100%. If the devs insist on placing this offshoot of Ravenswood here then it needs to match the surrounding area. Those buildings need more of a retro-futuristic look rather than Vibora bay buildings.
They look so out of place.
This is the type of style I think would fit......
Click here to check out my costumes/milleniumguardian (MG) in-game/We need more tights, stances and moods
Would the mods consider moving this thread to the PTS forum so that the Devs will more easily see it and the feedback it's getting?
They're textued for Vibora Bay permanent night ambience. For an example - they have lit windows.
Their color palette is also fit for VB, but it looks totally out of place within MC.
They should be at least retextured to fall into the same creamy/light brown/light gray coloring as are MC buildings.
They should not be placed just on the grass, but on their own proper bases. Like having every of them surrounded by their own sidewalk.
This part of the Park should have its sidewalk and grass layout chaged to match how buildings are placed there.
The fence should be higher and on its own base. There are some appropriate iron fences in Westside for reusing.
As it is now it looks like a cardboard decoration as if someone was making a low budget movie in the Millenium City. The uncanny valley is straight "in-your-face" there.
Still, this entire location was chosen poorly. It clutters the Park, for an example. The entire visual balance and flow of the area is kinda broken by it.
There are some areas with regular buildings in MC, on the far north, far east and far west borders of Downtown, that have minimal mob spawns or no mob spawns at all and one of them could be emptied to place a campus there.
I am sure many of us would like to know. I certainly would. It just feels so out of place as it currently stands, and just illustrates how much the current MC is at its limit as far as cramming new crap in.
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Here between the prison, the roads and the jet nearby i really wonder how those students manage to concentrate :biggrin:
Yet it is good to have some fresh content, lets hope they will open the buildings to visit and fetch some missions as well
Well, lets rejoice they have not been designed by cryptic's 3d amateur-intern who designed the variable robot or they would probably have looked like this :
I think that someone was me. Ravenswood really sticks out when you compare it to the high school which has: parking, garbage disposal, recreation, nice compact buildings that seem to make good use of the space, and no random NPC walking though the area. As is, Ravenswood, even if it is a remote campus, really doesn't fit into the area at all.
Now I for one like purposing dead space, and this area hasn't been used since On Alert came into effect and they got rid of those early missions, but I think a bit more effort and logical thought needs to be applied here. It's an interesting location for a school, nice tie in with the new tutorial, but as is, this needs better design.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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If the vibora buildings are just place holders they're not located terribly, it does make a nice small campus with lots of green, but the problems you pointed out, combined with the lack of access as I pointed out in another thread, random NPCs walking and running though the area,
and just basic size and scale of impossibly high art deco sky scrapers next to this rinky dink collage campus, well it's very jarring.
Because that would be past the evident boundaries of their world engine can handle from what I understand.
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Why are they making a new tutorial?
Whats wrong with the old one?
(Are they getting rid of the Qularr invasi
Well, if it can why hasn't it been done before? Certainly could have been done when the UNITY mission that required us to go to the Qularr ship was implemented required us to actually go out there? But instead of opening that bit of the world up they put the entrance right at the corner of the road. Not to mention Taco has said multiple times that MC is already at the extent of the size of stuff it can handle and anything more would break it going outside of that box.
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That sort of thing happens all the time in urban areas. (Warning: Yinzers Ahead)
That's an old picture of First Lutheran Church of Pittsburgh, already dwarfed by nearby skyscrapers. The photographer is standing on the site that eventually became the 64-story U.S. Steel Tower.
Granted, that's the tall buildings growing up around the short ones, but if somebody did want to build something on R-MC's scale in the shadow of towers, they could find an architect to do it.
The Vibora Bay/neo-gothic architecture is a big swing and a miss, though. And believe me, any new development in a city the size of MC is going to bring out opinions on the proposed architectural design. The moment Consol Energy Center's design was first revealed, there were two immediate reactions:
- "It's going to dwarf Epiphany Catholic Church!" Which, thanks to the way they built CEC into the hillside, didn't happen. Stand on the corner of Centre and Washington, and Epiphany looks plenty big.
- "From the Hill, it looks like a Home Depot." Well, it did. Looking down Centre Avenue from the Hill District, that northeast corner of CEC was completely blank. The main gates are on the northwest and southwest corners, facing Downtown. The architects added a third gate on that corner in response, and it gets plenty of traffic from the old Civic Arena lots across the street.
Those lots are closed now, because redevelopment of the Civic Arena site is under way. And U.S. Steel will be the first tenant, interestingly enough. They're no longer big enough for the skyscraper they built, so they're building a new HQ at the top end of the Arena site. And the moment the first sketches appeared, Mayor Peduto himself cried, in so many words, "A glass box? Whoop-de-s***. Go build that in an office park somewhere in the suburbs. If you want to revitalize the Lower Hill, you have to do better than that."
So, to reel this back in from real Pittsburgh to fictional Millennium City, location good (because why not use a high man-made cliff to separate the haves from the have-nots?), architecture bad.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
..............
The map size itself might be the biggest it can be, but they have room to expand a bit.
This is on Live:
Considering they've had ample oppurtunity to expand that bounding box, I don't think it's as simple as you make exploiting glitches make it appear. Otherwise, they would have done it at least instead of trying to cram more in already squashed places.
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If the game can handle people being outside the bounding box, it can handle it. The problem, and most likely reason they haven't wanted to put anything out here, is:
This is what the other side of the river looks like when you're this close. They'd have to remodel the whole thing.
Most of those buildings are low-poly (basically just boxes) models with low-res textures. Some of them don't even have more than two walls (look at the ones on the left). It all looks terrible from this close.
But you know I still am relieved to get it and understand the game has a small budget.
I can take a weird location over a place distant from ren center where no people would ever congregate.
I doubt that's the reason because you can see that from the Ren Center. I see it all the time. There's more to it than simple fact you can be out there.
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Maybe. It's much less obvious from where you're allowed to go. But it seems like the bounding boxes are placed independently of the others. For instance, I can't stand on top of the hull of the bug ship because of some arbitrarily placed bounding box. It's not just a cube surrounding the map of the city, which leads me to believe that they could indeed push some of these boxes south and make room for something.
The map itself is gigantic, the borders of it are a couple miles away from the bounding boxes. Even on a fast vehicle it takes a loooong time to even get to the edges. Pushing it out just a little bit, I can't imagine what kind of limitation would prevent that.
No the bounding box is not a cube, it's an oval. I've ran the map enough to know this, not to mention, again, Taco has mentioned this. Again, still more to it than you simply glitching your way to a bug ship else again they would have already expanded that bounding box ages ago.
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It doesn't resemble an oval at all... there's lots of straight edges for the bounding boxes all over the map. And once you get outside of those, there's no other boxes. So your info seems to be off.
Usually to build in cities these sorts of things are hashed out in planning committees and I'd find it hard to believe that someone on said committee would give the go ahead to build a french colonial style building so close to the RenCen.
Go to the westside edges and you will see it curves, the same along the north side, it curves slightly.
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I'm wondering where the limit that restrains Cryptic from enlarging the map is. MMO makers don't like to raise their minimum system requirements without a damn good reason, so if it's client-side, that might be the sticking point. Then again, the minimum, according to the game's Arc page, is a 1GHz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 or AMD Radeon 8500 with 64MB of framebuffer. If you have that machine, and you try to install Crysis on it, the installer just plays an infinite video loop of Jen-Hsun Huang laughing his arse off at you instead. And it probably stutters. But Cryptic would still like to keep you playing Champions on such vintage hardware, so there might be a polygon and/or texture budget that would be busted if you replaced the Q-ship with Belle Isle and cleaned up the Windsor assets that were previously culled for invisibility.
Or it's server-side, and they only give hardware that good to Neverwinter.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
Or those buildings across the freeway from City Center. Just sitting there collecting dust!
Compared to the stuff Cryptic North did, it's about on par. Especially compared to what they did in their first few updates. You remember the missions leading up to Lemurian Invasion? Keep in mind that the Lemurian Invasion rampage itself was pretty much almost done before they took the helm.
While I like what Cryptic North did, the new team isn't doing any worse than they did.
No. Those buildings look far too out of place. I mean, really, really, really out of place. They stick out terribly, and not just like a sore thumb, but a thumb that has been broken in three places, got a bee sting and peanut allergy and as a result, has swollen up to the size of a grapefruit.
I don't recall anything from CN looking that bad.
Renaissance Center looks nothing like Downtown! The Champions Building looks nothing like Downtown! Downtown looks nothing like City Center! The Argent Building looks nothing like City Center! The PSI building looks nothing like City Center! City Center looks nothing like Westside! The prison looks nothing like Westside! Little China looks nothing like Westside!
Where's the outrage for all these sore thumbs?!
Anyone ever stop to think about the fact that maybe the designer wanted this to stick out with a different look, just like all these other things that don't look like one another and have their own character? It's a design choice. I'm guessing that the main school would look like these buildings (maybe they even fit in where they were built!) and so these buildings were meant to look like them.
These buildings could be replaced by other Millennium City buildings to blend in and look absolutely nondescript. I think that would be a shame. It's a design choice. Like I said in the other thread, people are just seeing something new that looks different and their first reaction is "this is dumb! it looks nothing like it should!" A new player wouldn't even give it a second glance because, based on the rest of the city, having a couple buildings that look a little different isn't such a shock.
This campus could be better designed, yes. But the buildings themselves? They're just fine. A couple months after they go live, it'll look as natural as anything else, and no one will be complaining.
My only negative I can say about them is that I think their windows should be set to only light up in night time in MC, rather than always on as they are now, but that's just a nitpick.
I'd really like one of them to have an interior social instance, but I don't know if there's room for that on the design spec at the moment, and it isn't a complaint, just a suggestion.
Oh, and the dialogue from the two kids looking at the Modern Art elephant statues is hilarious. :biggrin:
This explanation may be wildly incorrect, but I know messing with outta the box too much is bad for the server, is all.
(°∇° ) #megalodon2015