Stargate - The Alliance (unreleased)

Stargate SG-1 was a first person shooter developed under the Stargate licence. I worked 18 months on this project until it got discontinued.

We used a modified unreal engine 2.5 to create the game content. My position was a level designer and I also helped out with some art assets.

I worked on quite a few meshes in this level too. Mostly using already existing materials or meshes and modified them to fit better into the room or have variations. I probably touched every mesh visible here except the start gate itself.

I did the lighting as well.

Art for Stargate

Over the weeks I updated the size, shape and content of the rooms from the blueprints we got from the TV show.

There is a video available now from someone who got hold on an alpha built. I think the 2 control rooms and the Stargate room itself are pretty much like I left them.

Some of the side rooms have messed up floor lineage. I guess they were not intended to be played in this level.

Watch in game footage..

It lives from the lighting which I set up in a moody dark tone. I also setup all the shaders for the self illuminating screens.

Most of the textures were done by artists but I modified the colour of a few or took screenshots from the monitors in the shows and used them for the monitor shaders in the building.

All the concrete floor and walls are made out of square segments. We had probably about 6 different types. The rest is done by adding additional details or swap textures.

I love working with modules. It gives the level designer better control over the environment and allows quick design changes even close to the end of the project.

Most of the shelves are filled with one large mesh. Mirrored rotated or both gives us 4 variations. Plus a second texture set to add another 4 variations. Finally if you leave one or two shelves empty and fill them up with unique pieces from elsewhere noone will notice that its all made out of a very few elements.

This room is huge so I had to do something to keep the framerate up.

To be honest - I am not quite sure where the XBox screenshots start and the PC screenshots end. But the levels looked pretty much the same.

I simplified a lot of meshes, combined some or changed the texture size so they would fit into memory.

There is a sweetspot you need to find between mesh size and amount of instances or textures used. E.g all 5 monitors are combined into one mesh as far as I remember. Try and error a lot of times.

We didn't have to compromise too much in the SGC area. We squeezed the tiniest bit of memory out of every bit of the environment.

We had blue prints of the set, as I wrote before. But the set for the TV show only represents one little section around "E". By watching the show closely I thought that is how the floorplan of this level of the SGC has to look like.

The look and layout changed through the seasons btw. First they had CRC monitors and then they got replace by flat screens. Just to name an example.