Well there are angles to be investigated here, first of all the closest showcase to a
sniper style game or level I've seen in a long time was Twitch Tweak's
Nuclear Sky, you'll want to check out page 4 of that thread for what I'm specifically talking about. He did a great job of producing a sniper level in his project, professional quality? Perhaps not, but with what he had to work with in FPSC, he did a stellar job in my opinion. Some inspiration could be gathered there.
Now, with so many mods these days now offering the freedom and luxury of assisting in the FPS rate of your games, such as
Fenix Mod, these can help you create your large-scale sniper environment (I'm guessing you'll be wanting to create a city style area), without gaining too much lag from the maps. Of course you don't want to go over board with models and map size, but this is where a lot of creativity and planning would come in.
Up-close, to keep a believable and elaborate looking environment, go ahead and use those high-poly or detailed building models, trees, vehicles, power-lines, trash or whatever you need to create a beautiful city-scape: When it comes to the backgrounds of the map however, employ the use of very low-poly, simple
box with texture building models, perhaps "billboard" models of trees to help disguise the edges of your map, blocking the visible portions of the skybox beneath the ground the best you can.
I've never actually played a "sniper" game, so I'm not all too sure how the gameplay would carry out specifically, although this again is where your imagination comes in; figure out what kind of things you want the player doing in the game. Whether they're always travelling across and through buildings to reach new destinations in order to complete continously changing objectives and targets - or if there are significant portions of gameplay where the player is positioned in one single building for a period of time, perhaps having to shift to different windows to pick off squads of enemy soldiers or hordes of enemies moving in on the tower to kill you.
Once you know that, you'll be able to then sit down and understand what sort of layout you want the map(s) to have. For instance, if there were large portions of the game where you're in one building, then the foreground about the building could be heavily detailed (to an extent), rather than a map where you're always on the move (where you'll then want the details spread out across the map so you don't totally run the chances of having an extremely laggy game).
As for free media you can use, definitely check out
Model Pack 36 which TGC generously released to the community as a gift during their 10th year anniversary. You might want to sift through the
Entity Packs section of
fps-files.com, where you can find a great selection of building and city model packs. For some fantastic, larger billboard trees to hide some edges of your maps or fill some empty spaces on the horizons (which by the way, don't produce lag so go crazy with 'em), check out Rolfy's
tree pack that he generously released. Also another billboard pack of smaller trees was released generously by Marc Steene
here.
Just remember, a little mistake a lot of developers make that really takes away from the realism of the experience is letting the player glimpse the bottom of the skybox, something they should never see. With a sniper game where you're constantly above the map surveying giant areas, this can start to prove tricky trying to cover up every angle and spot the skybox can be seen beneath the ground. So, just for one piece of advice, I recommend strongly the player never be able to actually get in the tallest of buildings, however relatively tall yet still shorter buildings amidst those towering ones. This can also prove to give the feeling that the map around the player is immense. Trying to use the sense that the world is
huge when it really isn't, is the ultimate goal you're going to be striving for in your environment.
In the end, it really boils down to your creativity, and different tricks you can discover and accomplish with FPSC. For the most part, it's not what you can be told, simply what you can learn on your own - the things we can offer you, and the program itself are just merely tools. It's up to you to take them and design that masterpiece you'd love to see. So long as you have fun as well! But the more passion and time you put into your project, the higher quality it will be.
Hopefully this gives you some inspiration and ideas of what you can do, I really do think with some effort you could pull off a great sniper game, and it would surely be something new around here. If you've got anymore questions though, I'd be more than willing to help out.
Good luck man
Cheers
Life would be much easier if I had the source code.
