@EA_Atic I work in architecture and cgi, and I do games design as a hobby. So basically I do building design, landscape design, 3d modelling, texture making, material making, texture painting, animation, rigging, rendering, and a bit of coding (although I'm not good at coding). There is a lot of overlap of skills and I can say what I am proposing is both easy and fast. The maps need basically no gameplay testing as you are replicating what already exists - if its unbalanced that's how it was in the game its copying and balancing can be done after release - it is very simple to adjust the number of vehicles to fine tune balance. Pretty much all of the objects are already in game. The only thing that would take time on this front would be finding suitable objects to replace ones that are not in game, or porting over the original models in specific cases.
Even if BF2042 uses a different measurement / scale, and the reference for 0,0,0 are different its still easy to take a project from one thing to another as long as you have access to the original file.
You don't even need to be able to open the original project, if you can get lists with co-ordinates you are more than halfway done - ie lists of all the buildings / objects, list of all the hand place foliage, list of all the capture points, list of all the spawn points. You start up a new file in the Frostbite editor place enough things so info is generated that you can copy the list info into. Sure you will need to set up some custom scripts to do a find and replace particular words and phrases before copying over, but thats super super easy. You may need to set up the script to scale the cordinates / add or subtract if the reference for 0,0,0 is different but this can also be done with a script if you can't select everything and scale the position in the Frostbite editor. There might not be a way to directly copy the info in but there are plenty of ways to open up closed files sort through the gibberish and find where the info can be pasted in.
If you can get the terrain mesh, ie - heightmap or mesh if it is just 3d model file then you are another 10% done.
That leaves sorting out the lists - ie if you can't get layer / property info you'll need to associate spawns with a particular capture point, setting whether objects are destructible / non-destructible and so forth - thats another 10% done.
That leaves terrain / decal painting, setting up foliage, scripted events, weather and lighting.
Terrain and decal painting will take some time, but a lot of it will be generated with algorithms - terrain at angle x at this altitude y and between these co-ordinates www and zzz does so and so.
Most of the foliage can be generated from taking the material map for the terrain mesh and tweaking it. The material map would have been done at the same time as the terrain / decal painting.
Weather and lighting is easy, you aren't setting up dynamic weather (ie storms / tornados) - the portal maps don't have dynamic weather. So basically you are just going to take the skydome or whatever sky-system being used in the previous title or try and generate one that closely matches the original. Then you just add the cloud system being used in one of the existing portal maps and make some minor tweaks.
That leaves scripting - background war animations can be left out - they are nice and add a lot of ambience but if it takes multiple months to do this for one map, just add them later.
The selected maps have very few scripted events. If you wanted you could add some of the scripted events from the BF4 version of Operation Firestorm but this would delay things.
So basically you've just got to add in the opening animations so people playing it with BF2042 factions get their osprey / hind / squad opening scene, and the scripted events for Rush / Breakthrough - ie after this MCOM this new shape mesh is used for the playable area for team x.
Done. Completed level.
Around 70% of the work is already done before you start, a large amount of the remaining work gets automated. Most of the work is just sorting out things that couldn't be automated, terrain painting, scripting and trying to replicate the weather / lighting from the original level.
The amount of testing done is - does this crash? does this crash on a particular system? does this crash on a particular game mode? does this crash in a particular area of the map? does this crash with a particular number of players? does this crash after 1000 games? Balancing can be tweaked later - the balancing was already set by the previous game and you are replicating the capture / spawn locations / number of vehicle spawns.
So how long would that take - probably a couple weeks for team to figure out the steps of how to do it if its not clear.
Once its figured out possibly two weeks for one person who is well versed in the process, maybe a month and a half if they wanted the terrain and foliage to look really good.
I would assume that there would be multiple people working on the project at the same time but certain tasks can only be performed by one person at a time - so lets say the benefit of an extra person is only 40% that of the first person. Then you have a team of 5 people working on the project - it should take a couple weeks to pump out a portal map if all the structures, objects and foliage are already in game.
The only reason I could see this not working is if the game designers were being forced to use Mac's, because then you would be missing most of the tools which would make this feasible.
Apart from that, this should really be the easiest work possible for a map designer, and you get to skip most of the stressful stuff (ie figuring out the design and gameplay elements) and can spend time on the more relaxing parts like painting the terrain textures. Sure you also miss out on the most rewarding aspects of map making - making something new, but the idea of portal is to bring back old maps. I'd rather see 6 additional ported maps to portal every few months over no new portal maps since release.
