Hellkeeper's Note

Long Time No See

I have been working on a single-player map. But that's not what I'm going to talk about now. A bit after releasing Riot I was contacted to do a Single Player map for Unreal (without 227), which I did. I put a lot of work into it, it's not perfect, but I think it is good. I will talk about it only when the entire campaign is released, or when it is cancelled and I release it as a Special map.

Because Exar and Riot will be included in the next issue of Patch 227 (and the subsequent versions), I have been told to modify slightly Riot. I had nothing but positive echoes for Exar, and I think it deserved it. For Riot, there was some reserves - which I understand fully. Smirftsch commented on the fact that despite the rain, all was dry and there was no splash. I used the FootStepSounds for the mud texture on the lower level, and the sounds made by the players walking in the mud or jumping in it conveyed the wetness, but otherwise he was right: no splashing effect and no texture effect was used.

I slightly altered the map: I would nomally not change a finished project to prevent mismatching and compatibility problems, but since it will be circulated more than ever through 227, I figured it was now or never: I created a WetTexture effect based on my original mud texture, keeping the same detail texture and the same sounds, and applied it by default on the meshes. Additionally, I corrected a couple of problems: the projector on the upper level was changed from Transluscent to Modulated and its texture modified to create the same effect as the other projectors: a wet and old poster. The previous effect made it seem like the paper was a hologram against the wall.

The two south rooms were considered a single zone because of a stupid mistake: I had forgotten to seal the corridor where the stais are, so that they formed only one zone. I added a Zone Portal, modified another one which caused a couple of possible HOMs, and was then able to put the BSP sliders almost on their normal settings (with a slightly unbalanced tree). The first two versions of the map had a completely unbalanced tree (slider on 10) because of geometric artifacts created by higher values. This also allowed me to tweak the lightmap settings in a couple of zones to increase their resolution and come up with better shadows.

Now that Riot is fixed, I have plans, plans involving Unreal 2, but I have no precise idea and everything is still at the conception table. I'm discussing the idea with GreatEmerald, who is more or less the only person I know still interested in it. We'll also try and find out how the Golem format works, and will maybe come up with interesting documentation for this uncanny version of the Unreal Engine. Though most of the basic stuff should be uploaded to the OldUnreal Wiki, a couple of long tutorials may be stored here.

Hellkeeper, 10/04/2012 à 21h45

Post-Mortem DM-Atomnium

DM-Atomnium was at some point the very best map I had produced. To be honest, I still think it is one of my best works, only slightly inferior to DmExar (which dominates everything I have made up to now). DM-Karalen, DM-Premaka and DM-Megatan are all more or less on the same level - with DmRiot maybe a bit better than them and DM-Honored a bit worse. DM-Cooling and CTF-Axlik were only experimental works and were not intended to be widely played. If Exar is my best work, Atomnium is a close second - at least in my opinion - and this is even more satisfying when I remember its chaotic and endless development. Atomnium was a real learning ground in many respects not linked to mapping itself, but regarding frustration, lack of ideas and self-imposed constraints.

The final build was accomplished in the second half of June 2008. That brings us back three years into the past. It might be surprising to talk about it so long after its release, especially considering that I have released 4 maps and a side project in the mean time, but I still remember clearly how it went; badly.

In the very last days of 2006 and very first days of 2007, after about a year with no finished project, I was becoming desperate to issue something. Anything. Karalen was almost a year old already, and I had not learned anything building it. I had issued Cockpit, which was not a playable map and consisted in only one room anyway. I had envisioned many things, from a grand CTF map that I had already begun in the form of the ill-fated CTF-Hellkeeper, to an indoor assault map based on DOM-Core's design, but also BR and DM projects with Arborea or medieval themes. I had thought about everything and anything. What I had done, however, was nothing. In mid-2006 it had occurred to me that CTF-Hellkeeper, despite almost two years of work, original plans sketched in Italy, huge experiments and set-ups with emitters, it was doomed, to be blunt, it sucked. Despite all the work I had put into it, its gameplay was simply not good enough. It had almost no height variation and only one route. I dumped it with regrets.

I did nothing for months, until, in a sudden burst of indignation, I decided to do something, something useless and soulless, just to keep myself working on something. I took the overused Shiptech theme I had already abused in Megatan and Premaka (and Cockpit) because I knew it perfectly. At that point, I was not striving for originality or uniqueness, or interesting things, I was only falling back on this package because I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything with unfamiliar assets given my lack of ideas. With a greyish-green texture, I started subtracting cubes in the last few months of 2006. It was only the beginning of a long disaster.

In January 2007 I showed everyone what I had done. I could only sum it up by saying that it was being done under "moral constraint" imposed by myself. It was what I would later call "beam-fest". I had decided to use beams as my unique mean of decorating the map, as I had no other idea.

For someone who had abandoned many of its last projects because they were unplayable, I was making a remarkably bad job at improving the situation. The map was symmetric, although in a strange and complex way, as the two levels were not symmetric relatively to the same point. There was only one way to access each level on each side, which meant that the map would suffer problems due to its structure. It was narrow, which hindered movement. In terms of BSP, it was a complete mess. There was almost no Static-Meshes in the map, and all brushes were solid. Using Semi-Solids gave me huge BSP holes, and when I tried to convert some of my twisted brushes into meshes, it gave me lighting problem so huge fixing them would have been a full-time job. The initial release of that alpha was met with initial enthusiasm, but this was mostly because people who knew me were eager to see what I would do after Karalen. When things began to cool down and real critical feedbacks started to arrive, reception became exceptionally lukewarm. The map was ugly, it was bugged (several flickering polygons were noted); it was terrible on a gameplay point of view. Adding insult to injury, I was not fond of it, it was hard to edit because of its structure and the horrible unaligned BSP was becoming troublesome.

I had to rework it, and rework it entirely. It was still an early alpha and nothing was settled. Someone suggested I should mirror everything I had already done and link both circular structures with corridors in a DM-Compressed way. I suggested several ways to improve connectivity, but each of my attempts was met with doubtful comments: my fellow testers and mappers could not see a way to make it less bad. To be honest, I couldn't either. Moreover, the map had no interesting concept or idea behind it, it was just a contrived beam-fest.

Mid-2007: I had not done anything more on the map. I would launch UnrealEd, open the map, stare at it for a moment and then go do something else. I couldn't, for the life of me, decide what to do with it. I was angry at it and at me. Life was not helping me either. In the last third of 2007, I dropped out of school and took a shitty job, I was less than happy. DM-Atomnium was dumped. Parts of my computer died and I lost it anyway. I was low. I had put DM-Atomnium in my Lost Maps' Pantheon long ago.

2007 ended. Unreal Tournament 3 was released. Even if I had had a project going, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that, now, UT2004 was dead and using it for maps was useless and foolish. I began studying Unreal 2's systems of Particles, dialogs and events. It led nowhere, because Unreal 2 was the last platform one should use for his mod or custom content. I abandoned the idea, and I more or less thought I was done with mapping at that time, given that UT3 was what it is. Most of my mapping-time was spent doing little experiments on UT99 and UT2004 - it was when I updated CTF-Axlik's graphics -, small things with triggers and emitters. After a while, I stopped launching UnrealEd out of habit.

In March 2008, I suddenly realized I was forgetting how to use UnrealEd after I found myself unable to answer a really stupidly easy question on some forum. That was an outraging realization: not only was I empty and unproductive, I was also becoming unhelpful and useless. "Well, I thought, it's time to find something to do if you don't want to forget every bloody thing, you spineless imp". The last modification of Atomnium dated back to February 2007, as did the last post of the topic about it on Unreal-Design. That was more than a year old. I posted, digging this topic out of its grave, to ask if someone still had an early version of, I quote, "that shit". It turns out someone (Alea) still did. Incredibly, the guy had stored it somewhere for a full year and sent it back to me.

Oh but it was not over yet. When I opened it, it was as chaotic and disastrous as I remembered, but I had leveled down. I also picked up Warsow and began to play a lot, spending much of my free-time on it.

I toyed with the idea of rebuilding it from scratch with the original map as blueprint, as I had done with Premaka and Megatan, but in the end I rolled with the first sketch. Everything was off the grid, which was hidden, anyway, by all the brushes I had, rotated 45°. Seeing how un-cluttering the viewports was almost impossible, I decided to just go with the flow. I converted my custom static-meshes back into brushes and added lifts to finally fix my connectivity problem, enhance the flow and add the possibility to lift-jump to add even more possibilities. Looking back on this map, it could have been finished in a few months only had I made this lift from the beginning, instead of waiting a full year to do it.

I finished decorating by just piling beams ad nauseam. When all the walls were covered with shiptech-textured beams, I covered parts of the floor too. When I had sufficiently abused the brushwork, I used blue and yellow/orange lights to lit the whole, with touches of red - a very very very (very) traditional lighting - I would use almost the same colours in DmExar, one year later, almost to the day. To add a feature to the map; I added a semi-random event with a "Bang" sound, camera shakes and smoke falling down from the ceiling to simulate bombings. To further enhance my walls, I added lights between some beams and upped the lightmap factor to get complex shadows at the cost of a tiny performance hit.

And there you go, I released Atomnium in June 2008. Lo and behold, I had done something! It had taken about 18 months, but I had succeeded. Compared to Premaka and Karalen, it was slightly more complex, as it had 3 levels and was not mirrored the same way. It was of course smaller than Megatan but much better gameplay-wise. As far as visuals were concerned, it had its own personality, if only because it was beam-land and a style I can only describe as being "a bit fucked up". The final release came a few days later, with a couple of bugs corrected. A few HOMs were hunted down. Still, you can find a couple of them today in very specific places view from very specific angles. Visiting the map in Zone/Portal mode shows why they still exist; The BSP Cuts are... Well... It's a bloody mess.
There also remains, to this day, a huge zoning bug which causes the upper room to be part of one of the two main zones. If the map wasn't so old, I would fix it, but I noticed it only months after it was finished, so the Lighting Gun Room and the Bio Rifle Side will remain fusioned.

It also remains my map with the most brushes, exactly 1800, 65 more than DmExar.

HOLY SHIT IT'S A MONSTER

Hellkeeper, 30/09/2011 à 18h00

Tarquin Tutorial

Since the extinction of PlanetUnreal a few years ago and the subsequent destruction of Tarquin's website and documentation, Tarquin's great tools have been almost completely forgotten and lost; I only know of Amisa's advertisment about them, but even there they're only mentionned en passant and the Tarquin Extruder isn't mentioned. After using it extensively for years I did what I thought about doing many times and wrote a tutorial which I believe to be complete.

I have been mapping an Unreal 1 single player map for someone and had to trick the game with warpzones in order not to let the node and poly counters go through the roof because of a huge church I was asked to make and which is now completely overdone. I have not been making much progress for the last few eeks though. I don't plan on showing screenshots of it since it is supposed to be a surprise in a single player adventure.

I have played many games, spent hours on Victoria. The game unfolds a bit more through each game and shows strange bugs. After turning the small and sparsely populated (127,000 inhabitants) Uruguay into a gigantic superpower (200,000,000 inhabitants, 150 divisions, hundreds of warships, main producer of all manufactured goods on the planet) and using it to crush the Royal Navy and the US. fleet, I conquered most of Germany with Denmark by releasing the beast that is Russia - my greatest ally - to set fire and spread chaos in Europe, by taking them into carefully planned wars against Prussia and Austria. Meanwhile France jumped aboard and took its share of the Reich too. Fun times.

I played Sweden and after a complicated set of events and bugs, managed to get a transport boat in the land army. Things started to get quite metaphysical when I loaded the army into transport ships. The bug having persisted, I found myself loading a transport ship inside a transport ship, but when I tried to unload my army and its land-boat on the coast of Burma, the game crashed.

Hellkeeper, 24/08/2011 à 23h35