Hellkeeper's Note

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 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 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 small 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.
Today also, there remains 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

Post-Mortem DmRiot

As promised in my last note, here is the post-mortem of my last map and its chaotic development.

Two years were necessary to build this map, and yet it is nothing impressive. The simple reason is that these two years were mostly used to think about it and fail at making anything, with only the last months spent actively mapping anything out of the pile of ideas and failed designs I had accumulated over time.

On 15th June 2009 at 19:57, I rebuilt and saved the final build of DmExar, with a new music and a corrected collision bug. The few weeks afterwards were spent looking at it with a fresh new look - and finding two more problems: a misplaced corona and an almost invisible texture problem caused by a wrong brush order; these were never corrected as I did not feel like having a third version when all these were barely noticeable and might create compatibility problems. After that, I wanted to do another U227 map and yet had no idea.

I was quite busy at the time, yet managed to plan a medium-size layout which, at the time, seemed quite nice and original. Many parts of it were hastily drawn in the margins of whatever piece of paper I could find. For personal reasons, I was not able to start working on it immediately, and it is only in January 2010 that I decided to start actual mapping. I had made up my mind to use a classic yet twisted theme based on brutalism and totalitarian architecture, which, now that I think of it, is not entirely unrelated to the landscape of destroyed London in the 1984 film 1984. I wanted large concrete structures with few decorations and simple flat surfaces, the opposite of Exar. I also started thinking about decoration, and at that time, I designed the concrete eagle with BSP.

It took me a few months of trial and errors regarding dimensions and setting before I started the map itself in April. It immediately became clear that though the layout looked good on paper, it was, truly, an abject thing in the game itself. There were only two real "rooms", with many side-corridors linking parts of the map unnecessarily, several places completely worthless, with the main fighting area itself a large flat zone on only two levels. The reasons it looked better on paper was, first, that I imagined that what looked bad there would be better in-game, and secondly that it was more or less devoid of straight lines, allowing places which were in fact far apart to blend nicely on the plan. I spent two weeks trying to think of something better until I finally dropped the idea completely, foolishly thinking that I would do something better later.

After months of idleness as far as mapping is concerned, I came back to it and tried to see if I could save parts of it, including the room with the eagle whose shape and design I like more than any other part of the map, and which was the only room I had already started to embellish. I mainly deleted the northern part of the map and the upper levels for which I had no hope. Meanwhile, beta-versions of the 227g patch were delivered to testers by smirftsch, who gave me access to them. I finally abandoned the layout in its entirety in May, when I was given the task of writing a basic help file for UnrealEd in order to finally make the "Help" button in UnrealEd useful. Seeing how DmRiot seemed doomed, I accepted eagerly, so as to have something mapping-related to do. This help is now part of the patch, though it does not always load up on some computers. I would come back to it several times to adapt it to a couple of new things and a few requests by smirftsch. By now, 2010 was about to end and I felt quite anxious as it would be a full year with nothing done, something that I had only experienced in 2007 before.

Starting from the eagle room, I tried to design new layouts, but only one was completed and I knew, as I completed it, that it was even worse than the first one. I looked at ancient aborted projects from 2007 without any better idea. My attempts to integrate these elements into outdoor terrains were not more successful. In the end, I abandoned Riot completely. After more thinking, I started a small DM project which was killed quickly by bugs and bad design. It was followed by project VIL, an industrial-themed realistic DM map with static-meshes, custom textures and detailed geometry, but it went nowhere beyond a single room, and though I keep it somewhere on my hard drive, it is clear that nothing will ever come out of it without a complete reworking and actual planning. 2011 was now upon us, and 227g was released in April 2011, more or less a full year after I had started working on Riot, which was now in my Aborted Projects list.

Being quite depressed and badly wanting to map something, I came back to the eagle room. Unlike before, I took only the room itself and nothing of the surrounding areas. It had previously been the inside of a small building surrounded by large volumes and great spaces. I now thought that the entire idea was wrong and took only the room itself: the inside, and none of the brushes that made the outside. I started building the north-west room, wondering what I could do with it. After that, the east room was built with difficulty and the project ground to a halt when I had to build the southern part of it. It took days and days of thinking, trying, talking with Jival to complete the painful delivery of the south-east room. After that, I was more than fed up with this and the south-west room, the last one, was hastily slapped together with minimal planning, and reusing the stairs of the main room of DmExar. I had decided earlier in the process to make it a rainy map with a muddy terrain on the lower level, and I was still using the brutalist totalitarian design I had adopted in 2009. After cutting out the window part of a UT texture, I created most of the few niceties with the TarquinExtruderBrush. The terrains themselves were made with static-meshes. As 227h had been released in the mean time (being the second version released during my work on this map - that says a lot on my workflow), static-meshes enjoyed a solid support. I used the BSP based terrain tool to create them. 227h has a nice way of handling this: surfaces with the FakeBackdrop flag are deleted when a BSP object is converted to static-Mesh, so I used this to delete all the surfaces of the terrain brush except the tessellated floor whose normals I flipped thanks to the corresponding Boolean in the Mesh Browser. Once converted back to BSP, the result was a tessellated sheet which was normally edited with Vertex Editing and shaped as a muddy terrain. A custom ground texture was applied, aligned to floor and the result was converted back to a static-mesh. Each room has one sheet. The eastern stairs were also converted to Static-Mesh and the BSP underneath it set to FakeBackdrop as a BSP hole appeared there which would not go away despite all my efforts. I also diminished the BSP cuts with the building slider as the entire structure is nightmarish, with all its 45° inclined brushes.

After that, only cosmetics were applied: a couple of projectors with loosely fascist-looking images to mimic posters, a shield and sword decoration built with BSP was placed in a few places, much like a couple of other eagles. A last panel with great flags, more soviet-looking than fascist was also made. For the rain, I used one of the new actors of 227. As it can only create rain in a whole zone or in a cubic volume around it, I used many of them in each room to fit more or less with all the 45° walls. A dark skybox was made. Lighting and Gameplay were made in 10 minutes each, with no planning or creativity. For sounds, I used the rainfall sound of NyLeve as a rain sound, a couple of wind-sounds and fountain sounds on the ground levels to mimic the impact of raindrops on concrete and mud. The custom mud texture was given "flitch-flotch" footstep sounds according to its material. Its hitsound was replaced with a grass footstep sound so that players jumping on the mud from the upper levels would not make a big "blomp" sound which fits concrete and stone.

The baby was released to a candid world on 21st June 2011, more than two years after DmExar. The next day, version 1.1 was released with a few changes: the outdoor lighting was slightly changed to a pale-orange - it makes the inside lighting, which is completely white, look much colder, and also fits with sunlight never being totally white. A possible collision bug was corrected on the static-mesh stairs of the east room, and the walls of the ground level were covered with a new texture with mud on the grey concrete walls to make the mud/concrete transition less abrupt. A lighting bug was fixed on the lift.

And thus DmRiot finally came out and was ended as a project. It's not great, but it's not that bad either. There are ideas I always wanted to use there, but they are not fully developed. Many parts of it were rushed, yet I like it as it is. I guess the best way to see what a mess it really is it to take a look at it in UnrealEd itself. Go ahead. There's also an unchecked group in it which contains the original eagle and shield decorations.

Hellkeeper, 08/07/2011 à 13h50