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Post-Abortion
I can't really say I've been putting a lot of efforts into having my last project live, although I did have some ideas for a few parts of the map I never started to build.
Since I never gave any sort of explanation on why I had decided to stop working on CTF-Hellkeeper and Dm-Quaker (which changed to Quaker2 and LargeQuake on its way to hell) I will give a few clues about why I stopped building NewMap.unr (it never had a real name) after a few weeks, roughly three days after I mentionned it here, which makes it a solid two months of on and off work. What is striking is that I never even tried to expand on the tiny base room I had prepared at first.
So first things first. Why did I started this map ?
Once upon a time, as I was looking for a few tricky set of triggers and scripted triggers in Unreal 2 and was having my mind conscienciously havoced by how tedious and inelegant the system they used is, I decided to have a look at some scripted stuffs in the first Unreal which had simpler systems of triggers, and on my way I opened Gateway.unr.
Now for those who don't know it, Gateway is a kind of bonus in Unreal, that is a completely empty map with working doors and lifts, a great skybox, really nice architecture and classy animated teleporters with a stargate-like feeling which is usually a bad thing but seemed to work quite well here.
I wanted to have the same kind of architecture as Gateway. Here's for why I did it. Now, let's move on to why I failed.
Obviously, the first choice I made was utterly stupid in that I started building something with the main walls of what-should-have-been-the-main room inclined by 45°. Even with the help of the mighty Vertex-Editing Tool - quintessential accomplishment of the human mind only rivalled by Plato's writings - it sooned looked like a strange mess of blue and yellow lines, whereas the map had only flat planes, a traditional sign that the man in control is only virtually in said control, which means I did not knew what I was doing, but damn was I making it badly. The second huge mistake was to use Ship.utx and Playershp.utx as my main sources of textures. That meant that the map would be various shades of blue with occasional spots of other colours as attractive as brown, grey or beige, with no help to be found in lighting as something mainly coloured in blue would look dirty if not lit in blue, or blue if lit in blue, or blue if lit in white. Of course, I could make a blue map, but I would avoid making a complete map with only one colour, mainly because it sucks.
In the prospect of having a misaligned blue and lazily textured map, I started having real problems because of how I had conceived the whole thing, that is to say how I had not conceived it. The main room was built using the Build As It Goes (BAIG©) method (patent pending) which is one the stupid traps of lazy designers who end up with a symmetric stuff that cannot be turned into a not-symmetric stuff without entirely re-designing the project. Afterward, I found out I had started doing something that would end up being too open or too close, depending on the way I would proceed next, and I started the map as a mistake (as a whole) since I had no way to correct its numerous problems whithout a total rethinking of it. Namely, coming up with a floorplan or a basic layout, even something drafted on a napkin, as I more or less did with Honored (already two years ago).
So I gave up. After not that much time indeed. That was less painful than CTF-Hellkeeper which had been on my mind for nearly three years when I declared it a dead project, but a little more than the usual messy collections of assets I come up with most of the time. There were some things I would have liked to try, such as a large glass-walls over the first floor, looking on outer space as in Gateway, and I had started working on some new textures for a nice sky but I just dropped them as I dropped the map. Mostly, the problem was one of basic structure and lack of planification of the aformentioned main room, which made it exactly the same sort of failure as the ones that plagued DM-Quaker (and the numerous offshoots I tried to get out of it): no plan, no idea what would come out of it. That is the reason I made the old Exar layout at some point (in... 2006 ?) which would obviously have a playable final shape, since it had been first thought in terms of gameplay (and incidentally, it may very well be the best of my maps on this point).
Next goal : some playable layout. Although the prospect of another deathmatch map is not as compelling as it used to be. As for singleplayer projects, It could be interesting, but I would like to use complex scripted sequences, weird particle effects, dialogues, shaders and meshes, which means I need an engine that can do all this. Since I am alone and not an able scripter, that would exclude UDK, which leaves me with Unreal 2, and that means plenty of works, no players, many UnrealEd crashs and so on. As for other engines, there is approximately nothing available that would allow me to do this.
Hellkeeper, 19/01/2010 à 15h45
Current project
No update since June, this is getting ridiculous.
Since I don't often have something going on it's worth telling it to the world : yes, I am working on something. Though it's more something to kill time than a real project currently.
If you can't see anything it's because there's almost nothing for now. Moreover, I started the map on a 45° angle shape and it's not easy aligning vertices and textures. As for movers, it's Hell. There's just one room at the moment and I don't have any idea how to enlarge the playground.
Hellkeeper, 05/01/2010 à 14h28
DmExar released
This is a little project I made to mess around with Unreal227's new features (I used one jumper, a new weapon and some particle Emitters). It's not a state of art hardcore map but the layout is quite good. It used to be a base for a hypothetical map Jival and me were going to do together but that was two years ago and we never even tried to do anything with it. Fortunately, he still had the layout.
Notice you can't play this one anywhere else than in Unreal 227. No previous version of Unreal and no Unreal Tournament setup can handle it.
Update 12/06/09 - 23:00 : Corrected a minor glitch.
Update 15/06/09 - 20:01 : Added a music.
Hellkeeper, 12/06/2009 à 00h36