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Hellkeeper, 30/09/2011, 18:35
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 maps with DmExar. The final build was finalized in the second half of June 2008, three years ago. It might seem futile to discuss it so late after its release, considering I released 4 maps and a side-project since then, but I still remember clearly how it went: badly.
Late 2006-early 2007, after almost a full year with no finished project, I was desperate to make something. Anything. Karalen was almost a year old already and had not been a learning experience. I had released Cockpit, which was not a playable map and was limited to a single room anyway. I had considered several things, from a grand CTF map that I had already begun (the ill-fated CTF-Hellkeeper), to an indoor assault map based on the design of DOM-Core. 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 occurred to me that CTF-Hellkeeper, after two years of work and a lot of experimenting, was doomed: it sucked. Despite all my efforts, its layout was simply not good enough.
I did nothing for months until, in a sudden burst of indignation, I decided to force muself into some project just to keep myself working on something. I took the overused Shiptech theme I had already abused in Megatan and Premaka (and, in a way, Cockpit) because I knew it perfectly. At that point, I was not aiming for originality. I was only falling back on this package because I knew I wouldn't achieve anything with unfamiliar assets given my lack of ideas. Using 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 as being done under self-imposed "moral constraint". It was what I would later call "beam-fest".
For someone who had abandoned many projects because they were unplayable I was making a remarkably poor job of improving the situation. The map was symmetrical, although in a complex way, as the two levels were mirrored along different axes. There was only one way to access each level on each side, which meant the map would suffer from its very structure. It was narrow, which hindered movement. In terms of BSP, it was a complete mess. Almost no static-meshes were used and all brushes were solid as using semi-solids gave me huge BSP holes. And when I tried to convert some of my twisted brushes into meshes, I got lighting issues which proved to big of a challenge for my patience. The initial release of the alpha version was met with initial enthusiasm, but this was mostly because friends were eager to see what I would come up with after Karalen. When things began to cool down and real critical feedback started to arrive, reception became exceptionally lukewarm. The map was ugly, it was crippled (several flickering polygons were spotted), it had terrible flow. Adding insult to injury, I was not fond of it. It was hard to edit because of its complex structure and messy geometry.
I had to rework it entirely. It was still an early alphan so nothing was settled. Someone suggested I should mirror everything and link both parts with corridors in a DM-Compressed sort of way. I suggested several ways to improve connectivity, but each of my attempts was met with doubtful comments: testers and fellow mappers could not see a way to improve on it. To be honest, I couldn't either. Moreover, the map had no interesting concept behind it, it was just a contrived beam-fest.
Mid-2007: I had not made any progress. I would launch UnrealEd, open the map, stare at it for a moment and then focus on 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, things worsened suddenly on a personal level. DM-Atomnium was dumped. Parts of my computer died and I lost the file anyway. I was low. I had appended DM-Atomnium's name to my list of aborded projects.
2007 ended. With the release of Unreal Tournament 3, I was overwhelmed with the impression that UT2004 was now dead and mapping for it was foolish. I began studying Unreal 2's particle system, dialog manager and triggers. It led nowhere, because Unreal 2 was indeed even more obsolete than UT2004. I gave up and considered myself more or less done with mapping at the time. I spent most of my time experimenting with minor UT99 and UT2004 stuff - I updated CTF-Axlik's visuals during this period - using triggers and emitters. After a while, I stopped launching UnrealEd out of mere habit.
In March 2008, I suddenly realized I was forgetting how to use UnrealEd after finding myself unable to answer a basic question on a forum. This was an outraging epiphany: not only was I unproductive, I was also becoming unhelpful. "Well, I thought, it's time to do something if you don't want to forget everything". The last modification of Atomnium was back in February 2007, just like the last post in the topic about it on Unreal-Design. That was more than a year before. I dug this topic out of its grave, asking if someone still had an early version of the map stored away. It turns out someone (Alea) did. Incredibly, the guy had kept it somewhere for a full year and was able to send it back to me.
When I opened it, it was as chaotic and disastrous as I remembered, but I had leveled down. I had to re-learn UnrealEd, but also reeducate myself on how this mess of a map worked.
I toyed with the idea of rebuilding it from scratch, using the original map as a blueprint, as I had done with Premaka and Megatan, but I ended up just rolling with the first alpha. Seeing how uncluttering the viewports was almost impossible, I decided to just go with the flow and build upon this rotten base. I converted my custom static-meshes back into brushes and added lifts to finally fix my connectivity problem, enhance the flow and add the opportunity to lift-jump to the upper floor. Looking back on how the level came out, it could have been a few week's job had I made these lifts from the beginning instead of waiting a full year to do so.
I finished decorating by just piling beams ad nauseam. When all the walls and ceilings 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 map, with touches of red - a very, very, very (very) traditional lighting scheme - I would use almost the same colours in DmExar, a year later almost to the day. To add a feature to the map, I added a semi-random event with a "bang" sound, smoke falling down from the ceiling and camera effects in order to simulate explosions. To further enhance my walls, I added lights between some beams and increased the lightmap factor to get complex shadows out of the mess of beams and supports around the lighting fixtures.
And there you go, I released Atomnium in June 2008. Lo and behold, I had done something! It had taken nearly 18 months, but I had succeeded. Compared to Premaka and Karalen, it was slightly more complex, as it had 3 levels and its symmetry was much more complex. It was of course smaller than Megatan but much more interesting to play. As far as visuals are concerned, it had its own personality, if only because it was beam-land and a style I can only describe as being "messy". A final version a few days later fixed a handful of bugs, even though you can still find a couple HOMs today in fringe situations.
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 months after it was finished, so the Lighting Gun Room and the Bio Rifle Side will remain fused.
It's also my map with the most brushes to this day, exactly 1800, 65 more than DmExar.
