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Hellkeeper, 28/10/2011, 19:31
Post-Mortem DmP17
Much like Exar and Honored, P17 was tons of fun to create and a nice change from DmRiot.
After releasing DmRiot, I was pretty much done with UnrealEd and I knew I wouldn't have the will to come back to it for a while. I still wanted to release something in 2012 and avoid another two-years gap in my schedule. I was soon asked to make a single-player map in the SkyCity style (think Na Pali Haven) for a single-player adventure under Delacroix's supervision. The map was finished in the first few months of 2012 after a long time in the making, it was a small project and not very good. The single-player campaign it is supposed to be part of has still not been released and seems to be stuck in developpment hell. I may release the map separately if the project eventually dies out. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to detail P17's evolution, which might be easier to follow if you download this compilation of all successive versions of the map.
Soon after the completion of this yet-unrealeased SP map, I started planning a new Unreal Deathmatch map. I first needed to come up with a nice layout. I explored many of my abandonned projects (my first stop when I need to start something new is always this bottomless pit of failed projects) and extracted a few interesting parts. One was from an aborted project parallel to Riot, another one came from a Deathmatch stub, another taken from DM-Quaker and the last bit was borrowed from Lruce Bee's, DM-TensileSteel. I like this map's compact layout and the way each room seems to be carved in the little space available behind every wall, an effect I attempted to recreat in DmRiot. The idea of a narrow lower level directly underneath the upper one drove the map's concept entirely. To link all the different height levels, I started my work from the corner of the map, which constrained the main structured much more tightly than if I had started with a central atrium. This stage is seen in test6.unr, demonstrating the first way the collection of ideas started to coalesce.
I put together a basic layout of four main rooms at three height levels, with a lower central corridor. I had settled on the Starship.utx package, a spaceship theme, which would be the human version of what DmExar was to Skaarj.utx. I also liked the idea of having the central lower corridor partially open towards the upper areas, on the northern side of the map. The room I started with, (let's call it Room One), was my main working area at this stage. From IsvKran32, one of the main Unreal maps using the theme I had chosen, I copied the corridor shape and stuck it to the top of Room One, lit with contrasting yellow, red, and some dashes of blue on the screens. This is the stage p1-2012 illustrates. I had also started working on the corridor between Room One, and Room Two, directly east of it.
In p2-2012, I focused on the junction between the four main rooms and the acces to Room One's upper level, as shown in p3-2012. At this point, I started saving different versions of the map with a number system so I could go back to former stages of the map and experiment without the hassle of deleting or moving away large parts of the map to make room. I then linked Room One to Room Three. In p4-2012, I copied the ramp to the other side of the map to provide another access to the third floor.
After a month-long break I reverted to p1, discarding everything except the passage between Room One and Three. I reworked the links between Rooms One and Two. The lower route received its final form (except for a few textures) and the upper one was mostly done too. In Room Four, I changed the platform to a walkway. There were still obvious problems I would have to tackle latter. I began to focus on the ramp.
The p6-2012/p7-2012-stage (for some reason, they are identical as I must have reverted to p6 at some point) was a massive change. I finished the lower corridor between Room Two and Room One and started working from the bottom up on Room one. I finished the ramp and duplicated it elsewhere. I began shaping the lower central corridor and the walls of Room One, but structural problems in Room Three and Four bothered me. I tackled them in p8-2012, and gave the map its quasi-final layout, removing part of the planned third level in Room One. I revamped the doorway between Room One and Room Three, moved the passage between the lower corridor and Room Two at the junction between the corridor and Room Three, but I found I had problems connecting a third level. I had also started working on the lighting.
By p9-2012, the layout was definitive. I had removed all connection between the lower levels of Room Three and Room Four, moving it to the lower central tunnel. I added a third floor and saved some space for a lift in Room Two. This allowed me, in p10-2012, to finish almost all connections. By now, I was lighting each part as soon as the main architecture was done, starting with Room Four. By p11, Room Four was finished and the colour scheme for lights was more or less settled: yellow on the upper levels, blue at the bottom, with red accents. I made a special effort on ceilings, as they're usually the largest flat surfaces in a map. At the stage p13-2012 illustrates, a fourth of the map was done.
From p14-2012 tp p15-2012, I focused on the third level on Room Two and Room One. Most of the later was built of rearranged parts of Room Four. I cobbled together a lift which caused a lot of trouble with lights at first. With Room Two and Room Four finished, things sped up.
At the p16-2012 stage, I had completed Room One effortlessly and could now marvel at the long way this part had come from its humble beginning in test6.unr. I started working on Room Three, working from the bottom up to the ceiling.
There is no p17-2012 because p17-2012 is DmP17 (that's where the name came from). I managed to make Room Three's ceiling looks almost symmetrical, despite one side being vastly larger than the other. I quickly finished the last details, then added pathnodes and sounds. I added a base effect for weapons to highlight their position in the dark, then zoned the map. I had been consistently monitoring the geometry stats and from p9 to p12, my node count had been decreasing constantly. The final map has an honorable 1.68:1 ratio, with 6339 polys and 10627 nodes for a grand total of 2493 brushes - more than any of my previous projects. The BSP tree seems more balanced than in Exar, even though the map looks hellish in UnrealEd. Neither sound nor weapon-placement were thoroughly thought out, as I could not get anyone to beta-test the map before its release.
