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.

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

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.

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 and 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.

Things were not so finished however: in 2012, Smirftsch decided to include both DmRiot and DmExar in the next releases of the patch 227 for Unreal, and felt free to comment on the lack of effects in Riot with the rain. Though I was more or less sure that was the first Unreal map to feature rain made with particle effects, luxury tastes come quickly: now the lack of water on the floor and rain impacts on the concrete and mud were felt to be a problem. A quick modification of the mud texture for a wet effect was sufficient, but as for the rain impacts, the emitting actors had to be modified specifically to allow the use of the particles of another emitter on impact: whenever a rain particle hit the floor, a particle created under the rule of a distant emitter is created.

The foundations of the great concrete cities are full of small recesses and loops created by a complete disregard for urban planification. There is no complete list of the many riots that have been crushed by the Riot Police in the muddy holes between the poorer buildings.

(The end result is so different from the original sketches that I should have changed the title, but in the end, the feeling is close enough.)

Update 22/06/11: 1.1 : fixed a collision bug, a lighting problem, modified some things, corrected errors in the readme. I'll do a post-mortemn someday of this map.

Update: 10/04/12: 1.2 : changed the texture of the terrain meshes to simulate rain impacts. Changed some lightmaps. Fixed an incorrectly sealed zone. Changed a projector from transluscent to modulated with an altered texture.

Update: 21/04/12 : 1.3 : Added rain impact effect, linked to the collision of rain particles on the BSP geometry. Smirftsch pressured me into adding this effect, made possible by Dots' modification of his XWeatherEffect.

I have a complex brush. A very twisted brush which is not only concave but also not fully aligned on the grid, hollowed and whose textures are not exactly fully correct. This one brush is actually the entire border trimming a roughly crescent-shaped platform. Believe me when I say "roughly". The whole contour of the room had to be adjusted to fit the thing as what I had originally planned was absolutely impossible to achieve without breaking all the surrounding BSP and thus the entire map.

Now here is the main problem: the thing was made using a close-pathed square in the Tarquin Extruder Builder Brush, one of the holiest tools known to Man. However, the tool has a tendency towards merging certain faces or not splitting some faces when certain angles are not sufficiently sharp. Or too much. I thus ended up splitting the whole mess into two separate pieces of BSP that were fitted into a big cube and intersected so that the border was only one brush again. However, the intersection itself led to some edges being changed and a few faces being broken. One faces on the bottom side was notably absent. Things were not going well and a few HOMs started springing up and invading the close-by stairs and other tricky parts of the geometry of the room.

After a few tries, it was clear I would not be able to do much better with the crude tools provided by UnrealEd, even the new tools from OldUnreal. I had no choice but to get this stuff through another 3D editor and edit it manually.

I exported it as a .t3d file, but it was soon made apparent to me that this exotic file format, the only brush format UnrealEd can export, was not supported by any easily accessible software. After a little thinking, I converted the broken border into a static-mesh and exported it as a .dxf file. I was then able to import this into Blender. There, I first quadrangulated (does this word even exist?) all the faces that had been turned into triangles by the Static-Mesh step. I proceeded to edit the brush until it was perfect regarding faces, edges and vertices. After a few tries, I was able to export a working .dxf file back and imported it to UnrealEd. The brush being downscaled by a factor of at least 10, I snap-scaled it back to its original size, but adding the border - the ultimate goal of the entire process - destroyed all nearby geometry and made the map unplayable. Taking it out of the map to investigate the new situation, I came to the conclusion that the faces were not all pointing outward; that is, UnrealEd wasn't able to tell the inside of the brush from its outside, and had to consider both the inside of the brush and whatever was outside it as being "out" and thus filled with "void”, which accounted for the total annihilation of the BSP of the map. Back in Blender, I had all the normals recalculated to point outward. In UnrealEd, no further bug was seen.

A few problems remained however. The previous release of patch 227 (the g one) had one stupid and annoying problem: clipping brush used to snap any vertices out of alignment, creating small mistakes, imperceptible polygons and all around bugged geometry, something that was corrected by the release of 227f. However, the edges of my imported border were a bit fuzzy and I suspected the same thing had happened because of the manual upscaling of the brush I had been forced to perform because of the unwanted downscaling of the brush by Blender. Usually, this is easily corrected on simple brushes, as you can paste the brush into notepad and manually correct errors, changing values like 15.998975 into nice 16.000000 ones. However, my brush has 72 vertices and many of them are supposed to be off the grid; this because the Tarquin Extruder Brush, when used to create a diagonal brush, makes sure the brush keeps the desired width, height and breadth, whereas, when doing it by hand, a human level designer will usually slightly alter the dimensions to keep all vertices of all brushes on the grid (and thus have to scale the textures by around 1.15 on 45° brushes).

When looking at the coordinates of my billions of vertices, it became clear it would take ages to see which vertices were purposely off the grid and which ones were to be snapped back. I tried to clip my brush to correct the Z coordinates, but the clipping wanted to merge the clipped faces badly and was essentially cancelling all I had done up until now. In the end, I took the brush to UnrealEd 3.0, where the Vertex Editing tool has a snapping function I used on all the vertices that were supposed to be clean. Afterwards, I pasted the result into textpad and semi-manually corrected the 163 errors that remained. It's only after all this had been done that I was finally able to use the brush in the map with no problem, as one clean and perfect piece of geometry.

As I said earlier, the general design of the map has definitely turned into a very compact and narrow setting completely opposed to the great open spaces of the first copy of Riot. It is much more compact than Exar. It should be able to contain up to three players in the end, but more than this would likely be a ludicrous bloodbath with no gameplay so to speak.

I went for a three-level map as I wanted something that felt very vertical, but it is hard to pile up these levels in such small rooms.

I kept most of the structure, got rid of any attempted decoration and deleted huge lumps of the layout. The basic idea is based on a few doodlings I had scratched on paper about a year ago, without really thinking about it, but a good half of the map was interesting to work on. I decided to start working on it again, and I am now studying several ideas to create another half that would not simply be an excuse to have the good part, as it was in the original project. I have been looking at a few other aborted projects, mainly DM-Quaker, which had one good idea, but I don't see how I would be able to blend parts of these different projects together in a way that would seem fluid and natural. Another aborted project which had kept me busy for a few weeks in January may end up providing a couple of interesting things too.

Right now my problem is getting back into the mood. So much time has passed since I've last been productive that I have lost some of my habits and I don't know where to start. The basic structure is not even half finished and half of what has been accomplished is not even assured to stay in place for more than a few days or weeks, so I cannot even plan deadlines to force me to work harder. This I could do with Honored and Exar, since the layouts were given from the start by old projects.

I thought I would start a huge project with many polygons and attempt to do something UT2004-ish in Unreal to promote U227, only to have my ass handed to me (in a seriously kicked state) when the eleven years-old engine saw what I was up to:

Though the whole map consists only of this staircase, the Versailles-styled ramps were enough to completely kill performances (on a computer which gets crysis to run on very high at full speed), for very simple reasons : Each column being 256 polygons ans one ramp being made of several brushes and 43 column, each with two BSP triangles to link it to the BSP ramp itself that was a lot of polygons. This number was twice as high as there are two ramps (one on each sides), which means 86 columns, 22 016 polygons only for the meshes of the stairs, not counting the BSP polygons and nodes. That, of course, was too much for an engine that slows down on Exar on lower rigs. And this was achieved with only this staircase and its ramp: there's no map around it, it's just stairs in a big empty cube.

So now, I have two things I want to do: make an Unreal map in some way or another (probably a DmExar-style map with ISV-Kran textures), and maybe try this style of Versailles map in UT2004, where polygons wouldn't be so scarce.

Last semester in college was a good one, although two of my courses were taking place at the same time and so I had to decide which one to pursue and which one I would pass only in the delayed september test. So I chose one.

Mid-September, the test was passed, brilliantly validated and I was now supposed to get ready to sign up for a third year in University. Except I could not. I had to wait for Monday 4th for the Jury to decide wether I was accepted or not. Monday 4th being the day courses started automatically meant I would start courses a couple of days latter than I was supposed to.

On Monday, people took their place in a USSR-style row of at least 600 young men and women, stretching from one side of the campus to the other. From the sight it was, I would estimate the waiting time for newcomers to be at least three or four hours, and I thought "No, I'll come back tomorrow". A moment latter, I decided that I would actually sign up, but I wouldn't wait for hours, so I nonchalantly walked to the door, in front of the mob, talked a moment with the security guard, confused him, got in, signed up, payed and walked out, all in about an hour. Once this was done, being a member of the University, I had to go to my own department and sign up for my actual courses. I went there, but it was 12h and all offices were closed until 14h. I didn't wait for two hours, went home. I came back the following day at 9h, supposed opening hour of offices.

A technical problem with public transports delayed my arrival and I arrived at roughly 10h. There, I met some guy from some course I had previously had and we decided to proceed together. The first problem was finding plannings to get our courses selected. Then, we had to find the office for our level. We never found it, so decided to take our turn in the general row of the department. At this moment, my comrade estimated the waiting time to be 45 minutes.

45 minutes latter, as we still had about 45 minutes more to wait, a girl that had signed up earlier in the summer found us, and because she had nothing to do for a few hours, she stayed and we chatted. At 12h, we were the next to pass in the office, but because of the hour, the office closed. The guy inside told us it would open again at 13h, and I immediately felt this would never happen.

During the waiting time, my comrade got to another department we needed to get courses from in order to complete the whole semester, where he wrote down all the options available, while I kept our place in the row. He came back, we managed to get everything in a decent planning, yet we knew 75% of the courses we had chosen would be full or canceled and that we would need to redo the entire thing, or nearly. A teacher I had the previous semester came, saw me, and we started to discuss the ridiculous bureaucratic quagmir we were in. This is when she informed me that she had been in the jury for my case and that it had been hard to get me through, as I had been noted AWOL on half my courses. This was ridiculous and wrong, and she knew it as soon as she noticed that I was supposed to have missed her course, whereas she had always seen me. I fulminated silently about this for the next hours. This had already happened to me in my second year, so I was not very surprised by this huge display of incompetence.

At 14h30, so, exactly 1h30 late, the office opened, we asked about our case and were told that we had to see somewhere, in office 129. We went there. After a 10 minute wait and a bit of thought, this was so obviously not our office that we searched around once more. We finally found our office, completely by chance, and took our place in the row there. At 16h, we finally went in, asked for the paper we needed, and were told the person in charge of this precise paper for our level was not there today. We had been waiting different stuff at different place for exactly six hours. We were not amused.

We went back the following day, still at 9h. The office opened at 10h (one hour late), and we were immediately told that the person was still not there. In the inscription week. Slightly pissed, we went back the third day, waited for the office to open (1h30 late), and a very long long long row of student passed before we could get in, have our paper, sign up for our courses, then go to the other department, sign up for our other courses and finalize the whole thing.

Except for a few units, all the armies of the Western Front are sent East. The Second Regular Army is sent Directly to Manassas while the NG and the IInd and IIIrd Conscript army are sent to Cleveland in order to shorten the front and divert forces from Maryland.

On March 8th 1863, the last two divisions we were ever able to recruit are deployed in Fredericksburg and sent to Manassas. Lee's extraordinary performance at containing the overwhelming Maryland Army is felt to be decisive for the later course of the war.
Dauterive arrives from the west on March 16th and joins the bloodbath in Cleveland. Jackson is still Fighting rebels in Missouri, along with a handful of depleted Union units. On April 2nd 1863, one year after the Conscription act was passed, the US army, though completely desorganized still manages to fight efficiently.

The battle of Cleveland is of course a success, our forces being more then three times superior. As the Norfolk Garrison established control over the aera, Dauterive takes all the available units on a chase to Pittsburgh, leaving only the Norfolk Garrison behind him to secure Cleveland

On April 18th 1863, The battle of Manassas is still going on. Despite the destruction of many US divisions, the US seems willing to throw everything it has in this battle, as if it had infinite manpower. Lee's incredible resistance proves very costly. Divisions have been pulled back from as far as Missouri, and several units have already vanished in the fires of war.

On April 24th, The bloodshed in Manassas comes to an end with the retreat of the remaining Confederate troops to Staunton and Fredericksburg. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the entire Army of Virginia have ceased to exist, and the remains of the IInd Regular Army and of the fresh troops of March consist in only a few hundred shellshocked, wounded men. Though the Western front has been closed, the Eastern front is falling appart, leaving the gate to Richmond wide open.

As the collapse of the Eastern front sucks US divisions from the Northern border, Lee, now without a command, is sent to assist Dauterive's Army of the West in taking Buffalo. US troops starts pouring into Norfolk, threatening Richmond and the CS capitol. The more or less valid IInd Regular Army, replenished with new men, marches towards them, while the Volunteer Regiment of Kentucky and a couple of disorganized units are sent to Manassas, in a desperate effort to isolate more US troops and stop the decomposition of the Confederate Army in Virginia.

Lee marches into Buffalo, looking grim. Though he has six divisions and Billings only four, his army consists mainly of exhausted veterans from the Lake Campaign and not one division has its ranks complete.
On the other side of the front, the Norfolk Battle is a victory, but new US forces gathered in Manassas refuse to leave Confederate grounds. Both the retreating US troops and the victorious IInd Regular Army also arrive and join the Second Battle of Manassas, where the disorganised US troops are finally overwhelmed.
On August 7th 1863, the CSA seems to have the upper hand.

However, riots just behind the frontlines prevent any offensive from the Confederacy. On August 5th, a large offensive lead by the US General Meade, threatens to isolate Lee and Dauterive's Army of the West.

They immediately retreat to save their supply lines and support the Norfolk Garrison. In Manassas, the routed US forces are retreating to Washington, chased by the IInd Regular Army, while the second half of the army stands in Manassas to reestablish Confederate control. Sudden reinforcements in Washington, and the fear of an early conter attack cutting back the Second Regular army leads to the canceling of the assault.

In Pittsburgh, the battle has turned into a ridiculous butchery. As Lee calls for more and more units from the central front and from the west, Meade's Battalion starts to plummet and falls appart. On September 7th, Jackson abandons Buffalo and joins the battle. Two days latter, Missouri officially joins the confederacy.

The Battle of Pittsburgh continues, under the general supervision of Twigs on the Confederate side and Meade on the Union's. Most of the US forces being pinned down there, the US have neglected the defense of Frederick in Maryland. An attack is immediately planned.

After the destruction of most of their forces, including Meade's own division, the survivors of Pittsburgh retreat. The victorious forces of the Confederacy launch a huge assault on the heavily fortified province of wheeling, hoping to conquer the second half of West Virginia and its mountains.
The battle ends with a costly victory, but Pittsburgh being defenceless, the US army jumps on the opportunity to seize control of one of its industrial centers. While the IInd Conscript Army occupies Wheeling, all the armies of the Western front march back there. In the west, Jackson still kills rebels and tries to prevent the remainig US west forces to regain ground. These tiny remains of an army are still without orders from their government since October 23, 1862.

Despite our efforts, Pittsburgh falls into the hands of the Union. We make a hasty retreat to Cleveland, both to heal our wounds and to prevent any further advance. However, the 1864 elections in the United States saw McClellan elected as President of the United States. The new president made a peace offer to the Confederate Military Command.

The US ambassador met General Lee, general Dauterive and general Johnson in Cleveland, where he proposed what was presented as an "honorable peace", basically a return to the 1861 borders with Missouri and Kentucky under Confederate control. The CSA government demanded all border states and, unsurprisingly, the United States would not submit. The war went on.

The US uses the momentum of its success to attack the army in Wheeling. This is a stupid decision because this province is heavily defended, easily defendable, and because it forces the Union army to leave Pittsburgh empty. We jump on this opportunity to take it back. Seing this, the US invaders make a hasty retreat to Pittsburgh, where they overwhelm the small Confederate attacking force, but are soon joined by the vast Army of the West.

More divisions from the east attack us in Pittsburgh, and we are forced to retreat to the secure province of Wheeling. There, the Eastern theater as a whole comes to a stop. What follows is a long and useless series of ambushes and skirmishes, but the real battle now happens in the West, where Jackson is still gaining provinces, crushing revolts and containing the shreds of the US army.
The theocracy of Deseret, under Confederate control, decided to officially join the Confederation on May 25th.

Finally, on September 12th 1864, on the brink of disintegration, the United States recognized its defeat and the legitimity of the CS claims on the western territories.

It was now time for the Confederacy to acknowledge its bankrupcy, starts to heal its wounds and prepare its administration for its glorious destiny. After the European intervention in Mexico, the Confederate Army liberates Mexico and includes it in the CS sphere of influence, but the United States, to counter this, also agree to a military alliance with the country.

At the end of 1869, after the expiration of the peace treaty, the Union foolishly calls for another war against the Confederacy, with mexican support. Though Mexico never did as much as moving troops to Texas, the United States found its army crushed and almost its entire territory occupied by Confederate troops, only the North-East being under siege. The peace treaty was much harsher this time, as West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and most of Mishigan were annexed to the Confederacy, definitely splitting the US territory, the Confederate Army dwarfing its ennemy.

A long period of peace was now to follow in North America. After the purchase of Cuba, Jamaica and other islands in the caribbean from the United Kingdom and Spain, the Confederacy, now rapidly extending its industry, invaded and annexed Guatemala, Honduars, Nicaragua, El Salvador, in the end, every country in Central America between Mexico and Columbia. We then decided to build the Panama channel, bought Belize from the UK and increased the size of our armies, creating great and efficient public services for Health and Safety Measures at Work. We thus managed to regain our status as one of the most important power on Earth.

The final situation is 1936.

A third Conscript army is deployed and sent to Charleston, under the name of IInd Conscript Army (the previous 2ndCA having been incorporated into the Army of the West). Meanwhile, the horrible assault on Louisville turns into a complete slaughter, as hopeless waves of Union soldiers are dropped into the firestorm. Part of the army of Paducah is sent there in order to support the exhausted troops under General Dauterive from the Army of the West, who took control of the battle, Jackson having been wounded.

On 19th February, the Norfolk Garrison from Lexington and the IInd Conscript Army are ordered to take Cincinnati. In Kentucky, incompetent Union command, refusing to retreat, leads to the complete anihilation of the army of Louisville and its support. Dauterive takes the city.

On 11th March, the three broken divisions in Lousville are routed and the Army of the West remains in Lousville, establishing Confederate rule over the ruins of the city. The bloody Battle of Louisville, despite a short interruption in Winter 1861, lasted for seven months.

On April 1st 1862, the government passed the Conscription Act. Ten new divisions were drafted, causing unrest in the entire Nation. The new soldiers are sent to all armies in order to strengthen the frontline, and two expeditionary corps are sent to take control of Oklahoma and Missouri.

Spring saw the Split Operation being resumed, now being executed with all available forces. We would try and conquer Evansville and Cincinnati and proceed Northward from here, without diluting our army or overstretching our supply lines.

The battle of Cincinnati ends. Once again, we stand victorious, as the Army of the West and the IInd Reserve Army, under Jackson, attack Evansville. The Norfolk garrison, now in Cincinnati, marches to Indianapolis, as we hope to encircle the US army of the Western Front there or in Cairo. The NG is intercepted and has to fight its way into the city. The Encirclement plan vanishes and the Ist Conscript Army, in paducah, is sent to Cairo to delay yankee reinforcements in Indianapolis.

On May 9th, Kentucky officially declares its secession from the United States and enters the Confederation. 10 000 enthusiast soldiers join the Volunteer Regiment of Kentucky and join the Battle of Evansville.

To my dismay, the counter-attack comes from the East, as armies marching through Colombus or descending through Ft Wayne make their way to the Norfolk Garrison, now fighting 1vs2. On may 18th, they are called back to the secure aera of Cincinatti, while Jackson secures Evansville.

The Ist Conscript Army reaches Cairo. Dauterive and the Army of the West join them. Fleeing units find their way to Evansville and are sent back to Cairo. West of this, the two reserve divisions deployed south of Missouri are finalizing the occupation of Springfield and Rolla

In June, the 2CA and NG are sent to Colombus, where only small Northern army stands. However, massive reinforcements after the outbreak of the battle prompt us to abandon the fight and come back to Cincinnati. June also sees our victory in Cairo. Our Expeditionary corps in Oklahoma, their task completed, are sent to nearby US states to disorganise the administration and disrupt any drafting attempt of the US in these states. The Missouri occupation plan is thwarted by a counter-attack in St Louis. The Reserve division there retreats as Dauterive, marching from Cairo, replaces it on the battlefield.

Colombus is taken. All remaining troops in Evansville and Cincinnati ordered to take Indianapolis to extend the front line north and separate the two fronts. Thus starts Jackson's "Lake Campaign". However, we notice a large concentration of US forces in Maryland and we fear a massive counter attack in Virginia that would endanger our whole strategy.

The Battle of Indianapolis is short-lived, as Confederate forces, five times greater than Lieutenant York's army brush resistance aside. The division routed from St Louis is sent to Jefferson City where they join forces from Springfield. Meanwhile, the Ist Conscript Army, in Cairo is under heavy attack. Our goal is to take Kansas City and Jefferson City, thus encircling the three US divisions in St Louis where Dauterive's Army of the West would destroy them entirely.

Four new regiments are created, forming the Second Regular Army, the first regular army implictly being the Army of Northern Virginia. They are ordered to Attack Cleveland, as this would complete our grand plan by dividing the Union. The East Front shows no sign of evolution right now. After a bit more than a year, the war has seen the Confederation expanding greatly, and the Union being threatened, as more and more divisions are unable to get clear orders from Washington.

In Mid-August, the US sends large reinforcments to Cleveland, which leads us to direct the IIRA on Toledo instead. The Western Front sees Jackson's IInd Reserve Army called back from Indianapolis to break US resistance in Cairo. He then chases them to Kansas City, thus giving us hope to complete the encirclment of St Louis where Dauterive is pinning down all the remaining armies of Missouri.
Both operations are complete success. The Confederate forces of Missouri are sent to St Louis while Jackson prevents any breakthrough. Toledo falls quickly, but has to be quickly reinforced as a medium-size counter attack is organized by the United States.

On September 28th, the encirclement of St Louis is complete. The US Missouri army is anihilated and the few survivors are taken prisonners.

The Norfolk Garrison is sent to Detroit to complete the splitting of the US while the 2ndRA protects their back.

After the successful breakthrough of the Confederate Army in Missouri, Jackson organizes the second phase of the Lake Campaign : Dauterive is to occupy Davenport while he himself takes control of Des Moines, then proceeds to take Chicago. At the same time, the Norfolk garrison is to take Lansing. This would create a huge pocket, Isolating what remains of the Western front.

While Dauterive's Army of the West marches to Chicago, thus cutting any retreat, Jackson's IInd Reserve Army, in Des Moines and the Ist Conscript Army in Cairo, launch a great assault on Spingfield. Feeling the trap, the army in Ft Wayne tries to break through Dauterive's lines. Their assault is a failure and they retreat inside the pocket. On January 29th, 1863, Chicago falls under Confederate control. The Norfolk garrison in Lansing effectively prevents any retreat through the lakes, the US armies in Springfield and Ft Wayne are doomed. All the Armies of the western front are sent in Springfield while the six divisions in Indianapolis march towards Ft Wayne, soon joined by the Norfolk garrison (now very very far away from Norfolk).

In the West, the two Expeditionary corps are still expanding the Confederate territories and smashing occasional union loyalists. However, Unionists also take arms against the right to possess human beings in the occupied territories of the north. The Confederacy is actually on the brink of self-destruction, its economy, army and civilian population exhausted. Feeling this, the US government decides to launch a huge attack in Northern Virginia, 12 divisions from Maryland attacking Lee's 4. Despite brilliant command, support from the fleet, entrenchment and use of heavy artillery, the ANV is suffering terrifying losses and fighting 1vs3. The various armies in Staunton are amalgamated in a single Staunton army and sent to Manassas to help.

Continue to Part 3

The war starts on day 1, July 4th, 1861. Some POPs are converted to soldiers, all the armies are reinforced, a new division is set up and four volunteer divisions are created and immediately mobilized. I will need all the forces I can gather and I won't even try to save the Southern economy, as the imports of clothes, weapons and food will be enormous. The economy is basically doomed.
Because the Union always starts with a massive assault on Manassas, the Army of Northern Virginia and all armies in the East are gathered in Staunton, save for the Army of the Shenandoah which is sent to Charleston, as its mountains and forests make it an easily defendable position. If the Union reaches this province before we do, it will be almost impossible to dislodge its troops, and the Confederacy has not enough men to suffer the heavy casualties that a regular assault would surely cost.

All the armies of the West are gathered in Bowling Green and amalgamated as the "Army of the West". Our great plan is to push through Kentucky to the canadian border or the great lakes, and thus break the communication lines of the ennemy, divide his territory and isolate the western part.

Two problems however: pushing north will stretch our supply lines to almost unsustainable level and open a new front on each side. The United States having what amounts to three times the confederate population and a larger army from the beginning will have plenty of time to crush our attacks and prevent us from advancing. At least three phases of the Confederate plan are based on major incompetence in the US military HQ.

Lee is intercepted by Major Baker's troops but quickly retreats to Staunton. The Army of the Shenandoah arrives in Charleston exactly one day before a Union army does and benefits from the topology. After a small skirmish, the ennemy retreat with heavy casualties.
Meanwhile, the Army of the West is split, and the three divisions are ordered to attack the remaining provinces of Kentucky. No ennemy division is visible west of us, but we fear it's only a matter of time before they arrive.

In yellow, the limits of Kentucky state, which I want to rally to the CSA.

Union forces spotted in Cairo, just north-west of us, attack Colonel Watts' division in Louisville. More soldiers from the east are threatening to attack us in Lexington, and we are outnumbered in both provinces. The Norfolk Garrison is detached from the Army in Staunton and sent to Charleston where another attack takes time to be crushed. We need them to cross the mountains, support the Lexington garrison from the incoming attack, and then help in Louisville.

Meanwhile, we receive a communication from general Lee. Troops from Maryland have been shifting west continuously, to try and stop our advance in Kentucky and West Virginia, leaving only a tiny garrison in Manassas. He has decided to use his overwhelming superiority to take it back, leaving only the Army of Virginia behind.

On September 13th, the 4 conscript divisions recruited in summer are deployed, divided between the First Conscript Army in Bowling Green and the Second Conscript Army in Lynchburg. Both are immediately sent to the front to assist in the battles of Louisville and Lexington.

Lee's army crashes into the Manassas Defense Force on September 22nd and routes them in 8 days. In the West, the Siege of Louisville turns into a bloodbath, as the Ist Conscript Army arrives to support Watts' division. The Paducah army establishes control over Paducah and plans an attack on Cairo, hoping to cut the armies in Louisville from their supply, but new US troops, pulled back from the West, are menacing our flank and any movement is canceled.
Lee chases the Manassas garrison up to Washington, hoping to seize the capital in a matter of days, as the Army of Virginia is ordered to take position in Manassas, covering his only supply line. Seing this, the US command starts gathering troops in Maryland.

In Kentucky, things look grim. The Paducah army is ordered to reach Louisville, in order both to assist in the liberation of the city, and to avoid the assault from Cairo of a Northern corps twice as large. They will never make it however, as the US detachment attacks them a week after they left their entrenchments.

As the battles in Lexington and Louisville are draining our men and energy, we detach commander Chilton and his Texas cavalry from the Army of the Shenandoah and send them to Louisville through Lexington, leaving Charleston defended by only one division. However, hysterical gathering of all union forces in Washington to counter Lee's assault have weakened the army of Cincinnati, which is now retreating through Colombus. Lee's audacious chase of the routed army of Manassas is a complete success for now.

In Louisville, stubborn US resistance seems to be paying off. A constant stream of fresh troops from the west pours into Kentucky and Watts' losses now represent half his initial strenght, and the battle of Lexington still delays all eastern reinforecements. Help planned for Paducah won't be ready until November 4th, and without a victory in Lexington, there is no way for us to hold on this long.

Finally, good news. The hopeless Union resistance has been crushed in Lexington, and the various corps are divided into four groups : one to Louisville, one to Cincinnati, chasing the demoralised US forces, two in Lexington to secure the province.

A new infantry division is deployed in Memphis and ordered to join the Army of Paducah. On November 7th, increasing foes starts overpowering the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite his resistance, Lee has to retreat.

The battle in Paducah is hopeless. Whatever is left of our troops there falls back to Bowling Green and the new division is ordered to hold its position in the fortress near Memphis, at least denying any further push in Confederate territory. A few miles away, the Siege of Louisville proves a disaster and the divisions there are also ordered back to Bowling Green.

The end of the Washington battle sees troops from the East walking back towards Kentucky. Partly because of this and partly because of bad weather conditions in the end of November, the assault of Cincinnati is canceled. However, the newly promoted commander Jackson, at the head of the newly deployed IInd Reserve Army, decides to use this relatively calm situation to attack the exhausted Louisville garrison.

On the East coast, the Confederate navy launches its three commerce raiders and our new secret weapon, the CSS Virginia, hoping to damage the US navy and prevent it from supporting ground forces from the coast. An old-fashion sailing fleet under Admiral Farragut is this found in Chesapeake bay and the battle begins.

New armies are deployed in Memphis and an assault planned to get the Yankees out of Kentucky. While they cross the border, Jackson falls upon the Louisville Garrison, completely taken by surprise. The reorganized armies in Bowling Green are gathered and sent to Paducah too.
Paducah secured, the reformed Army of the West, composed of the four divisions from Bowling Green (including the IInd Conscript Army), are ordered to take the Louisville Army from behind and thus force them to leave Kentucky under Confederate control. This is a complete success.

Continue to Part 2

Dans le prochain épisode, une map, parce que je ne vois pas pourquoi j'écrirais une autre note ici sans avoir une terminé un projet quelconque.

Download Exar (2884 KO)

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.
Update 18/04/12 - 16:44 : Years after release, a bug-fix in 227i, looped the sounds played by the jumper. The sound had to be modified not to loop. The pathing of the jumper has also been reworked.

-Smiftsch

Mirrors have been updated, download Unreal's 227 patch. Any bug found may be reported to OldUnreal.

I have not produced anything worth talking about since I released this stupid shit that is YouAreTheDemons. I have been trying various things with QuArK to get my way with it, but now that I can use it, I am faced with the same problem as always: I know how to do things, but I do not know what to do. Therefore, mapping is on stand-by mode.

I made a few changes to the structure of the site : My last update about QuArK is now the first article of a "Miscellaneous" page where I may add a few articles from time to time, not exclusively in French. I also modified a few sentences in some tutorials, and then forwarded all of them to Jival for him to correct them. Syntax seems to be his finest skill. I also started to import the tutorials from Unreal-Design to Hellkeeper.net, but I am not progressing very fast: most of these were written back in 2004 and 2005. I was younger and not very interested in syntax, spelling, or even good-looking screenshots. Most of them are painful to read and the pictures illustrating them are not what I would call pleasing. Hence a long and boring work of rewriting, most of the time seconded by a need to recreate some or every pictures. Some tutorials are almost new ones because both text and pictures went through a huge overhaul. French-speaking (reading ?) people may have a taste of this work by comparing the tutorials about architecture, here and on Unreal-Design. Texts changed, pictures changed, they are almost unrelated to the old ones. I recently finished processing my tutorial about outdoor terrains with Unreal 2 : though the text was good (because it was not as old), a few pictures were execrably bad. I started to change them, but I noticed that pictures taken today with Vista were looking very weird compared to Windows 2000 pictures of the original one, so I had to recreate each and every picture from scratch. A few modifications of the text were also made, and now it is really better. For tutorials about PathNodes, Projectors or Semi-Solids, things were much easier, because these are tutorials written in 2006/2007, when I had decided to make long and rich tutorials, with nicely framed pictures, so it was only a matter of adding the html tags to the text and uploading renamed pictures.

Reworking the last tutorials (7 remaining) is not a very exciting prospect, since some of them are really worthless and should be completely rebuilt from scratch, such as my first and most known one about terrains with UT2004, written in 2004, my third message on Unreal-Design. Some of them seemed really good at the time I wrote them, but I am not happy with them anymore. Take for ewample my outrageously long and complex tutorial on Karma objects. I will have to change almost every picture and a lot of the current text, and it could take a few days for this tutorial alone. As a consequence, I am not really willing to jump into it now and so this is also in stand-by mode. I am currently waiting for Jival to take the time to correct the ones I've done, but it is not going to be fun for him and there is a lot of material to process, so it should not be finished before a long, long time.

The miscellaneous page was supposed to welcome the few tutorials Jival wrote, including two new ones never released, but I decided not to do so to keep Hellkeeper.net my very own place. Jival, if you're reading me, no offense, I just don't feel like it. That's not a very communist way of acting but whatever, I'm the one paying for this server.

What else should I mention... I have approximately three hours of work in the whole week : two on Monday and one and on Tuesday. The fun part is that, since going from my home to University takes about one hour, I spend four hours a week sitting in a train, reading. That is half an hour more than the courses. This provides me the time I need to read, something I usually don't do at home because of the irresistible call of the LCD screen, the voice of my master. I am not feeling very connected with the outside world these days.

I am not really playing War§ow either this month. I am temporarily tired of CA, so I spend most of my time wandering aimlessly on the web, and there is nothing new. This is not a very exciting time; I am waiting for something interesting to spring spontaneously into my mind.

I have nothing to say. This is my work, I am proud of it. Thanks to pigfreezer for his voice. Thanks to Jival for helping me with sound synchronization. Thanks to me for building, special effects, directing, action scenes, design choices, etc.

And I know some people will absolutely love to have it fullscreen with the real map. They think "Ahah, I can combine random scenes too". But my work is far more complicated. Here's the map. It's an Unreal Cinematic: Not just a combination of random scenes, but a fully scripted game sequence. Just double-click on it, and watch the action, listen the script and enjoy.

Download YouAreTheDemons (5787 KO)

Yeah, it's heavy because of the samples of pig's voice.

For those who think that this is stupid, you need more Internet Culture.

Update 31/01/09 - 02:12, I felt like I could do something here, so I created a "Special Maps" page for this and Cockpit, my old freestyle map. I also updated the Readme of all the maps, modified a few things, reworked the "Files" page and added a compilation of the four bonus packs of UT99 to it. I searched for them on the web to help someone, but couldn't get my hand on them as Beyond Unreal was down. I found them on an old USB stick.

Download NotRealistic (783 KO)

Download .map file (93 KO)

Les utilisateurs de QuArK peuvent aussi télécharger le fichier .qrk contenant les versions successives de la structure :

.qrk file (for QuArK-Users) (2753 KO)

Update 20/01/09 - 10:59 : La map a été updaté avec les quelques bugs trouvés jusqu'ici. Le fichier .qrk aussi. Le fichier .map peut être téléchargé. Le placement des items est encore à finaliser.

Update 21/01/09 - 23:32 : Révision du placement des armes, armures et packs de santé.

Le niveau que je préfère traverser est de loin E1M2, deuxième niveau du premier épisode. Mon record absolu est de 41 secondes (0:41), mais c'était il y a quelques mois, et ces derniers jours, je n'ai pas réussis à passer sous la barre des 0:42. Le temps réalisé par QdQwav est de 33 secondes (0:33). On peut donc le dire, je suis totalement à la ramasse.

Voici la carte (OVER 9000 HOURS sur Paint) approximative (l'échelle est complètement flinguée et je n'ai pas fait la partie sous-marine, vu qu'on y met pas les pieds) d’E1M2. Je précise qu'à l'entrée du niveau, on ne dispose que du fusil à pompe de base, ce qui limite pas mal toutes les situations où il faut de la force de frappe. Le chemin le plus court serait de passer directement de 1 à 2, puis de passer à 4 qui est le portail final, mais en 2 se trouve la porte qui ne s'ouvre qu'avec la clé bleu qui se trouve en 3, là est toute la difficulté. En rose, j'ai indiqué les ennemis, en gris les portes qui s'ouvrent au contact du joueur et en vert toute les parties mobiles qui se déclenchent à cause du joueur.

Le joueur commence en 1, sur une petite zone surélevée (le gros point rouge cerclé de blanc). Dès le début, il faut faire un gros circle-jump et Straffe-Jumper en zigzag pour contourner les trois monstres, notamment celui juste devant l'escalier, qui est un ogre, donc relativement large. Une fois ceci fait, on monte vite-fait l'escalier. Au sommet, vous tournant le dos, se trouve un deuxième ogre qu'il faut aussi contourner en vitesse (pas le temps de le flinguer, le chrono tourne). Sur la passerelle devant lui, un marine que vous DEVEZ exterminer parce qu'il est sur le passage. D'ici, on Circle-Jump sur la passerelle d'à coté, sur la grosse croix violette qui n'est autre que le Super-Shotgun, qui a l'avantage de supprimer les marines de base en un seul coup. D'ailleurs, immédiatement, vous butez le péon à votre gauche et vous passez la porte. Derrière, immédiatement sur votre droite, un monstre volant dont j'ai oublié le nom, sur laquelle vous envoyez une salve de plomb, puis au bout de la passerelle, après un coude, un ogre. Il faut lui tirer dessus et éviter ses grenades. Le couloir fait ensuite un grand U, mais des pièges vous tirent des fléchettes et il faut faire attention à ne pas mourir bêtement ici, et ne pas prendre un projectile qui ralentit fortement.

Les deux plus grosses difficultés arrivent maintenant : Il y a dans cette grande salle, deux ogres. L'un tout au bout de la pièce, qui ne vous concerne pas. L'autre est directement en face de vous. Il faut prier pour arriver au moment où sa patrouille l'a éloigné, sinon il vous bloque le chemin et vous pouvez perdre une à deux secondes en le contournant. Il est même parfois directement au coin et vous subissez des dégâts quand il vous agresse, et êtes fortement ralentis. En haut d'un pilier, une armure jaune. Vous ne la prenez pas, pas le temps. Il faut pour l'obtenir, tirer sur le gros interrupteur rouge situé sur le mur, directement en vis-à-vis du pilier (rouge sur mon plan), qui fait monter les petits escaliers. Tout ça ne vous concerne pas. Vous devez Circle-Jumper par dessus le gouffre plein de flotte pour vous retrouver sur la passerelle d'en face. Dans l'escalier en colimaçon, deux marines vous bloquent le chemin et vous n'avez pas le droit de rater vos coups de fusil, ou vous perdrez du temps.

Le gros casse-tête du niveau à alors lieu : en montant en haut de l'escalier, vous devez vous jeter contre le mur à votre DROITE. Tout d'abord, le mur de gauche va s'abaisser et laisser passer quatre chevaliers. Derrière le coin se trouve un ogre et une saloperie volante, au dessus d'un grand trou. De l'autre coté de ce trou, la clé bleue, indispensable. Pour faire sortir la passerelle indiquée en vert sur mon image, il faut activer l'interrupteur rouge qui se trouve derrière les chevaliers. Mais ça prendrait au moins cinq à six secondes, un délai absolument ridicule. C'est pour ça que vous devez longer le mur de droite : En raison d'un bug ultra-connu et que je ne vous rappelle pas, le joueur se déplace plus vite au contact d'un mur parallèle à son chemin, car une partie de l'inertie qu'il aurait en se cognant au mur est transmise dans la direction de son mouvement. Arrivé presque au coin, il faut Circle-Jumper sur la gauche puis Straffe-Jumper de plus en plus violemment sur la droite, de manière à prendre assez d'allonge pour sauter jusqu'à la clé. C'est là que la plupart du temps vous tombez en bas et que vous tappez /kill dans la console. Prendre assez de vitesse pour sauter assez loin est le mouvement le plus difficile de ce niveau.

Si vous avez réussi, vous tombez en bas. Vous passer par en dessous dans la salle à l'armure jaune, dont le sol est couvert d'eau. Il faut tirer d'en bas sur l'interrupteur rouge qui ouvre une porte vers un téléporteur en 5. Ce dernier vous fait apparaitre en 6, devant un marine à abattre pour prendre une armure bleu. Circle-Jump vers la passerelle centrale, de là en évitant pas moins de trois ogres (plus si d'autre, que vous avez croisé avant, ont fait le chemin jusque là), il faut passer la porte, éviter ou flinguer trois marines et enfin utiliser cette maudite clé d'argent pour ouvrir la porte en 4. Derrière se trouve un ogre. Il s'agit pour moi d'un problème insolvable : je suis obligé de le flinguer pour passer, alors que QdQwav arrive à faire un saut bizarre pour passer par dessus et gagne ainsi au moins deux secondes, c'est à dire une éternité. Ensuite, il faut foncer, malgré d'autres ogres, sur l'interrupteur au fond de la pièce, qui se trouve au sol. Deux briques sortent du plancher et vont s'encastrer dans le mur. Pendant ce temps, vous devez vous dépêtrer des ogres (qui commencent à être un certain nombre). QdQwav arrive à sauter sur une brique et de là pilonner les monstres d'en haut, hors d'atteinte, mais personnellement, mon allonge est trop forte à ce moment et je finis par tomber, ou bien je ralentis pour éviter de tomber et je suis trop court. La porte en 7 s'ouvre et laisse passer un Fiend. Pas question de se laisser toucher sinon vous pouvez dire adieu à votre chrono. En 8, la grille s'ouvre sur un ogre. Il faut l'éviter par la droite (il est légèrement sur la gauche dans le couloir), monter l'escalier, éviter un chevalier et passer ce maudit portail.

Le voyage en image :

0:33 pour QdQwav. Là où ils me prennent clairement des secondes, c'est :

• En 1, car Straffe-Jumper comme il faut à cet endroit est très difficile sans élan et entre les monstres.
• Dans la pièce aux chevaliers. La plupart de mes échecs se décident là : est-ce que j'arrive à lancer mon Straffe-Jump ? Ma marge de manœuvre, l'espace, sont très réduits, et la distance à couvrir en un seul saut est très longue, l'élan très faible. De plus, le Straffe-Jump de Quake est étrange, j'y reviendrai.
• En 2, car je n'arrive pas à sauter par dessus l'ogre et suis obligé de perdre une à plusieurs secondes pour le tuer.
• Sur l'ensemble, leurs mouvements sont bien mieux maitrisés que les miens.

Le straffe-jumping de Quake, qui est l'inventeur du mouvement, est un mouvement très étrange et loin d'être naturel quand comme moi on vient de Quake II, III et War§ow. Dans ces derniers, pour straffer, il faut regarder à environ 50 degrés de la destination finale, commencer à sauter vers l'avant, enfoncer une touche latérale et lentement déplacer la souris de plus en plus loin dans la direction de la touche latérale. Quand on dépasse les 80 degrés d'angle de la vue par rapport au trajet, l'accélération devient difficile à maintenir et on change de coté. On fait ainsi Très rarement face à sa route.

Dans Quake, c'est le contraire : le joueur regarde en permanence dans la direction de son mouvement. Il faut sauter (de préférence commencer par un Circle-Jump puissant pour donner un élan appréciable), lâcher la touche avancer, enfoncer une touche de coté en dirigeant très vite la souris dans ce sens, sauter en touchant le sol et immédiatement répéter le mouvement de l'autre coté. N'espérez pas que pouvoir facilement tirer sur quelqu'un en conservant votre vitesse : il faudra rompre le mouvement de votre souris, ce qui signifie en général la fin de votre accélération, à moins de maitriser la technique à un niveau correct.

De plus, par rapport à War§ow et à ses frères, Quake a un système physique très kitsch. Il m'est impossible, contrairement à ce que j'ai l'habitude de faire, d'utiliser l'inertie pendant un mouvement aérien pour aligner une cible ou faire un 360 degrés pour vérifier les environs, là le control aérien très puissant est sur le chemin et modifie votre trajectoire, sauf si vous maintenant enfoncé la touche avancer qui empêche tout Straffing en canalisant totalement votre mouvement vers l'avant et interdisant ainsi l'apport en accélération du "faux" mouvement latéral qu'est le Straffe-Jump.

Sur ces quelques pensées, il est temps de m'accorder quelques heures de sommeil.

Small 1vs1 Deathmatch.

Download Honored (627 KO)

Du coup, je n'ai absolument rien foutu à part mapper et résoudre des problèmes d'alignement que je devrais objectivement qualifier d'obsessionnels, type alignement parfait de piliers menant au rallongement de salle et modification d'énormes parties de la map afin de conserver des proportions dans les textures et un certain ratio dans les dimentions, détails inutiles dans l'absolu mais dont la transgression me rendrait fou si je devais lâcher la map sans les avoir résolu. Surtout pas un bricolage de fortune, ça serait pire.

J'ai cherché pendant des plombes des chiffres à quatre décimales pour des alignements de textures sur des surface qu'il sera physiquement impossible au joueurs de voir en cours de jeu, comme les zones parfaitement au dessus de la map ou une CloudZoneInfo empêchera même un Rocket-Lift-Jumper d'accéder, avant de me rendre compte que je perdais vraiment mon temps pour rien. J'ai recalculé précisément des mesures inutiles et j'ai retaillé environ 10% de mes brushes qu'un bug stupide du découpage de brush d'UnrealEd 2.0 attiraient hors de la grille, ce qui me gênait, d'autant plus qu'UnrealEd 2.0 ne propose pas le snap des vertices sur la grille lors du vertex editing, que propose UnrealEd 3.0.

Au lieu de cela, j'avance à grand pas, et cette map sera sans doute la plus rapidement terminée après Karalen (qui fut exécutée en trois jours de travail intensif). Bien qu'abstraite, la map commence à avoir une identité visuelle forte, et dégage un certain poids, avec ses grosses structure acier et béton, et ses coupures nettes, pour lesquelles je me suis inspiré des architecture énormes d'Unreal 2 et de certains gimmicks de War§ow. Le tout gagne assez en style, je trouve, grâce à ces grosses lignes rouges ou bleu.

En revanche, je suis assez insatisfait du nombre de brushes qui augmente très rapidement alors que le résultat est volontairement simple et relativement dépouillé. 409 déjà, et j'estime la carte à 35% de finalisation. Plusieurs parties à terminer, et le décor hors de la carte à faire, sans compter la skybox.

Niveau gameplay, j'ai enfoncé dans le mur et rabaissé la plateforme sur laquelle se trouvait le +100hp, ce qui rend le tout visuellement plus agréable et rend bien avec la diminution de l'échelle. J'ai plus de doute sur l'étage du Sniper, où je n'ai pas encore bien réglé la disposition du couloir et des deux plateformes.

J'ai aussi percé fortement l'étage supérieur au-dessus du canon flak, de manière à permettre plus facilement le Lift-Jump. Cela donne aussi une continuité entre l'arrivée à cet étage et la zone du +100 qui s'aligne ainsi parfaitement, et cela augmente les possibilités stratégiques en permettant le combat à cet endroit (avec l'équilibre +100 d'un coté, Flak Cannon de l'autre).

Visuellement, cela restera sûrement dans les tons bleutés, avec quelques touches colorées. Avec l'abstraction thématique, c'est un truc que je pique sans scrupule à War§ow. J'aime ce style peu contraignant et très expressif. De fait, j'ai l'impression d'avancer dans la bonne direction, bien plus que pour le calvaire final d'Atomnium en tout cas. Cela faisait quelques temps déjà que je ne m'étais pas amusé en mappant.

Suite à la suppression en masse de géométrie non nécessaire, j'ai pris le temps de recalculer quelques mesures et de faire jouer l'outil de découpage de brushes pour retailler tout ce qu'il restait et l'aligner grossièrement sur une grille de 16, première étape d'un remake : c'est ce que j'avais fait pour Megatan et Premaka. Au passage, j'ai rectifié plein d'alignements, et éliminé toutes les imprécisions qui me font d'habitude grincer des dents, mais que j'avais laissées en dégageant la structure vite-fait. Temps estimé de l'étape : vingt minutes environ.
J'ai aussi simplifié tout les biseautages inutiles des plateformes et des zones inferieurs, biseautage dont j'avais largement abusé (mais ça rend si bien). Au final, je me retrouve avec le Bloc-land de base, de manière certainement encore plus épurée que lors du portage d’UT2004 à UT99. Je fais quelques arrangements sur certaines zones : je rabaisse la future zone du +100 HP, je déplace un peu la plateforme du Fusil de Précision et je retaille le couloir du shield +100.

Le lendemain, je n'ai quasiment rien foutu. J'ai passé la journée à essayer d'imaginer un thème correspondant à cette disposition un peu particulière. Sous une impulsion subite, j'ai essayé de faire quelques essais architecturaux, et je me suis arrêté sur l'idée des voûtes romanes sur lesquelles Jab avait fait un article.

J'y ai passé toute l'après-midi.

Et puis finalement, trop de bugs et pas adapté. J'ai supprimé tout le travail accompli, retour au Cube-Land. A moi de le retailler, mais impossible de me décider pour un thème. Si cela continue, je vais tirer à Pile-ou-Face entre les quelques-uns pour lesquels j'hésite.

Le gros problème de cette manière de faire, c'est que toute la géométrie est en dehors de la grille, ce qui est assez dangereux niveau erreurs BSP (même si Atomnium est là pour témoigner de la stabilité du moteur).

Première mesure : tout supprimer qui ne soit pas du BSP, puis enlever les portals qui seront refais plus tard et les movers qui, de toute façon, ont un fonctionnement anarchique après le redimensionnement. Une fois ceci fait, j'ai élagué en dix minutes la géométrie pour en dégager la structure principale, en zappant tous les petits dénivelés dans les murs et les dizaines de bordures partout, pour lesquelles je suis content d'avoir utilisé l'extruder de Tarquin vu que cela a permis de supprimer des morceaux énormes de géométrie en une fois. La skybox et le grand cube vide au dessus de la map ont aussi été supprimés, j'aviserai plus tard.

Cela donne un fatras de gros brushes. Suppression des textures et application de lights grossières. Tous les ascenseurs et les escaliers ont été supprimés, donc la map n'est pas jouable du tout.

Prochaine étape : définir un thème. J'y pense depuis un moment, mais j'ai envie de travailler un peu le BSP et l'architecture, donc je vais sans doute m'orienter vers quelque chose de relativement classique, style médiéval peut-être. J'ai quelques concepts pour un truc futuriste, mais j'ai envie de changer un peu et d'utiliser des packages un peu plus inhabituels d'UT. Après avoir lu quelques papiers sur Radiant, j'aimerai aussi d'expérimenter quelques déformations avec le 2dshape editor, calquées sur les patchs de Quake 3. A suivre donc.

Fighting in a bunker while being bombed is ridiculous. I would be glad to hear what you think of it if you win the fight. If you hear some big noise, don't be afraid : it's just a shell exploding on the shielding. Ahah.

Download Atomnium (4104 KO)

In the same time, I have performed a few optimizations on my previous UT2004 maps, consisting in rewriting material sequences so that they are now slower, just like the official UT maps, and a manual culling of unused-but-loaded textures, which may reduce loading time... You may want to re-download them to get up-to-date versions.

J’étais en train d'écouter Russians de Sting, que je connais surtout pour avoir joué Feyd Rautha dans le très mauvais film DUNE de David Lynch, quand je me suis penché à fond sur Atomnium pour y retrouver les bases perdues, car l'on perd ses repères dans une map si l'on y plonge pas assez ou pas assez souvent. Compte rendu : environ 25% des brushes sont alignés sur la grille et le reste flotte dans un vide ridicule, quasiment tout est tourné à 45 degrés à la manière barbare, il y a des parties abusivement complexes, ce qui complexifie d’autant le découpage ; malgré ce bordel, aucune erreur BSP n’apparait, et alors qu’un trou énorme déchirait une pièce géométrique que je fabriquais hors de la map, j’ai eu la surprise de voir l'objet parfaitement affiché sans erreur ni trou BSP une fois désaligné, tourné et placé en contact avec le reste de la carte. 911 brushes à l’heure actuelle, j’attends de voir quand tout va me sauter à la figure.

Merde, on voit rien une fois réduit...

Je ne sais pas comment j’ai pu en arriver à bâtir ça polygone par polygone sans être drogué ou mentalement dérangé, je ne sais pas ce que je voulais faire avec ce truc, mais une chose est sur : si mes maps ne sont pas de l’art, alors Atomnium est ce qui s'en rapproche le plus. J’en viens à mettre cette construction anarchique sur un piédestal parce qu’elle représente un jusqu’au-boutisme absurde, un exercice de style délirant, et en même temps, je ressens un mélange d’ironie narquoise et de douleur dentaire en pensant que ce qu’Epic a fait avec UT3, c’est globalement ça : surdesigner toute les maps et ajouter autant de polygone que le moteur pouvait en afficher, en bumpant le reste et en espérant que tout le monde penserait que ça suffisait à faire un jeu. Pour ne pas retomber dans un discours anti-UT3, je me permettrais de faire remarquer que la plupart des jeux suivent aujourd'hui cette ligne directrice de merde qui m’empêche de mapper tranquillement.

Visiblement on va dans le mur, à reculons encore, et en trainant les pieds, en se répétant que c'était mieux avant. C’est à peu près aussi enthousiasmant que les images que []pc nous balance sur #hl-parpaing, ou que les topics de MOUS sur Unreal-design : de quoi voulais-je parler en cliquant sur «ajouter une note» ? J’ai oublié, mais ça ne devait pas être tellement plus intéressant que ce ramassis de conneries dont je vous parle. Hexene devrait en prendre de la graine et déblatérer sur des conneries s’il tient absolument à remplir son blog. L’autre choix c'est de faire un article intéressant par mois.
Si vous êtes du genre sensible ou amis des animaux, frappez-vous et n’ouvre pas le(s) lien(s) de []pc ci-dessous.

Download Axlik (775 KO)

Bien sur, le problème est ici moins fort que sur Unreal vu la vitesse du jeu et parce que les maps sont tout de même intelligemment conçues. Il est possible de rompre la monotonie du cercle par quelques JumpPads ou passages, pour récupérer des munitions plus efficaces. Mais il y a malgré tout quelques serveurs ou j’ai vraiment dû arrêter d’avancer et repartir dans l’autre sens pour trouver l’ennemi. L’autre moyen d’éviter cela est de débarquer à fond dans une pièce où des joueurs se battent, et de vous mêler au combat. En cela, les cartes sont très bien organisées car vous passez toujours par une zone de combat (typiquement la salle avec un gros power-up), ce qui vous incite à ralentir, ou vous permet de vous prendre une roquette qui vous stoppera net.

L’autre défaut est que, vu la vitesse du jeu et l’étroitesse de certaines maps, cligner des yeux vous fait rater dix mètres de chemin. Résultat, je joue pendant vingt-cinq minutes quasiment sans sourciller, et quand je quitte le jeu, je ressens d’un coup la douleur et mes yeux pleurent tout seul. De plus, la tension est extrême au vu de la vitesse qu’il faut conserver, tout en tirant généralement, et il est extrêmement frustrant, quand vous êtes à fond, de voir que votre vitesse à tellement augmenté que vous ne pourrez pas prendre le prochain virage. Vous tentez un dash sur le mur d’en face pour vous remettre dans l’axe, mais les escaliers parfois trop nombreux, vous ralentissent et vous voilà bon pour sautiller jusqu’à retrouver votre vitesse de croisière. Croyez-moi, lorsque vous franchissez près de deux milles unités à la seconde, voir arriver en face de vous un adversaire, lancé lui aussi à pleine vitesse, alors que chacun d’entre vous dispose d’un lance roquette bien chargé, c’est un grand moment de boucherie comique. Généralement, vous vous percutez salement (dans la réalité, vous vous écraseriez l’un contre l’autre en vous disloquant), et les deux roquettes partent en même temps.

Suivant les conseils de Sd’ sur IRC, il me semble utile de me fixer des délais pour finir DM-Honored, sachant que sinon, je ne la terminerais jamais. Aussi, je vous prends comme témoins, rares lecteurs : nous sommes le 23 janvier 2008, le texturing doit être terminé le 31 (il manque une texture et l’alignement de certaines), le pathing sera fait pour le 5 février, Jumpers animés compris, l’éclairage et le ciel doivent être fait pour fin février ! Ensuite, phase de fignolage, certainement terminée aux alentours de décembre 2010. Eh oui, la réalité est parfois bien cruelle. Mais je ferais des efforts, j’ai vraiment envie de terminer cette carte et de passer à autre chose (en oubliant que les bots de UT99 ne savent pas Lift-Jumper).

Mes projets suivants ? Voir avec quoi s’édite War§ow, peut-être une map de type cinématique-matinée avec UT2004, et on verra. J’aimerais travailler sur un mod UT2004, quelque chose de gros, d’important, dans lequel m’impliquer. J’ai besoin d’un but ! C’est insupportable ! Voir même un jeu de type War§ow : créer mon propre jeu avec une équipe déterminée et un moteur Quake sous License GPL. Bien entendu, JAMAIS je ne rassemblerai une équipe assez déterminée et expérimentée, et de toute façon, même si j’y arrivais, je ferais sûrement un vaporware qui, après 10 ans d’essais, serait finalement abandonné, comme tant de mes cartes. Mais qu’importe. Quand je vois ce que certaines personnes arrivent à faire avec un moteur Quake 2 (douze ans quand même), je me dis qu’il y a plein de jeux géniaux à créer sans passer par les graphismes surjoués d’un UT3, d’un Crysis, ou autres. Note pour moi-même à ce sujet : voir ce que vaut Fallen Empire: Legions, la suite de Tribes. Encore un jeu qui ne met pas trop le paquet sur les graphismes. Sera-t-il réussi ? Rendez-vous à la béta, si je trouve le courage de m’inscrire sur leur clone de Steam à eux.

Bref, rien d’intéressant chez moi, tout ce qu’il faut savoir est sur internet. En premier lieu, comme le disait Bob_Le_Pointu sur IRC, je n’existais pas sans flux RSS. J’ai donc ouvert Textpad et j’ai créé un fichier php qui me génère le RSS à la volée, j’ai ajouté une ligne à l’en-tête de l’index de HK.net (ce que vous lisez actuellement), ainsi qu’un lien sous la forme de l’image «RSS» en noir et blanc (la couleur, c’est le mal). Je suis donc pourvu d’un flux que vous pouvez ajoutez aux vôtres. Et contrairement aux conseils fumeux dispensés sur le net, nul besoin d’un fichier XML qui sera édité de manière dynamique, ce qui est long, dur et ennuyeux à programmer : un print() suffit largement : vous envoyez l’en-tête du fichier, vous allez chercher tout les items nécessaires dans la base de données, et hop, une boucle s’occupe du reste. Je tiens tout de même à remercier Bob_Le_Pointu pour son aide précieuse. Toujours est-il que toutes mes pages sont valides, que mon CSS est valide, et que mon nouveau flux RSS est valide (à l’exception d’une erreur mineure sur la date, qui est générée par le code lui-même et que je ne peux donc pas changer).

Si vous n’êtes pas complètement abruti et que vous consultez régulièrement Nofrag, vous aurez certainement remarqué la version 0.4 de War§ow qui est sorti hier (au moment où j’écris ces lignes). Étant actuellement en train de refaire Doom 3 dans l’unique but d’avoir un jeu qui ne soit pas un Unreal à faire, j’avais déjà réinstallé Alien Versus Predator 2 sur une machine que je ne peux pas utiliser régulièrement. J’avais acheté ce jeu il y a quelques années et n’y avais jamais joué. L’ambiance est bonne, le graphisme estdu niveau de Half-life dont il utilise le Moteur (ce qui signifie que c’est du Quake 2 au niveau technique) (MÀJ : autant pour moi, c’est du Lithtech, et de toute façon, Half-Life utilise du Quake, pas du Quake 2). Il est agréable à jouer même si je n’en suis qu’à la campagne Marine et que j’ai hâte de passer à la campagne Alien.
Je me suis donc empressé de télécharger cette version de War§ow pour voir ce qu’elle valait. Je me rappelais en avoir téléchargé des versions antiques il y a bien longtemps, mais j’étais alors très mauvais et je jouais à des jeux de merde.

Première impression : le graphisme en Cell-Shading est pas mal, mais les personnages sont laids. Qu’importe, ce ne sont après tout que des cibles. Pour tout le reste du jeu, c’est du Quake 3 : les armes sont quasiment les mêmes, les bonus aussi, les maps ont le même style très centré combat à courte distance ou distance moyenne, avec ce coté Quake 2 qui fait que les niveaux sont très verticaux. Les Jumpers sont les mêmes cercles lumineux que Quake 3, et il y a même une sorte de Straff-Jump : cela s’appelle le Dash (MÀJ : mea culpa, il existe aussi un vrai Straffe-Jump), et c’est une touche qui vous donne une impulsion à partir de la surface avec laquelle vous êtes en contact (un mur, le sol). Vous pouvez utiliser cette touche puis sautiller pour prendre de la vitesse, façon Straffing de Quake, vous pouvez l’utiliser pour faire des sauts à partir des murs, façon Walldodge ou glisser sur des rampes, façon UT2004, vous pouvez faire des Rocket-Jumps (les self-damage sont un peu plus élevé que sous Quake 3, mais bien en dessous de ceux de Unreal), et surtout, il y a le Quad Damage ! Bref, il y a plein de bonnes choses. Les serveurs sont nombreux et les joueurs accueillants (et vice-versa).

J’ai fait quelques parties avec DukeNico (que j’ai éclaté), et j’ai bien pris mon pied. Pas moyen de créer un serveur pour l’instant vu qu’il ne sait pas quels ports sont utilisés et que je ne sais pas du tout utiliser ces trucs, mais à l’avenir, on verra avec QuoiMac s’il peut nous héberger sur son Mac. Enfin, à condition qu’on rejoue un de ces jours. piGfreezer était censé nous rejoindre (sur un obscur serveur public TDM 16 slots vides au ping pas trop mal), mais finalement, «[pigfreezer] J’sais pas», et Duke s’en est allé, donc ce fut court. J’ai erré un moment sur des serveurs bondés où j’ai fraggué comme un malade (je suis loin d’être mauvais, c’est agréable de l’apprendre par l’expérience), ce qui est beaucoup plus agréable que sous UT2004 et provoque beaucoup moins de bugs que UT99 (moins de cas où les decals des tirs sont coupés, moins de bugs ridicules, pas de réalignement subits des joueurs à cause d’un serveur mal configuré). Très quakeux donc. Par contre, le spouleur d’impression de Windows est persuadé que je lui demande une sortie dès que je lance le jeu.

J’imagine que ca s’édite avec une version quelconque de Radiant. Il faudra que je voie si j’arrive à faire quelque chose pour ce jeu. Avant cela, je dois finir Honored, et j’ai toujours un concept de map-film qui me trotte dans la tête. Je verrai selon mon humeur.

Je termine en signalant que Bob_Le_Pointu a inexplicablement ajouté mon RSS à Planet Parpaing.
MÀJ : et j’ai mis à jour mes liens.