jlctf4 "Heaven's Engines" -- alpha

[Johnny Law]

Seeing you folks still cavorting about the forum inspired me to unholster Radiant again. Or maybe it's a midlife crisis?

In any case, I've spent a few weekends of the new decade sketching a Q3CTF map layout. I'm at the point where layout-wise I'm just shoving minor bits back and forth, so I'm going to take a break from that to move on to doing texture treatments. Meanwhile here's what I have so far, for giving feedback if you like.

This is an ALPHA version. It ain't anywhere close to being done!



(Click on the overhead image above to go to the entity overview.)

I'm ready for feedback on these things:

• layout (attack/escape routes and combat surfaces)
• major architecture (the "bones")
• entity placement

Actually I think I'm pretty close to freezing out major layout changes.

I'm NOT ready for feedback on:

• texturing (everything is "prototype textured" -- just raw red and blue)
• lighting (just a sky and buckets of pointlights)
• sounds (there are none)
• botplay (it works, but hasn't been tuned)
• clipping, rendering performance, location markers, and anything else I haven't mentioned

If that sounds like the kind of thing you want to look at, have a go: ==> jlctf4_a12<==

There's also an "alternate entity placement" version I'm fiddling with: ==> jlctf4_a12_alt<== (and overview)

Screenshots are moderately pointless at this stage, but it's tradition for a thread yeah?

[Johnny Law]

BTW, handy tip: if you use bot-debug console commands, they may rewrite the .aas file. If this happens when you're using ioquake3 on Vista (maybe with Win7 and other Q3 engines as well), then the modified .aas file might end up in a spot like

C:\Users\your_username\AppData\Roaming\Quake3\baseq3\maps

Once that .aas file is squirreled away there... if you continue to make map changes and try to regenerate your .aas file, Q3 will still be loading the old .aas file from the AppData\Roaming subfolder, and it will keep telling you that your .aas is out of date.

Arrrrrgh I wasted a lot of time figuring out what was going on there.

[AEon]

You seem to be using recolored AEcell textures... ... and actually using the on-the-fly recoloring via shaders... nifty to see someone actually use that.

[Johnny Law]

Yup, pads/itemspawns/grates in the prototype are courtesy of AEcell. Very useful.

[v1l3]

I didn't realize that you were the creator of Titans. I've played the hell out of that map with promode physics enabled..very original.

[Johnny Law]

Thanks! For an ugly-ass pinky demon, you're good people.

[Pat Howard]

Always glad to see people coming back to the Q3A engine .

This map really has an "epic" feeling about it. I was taken by surprise by how much personality it has, even in this stage. After playing, I saw the name "Heaven's Engines" and thought, "That's perfect!" It reminds me of a fantasy adventure game level or something. Pretty cool.

Haven't played enough yet, but one thing I noticed right away is that RA route. I guess this is the stealthy way in? It gets old really fast. Totally different than the super high speeds of the rest of the map. I would at least shorten it.

I learned the layout pretty quickly. There were a couple confusing parts though. It's not very obvious at first coming down the stairs into the RA room where to go next. Also, going straight up the middle via the bouncer up to the grated area is a little unintuitive because you have to turn around and backtrack a bit. Feels like an attack opportunity on the enemy defenses more than a path to their base. Overall I like the grates. The make for interesting defensive gameplay.

That's it for now. Nice layout you've got going here.
-pat

[Johnny Law]

Haven't played enough yet, but one thing I noticed right away is that RA route. I guess this is the stealthy way in? It gets old really fast. Totally different than the super high speeds of the rest of the map. I would at least shorten it.

That's a bit of a conundrum yeah. I could make the water part shorter by removing some or all of the grates around the GL. In that case I probably need to come up with a way to make it not quite so quick/easy to get from enemy base to friendly RA room when you're escaping low with the flag. Food for thought...

[o'dium]

It would be quite cool to make a CTF map thats blue vs red but blends between the two the closer you get to the flag, so rather than having SOLID BLUE and SOLID RED, you would get a ramped blend between them.

[Johnny Law]

Fiddled with the area around the water a bit more: (Edit: old link removed)

(Grenade launchers are also gone for now, but I'll probably find a spot to squeeze them back in.)

[Johnny Law]

On the chance that anyone will be taking a look at this over the next week or so... you can ignore the outside/center area between the bases, because I just dropped a nuclear bomb on it. Probably this thread should just be on ice until I have a new version working.

[Chretien]

How did you make the stairs so perfect? So it follows the curve patch I mean.

[Johnny Law]

The stair risers are detail brushes that extend through the patches. Since they're not structural it's OK to do that.

For the shape of each riser, you can use trig. Looking at the stair from above you can see:

The curve of the entire stair sweeps through 90 degrees. If you want 10 risers (for example), each riser must sweep 9 degrees. The first riser is a right triangle (including the part that extends through the patches) with its long edge being X units wide. So for the riser to look "correct", its short edge would need to be close to X tan 9 units long. The shape of the first+second risers together is another right triangle that sweeps 9*2 = 18 degrees, so the short edges of the first+second risers together would cover X tan 18 units. Etc. Probably much better with a picture but I'm off to work now.

Once you have the risers constructed you can snip off some of the hidden-behind-a-patch parts to reduce overdraw, but I haven't gotten to that part yet, so if you use r_showtris you can see the shapes of the risers as constructed.

[Pat Howard]

The only problem with that is often you can tell that all the stairs are converging at one point, which looks kind of strange in my opinion. Personally I just like to use brushes and eyeball it. This is an alpha though, so it doesn't really matter.

[Johnny Law]

It looks right to me for a circular stair. I dunno, maybe it'll wear on me differently after a while.

Chretien, one more thing I should mention is that if you do clip off the parts of the risers behind the patch, you have to be careful about clipping away too much, since a player could choose to display the curved patch with a low LOD. Just generally speaking, the curve in-game doesn't necessarily match what you see in-editor. I think q3map2 now gives you an option to "bake" a specific LOD for the patches in your map, so that they won't change at runtime, but I haven't experimented with that.

(For Q3 on modern systems, it seems like a bit more overdraw from a few stair risers isn't worth worrying about.)

[Johnny Law]

Aight, new build. I've updated the links and pictures in the first post.

Download link: ==> jlctf4_a12<==

Also an entity overview available (only shows major items, no ammo or shards).

I think I've subdued the Must Fiddle With Geometry demon for now; back to another attempt to start texturing.

[deqer]

Great work. The texturing should turn out nicely.

This map did feel kind of big, but other than that it's a perfect layout -- and the grid texturing proves that.

I played this map for about 1/2 hour, 4vs4 bots.

There were times where I wanted the grate textured brushes to have some weaponclip, but I can see it's also cool to have them transparent.

As usual, I really like the overview.

[Pat Howard]

Wow man, sweet layout. I like all the changes you made. MH makes more sense in the water area (which is no longer annoying) for recovery, the new center paths branching off the center PG engine give that area more purpose, and the new LG paths actually make that area useful than the dead end it used to be. Generally all the path risk/rewards make sense.

I haven't played too much but structurally there's nothing I'd change at this point. Those 50 healths that are unreachable from the ground floor in the center kind of bugged me, but other than that the items looked fine.

The scale is definitely big as deqer said, but it fits the theme and movement is really nice because of it. I wouldn't worry about that. You definitely had the "fun factor" down in the beginning and now in this version you seem to have the balance there too.

Nice work!
-pat

[Johnny Law]

Excellent! Music to my ears. I like it a lot more now myself. Sometimes you just have to drop the nuke.

A couple of random things this morning:

- I'm playing with an alternate entity set (just swizzling some of the weapons and armors); if anyone likes puzzling over entity placement I've uploaded the pk3 and overview.

- Anyone have a recommendation for the grate texture? I've actually become a little attached to the general pattern and amount of open space in the prototype grate texture. The "real" texture should probably look like ironwork (painted or not); the surrounding walls will probably be worked stone blocks. I've poked around at the id grate textures but they seem to generally have a smaller pattern and less open space.

[Chretien]

Johnny would you be so kind as to post the source file on just the part that includes the stairs? I want to learn how to do that!!

The trig part you posted before would produce real numbers... So how do you fix that on the grid?

[Johnny Law]

Johnny would you be so kind as to post the source file on just the part that includes the stairs? I want to learn how to do that!!

Here's a map chunk that includes the stairs down to the water room: http://www.neogeographica.com/temp/stairs.map

The trig part you posted before would produce real numbers... So how do you fix that on the grid?

Just round to the nearest number, or the nearest multiple of 4, or whatever multiple you're comfortable using in your map. The stairs don't have to be mathematically exact, just close enough to look regular & correct.