Hey all,
For our entry to the
GGC Mapping Contest, we've concocted a tight 12 player (max) CTF set in an industrial complex thats been vandalised and turned into an impromptu paintbal CTF arena. We reckon this map works well as a 3vs3 match map, but would be pretty fun and intense on pubs too.
It was good fun designing this in such a short space of time, we weren't sure if it would come together in the time we had but we pushed on though a few late nights and got it sorted.
I'll explain our rationale as we go thorugh the screenshots, hopefully give an insight into what we intended and some of the decisions we had to make on the way.
Screenshots:
This shot shows the mid arena. Making a fast and fun centre to this map was a little challenging, however we packed a great deal of fun jumps into it and we think it came out pretty well. The piping round the outside can be used with a few quick doubles, etc... to get to the high path from low. By doubling off the railing by the entraces to the mid, you can bound off the pipes to traverse the mid very quickly.
This is the crusher room. My favourite aspect of this one is the rusty gantry with the punched metal grilling. We thought this was a great opportunity to use alpha'd tga textures to give us a great looking peice of industrial junk. It really came out great, so we hope you like it too.
This shot shows the locker room for the employees to stash their stuff and check the noticeboard. For us its the entrance to the high route to the mid-flag and also a forced open vent that lets us get the drop on the enemy's engine room!
Here is the engine room of the base. This room provides a shorter route to the flashpoint between team's buildings, but doesn't have as much cover. Also, there is a crafty jump which if done right can get you to the high mid-flag extremely quickly. Also, if you want to switch between rooms without venturing into the spawn area, your best bet is the conveyor system...
Here is the spawn. A yard between the two entrances with the dumpster and a load of grafitti. I love how this looks, it really sums up the industrial/gritty feel of the map for me.
All in all its a smallish but tactical map, is very quick and the 'ownership' of each area changes hands very quickly. In the playtesting we conducted earlier it was pretty intense with lots of good confrontations at the flashpoints and a few good chases to the caps.
The inclusion of the midflag was a consideration that the spawn could be reasonably campable, but it would be pretty detrimental to your score if you chose to do so. Instead, a floating presence around the mid or one of the junctions of buildings would be much more effective (and interesting).
Technical:
Bringing this much detail into the map was a challenge. We really learned our lesson with KungFu and Zen, which is why we pulled out all the stops to deliver a really great looking but technically superior map this time. The r_speeds on this map may be considered high by purists, but we haven't experenced them higher than about 2100, which really isn't that bad given the level of detail crammed in.
We pushed for a great deal of 'decal' type touches to provide us with the desired atmosphere and details instead of brushwork (unlike Zen!) and used the func_wall's ability not to split geometry on contact to keep r_speeds down where a lot of decals were used. This also goes for complex structures like the staircase in the crusher room.
To get the feeling of a run down industrial building, we tried out some environmental techniques like having broken lights flickering in the crusher room, and bringing the ambient lighting down to give a more dank feeling to the buildings. We had to think up some novel ways of lighting some of the areas too, we didnt really want to settle for random lights in unrealistic places.
Download:
here - BSP + All Textures. This is the only version we are releasing as we think this really needs to be seen with the high res textures, etc... If people have a real problem with this, we can post a smaller version. ~8mb (sorry knack!)
Here is the jump pack full of demos for jumps we included in this map:
*we'll re-upload them for the new bsp file ASAP. It's by no means complete, so go out and find some more!
We hope you like it, it's taken a fair bit of hard work to realease in time. Good luck to all the other entries, I know I can't wait to see what Uni,y00tz and the rest of you guys have cooked up for us!
- Dr Rick Dagless M.D and Reed
Edit: We've uploaded the latest version now. There were some problems with the old one which needed addressing, and we reimplemented phong shading (something I forgot to readd from an earlier build). Id suggest everyone who got the old one update with this copy asap!
Double Edit: we've uploaded yet another bugfix, really sorry for all the hassle. Download link is now current.
13th nov - Pureblood let us know that a couple of the ctp textures were missing from the zip we released, so we've included them in this zip:
http://zilla-clan.net/upload/848281 - you only need this is if you don't have the CTP and want to use low-res ctp textures on our map (which I don't imagine is many people!) Sorry about this!
