CTF_Kamino

Started by Dagger, September 10, 2006, 11:36:35 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dagger

This is the CTF Expansion to my previous DM_Kamino map.

Features include several live NPCs defending critical paths in the map with enhanced weaponry, a trigger system to unlock AAs and Rocket Launchers (for both teams simultaneously), an extremely detailed sky zone with multiple movers in the background and blended and multi-faceted environmental fog. An intro follows, continuing the story of the commando unit sent to rescue Jedi Master Yoda in the DM map :)


"At least the Jedi is safe," mumbled Four Seven.

His sarcasm was inherently unnecessary - the brains of all of the clone troopers regardless of rank were hard-coded to accept the orders of the Jedi Council as an additional Commanding Unit. The lives of Jedi were ordered to be inherently higher in value to a clone than their own lives and the lives of their fellow soldiers, no matter how much they disagreed with that. The sacrifice of nearly 75% of their unit to extract the Jedi Master Yoda from Platform A2217 had been rationalized as acceptable by those in charge.

There was one particular directive which could override the value of Jedis'lives, but Four Seven could not recall its structure or designation right now.

Sixty-something, he thought to himself.

He made a mental note to look it up in their brain-encoded Operations Manual later - he couldn't wait for the day they no longer had to listen to the orders of those religious freaks with their over-dramatized laser swords. Three or four blaster rounds to the skull would make them just as dead as the Trandoshan and Clone corpses sitting to Four Seven's right in a hastily organized burning pile.

Crouching on a small supply platform outside the two lateral entrances to A2217, Four Seven tuned his thoughts back to the advisor's briefing still playing from the miniature comm unit on the wet metal ground.

"...Five's team will trigger the explosives and make entry through the improvised passageway. Two Two and Four Seven flanking. Units Eight and Three cover the power cells. Those are our only source of light for one, and the lizards could presumably use them to get their ships back online if they got their claws on 'em. Meanwhile, see if you can get to the dropships. If you can remove some critical components of them, then they won't be able to take off again, power cells or not. Then it's just a matter of starving them and outlasting them."

Four Seven couldn't help but smile beneath his faceless helmet. "Improvised passageway" was a military euphemism for "big freakin' hole in the wall," and it was a particular hobby of Four Seven to create such "passageways". The briefing continued.

"Remember, keep those lights intact. Our nightvision systems take time to render and initialize. Theirs are racially innate. We lose the light, and the fight becomes a lot more hellish. We have to be able t--"

The advisor's monotonous speech was interrupted by the metallic scream of two explosions at the entrances to the platform. The solid plasteel doors flew from their insets and off into the darkness.

An experiment using an annoying protocol droid a few nights ago among the troops had determined that objects thrown from a supply platform like this took approximately 42 seconds to reach the unforgiving and pitch black worldwide ocean of Kamino below them. The scientific knowledge gained from this experiment had been invaluable - Half the batallion had nearly died of laughter.

"Heavies! Cover up!" someone shouted, and the group of eight commandos was more than ready to heed this order. The briefing holocomm was kicked across the edge of the platform by someone, and within a few seconds all eight of the clones were behind some form of cover, rudimentary or otherwise.

"Both sides! Both sides! They're after the power cells!" shouted the same person who had yelled out the previous order.
"Explosives!" they added.

Four Seven pulled a remote detonator from the supply pocket on his belt, and without hesitation pressed down with his thumb upon the trigger mechanism. Nearby, two vertical pipes exploded at their base, buckling and cracking under their own weight before tumbling down to rest against the outer hull of A2217. The explosives had been placed to achieve precisely this effect in Stage 1 - a passageway down against the hull. He tossed the detonator aside.

"Stage Two!" Four Seven yelled, pulling a separate detonator out and pressing it. Where the pipes had dropped against the hull, six chargepacks in a concentric circle detonated in sequence, blasting a hole in the outer hull and creating an ingenious entrance for the clones.

"Two Two, Six Five, you're with me! The rest of you, hold the line and protect the power cells!" shouted Four Seven above the ACP shells roaring over their heads. "Keep your heads down!"

"Covering fire!" yelled Six Five.

In unison the troops popped up from cover, firing at the two Trandoshan heavies on opposite sides of the platform. The lizards swiftly rolled behind cover, giving the three-man offense squad the time they needed to make their move across the line, down the pipes, and into the heart of the Trandoshan-infested interior platform...















//http://files.filefront.com/CTF_Kaminoexe_Installer/;5504505;;/fileinfo.html
Dagger - "The Professional"

Freelance Rifle Artist

"I bow to no one, and give service only for cause."
-Boba Fett


Spuz

#1
played it!!!

pure awsomeness!! those movers look awsome!

a must have
My maps: ForestCorridor             Pizzaria
{MotR}Spuzzy{ZetVCom}

{MotR}Weapon

#2
Ditto. :)

Darktrooper

#3
I just tried this out and I'd say it's one of the best maps I've ever played in RC. Nice work Dagger.

DooFi

#4
*dls,playsandthenwritessomethingmoreintothisp0st*

screens look very nice! This is worth a DL.


EDIT: sweet map, man! I gotta say its pretty confusing and I'm not sure about the gameplay but it looks cool and has some nice stuff in it. I'd just not consider it to be completed, because there are some bugs eg the bridge cannot be triggered from both sides and you should check your kill zones! I once fell off and landed in the middle of nowhere lol. As soon as i walked a few metres I just died and fell into the sea xD.
in addition I dont like to see pawns in MP maps. Especially no droids, since you get a frag each time you kill one and thats not fair... Thats also why i removed some small bugs from Oasis. I only put pawns in my maps when I want to test them, in order to not feel alone while testing :P.
I love the idea with the helmet/droid/weapon meshes inside the holo-screens, although it doesnt look entirely convincing ;)
Some static meshes seem to have been put together kind of randomly and not everything is matching the kamino-theme.
Sounds! Great, dude! Sounds! I think you are one of the.. maybe 5% of RC mappers wo put sounds in their maps^^
Lighting could be improved a tad.
The blood-sheets suck, sorry. they are pixelated like hell and the opacity fades from 100% to 0 from one pixel to the next ;) color is not too realistic either. I'm sure you can do that better ;)
The visor-rain-drop-effect is phat, but its missing the actual rain lol.
I didnt look at it in the UED... so I won't say anything about overlapping brushes and grid-aligning :wink:


so all in all i gotta say it looks pretty nice, has some cool technical stuff in it, but I don't think it'll play well since its very low-contrast, confusing and so on... You dont get the hang of the map, playing it for the first time. I still dont have a clue where which room is and where i can get which weapon. I think things like that should become second nature to the player by walking through it one time^^
Dunno, maybe I'm just too stupid or I just didnt pay enough attention to stuff like that lol

Dagger

#5
The layout of the map can come off as a bit confusing, but once you play the map a few times, especially in actual gameplay, it really meshes well and becomes second nature. Part of the issue is that the map is wider than it is long. Flag to flag time with a pistol is only 22 seconds on CTF_Kamino, compared to 30 on Garden, 33 on GhostShip and 27 on Garrison, yet the map occupies the same amount, technically, of grid space as any of these seemingly larger maps. It's designed to give multiple paths to and from each flag and to eliminate choke points.

From every test I've done, the tunnel service bridge (which I assume you're referring to since it's the only thing in the map that can be conceived to be a bridge) can be opened from both sides of both tunnels. I'd be curious to hear, or preferably SEE, where you encountered this issue.

The kill zones are placed geometrically perfectly, with a pain-causing physicsvolume covering the lower half of the subtractive brush for the blue outer area. If you know of a better way to accomplish a falling death, aside from partitioning the area into two zones which would destroy the environmental fog effect crucial to the feel of the level, I'm all ears :)

The pawns were intentionally kept to a minimum and honestly were primarily placed for their weaponry. When you kill the Trandoshan heavies, for instance, you acquire their heavy repeaters with a maximum of 400 ammo minus whatever they managed to unload on you. However, once the weapon is gone, it is gone for the duration of the map, so it presents an interesting tactical challenge for one team to perhaps intentionally control the weapon and use it against the enemy. Ditto the rocket launchers from the clones on the Trando landing platform.

As for the droids, they are eye candy only. In games played on a dedicated server they cease to be destructible actors (a test on my part verified this), and become simply non-solid meshes that beep, move around from time to time, and make it look realistic. They are only killable in solo play of the map.

However, I will admit while being intentionally vague that the droids themselves do serve a...larger purpose in the scheme of the map. The droids and the alcoves they reside in were not placed without a purpose - nothing I put into my maps is ;)

Part of the issue with the Kamino 'theme' for me was that this wasn't supposed to be a Kamino theme on a happy, sunny day - it was supposed to be a Kamino theme after an assault squad of Trandoshan mercenaries
had torn through it, impaling, killing and destroying everything that breathed and most things that didn't as well. Everything I place in my maps has a reasoning behind it and I place absolutely nothing frivolously, so I'd be curious which particular parts or meshes you refer to as random.

The lighting was made intentionally monotonous and dull - The Republic/Empire is not known for aesthetics in their bases.

To comment on the crappy blood texture, it was literally all I could do to create the effect I was looking for. That was the only blood graphic I could find on a solid background for a masked texture, and it served its purpose fairly well, though the look isnt exactly perfect.

The rain was a tough sell. As we all know, animations do not work in multiplayer, at least not on dedicated servers with live clients on them, and so actually making rain was impossible. The best I could do was the visor effect and heavy fog to simulate a deep and foreboding rainfall pattern. This was all I could do with the limitations of the engine.

All in all, it turned out all right, and to answer your complaint about it being confusing, I am not like most mappers in that I don't make my maps to be 'maps'. For most mappers out there, mapping is the process of creating an artificial environment for matches to take place in. However, if you look closer at the retail maps, especially ones like Garrison and GhostShip, you'll see that the real treat of mapping and the real goal is to find one spot, one single locale in the Star Wars universe, isolate it, and drop the player in there. Making the player feel like they're really a part of a larger universe is my ultimate goal. I make my maps to be realistic depictions of real Star Wars environments, not to be artificial and fake 'arenas'.  Layouts of buildings, structures and the like are not always pretty and certainly not always orderly, in the real world or in the Star Wars Universe. This is reflected in the work I do - it is not an environment made from scratch for the purpose of gaming, but a single piece of a much larger universe that the player is placed in.
Dagger - "The Professional"

Freelance Rifle Artist

"I bow to no one, and give service only for cause."
-Boba Fett


DooFi

#6
Quote from: "MotRDagger"From every test I've done, the tunnel service bridge (which I assume you're referring to since it's the only thing in the map that can be conceived to be a bridge) can be opened from both sides of both tunnels. I'd be curious to hear, or preferably SEE, where you encountered this issue.
hmm, i was not able to trigger the bridge from one side. I'm gonna test that once again ;)
EDIT: oh.. yea. I found the mistake in UED. The Bridges have the tags "servicebridge" and "servicebridgeright", but you forgot to change one of the triggers to "servicebridgeright", so it will trigger the wrong bridge ;)


Quote from: "MotRDagger"The kill zones are placed geometrically perfectly, with a pain-causing physicsvolume covering the lower half of the subtractive brush for the blue outer area. If you know of a better way to accomplish a falling death, aside from partitioning the area into two zones which would destroy the environmental fog effect crucial to the feel of the level, I'm all ears :)
I have a screenshot of me standing midair. I dont know on what i stood, since as I said I didnt look at it in UED, but I'm gonna check that now :)

I know, you dont see very much, you can make out a clone commando there lol


Quote from: "MotRDagger"Everything I place in my maps has a reasoning behind it and I place absolutely nothing frivolously, so I'd be curious which particular parts or meshes you refer to as random.
I don't doubt that ;). I just thought the red doors for example dont fit to Kamino. Dunno whether there are Kamino doors in RC but I'm sure you searched every package for them twice, cause I'd prolly do the same xD.


Quote from: "MotRDagger"To comment on the crappy blood texture, it was literally all I could do to create the effect I was looking for. That was the only blood graphic I could find on a solid background for a masked texture, and it served its purpose fairly well, though the look isnt exactly perfect.
Hehe, so I'm gonna rewrite my Alpha-Texture-Tutorial and upload it again.


Quote from: "MotRDagger"The rain was a tough sell. As we all know, animations do not work in multiplayer, at least not on dedicated servers with live clients on them, and so actually making rain was impossible. The best I could do was the visor effect and heavy fog to simulate a deep and foreboding rainfall pattern. This was all I could do with the limitations of the engine.
I'd have made some sheets with a transparent rain-texture-panner :mrgreen: Or convert one sheet to an SM, that should do too. Probably not the most beautiful solution, but after all its rain lol. Could even be better for the performance than emitters, but I don't know

wgo-Stalker

#7
Hey guys, I got a problem with these custom maps. I try to install them, they say its sucsessful, but It doesnt show up in the map load screens. Ive got a mod that makes the commandos white but i dont think that could do it.

Sandcrawler

#8
Thats because you have to manualy add them to your RC map list, or add them using the RC Utility tools, tutorials and the download of his tools can be found on my site.

Tuts:
For mappers:
http://sandcrawler.net/rcmod/tutorials/m1.html

For Gamers:
http://sandcrawler.net/rcmod/tutorials/m2.html

Download:
http://sandcrawler.net/rcmod/downloads/ ... php?file=7

Any other questions on this subject should be directed to my Email, my Email is mailto:DS.sandcrawler@gmail.com">DS.sandcrawler@gmail.com
~Sandcrawler
This is my super cool signature, if you think you can best it then make one and Personal Message it to me. :)