Map castle_m for HL

Phase: Finished (?). Need a real playtest with a lot of players, maybe. That's the only way I could discover any more flaw. Two of my beautiful towers had to go - they seemed to crash the client. It is still possible to crash the client, but it's very rare - and I won't tell anyone how. :) To do: o Nothing? /Mirar <mirar@mirar.org> ---------------------------------------------------------------- * Play Information * Title : Castle M Filename : castle_m Map type : Deathmatch 8-32 players Author : Mirar Email address : mirar@mirar.org Home page : http://www.mirar.org/half-life/ Screenshots : http://www.mirar.org/half-life/castle_m.html :-) Installation : Since I'm using a custom sky, this is going to get a little bit harder then usual. The easiest thing (if you didn't do this already) is to unzip everything in the Half-life/valve directory - everything will be in the right directory then. If you fail with this, this is where the files should go: castle_m.bsp -> half-life\valve\maps\ castle_m.txt -> half-life\valve\maps\ (or wherever you want) castle_m??.tga -> half-life\valve\gfx\env\ Sorry about the inconvinience. (I sure wish valve would have made this easier.) If you get the "desert" skyline, your installation wasn't successful. Please try again. Description : Short: It's a fantasy castle. It's abandoned, since a lot of futuristic and strange maniacs are running around and killing each other with weapons from other worlds. This happened just now, anyway. :-) It's magically locked up, so don't try to escape. ;) This is an attemt of several goals: o I wanted to make a real fantasy castle, with lots of details. And it should be huge. So I sketched up the looks, and tried to compile. Not enough room for lightdata -> blam! So I shrunk it. And shrunk it. Now it isn't that huge anymore. :-) The details? I hit the ceiling of clipnodes, too! I had to strip the castle of details and details to get it through compiling. Well, the r_speeds liked that. :-) o I wanted to make a large playable maps. I'm tired of all these crowded small places... Ever tried "maze" with 16 players? Or "snarkpit" with 32? Well, I guess this is only for powerhorse servers... I think it will play well for 16 and above players. It should play for 4 and up, too, but it will be an entirely different game. It doesn't work at all for 2-3, though. o It shouldn't give as high r_speeds as my last map. Well, crap this goal. It moves from 100-500 in most areas, but raises to 1500 wpoly epoly if you are in the right tower looking in the right (wrong?) direction. :-) And you can get higher from the intermission cameras, but that won't affect play. I've played it in software mode on my machine (see below), and didn't have a lot of troble, so I hope it's enough. I had to make a lot of textures scaled up 4x, thats why it looks unsharp now and then. There is some nearly-misalignes from this, but it doesn't seem to stop the ambient feeling. I hope. :/ o I think I've succeded in the connectivity bits. You can get from anywhere to anywhere in just a few seconds (well, it's a large map... half a minute?). I hope the hidden passages isn't to hidden. Well. The result is a fantasy castle with not a lot of details, but I'm happy with the architecture and lightning. I couldn't fit in the HEV and health charges, so there is a lot of batteries and helthkits - and some magical health chargers, too. When I was amost finished, I got some reports of crashing clients. When I investigated this, it seemed that my map could crash any non-local client. Bad. I've spent some weeks just tracking this bug. I had to remove even more details and get rid of some towers, and redo a lot of things. Valve couldn't reproduce the bug, so I got no help there. Sierra told me to buy WC Pro, but afaik that isn't possible yet. (And I think it's a HL bug, anyway.) Well, I think I've solved the problem. You can still trigger the bug, but only I (and [black]Hubbe) knows how, and we won't tell you. It's very rare. I closed the top one of the towers to stop people from going there often and eventually (still rare) crash their clients. Now I'm satisfied with and tired of this map. So out she goes. Handle with care, and have a good time playing on it! Can you find the hidden passages? /Mirar (There is one bug still - the "painting" hidden passage isn't openable from the inside. This isn't my fault, and I couldn't find any way to open it from the inside. Sometimes it helps just rotating and press the air everywhere. This is, too, a half-life bug - but I feel it isn't that important.) Additional Credits to : clan Black Beret (former Lysator); especially ZinO, Per, Hubbe, Marcus Evilchild and the other people at Rust Editing discussion board Radium for reviewing maps (and giving general advices) Textures : a lot, and almost all are home-made; CW_TALL The main textures. The walls and the CW_TALL3, 4 common floor texture. CW_PEB2 TALL3, 4 is the same as TALL, but scaled and tiled 2 and 4x for larger textures (to fewer the polys) * OUT_GRAVEL The gravel in the yard. CW_IVY The ivy texture on the walls. CW_BRN_ROCK The throne. CW_FLOOR2 The throne hall floor. CW_SANDSTONE The raised floor below the throne. SG_1 - SG_4 The four textured windows. -0CW_PLASTER The white plastering (also in the kitchen) {CW_LADB0 Ladder textures - the side and {CW_LADB2 the ladder (with transparent holes). {CM_RAIL0 rail top {CM_RAIL3 rail side CM_BED_TOP These are heavy modified and home-made CM_BEDSIDE variants of some texture i found on the net. It's the beds in the lower floors. CM_PINE3 This is the common wood texture's i've used. CM_PLANKS3 The two first are warmer (pine) textures, * TRRM_WOOD the two second look more worn. * TRRM_WOOD2 -0PANELF The wooden panel (5 variants) CM_WOODWALL The wooden floor in royalty bedroom * FIFTHIES_CCH1B For the royalty bed. * FIFTHIES_DSK2 The hinges on the main doors. * ROPE Ropes. * SILO2_C1 The roof. :) CM_KITCHEN Kitchen tools (for ambience) CM_KITCHEN2 * !GWATER3 Is the water in the kitchen. CW_WEAPON Is the Black Berets (my clan) large weapon in the throne hall. CMBEYF Art by Maria "Jade" William; CMCERUG "Always a memory", "Iechuza", CMMETEF "The Masked Succubus", "Eternity", CMLECHG "A quiet of beyond" and CMMEMF "Cerulan Blue". CMSUCCG CRDRACF Art by Roberto Campus; CRFORBF "Dragon birth", "Forest", "Snake" CRSNAKEF and "Waterfall". CRWATERF * BLACK misc (actually, I don't know) * WHITE * C1A3YELLOW * C2A4_BRD1Y3 * ORIGIN You can't see these. :) * CLIP * AAATRIGGER * SKY This you can see... Well, that's it. The ones marked '*' is from HL packs. The other lot are from the net, mostly heavily modified by me (using Gimp), or even made from scratch. I made sure they all were in public domain. I hope I'm right about this... Tell me if you want the WAD's. I'll be happy to share. They contain some more stuff, too. :) I have permission from the artist to use the art. Here is their URL's: Maria: http://www.elfwood.com/lothlorien/artists/william2/william2.html http://www.xlnt-arts.com/maria Roberto Campus: http://www.elfwood.com/lothlorien/artists/robertocampus/robertocampus.html http://www.inergy.com/robcamp/ Sky : custom ("castle_m") based on valve's maps and images from NASA * Construction * Base : no Tool(s) used : Worldcraft 2 beta, GIMP for Solaris (it's a unix), pnmtools (for unix), pike (i'm a developer anyway), texturesdk (from valve), emacs Build time : 5 weeks (~180h, i guess) Compile Machine : PII 266 w/ 128Mb RAM Compile time : 0:30:40 (!) (yes, half an hour!) Statistics: Object names Objects/Maxobjs Memory / Maxmem Fullness ------------ --------------- --------------- -------- models 231/400 14784/25600 (57.8%) planes 18720/32767 374400/655340 (57.1%) vertexes 18544/65535 222528/786420 (28.3%) nodes 7328/32767 175872/786408 (22.4%) texinfos 1275/8192 51000/327680 (15.6%) faces 13602/65535 272040/1310700 (20.8%) clipnodes 30298/32767 242384/262136 (92.5%)VERY FULL! leaves 5131/8192 143668/229376 (62.6%) marksurfaces 17301/65535 34602/131070 (26.4%) surfedges 63599/512000 254396/2048000 (12.4%) edges 32362/256000 129448/1024000 (12.6%) texdata [variable] 2059792/2097152 (98.2%)VERY FULL! lightdata [variable] 1649121/2097152 (78.6%) visdata [variable] 129452/2097152 ( 6.2%) entdata [variable] 71794/131072 (54.8%) === Total BSP file data space used: 5825281 bytes === brushes total : 2069 special brushes : 110 (walls, illusions, doors) textures : 56 light sources : 198 sound sources : 24 doors : 26 ladders : 26 starting points : 74 weapon spots : 60 ammo spots : 36 healthkits : 16 batteries : 26 grey hairs : 4711 hours of missed sleep : more than you want to know fun time : a lot, and I hope you'll have that too! ================================================================ ::: ADDITIONAL INFO ::: ================================================================ * Copyright / Permissions * o Authors may use this level as a base to build additional levels. o You may distribute this level without this file. (Why?) But I would prefer if it's sent both with this file and the sky. o This BSP may be distributed in any way. o You can have the .RMF file if you want to check it out, just mail me. o You can have the .WAD's with the new textures, just mail me. (Not the art, though. I promised the artist.) o If you have any regular mapping questions, state them at Department of Engineering, halflife.lowlife.net. I will probably answer them there - or someone else will. o If you're making a map, test it at DoE (see directly above). This will save Radium from going insane from too many too bad maps.