CTF-Rollercoaster

Re: tiiiiight!

OOOPS I forgot to post the the pics

Well here's 3 pics of what the map looked like a few days ago. Note that I turned up the brightness quite a bit.

pic 1: hanging above the blue flag. You can walk over the energy beams, but it's easy to fall into the green water (doesn't hurt tho ). There'll be a lot of fighting underwater, because all 3 exits are underwater . 2 entries to the base are at opposite sides of the flag. 3th entry is through the titan's mouth (be carefull not to splatter on top of the blue flag, unless you're carrying the red flag! ). Also notice the 2 sniperspots at the upper left and right side of the pic. I used Queen textures to get an organic feeling (it looks pretty creepy in there! ).

pic 2: the central part of the 'relay station', at least that's what it looked like a few days ago . It's going to consist of 4 small rooms (like in the 3rd pic) and 1 larger one (the one in the 2nd pic) in the center. They are connected in such a way that you always have to use the jumppads (a bit hard to see in the pic) to get to your next tunnel. This is probably where most of the fighting will be (also z-axis action! ).

pic 3: another pic of the blue tunnel entry room.

Originally posted by Freakish
I'm a rollercoaster nut..so this map is of special interest to me. The loop is great! I like how it looks, and it's fun to ride through. One thing I noticed though..if a player translocates out of the loop while still riding through it, they'll be subject to instant death when they hit the ground...this continued after respawning until I entered 'walk' at the console.

Aside from that..I LOVE flying through the air to the titan and doing loops and really can't wait to see what other crazy rollercoaster aspects you put into this map. Keep up the good work!!

oh..and you said you were almost done with blue base? There's going to be somewhere to stand down in the stomach..right? not just the flag platform..

Click to expand...

Thanx for the feedback!

I know about the translocating problem; this also happens when someone kills you while riding the looping. Appearantly your collision with the world doesn't get turned on again when exiting the interpolation path before you've reached the last point. I'll dive into the interpolationpoint script to see what I can do about it.

You may have noticed that you die a lot in the titan's mouth. Appearantly you're coming in so fast that you splatter against the bottom of the warpzone in his mouth before you get the chance to be warped to his stomach. I think I'll ask navboy (a Fragadelic mapper) if I can use his OffsetTeleporter to teleport players past the warpzone before the titan 'eats' them alive! I can't make the warpzone any deeper because there's just no more room in his lower jaw...

About the blue base, yes you stand on the energy beams and the 4 small rooms at the sides, but there'll be a lot of swimming tho! I think it'll be a great place for snipers (see upper corners of 1st pic).

OK here's the map. Please download it, have a good look around and tell me what's wrong and what's cool.

I added temporarely arrows in the tunnels to indicate whether it's an entry or exit. Beware! The tunnel entries/exits have bad geometry and texturing, worse alignment, and worst lighting!

I'm not happy yet with the lighting in the blue base, but I can't find out what's wrong. Any idea's? (strip of blackness??)
And I just scaled up the water texture, just for Lugg .

A few days ago, I installed 3DS Max 4 to see if I could make some cool terrain for the looping area, but it wasn't as easy as I hoped! It should be possible to create terrain like in LavaGiant with 3DS Max, right? Hmmm I guess I'll have to go find some good tutorials...

Dammit, I had just written a huge reply and then IE crashed and I lost it all...

Anyway I wanted to say thanx to Lugg, that's what I had been searching for.

Freakish:
Thanx for your PM. I saw you found some webside I once made displaying my UT concepts, but it was just an assignment from my university to test my HTML skills! I never made it to be found and read and it has never ever been updated. CTF-Sfear][ has been released ages ago, but since NC hasn't made any new maps available for download yet, I made it available for download in this thread. Post a message there if you like; the thread could use a bump!

As for the speed and bends of the tunnels, I'm still tweaking that. The one tunnel the map has now is just a workaround. The tunnels shouldn't be too fast, because I want it to be possible to put up a fight inside the tunnels. However they shouldn't be too slow either, because that would kill the rollercoaster feeling...

I had written a huge description of how the teleportation problem could be fixed, but I lost it when IE crashed. However it wasn't much different from your idea.

Hmmm those castles.... I guess you've seen the pics at my 'website'; it looks so damn good, but I just can't finish it. It's almost unplayable because of all the collision errors (the map is almost 11MB in file size), caused by all the spiral stairs inside the towers. Also the pathnodes won't connect properly because of the many cramped spaces (like in real castles, I fear I sticked to reality a bit too much). I wish there was a way to scale up an entire map by a factor of 1.5 or something...

Geometry of the red base is 80% finished now and OH LA LA this is gonna be gooood!!!

I didn't have any plans for the red base yet, I thought I'd 'improvise' something. But then it struck me, like lithning, suddenly I saw the light.... all pieces fell to their place...!

Well what is it? I'll keep that as a little surprise.... I'll show you when it's operational!

Yes, you're a psychic, but I think you already knew that (it's says so right above your avatar)...

Freakish had already guessed it right in the other rollercoaster thread, but for those who didn't have a clue what I was talking about in my previous 'teasing' post: the red base is going to be a huge castle!

I guess most of you have seen this very old pic of my 1st map ever, which I have never released, because it was pretty much unplayable. I made the castle over a year ago when I was an absolute newbie to Ued. At that time, words like "framerate" and "polycount" were unknown to me.

When Freakish mentioned the castle, I dug it up from the dark dungeons of my harddisk to see if it was still as unplayable as the last time I checked. I looked at the castle, and suddenly I saw the light: those aren't towers, those are vertical tunnels! Replacing the spiral stairs inside the towers by velocity zones would eliminate one of the 2 things making the castle unplayable: the collision errors caused by the huge (and I really mean HUGE) amount of spiral stairs. I know a castle with velocity zones doesn't make much sense, but that's just why it fits so perfectly in CTF-Rollercoaster: the entire map doesn't make any sense!

The 2nd thing making the castle unplayable was the polycounts. But I found some nice program called MeshMaker, which can turn prefabs into decoration actors. I used it to turn all pillars and other decorative stuff into meshes. It looks a bit less good, but it has produced very acceptable polycounts!

And last but not least, I've changed the setting of the castle. I've always been fascinated by great heights, and it shouldn't be much of a surprise that the Sunspire is my favorite Unreal map (note however that I had made the castle long before I knew the existance of the Sunspire!). I've made a terrain brush similar to the one used in Sunspire, but about halve the size (it's still huge tho!), and placed the castle on top of the big rock in the center. I'm going to make a similar brush for the titan statue, but with a very small rock sticking out of the lava for the titan to stand on. Of course the looping will be right in place for the famous jump into his mouth!

OK here are some pics of the castle under construction. Pics 6 and 7 show the opening roof with the flag on top of it. I had to delete the old mover on which the flag was standing, because it was causing terrible collision errors, but I haven't replaced it yet, so the red flag is hanging in mid air now... Just imagine a pillar there.

please, don't ask about this pic....

Originally posted by Luggage
Remember the cool warp effect in one of the last few levels of Unreal 1? It had you going through a tunnel and lots of coronas (no, I don't mean the outro)... That's kinda what I mean.

Click to expand...

I think you mean ExtremeLab, it has very cool warp tunnels. That's a very good idea for inside the huge rock on which the castle has been built. You'd have to go a long, long way up (and down again) to reach the castle while staying underground. I think it would be cool to have a tunnel with some very bright flares at the end (and maybe some halveway) to cover the big vertical trip. Because those flares don't change in size when getting closer, you don't get the idea of travelling over a great distance. So you step out of the tunnel once inside the castle, you look down and think: "WOW how did I get up here so fast?!". Yeah that'd be cool! Good thinking Lugg! :tup: