[High Treason]

Backstory
After escaping the alien planet in Alien Abductee using a stolen ship, Duke returns to earth but is blown out of the sky by the mysterious red ship. Escaping through the small hatch in the side of the cockpit and falling towards a lake, Duke now finds himself in front of an old forgotten house. Whilst it is overgrown and looks abandoned he can't shake the feeling that someone is watching him from behind those dark windows. The bushes too thick to pass and the door surely jammed, the only way in is through the basement but it quickly becomes clear that something is very wrong here.

This is NOT a combat heavy map (though it has some monsters with limited ammo) and focuses on solving a few simple puzzles to reach the lower level of the basement, the monitors are your friend, mostly the left one, that shows progress and zone. The right monitor will give you a clue as to which order to enter each area, but these clues won't appear if you have the difficulty set to 'Come Get Some' and want to torture yourself, no extra enemies appear on this setting however - in fact the level already comes close to the sprite limit whilst running, it can spawn too many sprites if you try to speedrun at the start. There are a few notepads around the level which you can read, these will always appear though it seems the author was in a hurry to scribble them down, meaning they're not the most legible. Beyond that the best advice I can give you is to save before entering the lower area of the basement behind the yellow key door, there may be a surprise down there.

Download
See Later Post

Installation
Extract the ZIP to a subfolder in your EDuke32 directory to keep things tidy, start EDuke32, select New Game, User Map, then navigate to the map in that directory. The music should play due to sharing its name with the map file. This map was designed for Polymer with dynamic lighting disabled (r_pr_lighting 0 in the console) and the other renderers were not widely tested, so those may have issues. Polymost should work but 8-Bit stopped working once extended limits were reached, which is annoying to me as the feat achieved was kinda impressive and does work in the DOS version of the game. There are, however, some issues you should be aware of and so you should really read the following or at the very least the included TXT.


Important - Please Read!

Spoiler

Current EDuke32 builds have issues which affect this level significantly, in fact you will not be able to complete the level with the current builds (8040 is current at the time of release), some of these issues are over five years old and others are more recent. You should play the level with build 4593 for now as this was the last one which worked. If you reach the central hall and do not see yourself in the monitors, stop the game and downgrade to this version immediately. Other than this you may have trouble with getting stuck at the top of stairways, warping through floors, sounds not playing and various other oddities in later versions of the port.

Beyond that;
- The logic for hiding the gray crystal sometimes gets reversed, this may be related to pausing but is otherwise random. So long as the bong sounds and it appears as collected on the monitor, you're fine.
- A 'player detector' towards the end of the level can malfunction and blow you to smithereens, this is rare but it can happen, so save before you go down those stairs. Projectiles can also warp to other sectors occasionally and break things.
- Some machines in this level are sensitive to within a single tick, which is probably a large part of why these things happen, the timing is simply that precise whilst relying on imprecise mechanics being grossly misused.
- I urge anyone curious to investigate the upper and lower left corners of the map in Mapster32, there's a large 3x3 area which was extremely tedious to build.
- The whole map was built on the assumption this would work despite no tests ever being done besides that detector back in 2014.

Closing notes
As always I ask that anyone planning to host this wait a few days in case any major bugs appear, but they probably won't beyond ones I already know about and can't really fix. For players busy with Ion Fury, don't worry too much if you don't have time to play this map as it may reappear later, I've had this idea in my mind for years of packing up this series, from Riverside Town to this map, into an episode with a few tweaks, maybe more, so this map will surely be a part of that project if it ever comes to be - time isn't generally as readily available as it once was and I think this is a good place to stop with the large scale maps, I don't have time and I'm honestly quite sick of having to work around problems at this stage.

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[Mark]

Hey, another fan of 4593. That was my favorite version for a long time because it did not have a couple of Polymer issues that later versions had plus I had a slightly faster framerate. I downloaded and will play later today.

[Forge]

The effects pulled off are pretty interesting.

[Mark]

I look forward to HT's maps because they are different from the rest. Same with this one. I haven't gotten too far yet but I like it. I was re-introduced to one of the shortcomings of the old eduke32 version. Full speed opening or closing swing doors can kill you. And in the map's first area I had to resort to drinking toilet water for health. I haven't had to sink that low in quite a while.

[Paul B]

From the words of... myself. https://www.dukemaps.net/?page_id=40
I couldn't wait to upload this one to the site. If there are any future changes to the map I'm more than happy to update the map file.

More Screenshots and the download can be found here: https://www.dukemaps.net/?p=13887

Great work!

[High Treason]

Thanks for the nice review.


Bumping to say that I will be taking a last look at the machines some time next week due to random issues they have, though I'm not entirely confident in being able to make them totally infallible. The whole design treads a very fine line.


Beyond that it's always good to know a map has gone down reasonably well instead of turning out to be a total turd, admittedly the minimal combat in this one did worry me a little - which is one of the reasons the previous one had more of it.

[LeoD]

...busy with other stuff, but I'm convinced I'll be impressed as usual...

[zykov eddy]

This is an amazing map, one of the most original usermaps in years. The boss at the end blew my mind especially. I can't actually remember if somebody used this idea before, this is someting totally new. Though, I have to say, even when playing on the included EDuke 32 version, the second half of the mansion had some bugs, such as the weird flickering ghost in a chair with ugly white box around it. I also remember being stuck in the bathroom in the same area, because a flame with the invisible wall appeared at the entrence, preventing me from escaping.
Also, I have to ask, was you inspired by a time machine level from Lost Duke Episodes?

[Seb Luca]

Well done ! Very creative.
Lol, the little table with wheels is well thought!

[High Treason]

@Seb Luca; Cheers. That table probably took longer to make than I'd like to admit though, that stupid little diagonal metal texture between the handle and the top tray never quite behaves as expected.
@Zykov Eddy; Thanks. The white box around the ghost shouldn't be visible, it should only flash for a split second when the puzzle for that room is completed, others have reported some visual bugs I can't reproduce either. The ghost, however, does flicker, there wasn't much I could do about it in the end as enlarging the sector which makes it visible caused some ugly things to happen. That flame bug is another I could never track down beyond how the 'selector switch' by the monitor can be triggered just a tick too early, breaking the sequence of things in that area, the flame coming up whilst you're in the room already is completely baffling as the switch issue would cause it to happen before you arrived. Overall I'm still leaning towards some of these being the effects system breaking down due to the levels of abuse it is receiving. Rather pointless trivia: That bathroom was already annoying to work in, if only because the toilet has to be moved at map start, though admittedly I did laugh slightly at there being a system dedicated to this task in the corner of the map.
Similarly there's a bug with the boss that I actually can reproduce, but the only potential (unconfirmed) fix involves using a lot of sprites, this would have hurt detail even further as the map can actually crash if you manage to play the first area too fast due to too many sprites spawning, so the map had to be put out with a 'player detector' which isn't always reliable due to missiles occasionally warping into it and breaking the machine. Had very little time to look into issues beyond release due to bullshit with the council and my house.
I've long forgotten where the idea originated as the map was started in 2014, if not earlier, it just wasn't finished until now as there was no time to work on it. Not sure if any of the architecture from then survived as the courtyard had TROR and custom textures, both of which were ditched in favor of vanilla, the current courtyard effectively uses a reverse of the method of your dock in A.Dream 2, or I think it does, it makes use of the drawing order but it isn't reliable at this scale.
A few things probably got carried over from other maps which never got made, there were meant to be at least three more somewhere between Nitroglycerin and here, but they would never have stood on their own.


This one is almost certainly going to be the last time I try to map on this scale, I'm burned out now, only have one worthwhile idea left for a concept map but it would only run in the DOS version of the game, that might appear some day, who knows.

[Seb Luca]

Yes ! I imagine the overwork of your F8 key

[Tekedon]

Paul. How about making something equally incredible for Blood? I haven't seen any Blood maps ever from you, allthough I know you messed a bit with mapedit in the past.

[zykov eddy]

High Treason, on 02 October 2019 - 03:25 PM, said:

@Seb Luca; Cheers. That table probably took longer to make than I'd like to admit though, that stupid little diagonal metal texture between the handle and the top tray never quite behaves as expected.
@Zykov Eddy; Thanks. The white box around the ghost shouldn't be visible, it should only flash for a split second when the puzzle for that room is completed, others have reported some visual bugs I can't reproduce either. The ghost, however, does flicker, there wasn't much I could do about it in the end as enlarging the sector which makes it visible caused some ugly things to happen. That flame bug is another I could never track down beyond how the 'selector switch' by the monitor can be triggered just a tick too early, breaking the sequence of things in that area, the flame coming up whilst you're in the room already is completely baffling as the switch issue would cause it to happen before you arrived. Overall I'm still leaning towards some of these being the effects system breaking down due to the levels of abuse it is receiving. Rather pointless trivia: That bathroom was already annoying to work in, if only because the toilet has to be moved at map start, though admittedly I did laugh slightly at there being a system dedicated to this task in the corner of the map.
Similarly there's a bug with the boss that I actually can reproduce, but the only potential (unconfirmed) fix involves using a lot of sprites, this would have hurt detail even further as the map can actually crash if you manage to play the first area too fast due to too many sprites spawning, so the map had to be put out with a 'player detector' which isn't always reliable due to missiles occasionally warping into it and breaking the machine. Had very little time to look into issues beyond release due to bullshit with the council and my house.
I've long forgotten where the idea originated as the map was started in 2014, if not earlier, it just wasn't finished until now as there was no time to work on it. Not sure if any of the architecture from then survived as the courtyard had TROR and custom textures, both of which were ditched in favor of vanilla, the current courtyard effectively uses a reverse of the method of your dock in A.Dream 2, or I think it does, it makes use of the drawing order but it isn't reliable at this scale.
A few things probably got carried over from other maps which never got made, there were meant to be at least three more somewhere between Nitroglycerin and here, but they would never have stood on their own.


This one is almost certainly going to be the last time I try to map on this scale, I'm burned out now, only have one worthwhile idea left for a concept map but it would only run in the DOS version of the game, that might appear some day, who knows.

Thanks for the detailed answer.
Was your map inspired by a time machine level from Lost Duke Episodes?

[High Treason]

@Tekedon; I retired from Blood mapping years ago and don't really have any desire to return to it any time soon, don't even have any ideas for it any more like I occasionally used to. It's possible some of my old maps are still in the wild, but I've never seen them out there and they were trash anyway.

@Zykov Eddy; I didn't even know there was such a thing. Whilst I was at least aware of the mod's existence, I've somehow never gotten around to playing it and have no idea what levels it contains, maybe I'll give it a go some day if I have the time.



To think, none of these mechanisms would be as readily possible if it weren't for everyone's favorite level, Babe Land, being in the Plutonium Pak.

[Radar]

Can anyone help me figure out what to do next?

As you can see, I still have most of the crystals remaining:




I already placed the fuse in this box:




And I see here there is a crystal on the right, and a jetpack (?) on the left:




Anyone know what I'm supposed to do?

[Forge]

the premise of the game play is kinda like time travel
you go to a room when you have the zone set to a color, you perform an action, it affects something in the room when it's changed to a different color zone.

e.g. the last picture you have of the library.
there's a stair-ramp thing that's blocked from moving to the jetpack
you do something to move it in one color zone, so you can go back to another color zone in the same room and climb the ladder to get the jet pack.

pretty much all of the rooms are like that

[High Treason]

Indeed, if you didn't ramp the difficulty up you do at least get a room order on the right hand monitor in the entrance hall, the color squares tell you which order to visit the dimensions in for that room. Not sure why so many of your crystals are blue.

[High Treason]

Update!
Better late than never. I repaired several things in the map;

• AI system now has 'flood control' so that when missiles warp into the 'player detector' an 'unclogger' steps in, which should make the machine more robust and prevent the boss going haywire and appearing in more than one place.
• Mended some drawing bugs around Helen, which previously manifested as huge glass walls around her. She yells a little louder now too.
• Corrected a small palette issue in Helen's room.
• Speaking of which, I mended an audio cue for the yellow key door.
• Possibly fixed the fire issue, seemed to be an SE31 misbehaving and going into some weird state in no-man's-land, cannot confirm.
• Mended a texture problem in the ventilation shaft.
• Also made the SE7 in the ventilation shaft more robust.
• Fixed a slight palette issue in the kitchen.
• Mended timing for the dimension shifter, it is slightly slower but should prevent the reversed logic of the gray crystal.
• Tampered with timing for the toilet, as it was possible to flood the machine with inputs and have bad things happen. It now uses the same timing as the dimension shifter, so should behave itself.
• Fixed an audio issue in the bathroom.
• Minor texture fixes behind some pillars near the pool that really annoyed me.
• Dodged a potential out-of-bounds in the dimension shifter's corridors.
• An item that didn't exist in the map but appeared anyway no longer seems to appear. I don't know what it was or why this is.
• Some other minor things like a couple of stray sprites.

The map is still supposed to be played in r4593 or older though, haven't tested newer versions to see if the problems they had were fixed. Some oddities still exist, the bathroom mirror doesn't work in Polymost sometimes, also a platform raised that shouldn't have, but nothing else on the same tag activated and the platform didn't go back down when they did, this only happened once so we'll say it was a solar flare, but I kinda think the upper right hand side of the house is cursed or something, constant source of trouble when building the map.
That aside, Download the updated version here; http://dxzeff.com/trash/VHT0136.zip


If you still get stuck, here's a video walkthrough with chapters, so you'll probably want to view it on YouTube itself for those to work;



Guess I should ask an admin to edit the first post and replace the old download with a link to this post instead.

[Aleks]

A bump one year later, but just played this one after having played your other works (from Riverside Town onwards) for the past few weeks and gotta say - this is by far your opus magnum! While I also really enjoyed Nitroglycerin (also having realised I subconciously did some very similar mechanics for collecting stuff in both Back in Business and Submachine) and Alien Abductee, this one felt a lot more coherent and complete. Loved how it functioned pretty much like a completely different adventure type of gameplay, also minimal approach to gameplay was a good idea (both in terms of appreciating all the mechanics and design more, but also how the final encounter hit harder this way).

I liked the design in your earlier, city maps, giving them this kind of bleak, rainy British docks look with all the brick buildings and architecture. Alien Abductee was a pretty cool approach to alien planet and ship, but in this one the design also shined the most - while I appreciated the other maps a lot, there was always something that felt quite unbalanced in terms of effects/design/combat in there, while here both the more detailed and refined design and minimalistic combat worked in favour of all the cool effects, making it a much more enjoyable experience. There's also usually been something cryptic that would break the pace of the other levels a bit for me, while here even at the beginning looking for clues felt fresh and once I grasped the concept, I didn't even mind what could be considered some length-padding.

The boss battle was super cool and creative, worked perfectly fine for me and the bastard (or was it just poor Helen?) did hit me a couple of times while appearing right behind - although the first time I beat him, I appeared in a brownish room with a circle of 8 targets that would sometimes hit me with freeze ray projectiles after activating them, with no way out - but the fight was enjoyable enough to retake it anyway.

Also found a bug which was probably a result of your final changes, since this seems to work fine on your YouTube video:

Spoiler

The secret inside the tiny ventilation shaft that requires shrinking seems to be no longer accessible, as the mirror can't be hit with shrinker - for some reason you blocked/hitscanned the wall right before the mirror instead of mirror itself.

Besides how all the little puzzles with dimension shifting worked and the boss, I enjoyed all the small details along the way - like the sloped roofs (I remember reading you posting about it somewhere else, so kinda knew I should pay attention there, but still it was pretty impressive), the hanged guys visible only in the mirror (creative way of using the sectnum change) and how smooth you connected the potentially changing rooms with darkened corridors or ventilation shafts.

[High Treason]

Well thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed them. I really, really need to get around to playing Back In Business as well as Submachine some time, hopefully will find time between finishing the Roch maps and starting on other things. Have welding to do, though, urgently. I seem to be consistently a year or so behind on playing other people's stuff.

The boss wasn't Helen, but I'd wondered if people might think it was. Helen was just the dead home owner's sister, where the boss was the pilot of the red ship, some other form of alien. This is the first time I've heard of a player warping into 'the eye' or 'player detctor' down there. Rockets used to get in there and break the whole thing sometimes - they still can get in, but there's only a tiny chance of them breaking anything now due to the 'unclogger' trying to account for it.

Have no memory of blocking the wall in front of the mirror, could swear it was working when last tested, but that area is haunted or something, what with things like that, the earlier issues with fires appearing and a bunch of other oddities. It actively fought against being fixed on multiple occasions.
Incidentally, that ventilation shaft you mention, the larger one that you enter the room from, doesn't actually work the same as the corridors. It exists mostly just to dodge sprite drawing limits. Otherwise that part of the house does everything in a single instance, which is probably half the reason it produced so many issues.

In any case, I'm glad you enjoyed it, as I always figured this would be a somewhat divisive map due to the way it plays and its tendency to do peculiar things sometimes.

[Aleks]

High Treason, on 27 June 2021 - 04:45 PM, said:

Well thanks. I'm glad you enjoyed them. I really, really need to get around to playing Back In Business as well as Submachine some time, hopefully will find time between finishing the Roch maps and starting on other things. Have welding to do, though, urgently. I seem to be consistently a year or so behind on playing other people's stuff.

Tell that to me - I've been out of the loop for like 15 years, so there's been a lot of stuff I'm trying to catch up on, especially considering people with interesting ideas like you or Mister Sinister emerging in the meantime.

Quote

The boss wasn't Helen, but I'd wondered if people might think it was. Helen was just the dead home owner's sister, where the boss was the pilot of the red ship, some other form of alien. This is the first time I've heard of a player warping into 'the eye' or 'player detctor' down there. Rockets used to get in there and break the whole thing sometimes - they still can get in, but there's only a tiny chance of them breaking anything now due to the 'unclogger' trying to account for it.

I wasn't sure with the notes if it was Helen that kinda inherited the power or was it something else, also with the shifting dimensions by the time I read about the alien ship, I assumed it was the Duke's ship, but all happening in another time plane (on a sidenote, if I were to nitpick on something, I wasn't too fond on the font you used for the notes, even though I read you wanted them to be a bit illegible). If anything, it's pretty cool how the story is told here - both detailed enough for people to get it, but also leaving a lot of room for personal interpretation. Also the ghost sister Helen really reminded me of Madeleine from "Fall of the House of Usher", which is awesome.

Didn't really dive too deep into how the boss fight is constructed, but either way it's really impressive and minor bugs like that happening is understandable with that level of complexity, so I don't mind.

Quote

Have no memory of blocking the wall in front of the mirror, could swear it was working when last tested, but that area is haunted or something, what with things like that, the earlier issues with fires appearing and a bunch of other oddities. It actively fought against being fixed on multiple occasions.
Incidentally, that ventilation shaft you mention, the larger one that you enter the room from, doesn't actually work the same as the corridors. It exists mostly just to dodge sprite drawing limits. Otherwise that part of the house does everything in a single instance, which is probably half the reason it produced so many issues.

Ah damn, that flicking shit in the video looks like the parent sector got "nuked", no idea why, but it happens sometimes, especially with older Build/Mapster versions it seems - like adding a single vortex inside will just fuck up all the child sectors. Anyway, was wondering, did you use that old build (r4593) just for the sake of viewscreens and clipping of shrinker projectiles? Not even sure if viewscreens showing proper things when idle were that essential here (I liked how you used them as basically mirrors in Alien Abductee though).

[High Treason]

The story was always a case of "It's still a Duke Nukem 3D map, so people aren't going to over-analyze this too much" anyway.

The flickering only happened when the view mirrored like that, so went ignored otherwise. Assumed it was just things rendering 'out of order'.
It wasn't the only time something like that happened. Whilst there's no images of it left, at one time the kitchen worked differently and a swing door was used to get the crystal there from a weird cabinet thing. Opening that door made all of the points from surrounding sectors pull inwards to the corner of the door, killing the player. Reasons unknown. Never investigated too much as the glass windowed cupboard seemed a better idea and was more reliable. Also I feel like that all happened before the kitchen was moved - the kitchen used to be smaller and located at the other side of a huge hall, accessed through those other double doors opposite the ones where the kitchen is now. Mostly just moved it because the big hall was useless and it seemed too far to walk.

Viewscreens were only a part of it the decision to stay on an old build. A decent amount of Alien Abductee was built in 2014, so it had to stay on 4593 as reworking would take too long. I went into Dimension Shift having to rebuild most of what existed of it anyway, so actually did intend to make it compatible with later builds. Unfortunately it turned out that you couldn't walk back downstairs to the basement, that the pool couldn't be exited short of performing a glitch, but sometimes the pool would crush the player. There were other game breaking issues elsewhere that I don't remember now.
The first landing above the curved stairs used to have a white wall area in the middle to make up for the lack of viewscreen functionality, where it would have allowed for a display to be in the wall behind the switch console thing. When it became apparent the other problems would render the map impossible to complete and none of the devs seemed to care, I decided to just move back to 4593. The white wall was then knocked out as there was no reason not to let the player see down into the hall, though it did make the sprites up there slightly less fun to line up.
There's actually a feature of the original viewscreen behavior implemented that I'd wanted to use, but could never find a way that didn't seem forced. It only works with one or two renderers, but if you stand by the front door before ever using the viewscreen, it should switch its view automatically to the camera there. This can actually be done across multiple cameras and viewscreens. Always kinda liked the idea of having a big screen up on a wall or building somewhere do this - think something like LA Rumble - but connected to a puzzle in some way.

In any case, it was bad enough trying to debug the problems I was causing already without having to try and figure out what was my fault, what was the original code's fault and what was caused by the then current port versions. Plus if I'd tried to counter port problems, they might later get 'fixed' in ways that would then break my workarounds. It seemed like the only solid option was to work with a known quantity, that being an older build that I knew still had very much vanilla behavior. In days gone by, we were told to do it this way anyway - to always assume that it should function the way it always did before and to assume it will again eventually.