[Aleks]

ck3D, on 26 September 2020 - 03:54 PM, said:

No that's really cool, I'm no longer into building detailed micro structures myself but there is room for all styles as long as the level plays well, and you have an interesting style doing it too, those bar stools are some engineer stuff. I especially like the pool table and the classic-looking (yet quite rare in modern user maps) play on browns and greens for a gloomy look. By taking advantage of all the new techs, sloped sprites you're carving the niche of your own style, it's already quite recognizable, although thinking about it now it reminds me of Quakis': https://msdn.duke4.net/hotflaming.php

Thanks, and yeah, I actually did play "Flaming Shipwreck" a couple weeks ago, loved the map - and the credit for the technique used for the bar stools goes all the way to Quakis actually, he made them like that (circular sprites "wrapped around" in those stripes) in his map, and he also used the Octabrain projectile sprite for the circular base of the stool. I found his spritework style in general quite similar to mine, with all the little details (although his style is far more "clean" compared to mine and his take on a bar was very high-end compared to this place, which is where Pig Cops would go for a beer). His map also reminded me there are these two wooden "ship" textures hidden in completely unexpected place among the tiles, which broadened my choice of wood and made ideal pick for the pool table.

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Also maybe a stupid question but is that bar texture new .art?

And correct again - well, it's not really new, but it's from Duke It Out in DC.

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It's funny, I was also coming into this thread to report that as part of general progress on map 3 of my project, I just built a room with 1000+ sprites too (actually roughly 1200 so far, and that's without the detailing that I'll add later), basically imagine the cinema room in E1L1 but four times bigger with an extra floor/balcony (complete with seats) in the back. Funny anecdote is I built it piece per piece over a few hours, only to end up with a rather symmetrical room I could have very well copy-pasted fragments of, had I done things in the correct order, and saved most of that time (but it was fun to see slowly come together). In general I'm having fun working the inside of my little pyramid-shaped building right now, composing different floors, connecting them together in different ways and the like. Just need to keep an eye on the wall limit as I'm nearly at 10k already and estimate that I need to save at least 4 or 5k to really wrap things up everywhere else in the map, but so far so good.

Aw, that happens with me quite a lot, building something piece by piece only to realise it could have been done way faster. Still, 1200 sprites in a few hours is still a good speed! Those balconies sound promising. As for the walls, I also have to keep a close eye on them, just merged different pieces of my map for check and I'm at about 13.5k already with few more rooms and some landscaping to go.

[oasiz]

Not really Duke related (mapster32 still is!) but here is a small tease on what I've been doing with .m32 scripts for the past two weeks :)

Keep in mind that there are some things like scale, ROR preview and few other Duke remnants that remain as issues, but it's very usable otherwise (Tags/Bools/SO creation/etc.. all work) -- A perfect companion for VoidSW.

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[ck3D]

Celebrating going over 10000 walls on map 3 with a handful of screens from a random room I like. Lots of plays on red tints all the while avoiding the more brutal pal 2 in that section of the map in general. Once again I'm not too crazy about the wall limit starting to close in compared to how much more I wish I could add to the map, so I've been starting to build a lot of the decoration out of sprites instead of sectors (normally a basic go-to technique for large levels already, but here I might have to abuse it even more than I'm used to); now 6000 walls left is a lot but I know I'm probably going to need a quarter to half of that for fine-tuning/detailing at street level, and the rest for more locations I want. But if I managed to (just barely) make balance ambition and resources for map 2, I should be able to pull it off again here. Otherwise I'm at 1500 sectors and 5400 sprites right now. While I'm at it, I'd like to thank the people on here who've been keeping encouraging me to keep working on this for over a year now, despite how that means I haven't released anything in the meantime (although CBP2020 is coming) - I appreciate the patience.

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[Mark]

That computer keyboard is huge. :)

[ck3D]

Mark, on 01 October 2020 - 06:02 PM, said:

That computer keyboard is huge. :)

Good catch, thanks, it's supposed to be a bigger/futuristic-ish work station that I'll probably make interactive too (and I like it when interactive elements stand out visually) but now that you've pointed it out I can see how it looks odd, especially from that angle. I'm going to keep making alterations to that area in general, for now I've mostly been throwing the basic structure of every floor in that building together with little concern for refining stuff so far (as of now, many of the hallways are just textured and still basically empty or in a general temporary state).

[Mark]

Maybe the reason scale jumped out at me was that I have been revamping the Pigsty map for HHR and its amazing how overlarge the scale was on things throughout the whole map. Its funny I never really noticed til now.

[ck3D]

I literally just fixed what looked odd/off with the keyboard, without even retouching the sector size, just using E on the texture with proper alignment was enough to rectify the perspective (funny how perception works), for some reason I could have sworn I had done it already but I guess not. To be honest I don't mind it in Duke 3D when some proportions are made a bit unrealistic if that helps with the gameplay, for instance in relation with enemy/actor height etc. to make sure every angle will turn out to be practical in the middle of the action, I'm pretty sure that's why a lot of the original maps had oversized crates, elevated platforms, ceilings and whatnot, too. Detailed user maps are really what got us used to small scale stuff. On the other hand there is definitely such a thing as stupid oversizing and occasionally I can happen to stray in that direction here and there in levels too (e.g.. that whole bar in Hibernal Solstice was ridiculous), so I appreciate you keeping such concerns in check.

[Mark]

I'm a nitpicker when it comes to stuff like scale. It stems from me paying too much attention to eye candy in my projects. :)

[Aleks]

Scale can be tricky in Duke 3D, as making most stuff perfect scale in comparison to Duke's height would usually result in very cramped rooms. I just assume that Duke is quite a short guy, also I don't think the F7 third person view is scaled correctly to first person perspective (also Duke seems more bulky than his sprite). In general, most of the time I go for a bit of a compromise so the slight overscaling would be unnoticable for most people, but then sometimes looking at my own maps with F7 view is like "something's clearly wrong"...

As for the screens, love the texturing and palettes. Some of these textures are rarely seen around (even in the base game), like the Star Trek ready room wall or that tan/brown thing with a light you use for the ceiling - doing my little bar I've also used them and found they are quite underappreciated. It seems they also pal quite handsomely here :) Same for these wood textures from Atomic tileset - they have a neat, large resolution and pal 17, 19 or 24 works well on them. I also really like these corridoors in the background on these screens, gives them a nice depth feeling.

As for some nitpicking (dunno how far you are with panning textures here, so might be just something you haven't done yet): on 1st screen, the wall texture on the lintel to the far right might need a little change of panning, as the screws on it look somehow "cut". And I'm not sure about the black and white wall texture on the 2nd screen, it looks great on the corner and fits with the overall texturing, but on that longer wall it pans quite ugly with the repetitive pixel patterns - but again, this might be due to the shading at this specific perspective and something that won't be noticed within the game when running around and not paying so much attention to every detail.

[MetHy]

OG maps tend to have a lot of space yes, especially considering they're supposed to be playable for 8 players in co-op and DM.

It's easy to start building on a certain scale and get so used to it you can't tell anymore how small/big it is. Both Shadow Warrior and Powerslave have an overall scale approximately 40% bigger than Duke's, I mapped for Powerslave right after mapping for SW and I was so used to the scale it didn't even hit me that Powerslave was also on a bigger scale, despite in both cases, using mapster32 which is built for Duke's scale.
That's why it's good to test early on with a couple of temp enemies too. Always sticking to the same sizes for doors also helps: build a door the size you know is right and then you immediately get a feel of how right or wrong the room is.

[ck3D]

Aleks, on 02 October 2020 - 08:15 AM, said:

Scale can be tricky in Duke 3D, as making most stuff perfect scale in comparison to Duke's height would usually result in very cramped rooms. I just assume that Duke is quite a short guy, also I don't think the F7 third person view is scaled correctly to first person perspective (also Duke seems more bulky than his sprite). In general, most of the time I go for a bit of a compromise so the slight overscaling would be unnoticable for most people, but then sometimes looking at my own maps with F7 view is like "something's clearly wrong"...

Oh that's definitely true, honestly I've always read people post 'use F7 for scaling' but practically that doesn't work and is indeed how one ends up with cramped stuff (that's actually a big reason why my first maps were consistently so cramped, I used to believe the lie). Movement of the player is already way too fast (and their jumps too high) to be realistic, so in order to match such a behavior one actually needs just as unrealistic settings, otherwise the mapper is only falling into the trap of bad game design by unpractically restricting movement (since it's game design this is about and not 1:1 recreations of real-world places).

Aleks, on 02 October 2020 - 08:15 AM, said:

As for some nitpicking (dunno how far you are with panning textures here, so might be just something you haven't done yet): on 1st screen, the wall texture on the lintel to the far right might need a little change of panning, as the screws on it look somehow "cut". And I'm not sure about the black and white wall texture on the 2nd screen, it looks great on the corner and fits with the overall texturing, but on that longer wall it pans quite ugly with the repetitive pixel patterns - but again, this might be due to the shading at this specific perspective and something that won't be noticed within the game when running around and not paying so much attention to every detail.

It took me a bit of time to understand what exactly you were describing because it sounds like the screens show up in a different order for you than they do for me, for instance the lintel I'm personally seeing it on screen 2 and the 'black and white' texture I assume is the grey wall with darker lines on what to me is screen 3 (?). Screws on the lintel look cut because they're connected with the ones on the bottom texture which indeed can hardly be distinguished from this angle, but otherwise it works well, although what I might do is stretch that texture in height for less sketchy trimming. And about the grey wall I think it looks OK in game, that hallway serves as transition with the main hall of the building (that room with the green ceiling you can distinguish further in the back) and it's quite seamless, it only starts getting repetitive in said main hall of the building (is that what you meant?) but that's because I haven't done anything to that particular long wall yet besides texturing it, I'll most likely break it down and embellish it with some detailing later on.

Thank you for the observations and yeah, I'm having a lot of fun with texturing on this one (well on the whole project but also especially on this map in particular), really I'm only posting the areas that don't spoil my favorite eye-candy but otherwise those maps are littered with little bullshit combinations here and there that I'm pretty content with and hopefully people will find cool too.

I'm a bit pissed though, talking about scale, I just realized I got the size of the main hall wrong compared to its outside counterpart, shouldn't be too hard of a fix but I'm still going to have to move a bunch of older stuff around just when I thought I was about to move forward on the level, ah well, I'm still quite largely done with that one complex building (which in itself feels like a level within the level; coincidentally all the other maps have specific segments that feel like that to me too). [edit - sorted already]

[Aleks]

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It took me a bit of time to understand what exactly you were describing because it sounds like the screens show up in a different order for you than they do for me, for instance the lintel I'm personally seeing it on screen 2 and the 'black and white' texture I assume is the grey wall with darker lines on what to me is screen 3 (?).

Oh, just realised it's just me who messed the order of your screenshots, I actually double checked if I have the tabs open in the correct order before posting and still managed to get it wrong https://forums.duke4.net/public/style_emoticons/default/unsure.gif Yes, lintel is the thing on screen 2 (https://forums.duke4...attach_id=15755) and with the black and white texture I meant the wall from screen 1 (https://forums.duke4...attach_id=15756), which is also visible (barely and on opposite wall) on screen 3 - tile #205 to be exact. I actually just checked in Mapster how it looks on a longer wall and it seems fine, so might just be the matter of perspective (and it seems to connect nicely with #204 too). Sorry for the mess!

[ck3D]

Yeah no sweat at all, I quickly got you regardless eventually. I've fixed the look of the lintel by the way (didn't change the 'cut' alignment as to not break the connection of the screws with the ones on the bottom ceiling part I was describing, but just stretching it a bit helped clean up the trimming). Regarding tiles 204 and 205, yeah those connect seamlessly, there's probably a lot to do with them for trimming purposes or even building facades/ornaments, in general I've been quite into exploring the possibilities of 'different' textures lately, tiles from the base game I used to completely skip/sleep on, trying to read forgotten or new patterns and purposes in them, in the end it allows for both diversity and very specific looks when you need them, fun stuff. There's actually quite a few semi-obscure tiles that are meant to go together like this one for trimming, yet user mappers tend to overlook that specific purpose and instead typically use them in different ways, and now going back to the original feels fresh. Speaking of that pal 19'd brown light thing you were mentioning for instance, I've also used on some buildings (see red building in that earlier post), which is not something I would have felt comfortable doing before but sometimes you need to leave that comfort zone to get better and keep things fresh.

PS. also before I forget, something funny happened while I was experimenting with the map yesterday, nothing crazy but I had forgotten Build worked like that. So right now, the map has that one big building (the pyramidal one), the inside of which I built separately from the outside (as 90% of the corresponding outdoor structure for the building is also valid player space, with roofs etc.), with the prospect of later moving the inside layout over the outside structure eventually, as SOS, for things to look coherent in the automap and also to then enable me to add a physical connection or two between both 'dimensions'. As of now, the only connection between the two is an artificial one, a silent teleporter via a sewer hole. Anyway, trying to prematurely move the indoor segment over the outside outline to check my dimensions, I accidentally exactly connected the two manhole sectors (in the eventual product I'll just have them one pixel off diagonally), and even though things were glitchy in 3D mode with some of the walls having turned solid/white in the upper layer I could now physically travel through the manhole in the editor in 3D mode, so without relying on the silent teleporter. Probably basic knowledge (the invisible window trick probably relies on a similar mechanism - I remember nothing), and useless due to the white walls thing, but I wasn't prepared for it so when I successfully dropped down the manhole in the editor and reached the other section it kind of blew my mind. I'm easily entertained.

[ck3D]

Couple of sleepers for tonight. Started sprinkling some basic detail at street level (screen 1), so far nothing remarkable although I suspect the scenery will look better once finalized with cars, signs, road marking etc. Screen 2 is the same room I've posted before, just with slightly more detail too, still tons of work left to do. But I'm getting to the point where I'm slowly feeling comfortable at the idea of starting to enclose the map at street level soon, and use the remaining walls for interior tweaks/detailing. I'm having a blast working on this particular map but also starting to feel like the process has been too long for my liking, so hopefully I can wrap it up by the end of the month and move on to the fourth.

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[11bush]

I have been spending my little bit of spare time making trees grass and shrubs, as well as wall textures to give the look of a forest.

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[Aleks]

ck3D, on 04 October 2020 - 04:51 PM, said:

Couple of sleepers for tonight. Started sprinkling some basic detail at street level (screen 1), so far nothing remarkable although I suspect the scenery will look better once finalized with cars, signs, road marking etc. Screen 2 is the same room I've posted before, just with slightly more detail too, still tons of work left to do. But I'm getting to the point where I'm slowly feeling comfortable at the idea of starting to enclose the map at street level soon, and use the remaining walls for interior tweaks/detailing. I'm having a blast working on this particular map but also starting to feel like the process has been too long for my liking, so hopefully I can wrap it up by the end of the month and move on to the fourth.

Just took a closer look at the pictures, and I really love how the buildings blend with the parallaxed sky on the street one :) Great effect with the "shining" parts on the buildings and sky choice/palette! Also the bus stops look really nice, simple and elegant, but still eye-catching and realistic. As for the indoor pic, I'm already starting to build a "3D map" of that building in my head by scrapping together the screens you posted, can't wait for the final in-game effect though.

As for my progress, there's 3-4 more rooms and a corridor left to finish the inside part, then all that is left will be some more landscaping on the outside. Just merged the map from 2 different files I'm working on (SOS floors are done in a separate map, because it's easier that way at this point) to see where I am with resources and it's at 1594 sectors / 14127 walls / 9462 sprites, which is quite reasonable and should leave me enough walls for the remaining outside polishing. 250 of the sprites are sector effectors alone, not to count other effector sprites, which are at like 400 more I guess ;) I'm really trying to get as much interactive environments inside as possible with little details, some with practically no gameplay effect other than catching players attention for a moment - others do bring some benefit on the other hand, so it should be worth trying to interact with them anyway :(

[ck3D]

Aye thanks Aleks! Yeah, other people were mentioning the buildings blending in with the sky too, which I suspect will look even better once I've designed the surroundings of the level itself (with similar skycrapers to the ones I've shown before on map 1&2). In a way that should give the level three layers of depth in total which I hope will look and feel coherent and immersive (otherwise I'll just scrap the idea and save the corresponding resources; a humble win-win either way). Not going to lie I was suspecting you to wonder about the tile I used for those guard rails at street level (visible here next to the bus stops) in particular out of all things as it seems to be your style to stop and wonder about such things, but if you didn't then it probably means you spontaneously figured it out by yourself, ha - I actually had you on my mind when I put those in. About the mental automap you're drawing of the inside of that building, there's a lot of it I haven't shown at all (at this current point, the space I'm using for that part is a good four times larger than on the 2D shot I posted earlier, with extra floors etc.), but I'm comfortable showing that much of that part in particular as I'm really making sure not to spoil the map bits I personally think are the sweetest, despite the amount of screenshots I've been posting. At least for this level I don't mind using this thread as a journal for updates as people were curious about my workflow before, I guess at some point it'd be a good idea to start a thread on just that - people's individual workflow and progression in the makings of one specific level - for those wondering how everybody else builds things and in which order. With the 'new' limits on resources making this possible, I kind of like the idea of individual level sections such as the inside of this building feeling like separate base game map-sized levels of their own, connected together by the streets then acting as a central hub. I don't want every map of the episode to be that ambitious or even in that style but so far that's what I've been enjoying putting together, although I do have different plans for a good chunk of the rest.

Great to hear about your progress too - working on SOS layers in different maps actually sounds way smarter than the way I'm doing it in this map (which is separately pre-eventual connection too but within the confines of the same map file) as then you can directly work on the correct coordinates as opposed to having to move stuff around later, which I'm going to have to do and will probably entail realigning quite a few ground and ceiling textures that aren't set to relative alignment - so it's actually a great idea. Good luck on the landscaping, sounds like we're in the same boat dealing with that aspect right now! Looking forward to your levels, I'm intrigued.

PS. Funny you'd mention the amount of SE's in your map, I think mine uses close to zero right now as I've been so focused on designing the thing I've been slacking on actually implementing the effects everywhere and tagging stuff, although technically it's all in place but most of the SE's and tags. That's actually a bad habit I should work towards jettisoning because then catching up with every 'forgotten' door, floor rise or general effect last minute can get confusing, especially when you have a hard time remembering every exact tag you've used before so far. I didn't sleep on the tagging for the first two maps like that, thankfully. I suspect that once I actually implement the effects here, the general sprite count will get quite the bump so even though I most likely won't reach the limit, for overall performance maybe I should think of taking it easier with my little sprite floors and fancy scaffoldings.

[ck3D]

Got a lot done on this one today. Before going in any further on the last few indoor locations I want to build, I'm trying to polish the map at street level and enclose the gameplay area outside, to make sure I won't run out of resources before the time comes. I'm actually pretty happy in that department for this one (less stressed out than for map 2), I still have roughly 5000 walls left and as every indoor addition will be mostly spritework at this point, so I'm feeling comfortable, even though I'm only done with maybe one third of the terrain I need to enclose. Still missing fine detail, cars and whatnot but getting closer to the intended look and feel. I also built a giant ass destructible building (well, only its structure so far, will add most effects last) with a connection to another area at the bottom, think E1L2 but bigger.



Part of the destruction scene:



And yo I heard you liked lights from a distance, so I put lights from a distance in your lights from a distance so you can light from a distance while you light from a distance.
(Reminder, visibility will be bumped eventually)

[11bush]

I haven't had a ton of time, but I've been working on a new M-4 Carbine.

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[Aleks]

ck3D, on 08 October 2020 - 04:47 PM, said:

Got a lot done on this one today. Before going in any further on the last few indoor locations I want to build, I'm trying to polish the map at street level and enclose the gameplay area outside, to make sure I won't run out of resources before the time comes. I'm actually pretty happy in that department for this one (less stressed out than for map 2), I still have roughly 5000 walls left and as every indoor addition will be mostly spritework at this point, so I'm feeling comfortable, even though I'm only done with maybe one third of the terrain I need to enclose. Still missing fine detail, cars and whatnot but getting closer to the intended look and feel. I also built a giant ass destructible building (well, only its structure so far, will add most effects last) with a connection to another area at the bottom, think E1L2 but bigger.

Wow, this looks really huge, larger than it felt from the screens you posted before, and really immersive :) And this might be stupid question, but are these yellow, red and blue lit buildings with skybox texture actually "block" sectors textured like this to give more "depth" to the parallaxed sky? https://forums.duke4.net/public/style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif Took me a while to figure out what's going on there with all these palette and heights changed, now makes more sense - simple, but really effective trick!

Love the scaffolding too of course, but make sure they're "compatible" with new Eduke versions, e.g. if they aren't blocking player too tight or "skyrocketing" the player up like a ladder, as this happened to me sometimes with such stuff (again, if they serve some "platformer" purpose, but I'm quite sure I'd jump on them myself looking for secrets).

The general ambience is really awesome on the street photos. Destructible building looks quite complex 2D design-wise, waiting for more "intel" on these.

[ck3D]

Aleks, on 09 October 2020 - 02:51 AM, said:

Wow, this looks really huge, larger than it felt from the screens you posted before, and really immersive :) And this might be stupid question, but are these yellow, red and blue lit buildings with skybox texture actually "block" sectors textured like this to give more "depth" to the parallaxed sky? https://forums.duke4.net/public/style_emoticons/default/ohmy.gif Took me a while to figure out what's going on there with all these palette and heights changed, now makes more sense - simple, but really effective trick!

Yeah it's the good ol' beta Stadium trick (IIRC from that screenshot), just last night while posting the screenshots it kind of hit me how similar the technique also is to how I used to build primitive buildings beyond the gameplay area in maps like Happy Hangover etc. except pitch black instead of full bright. I've used that look in every big city map in the episode so far (so in every map so far since all I've been working on is the city maps), if you ever go back and find some old screenshots you'll see it too, I never posted the areas where it looks the best though. What's cool is since they're just sectors, one can also make them interactive, destructible and whatnot. If you ever try it, remember to set the brightness of the texture at -128 (full bright) otherwise you'll get funny glitches from distance with the default visibility.

And yeah all the maps are pretty large and play with scale a lot, all 3 are by far my largest so far, about twice the size of Poison Heart minimum which is an aspect I'm rather stoked on, I always wanted to know how to make levels like this and now I guess I've developed the right habits when it comes to resource sparing/balancing or something since it's actually starting to kind of work. I appreciate you appreciating the atmosphere, mood is a big part of my vision.

Aleks, on 09 October 2020 - 02:51 AM, said:

Love the scaffolding too of course, but make sure they're "compatible" with new Eduke versions, e.g. if they aren't blocking player too tight or "skyrocketing" the player up like a ladder, as this happened to me sometimes with such stuff (again, if they serve some "platformer" purpose, but I'm quite sure I'd jump on them myself looking for secrets).

Ah shit yeah good point, that scaffolding is indeed supposed to play a certain role, I built it according to the base behavior of the game (each story being the exact height Duke can reach with a big jump), and the poles are blockable but just narrow enough for the player to venture through, hopefully it'll be alright. I'll be heavily testing the episode in the latest versions pre-release anyway but thanks for the reminder about this potential concern, I should keep it in mind while mapping too. This particular segment is not especially meant to be challenging though so it's not much of a problem to me if the player can somehow cheat their way up.

Aleks, on 09 October 2020 - 02:51 AM, said:

The general ambience is really awesome on the street photos. Destructible building looks quite complex 2D design-wise, waiting for more "intel" on these.

Thanks a lot, yeah the destructible building is actually one cheap fucker, the inside is somewhat complex but technically the facade is going to be the only part actually crumbling down with the effect, lol.

[Merlijn]

These constant updates are really cool, ck3d! The map already looks really impressive and atmospheric, the colors really pop out.
This is going to be one hell of an episode if you keep up this quality. :)

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Thanks a lot, yeah the destructible building is actually one cheap fucker, the inside is somewhat complex but technically the facade is going to be the only part actually crumbling down with the effect, lol.

That's the best way to do it haha, no need to make it more complex when it's not needed.

[Mark]

Driven once again by boredom this afternoon, I spent a few hours re-imagining a popular map using my current project just for fun. I'm sure you can recognize the simple street area and where its from.

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[ck3D]

^ I'd bite but I'm not sure, the style of the new art results in so much characterization of the locations compared to the base assets that it could be many popular maps under that disguise, are we talking base game maps or user maps? For some reason episode 3 can't help but come to mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a user level too. That pillar with the missing chunk especially looks familiar (and is good design either way).

@Merlijn appreciate the appreciation! Keeping up in terms of quality shouldn't be a problem, now finding enough spare time to materialize every idea is, but that also allows for better planning and organization when it comes to level concepts and themes. And recently I've been able to map a lot, so I'm not complaining.

And now for an update just for the sake of it, map 3 is 1700 sectors/12500+ walls/7000 sprites now. Over the past few days I improvised a cool little indoor segment (which will probably make for a sweet firefight), and I've kept on enclosing the boundaries of the outdoor gameplay area, tackling the south of the map now after quite some time spent on north and east. In fact I would already be done with the south and more if I hadn't had to scrap it a first time, due to originally building it in a single sector that turned out to be so big it would disappear from distance and insta-nuke itself if I touched it in 2D mode (similarly to the subway track thing in map 1, so now I know size is the problem), given the height and visibility of the towers that was obviously a problem so I had to go and remake it from scratch. Splitting the thing also made me use up some resources I hope I'm not going to miss soon, I think I'll be alright though, most of the core layout is done.

Here's a WIP perspective, although the rightmost side (the aforementioned south) is still missing towers (that it once had). Not the most interesting shot, but it's growing.

[Ninety-Six]

It looks like Shadow Warrior's first level to me.

[ck3D]

Ninety-Six, on 11 October 2020 - 07:16 PM, said:

It looks like Shadow Warrior's first level to me.

Ah but of course, I see it now. For some reason I was dead set on making a reinterpreted Duke 3D map out of those shots, lol.

[Aleks]

ck3D, on 11 October 2020 - 07:00 PM, said:

And now for an update just for the sake of it, map 3 is 1700 sectors/12500+ walls/7000 sprites now. Over the past few days I improvised a cool little indoor segment (which will probably make for a sweet firefight), and I've kept on enclosing the boundaries of the outdoor gameplay area, tackling the south of the map now after quite some time spent on north and east. In fact I would already be done with the south and more if I hadn't had to scrap it a first time, due to originally building it in a single sector that turned out to be so big it would disappear from distance and insta-nuke itself if I touched it in 2D mode (similarly to the subway track thing in map 1, so now I know size is the problem), given the height and visibility of the towers that was obviously a problem so I had to go and remake it from scratch. Splitting the thing also made me use up some resources I hope I'm not going to miss soon, I think I'll be alright though, most of the core layout is done.

Here's a WIP perspective, although the rightmost side (the aforementioned south) is still missing towers (that it once had). Not the most interesting shot, but it's growing.

br3again.png

This screenshot has such a strong Las Vegas vibe to it! The street which immediately reminded me of GTA San Andreas strip in Las Venturas, all the neon lights and "pyramid" building certainly do the trick here...

As for the single large sector, never thought this could cause problems actually - maybe you should really get a newer build of Eduke and Mapster to check if this could be mitigated somehow (at least for removing the "insta-nuke" thing and just fixing the thing in 2D mode)?

[ck3D]

Thanks, adding those towers has actually been quite the addictive process lately, I think it's just excitement of seeing the level come together the way I had been envisioning it the whole time, and getting that extra satisfaction (that also stems from starting to feel like I'm wrapping the map up). Since your last post, I've been thinking of incorporating a few into the gameplay with some destruction sequences too.

And yeah, right now I'm still using my old build but in the future I will update and fix what needs a fix and optimize the levels accordingly. That problem in particular though, if it's ever been tampered with then I haven't heard about it, working with huge sectors has always been an inherent issue with the engine to begin with AFAIK (due to how sometimes they can glitch like that, or by stopping your bullets in mid-air, etc.).

Note that by huge I do mean huge, for instance my improper sector here was almost as big as the rest of the map, and the subway track in map 1 covers most of its surface. My version of Mapster does warn me of wall length, but sector size has never really been addressed that I know of and I'm not even sure much would be of any help here; in a way, always breaking huge sectors down into smaller pieces is as basic 'safe' logic as always building the parent sectors before the child sectors, when you're familiar with how the engine works (and its quirks) it's just common sense for users to develop. Here I just kind of tried to see if I could push it and of course I did and fucked up, so it was my mistake. What would happen is I could add island sectors to the problematic huge sector just fine, but any split would either delete it, or delete some other walls/sectors inside it depending on the type of split (and the Undo function would suddenly stop working, always returning 'nothing to undo!'). Could have lived with it but now the visual glitching from distance was too much. Either way it's cool since I managed to fix it, only wasted a couple of hours if anything.

[Aleks]

Finally finished on the interiors and put them into the main map - got about 1500 walls to spare, which is a little less than I expected, but should be sufficient for final touches on the outside. Didn't really merge every floor of the building into one inside the main file yet - this will have to be the last thing to do (even after adding monsters and items inside) as it's pretty damn complex. Had to test it anyway to see if any bugs occur after merging and it seems pretty fine - I've noticed 4 minor bugs, 2 of which may not even be related to SOS at all, and they should be quite easy to mitigate. I also have the manhole there, but it didn't act weird upon merging and seems to work just fine (with SE7). Most important thing, I've developed a "pattern" to merge all the SOS floors later on quite fast and bug-free. Well, here's a completely unreadable 2D screenshot showing the mess that is 4 excessive floors merged together:
https://imgurl.me/images/2020/10/13/SOSd887e89c86972203.th.png

[ck3D]

Aleks that's great, honestly I would almost frame something like this and put it on my wall if I were nerdy enough, I always appreciate funky 2D layouts. Now this one is only a few sprites short of being readable by my phone as a QR code. It's cool to see more people still focusing on that aspect nowadays, I feel like for a while 3D mode aesthetics were mostly the trending style in user maps (well most people skilled enough to pull that off in the first place usually had a clue about 2D level design too, but occasionally it'd take the back seat). Coincidentally I ran into the bunch of screenshots which you posted a few weeks back again just the other day while looking for another old post, and got even more excited for your project, promising stuff.

Also progress on map 3 is ongoing with about 100 sectors, 1000 walls and 1000 sprites added yesterday. Trying to make the most out of some low times in work. I've been getting one sector glitching bug again which is minor (it's easily reproducible, but barely noticeable and only happens from one certain point and angle in the map which I can easily fix or block if all else fails), but intrigues me a wee bit as it's now part of a building I made months ago and never had problems with that's affected. Building is located at the very south of the map, and seems to partly glitch in and out of existence/display weird HOM when viewed from one particular point in a sector at the very north, both being separated by overly long roads for now which are sectors I have yet to split (I suspect the issue might disappear if I do). Then studying the glitch in-game with automap on (to check if anything weird was going on live in the layout at the same time) made me realize that the particular distance and angle needed to replicate the glitch was the exact one needed for fully zoomed-out automap to block that sector from appearing on screen (due to the size of the map). Not sure if there's a correlation or it's a coincidence but I thought that was funny. The building has full-bright sections and those seem to be the specific sectors acting up.

Also another funny thing is the north and south unreachable areas with the full-bright towers coincidentally seem to be just about the right distance from one another that it takes for Build to start struggling with rendering even tiles with shade value of -128 with the default visibility fog (as long as the player remains in the gameplay area it all looks fine, but from an unreachable area to the other, even the full-bright tiles fade to black).