[Mike Norvak]

Sunstroke is a canyon-sized Duke Nukem 3D desert map where the darkest shadows are cast under the brightest sun.



I started it in 2009 and finished it this year, you'll probably wait another 17 years to play it, will you?



Especial thanks to Mya Acker (Juvenite) for the custom made soundtrack! and Forge for his encouragment on every phase on the making of this map.



And to betatesters Alex Pistol, futuretime23, flamin_weenie, dwtietz, Redxplatinum and DiukNiuk!

Attached File(s)

•  Mike Norvak - Sunstroke.zip (10.46MB)
  Number of downloads: 51

[unedukecated]

´Now

´this

´is

´a

´force!

Very cool map, took me 35 minutes and I like how it looks and how you designed it. Especially broken stuff and the vehicles are super neat. The custom backdrop/landscape and the soundtrack are very nice additons as well. Hello "Terragen", old friend. Long time no see! Haven't used it for years, completely forgot about it... Anyway congrats, I really want to play more like this. Found zero secrets, but will replay again later and then explore some! I have seen one RPG, but couldn't figure how to reach it though, haha!

[Dr.Panico]

Pretty creative level you've got here. It's somewhat creepy with all the shadow creatures, even though I wouldn't call it a horror map per say (it's closer to the spooky weirdness of say Dogville). Very inventive terrain tricks and stuff like an alien palm reader plus all the stuff written in "Cyclodian".

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the sky to load. On Polymost, the sky is black. On Polymer, it's blue and glitchy-looking. I'm running it on the latest Eduke32 btw.

Another thing,

Spoiler

Those cracks hanging in the air near the end. Was that intentional? Last time I've seen something like that was when I tried to run HRP levels with normal graphics. I hope it wasn't something else that broke on my end.

[pepsodent]

Dr.Panico, on 07 May 2026 - 03:16 PM, said:

Unfortunately, I couldn't get the sky to load. On Polymost, the sky is black. On Polymer, it's blue and glitchy-looking. I'm running it on the latest Eduke32 btw.

All I had to do was to select the files through 'custom content folder' and then to turn on 24bit textures in renderer settings. Got it working for Polymost

[Mike Norvak]

unedukecated, on 07 May 2026 - 01:20 PM, said:

´Now´this´is´a´force!Very cool map, took me 35 minutes and I like how it looks and how you designed it. Especially broken stuff and the vehicles are super neat. The custom backdrop/landscape and the soundtrack are very nice additons as well. Hello "Terragen", old friend. Long time no see! Haven't used it for years, completely forgot about it... Anyway congrats, I really want to play more like this. Found zero secrets, but will replay again later and then explore some! I have seen one RPG, but couldn't figure how to reach it though, haha!

Didn't know about Terragen, we must make it trendy again right now!!!

About the RPG behind the forcefield, think about it, every force-field is deactivated through a switch, maybe you already deactivated it without noticing

Dr.Panico, on 07 May 2026 - 03:16 PM, said:

Pretty creative level you've got here. It's somewhat creepy with all the shadow creatures, even though I wouldn't call it a horror map per say (it's closer to the spooky weirdness of say Dogville). Very inventive terrain tricks and stuff like an alien palm reader plus all the stuff written in "Cyclodian".Unfortunately, I couldn't get the sky to load. On Polymost, the sky is black. On Polymer, it's blue and glitchy-looking. I'm running it on the latest Eduke32 btw.Another thing,

Spoiler

Those cracks hanging in the air near the end. Was that intentional? Last time I've seen something like that was when I tried to run HRP levels with normal graphics. I hope it wasn't something else that broke on my end.

I wonder how it looks with the pitch black sky, maybe the error was caused by one of the shadows... Try to put everything into a fresh folder so no file is conflicting with the .cfg

[pepsodent]

good map. Nice visuals, interesting texture picks, quite a few things that had me questioning "how the fuck did he do that?". Loved the spaceship area, felt truly alien with all weird texturing and fog pals. There's also a few neat sector vehicles that are now part of my sacred collection, the Camaro was fucking awesome!

Unfortunately there are things that ruined the overall experience for me a bit. I couldnt understand the map progression, what made it worse is I managed to tripbomb skip to last part of the map which I think is not intended early on as I had to do some crazy strafe jumps on cacti to get back. Then later on when I blew up the fence there was no tripbomb to progress, as I already used it earlier than was intended.
Another issue was with the big alien ship, all doors in it, even keylocked ones, seem to have autoclose. A few of them locked me in, I got stuck and had to clip out. The hard to hit buttons made it even more confusing, I couldnt figure out if some doors locked me in or if I was just unlucky with trying to press some buttons. One of them did lock me in for sure and thats why I had to cheat.
The door to alien barracks that opens with 2 red thingamagingies, I thought I had to find one to open it, turns out I was just missing the damn button.
There's also a visual glitch at the end of the map, the road texture near Camaro has transparency flag on it. Looks trippy as fuck, at first I thought that was intended effect for some kind of mirage effect, actually gave me some neat ideas on that, but only 1 side of the road had the bug so it looks like it was a mistake.

I was a bit disappointed by the map overall, The screenshots made it look like interesting desert/mesa themed map, but most of the action is set in the alien ship. I was hopping for more desert things going on, but there's just a road and that canyon. It does look great though, and thats why I wanted more of it!

[Dr.Panico]

Quote

All I had to do was to select the files through 'custom content folder' and then to turn on 24bit textures in renderer settings.

I did that. It resulted in another glitchy blue sky. No idea what's happening, however...

Quote

Try to put everything into a fresh folder so no file is conflicting with the .cfg

This appears to have worked! Thanks!

[Mike Norvak]

pepsodent, on 07 May 2026 - 04:07 PM, said:

good map. Nice visuals, interesting texture picks, quite a few things that had me questioning "how the fuck did he do that?". Loved the spaceship area, felt truly alien with all weird texturing and fog pals. There's also a few neat sector vehicles that are now part of my sacred collection, the Camaro was fucking awesome!

Unfortunately there are things that ruined the overall experience for me a bit. I couldnt understand the map progression, what made it worse is I managed to tripbomb skip to last part of the map which I think is not intended early on as I had to do some crazy strafe jumps on cacti to get back. Then later on when I blew up the fence there was no tripbomb to progress, as I already used it earlier than was intended.
Another issue was with the big alien ship, all doors in it, even keylocked ones, seem to have autoclose. A few of them locked me in, I got stuck and had to clip out. The hard to hit buttons made it even more confusing, I couldnt figure out if some doors locked me in or if I was just unlucky with trying to press some buttons. One of them did lock me in for sure and thats why I had to cheat.
The door to alien barracks that opens with 2 red thingamagingies, I thought I had to find one to open it, turns out I was just missing the damn button.
There's also a visual glitch at the end of the map, the road texture near Camaro has transparency flag on it. Looks trippy as fuck, at first I thought that was intended effect for some kind of mirage effect, actually gave me some neat ideas on that, but only 1 side of the road had the bug so it looks like it was a mistake.

I was a bit disappointed by the map overall, The screenshots made it look like interesting desert/mesa themed map, but most of the action is set in the alien ship. I was hopping for more desert things going on, but there's just a road and that canyon. It does look great though, and thats why I wanted more of it!

Back in 2009 the mirage effect worked wonders at the end of the first highway, it looked really cool like reflections at the distance, however the behavior of transparency was changed over the years so it no longer worked as intended and I removed it completely. On the other hand the visual glitch at the end was made on purpose, intended to look trippy.

About the layout and progression of the map, I know where are you coming from, and those are the kind of thoughts that made me abandon the map for so many years, I'm glad is over now

The tripmines are totally optional, you can always use the bonfire teletransporting. I'm wondering how did you get the mine before blowing the fence though, did you glitched through it?

[pepsodent]

Mike Norvak, on 07 May 2026 - 04:40 PM, said:

The tripmines are totally optional, you can always use the bonfire teletransporting. I'm wondering how did you get the mine before blowing the fence though, did you glitched through it?

I just jumped over the fence. There were some weird blocking lines that would hint at it being wrong way, but right behind the fence is a tombstone directly telling me to do tripbomb jump so I bruteforced my way through. After blowing up the fence I didnt think of going back to bonfire teleports because there was another big barrier down bellow. It broke at some point but I didnt notice that until I already cheated my way down.

[Mike Norvak]

pepsodent, on 07 May 2026 - 04:44 PM, said:

I just jumped over the fence. There were some weird blocking lines that would hint at it being wrong way, but right behind the fence is a tombstone directly telling me to do tripbomb jump so I bruteforced my way through.

I see yeah that's totally not intended, the progression was broken this way. I tried my self to glitch through the fence during testing with no luck, it's a shame you managed to do it, probably I'll fix this.

[slacker1]

I had fun with this map. I didn't experience any of the issues that other people reported. Before I started, I copied the images from the skybox directory into the directory I extracted the map to. Not sure if it made a difference or not as I didn't load it before doing that. I also didn't have issues with the doors on the ship locking me out. The only minor glitchiness I had was when I entered the tunnel that leads back up to the top. It's like a I got turned around and had to turn again to get out. With what was happening at that point in the map though, I'm guessing maybe that was intentional?

It took me about 32 minutes and I didn't find any of the secrets. There were a few points in the map where I was a little confused on where to go next but didn't take too long to figure out the path. One instance was at the quake site where the water hole is. The bonfire teleport didn't work for me at first so I thought maybe it wasn't one. That led me to wander around for a bit trying to jump over the wall before going back and getting it to work. I'm also not sure how the trip mine was suppose to be used? I went back in the ship and used the teleport to go down. I'm guessing I was suppose to attach it to the wall before hitting the bottom?

I really liked the overall vibe of the map and where the story was going. Having no pistol until almost the end of the map was a nice change of pace. I have a habit of relying heavily on the pistol as a sniper rifle type of thing and this forced me to approach the open area battles a bit differently than I would have done normally. The only real downside is that I felt like it could have had a grander end of level battle or something but the current ending was still interesting and different. Were there follow up levels originally planned to expand on the story?

One more question:

Spoiler

The switch puzzle in the middle of the ship that has two rows of switches. I couldn't figure that one out. Was there a hint somewhere on the ship on what the correct key combo was?

[ck3D]

TLOD stream 34 hours from now:



Congrats on release. Vehicles look cool. Can only play in classic so will I miss out on the sky thing? If yes then perhaps I'll make myself a version that swaps out the skies for an OG tile that has similar composition/palette for my playthrough. (If there is interest and I actually do that I can always post it and you may include it as an option in your archive for users like me if you want.) Hopefully that will be soon, am still knee deep in my own project but at least not neck deep anymore so hopefully I can manage before TLOD's stream (if not I might miss it to avoid spoilers, sounds like those could harm the map a lot).

[Mike Norvak]

ck3D, on 07 May 2026 - 09:31 PM, said:

TLOD stream 34 hours from now:



Congrats on release. Vehicles look cool. Can only play in classic so will I miss out on the sky thing? If yes then perhaps I'll make myself a version that swaps out the skies for an OG tile that has similar composition/palette for my playthrough. (If there is interest and I actually do that I can always post it and you may include it as an option in your archive for users like me if you want.) Hopefully that will be soon, am still knee deep in my own project but at least not neck deep anymore so hopefully I can manage before TLOD's stream (if not I might miss it to avoid spoilers, sounds like those could harm the map a lot).

You'll miss the skybox and spritework probably will not look right, I haven't tested 8 bit my self.

Thanks for all the comments and feedback guys! Here's a new version of the map wich fixes misoriented 1-sided walls at the edge of the cliff, you can't no longer jump over the fence by accident.

@ slacker1: Check the viewscreen that shows how the central door of the ship is opened.

Attached File(s)

•  Mike Norvak - Sunstroke.zip (10.46MB)
  Number of downloads: 11

[unedukecated]

Found 2 secrets now, so yeah the forcefield was off finally to grab the RPG. Missed that on first playthrough, but doesn't matter much since there are plenty of items everywhere. And I know Terragen when I see it, there are similar apps but your backdrop is made with Terragen I would bet. I made this random nonsense by myself now:

[Mike Norvak]

 unedukecated, on 08 May 2026 - 10:20 AM, said:

Found 2 secrets now, so yeah the forcefield was off finally to grab the RPG. Missed that on first playthrough, but doesn't matter much since there are plenty of items everywhere. And I know Terragen when I see it, there are similar apps but your backdrop is made with Terragen I would bet. I made this random nonsense by myself now:

Untitled.jpg

Does it run on Windows 11? Hehe

Well yeah the secret places just give you "early access" to weapons you'll already find later in the map.

[ck3D]

Am playing right now (well taking a break 20 mins into the level), it's a pretty cool map so far, does interesting things. Yeah visuals do funny stuff in classic but honestly very playable if you don't mind the occasional sprite clipping, and funny sky like I've never seen before (due to classic; I didn't make a personal version after all and just jumped right in, I'm getting unique sky blue and navy blue striped sky) but that just makes it all the more ominous. Wasn't so convinced for the first couple of minutes or so, it seemed like mostly a bombardment of spritework and decoy (some of which doesn't even look right for me, remember) but as soon as down the first elevator inside the ship and the scenery in general comes together becomes more interesting.

I took a break specifically to check this thread and make sure certain doors closing behind me was normal, for instance red key door shuts behind you/traps you in (and is followed by pretty unfair explosion in tight corners with a locked door in the room that misleadingly looks like potential shelter) and then can't be opened again, but it is still possible to circumvent by going around the ship again. Not questioning it or asking for answers/spoilers but it is confusing me, way more so than the bonfire teleporters (thus far). Tested fence skip in new version (couple times; didn't push it), couldn't get it. Favorite room so far is underwater Octa fight but scenery from the ship looking down is neat too. It indeed is really cool what you're doing with the pistol, I love playing with ammo distro/weapon restraint (on either end of the s(h)tick) and it is very uncommon to see it done this way, pistol as idiot proof/safeguard option instead being a standard that indeed is worth questioning, really messes you up against the turrets if used to autoaim, so far this is my most important takeaway from the map but am not done playing and will share more thoughts/screens later.

Combat/item distro so far flawless, I also like what you're doing with the crumb trails of small medkits and all of the general subtlety of the gameplay (again so far), fun but never overwhelming. One gripe I had was with those flying Liztroops spawning way too high up at sky level and it takes them forever to come down, as much as airborne enemies are great especially Liztroops or Commanders I don't think ever should just be stuck to sky like that (if the map is tall) but instead spawn at (a) different, specific height(s) and why not in formation(s) which adds depth and timing. Still played well enough but could have been not annoying at all whereas here felt scenic but practically just a tad undercooked (all of them coming down at once in a pack where every other one is hitting the next, and most of them dead within the minute it takes them to land etc.). Maybe that they spawn right on top of you within the (fair, but still) confines of a clearly vertical space doesn't help, personally I like my flying Liztroops spawning far away so that the player has plenty of time to address them after they are detected (instead of being stuck in wait mode) thanks to the diagonality and distance. Combo with Commander was cool.

Worth mentioning is it is cool to see juvenite involved, music track works well, felt a bit too epic for the map that seemed more on the atmospheric side at first but a couple of loops (and hallways) in I started getting into it, which I find is better than catchy at first but wears off (just like maps).

Oh yeah - at first I saw the Dogville comparison and expected to be intrigued, and then inside of the level I saw the flowers; makes sense!

[Mike Norvak]

"One gripe I had was with those flying Liztroops spawning way too high up at sky level and it takes them forever to come down, as much as airborne enemies are great especially Liztroops or Commanders I don't think ever should just be stuck to sky like that (if the map is tall) but instead spawn at (a) different, specific height(s) and why not in formation(s) which adds depth and timing."

Totally true, I don't know how I didn't think about this, there's a lot I need to learn about gameplay improvement yet, but you know most of the things someone can complain about this map, it's just me don't changing stuff that has been like that for years (for better or worse) in my mind it just felt natural. If I'd remake the map today I'd change a lot of things, maybe even probably the vehicles wouldn't be as detailed.

Think of Sunstroke as a time capsule I managed to recover.

[Aleks]

I absolutely loved the map during beta test and am going to play the final version tonight - although I don't expect much to change (my comments mostly pertained to little details and some sprite collision behaviour which was rather a systematic thing). Re: some of the stuff that's been reported as "broken", from my experience:

1) Some of the doors are meant to lock you in and that is completely normal. Red key gives you 2 or 3 atomic healths to compensate for the explosion. I did panic a bit myself after the first door got me locked in the red room as it felt like I did something wrong, but in retrospect it turned out as a complementary tension added to the overall experience - after all, you are on an alien ship, so weird shit is bound to happen. And you can always back track to anywhere in the map in the end!
2) Tripmine jump is optional - Mike did even ask me after beta whether I realised there was another way and I did, although tripmine jump made it a lot faster.
3) I think a lot of the stuff towards the end becomes confusing on purpose, which does not help the progression - but I think this is a strength of the map in this case given what is happening to Duke. The finale themselves was just creepy - I wonder if Mike took it a notch further as I suggested!

I am also planning to write a review for Dukemaps over the weekend!

[stillTodd]

Worked great here (slow system, no lags) using DukePlus. I was locked out of the BFG, and it didn't feel needed; the devastator showed up at a good time. So I'm not sure how much DP was involved.

I cliff dove early too & then backtracked to a previous save to get the full experience.

Found 1 of 4 secrets. I'm guessing one had a freezer early on - was getting trolled by all the ammo until late in the game

Two general comments and I sincerely hope you find them helpful: Too much ammo & health (CGS) for my particular style/capabilities, just in general. The ending with/because of the mini protector drones wasn't as much fun as the rest of the map.

Regardless of those couple of criticisms, this is a really, really cool map. Loved the effects, how things appeared during progression, the "ghost" stuff & things like the repeated words joke And using a tripmine to make it down the cliff.

Thank you for this.

[pepsodent]

how do those tiny drones work btw? I tried to find them through mapster but coudnt and I'm curious how you did it

[ck3D]

pepsodent, on 08 May 2026 - 01:10 PM, said:

how do those tiny drones work btw? I tried to find them through mapster but coudnt and I'm curious how you did it

Assuming you mean Protector Drones/Newbeasts (haven't met them in this map/resumed playing yet), it is just only a few of the poses are coded to auto resize and the rest will remain the size you make them in Mapster. That's why occasionally in user maps you'll find Newbeasts that look just a bit bigger than normal, usually mapper didn't know/was too lazy to resize the sprite from the default 64x64 and in game shows up like that instead of normal 40x40.

One problem is that makes certain poses incompatible with RESPAWN and so by spawning them in at size 1x1 (unchecked by the game) you end up with 99.9% invisible newbeasts that are full strength/speed and almost impossible to hit but by blasting all over the floor with RPG.