[Dukebot]

A huge exterior map with some interior locations including some temples and "medieval" stuff.

A bit of history: After alien fail invasion to the earth, they invented a time machine and invaded the earth in the past. The mission of Duke is travel to the past and defeat the alien lider.

Some screenshoots
http://imageshack.co...4/8975/kmsx.png
http://imageshack.co...6/8155/snu7.png
http://imageshack.co...2/6083/e0np.png
http://imageshack.co...4/7923/cg11.png
http://imageshack.co...2/5930/9y4m.png
http://imageshack.co...2/4496/8zjw.png
http://imageshack.co...6/8216/sk29.png
http://imageshack.co...8/1523/70sf.png
http://imageshack.co...8/6890/x1en.png
http://imageshack.co...1/3131/a0dx.png
http://imageshack.co...8/2246/nwhr.png
http://imageshack.co...4/9452/otzv.png
http://imageshack.co...7/8919/5exk.png
http://imageshack.co...5/3678/99z2.png
http://imageshack.co...4/6084/xqb5.png
http://imageshack.co...4/5669/8xxb.png

Feel free to give your opinion and suggest things that I can improve or include in the map.

[The Commander]

This looks dam fine to me and nice to see it will be a COOP map.

[MetHy]

I think those look good indeed, even though more shading in general would make miracles. I know you got recommended to do more trimming but I don't think the trimming in screenshot http://imageshack.co...4/6084/xqb5.png fits, is the metallic bar supposed to be the end of the blue rocks wall? Imo it doesn't really fit, but that's really nothing major

[Dukebot]

Thanks for the advice. I will focus on strong shading when i finish the basic architecture of the map. I will consider the change of the metalic texture, you're right, it don't look very good.

[ck3D]

looks really cool to me. nothing much to say besides what has been said by others before, notably pointing out the lack of wall shading but you have already said that you will take care of that. looks pretty immersive, looking forward

[Sixty Four]

Looks like gameplay could be added in very well and could flow nicely which is important for sp co op. I say good job so far the map looks nice, any idea when you will release?

[faked]

Very pretty.

[Dukebot]

ck3D, on 27 March 2014 - 05:22 AM, said:

looks really cool to me. nothing much to say besides what has been said by others before, notably pointing out the lack of wall shading but you have already said that you will take care of that. looks pretty immersive, looking forward

If I have enought time i will try to finish the map this summer.

[Dukebot]

6 Years later after abandoning the project I've got some motivation and I want to finish it. This days I've been investing a lot of time and I am progressing with this map.

The idea was to make a big SP/COOP map, really big, with a lot of open space and areas to explore.

Here are some recent screenshoots, the old ones are not available anymore.

I will try to post screenshoots and updates about the progress, at least once a week. This way I keep myself motivated and also I can get valuable feedback for improvements before releasing the map.

Also I've done like a TODO list of pending things, this way I can track progress and the status of the project is public.


OVERWORLD Map Status

Areas to finish
- Main area
- Fire Temple
- Water temple
- Caves
- Toxic lands
- Cementery
- Mini Forest
- Lake next to water temple
- House
- Key introduction area
- Colisseum

General
- Add map details in general
- Improve map shading
- Improve map edges
- Enable coop spawns
- Add enemies
- Add difficulty levels
- Add items
- Hide various keys around the map needeed to progress
- TESTING

[ck3D]

Best of luck with this!

[Dukebot]

ck3D, on 31 March 2020 - 04:02 AM, said:

Best of luck with this!

Tahnk you!

I'm actually having some issues that don't let me progress fast. The map is so big that it's becomming so buggy when slitting some sectors. So I've to be very carefull every time I modify one of this sectors. Any experienced mapper has dealt with this issues in the past? Which are good practices in order to handle this problem?

[Perro Seco]

Can you explain the problem better or show some screenshots? Maybe I can help. I had some issues years ago when building a big map, but I don't know if we're talking about the same problems.

[ck3D]

Dukebot, on 31 March 2020 - 05:29 AM, said:

Tahnk you!

I'm actually having some issues that don't let me progress fast. The map is so big that it's becomming so buggy when slitting some sectors. So I've to be very carefull every time I modify one of this sectors. Any experienced mapper has dealt with this issues in the past? Which are good practices in order to handle this problem?

You should definitely (reasonably, to save resources) split some of the biggest, problematic sectors; if you don't, you'll get weird stuff such as bullets stopping in the air and whatnot in some versions of the game (maybe that's been fixed in more recent eDuke32 updates than mine, I don't know; what I do know is one map I made for Metropolitan Mayhem ten years ago had that problem). I'm assuming you built most everything from the outside in, too? Oftentimes, 'wrapping' a sector-based construction around another pre-existing one will cause many problems you don't want. Some of which you can fix by joining the right sectors together sometimes, but you have to know what you're doing.

I'd advise making back-ups of your map, literally every other save I make is a 'save as' under a different name so I never lose huge chunks of work anymore by accident. The habit has actually saved my ass quite a few important times, from that one instance where Mapster somehow crashed mid-save and corrupted my map file removing all of its (6000+ at the time) sprites and fucking around with its walls/sectors, to that other instance where I just straight up perma-deleted the correct, current version of my map whilst trying to clean my folder of redundant back-ups (ironically enough). Make copies, and then start experimenting, I'm sure people will be able to provide more help if you can share screenshots like Perro Seco said above, too.

[Dukebot]

Perro Seco, on 31 March 2020 - 05:37 AM, said:

Can you explain the problem better or show some screenshots? Maybe I can help. I had some issues years ago when building a big map, but I don't know if we're talking about the same problems.

Hello Perro Seco I think I know you from another community, it was Dukespana or Arcades3D I think, long long time ago, I used the same nickname on that forums.

After work I will upload some screenshoots and I will make a detailed explanation about the issue. With images it will become very clear.

ck3D, on 31 March 2020 - 06:12 AM, said:

You should definitely (reasonably, to save resources) split some of the biggest, problematic sectors; if you don't, you'll get weird stuff such as bullets stopping in the air and whatnot in some versions of the game (maybe that's been fixed in more recent eDuke32 updates than mine, I don't know; what I do know is one map I made for Metropolitan Mayhem ten years ago had that problem). I'm assuming you built most everything from the outside in, too? Oftentimes, 'wrapping' a sector-based construction around another pre-existing one will cause many problems you don't want. Some of which you can fix by joining the right sectors together sometimes, but you have to know what you're doing.

I'd advise making back-ups of your map, literally every other save I make is a 'save as' under a different name so I never lose huge chunks of work anymore by accident. The habit has actually saved my ass quite a few important times, from that one instance where Mapster somehow crashed mid-save and corrupted my map file removing all of its (6000+ at the time) sprites and fucking around with its walls/sectors, to that other instance where I just straight up perma-deleted the correct, current version of my map whilst trying to clean my folder of redundant back-ups (ironically enough). Make copies, and then start experimenting, I'm sure people will be able to provide more help if you can share screenshots like Perro Seco said above, too.

The thing you mentined about some bullets stopping in the middle of the air is actually happening in some areas. I noticed this and was wondering why was that happening. It only happens with hitscan weapons, it don't affect projectiles. But this is a thing that I know happens in some places and I don't know how to fix.

Thanks for the backup advice, this is something that I am already doing but I appresiate the help.

Let me post a few screenshoots and detail the problem better in a while, after work.

[Dukebot]

Problem explanation when splitting a sector which is very big.

This is how it looks when it’s working fine:



And this is how it looks when it gets buggy:



Another image with the problem happening in another part of the map:



The only thing I did was to split the main sector, which is the one that contains the grass texture into two sector:



But modifications of this sector in other places of the map, cause the whole sector go BUG. I still don’t understand when it breaks and when don’t.
When adding a new sector that it’s inside this big sector seems to not give trouble, but when I modify the sector itself by splitting it, it breaks the whole map.

[Mark]

If you can send me a link to the map in PM I would be happy to look at it for you.

[ck3D]

This type of stuff usually happens when you've built sectors around other sectors, like I was saying sector 'order' is important to an extent. Can't really tell the whole situation from the 2D screenshot, but I suspect the sector you're splitting is treated by the engine as the 'container' of everything in the middle and by splitting it, you confuse the heck out of it. Definitely has happened to me before, actually if one tries to no clip past the train station in Bummed Out they'll see the whole city block start to disappear because I built that train track last minute around the entire layout and Mapster doesn't really like that stuff. One should build from the outside in at all times unless they're not going to have the inner sector completely surrounded by valid player space eventually.

Maybe try and split the inner sectors as well, not just this one you're cutting but also the sectors down below and in the vicinity, waste some time experimenting with splitting/joining stuff and hopefully you'll pinpoint a combination that works. Not sure if the 'Roch shortcut' Pascal mentions in the Roch 8 .txt file IIRC (I haven't looked at that in over a decade, can't remember the key presses off the top of my head but it's something simple), or the corruptchecktryfix etc. commands can do much here, but maybe you should give those a try too.

About the bullets stopping in mid air, like I was saying that happens because your sector(s) is(are) too big for the engine to handle properly, you should try splitting them into smaller increments even if that makes no difference in 3D mode visually (of course you can always optimize those new lines by adjusting the terrain height, slopes for hills etc. for variety if you feel like it), not sure if that logic is correct but the vulgarized way I perceive it, hitscan bullets can only travel so far in a straight line before they just invent a wall to jam themselves into if they can't find an actual one (even a red line) on the way.

edit - come to think of it, in such situations where you'll most likely have to do some manual labor, copy-pasting very much comes in handy to easily duplicate or recreate areas during the process, make sure not to overlook that possibility in order to save a lot of time

[Dukebot]

Mark, on 31 March 2020 - 08:24 AM, said:

If you can send me a link to the map in PM I would be happy to look at it for you.

Thanks a lot, I've PMed you with the link to the map.

ck3D, on 31 March 2020 - 08:34 AM, said:

This type of stuff usually happens when you've built sectors around other sectors, like I was saying sector 'order' is important to an extent. Can't really tell the whole situation from the 2D screenshot, but I suspect the sector you're splitting is treated by the engine as the 'container' of everything in the middle and by splitting it, you confuse the heck out of it. Definitely has happened to me before, actually if one tries to no clip past the train station in Bummed Out they'll see the whole city block start to disappear because I built that train track last minute around the entire layout and Mapster doesn't really like that stuff. One should build from the outside in at all times unless they're not going to have the inner sector completely surrounded by valid player space eventually.

Maybe try and split the inner sectors as well, not just this one you're cutting but also the sectors down below and in the vicinity, waste some time experimenting with splitting/joining stuff and hopefully you'll pinpoint a combination that works. Not sure if the 'Roch shortcut' Pascal mentions in the Roch 8 .txt file IIRC (I haven't looked at that in over a decade, can't remember the key presses off the top of my head but it's something simple), or the corruptchecktryfix etc. commands can do much here, but maybe you should give those a try too.

About the bullets stopping in mid air, like I was saying that happens because your sector(s) is(are) too big for the engine to handle properly, you should try splitting them into smaller increments even if that makes no difference in 3D mode visually (of course you can always optimize those new lines by adjusting the terrain height, slopes for hills etc. for variety if you feel like it), not sure if that logic is correct but the vulgarized way I perceive it, hitscan bullets can only travel so far in a straight line before they just invent a wall to jam themselves into if they can't find an actual one (even a red line) on the way.

edit - come to think of it, in such situations where you'll most likely have to do some manual labor, copy-pasting very much comes in handy to easily duplicate or recreate areas during the process, make sure not to overlook that possibility in order to save a lot of time

Thanks for your asnswer. As you mentined yes, the conflictive sector it's a container sector. A big sector containing a lot of smaller. And I see that the air bullets problem it's related with the same issue. Now I see that I should split this sector into smaller ones to avoid troble, the thing is when splitting the bug appears. I will try to split it in different ways and try to see if the BUG it's tiggered or not. Maybe I can cut it slowly by pieces.


Thanks a lot guys for your answers and feedback, your help is really appreciated.

EDIT: If this helps, this is an overview of the whole map and some examples of conflictive sectors highlighted:

[Mark]

After already spending about 15 minutes dividing large sectors I ran across this whopper. I turned off sky parallaxing so you can see it. The darker blue is all 1 sector that travels the entire map. It may have been even more before I started dividing sectors. There are a few other areas of interest. If I determine something after more testing I'll let you know.

Attached thumbnail(s)

• 

[Dukebot]

Mark, on 31 March 2020 - 11:06 AM, said:

After already spending about 15 minutes dividing large sectors I ran across this whopper. I turned off sky parallaxing so you can see it. The darker blue is all 1 sector that travels the entire map. It may have been even more before I started dividing sectors. There are a few other areas of interest. If I determine something after more testing I'll let you know.

Thanks for your answer and your feedback! Yes, the sector that you turned off parallax it's the conflictive one that I was talking about. It's the main floor with grass. In the above image you can see the sector highlighted. There is also another conflictive sector that I marked on the previous image aswell.

[Mark]

I sent a link in a PM. I hope it's usable.

That is going to be a mighty challenging co-op map.

[Dukebot]

Mark, on 31 March 2020 - 11:39 AM, said:

I sent a link in a PM. I hope it's usable.

That is going to be a mighty challenging co-op map.

Yes, you fixed the problem. After applying the changes that before were breaking the map, now it don't breaks, this is great!

Now that yo've seen the map yo're free to join me to test coop mode before relase .

[Mark]

I'm a very low skilled player. I make a lot of maps and mods but I rarely play any other maps.

[Dukebot]

Mark, on 31 March 2020 - 12:55 PM, said:

I'm a very low skilled player. I make a lot of maps and mods but I rarely play any other maps.

Do not worry about that I carry for you, you can just walk behind my back while I kill enemies ! I'm not very good at mapping but I used to be a good player in the old days!

[Mark]

Me too. I played a whole lot of deathmatches back in the late 90's with my brothers over the phone lines.

I was a horrible co-op player. I just couldn't resist the urge to shoot my partner. And you're asking me to stay behind you.

[Dukebot]

Mark, on 31 March 2020 - 01:10 PM, said:

Me too. I played a whole lot of deathmatches back in the late 90's with my brothers over the phone lines.

I was a horrible co-op player. I just couldn't resist the urge to shoot my partner. And you're asking me to stay behind you.

Hahahaha that would be fun! Having to worry about your teammate insted of the monsters.

Thank you again, now I have more motivation to continue the map.

I will try to post updated with screenshoots and details to both get feeedback and keep myself motivated to finish the map!

[ck3D]

Great news to read. Mark doing the Lord's work, salvaging other people's promising maps from potential doom! Will be looking forward to playing this one. I still need to play Sanek's map, too.

[Perro Seco]

Dukebot, on 31 March 2020 - 07:00 AM, said:

Hello Perro Seco I think I know you from another community, it was Dukespana or Arcades3D I think, long long time ago, I used the same nickname on that forums.

Yes, I'm registered at Arcades 3D and I also was in Duke España before it closed. Me alegra verte de nuevo en acción.

Right now I don't have much time and I don't even have any program installed to play online, but I'll test the map in SP once it's finished. I remember having played and enjoyed Europe years ago, so I guess this is also going to be a long and difficult map.

[Dukebot]

ck3D, on 01 April 2020 - 01:39 PM, said:

Great news to read. Mark doing the Lord's work, salvaging other people's promising maps from potential doom! Will be looking forward to playing this one. I still need to play Sanek's map, too.

Yeah, he saved the map completly. I was getting a lot of trouble advancing with the map because of this problem.

Perro Seco, on 02 April 2020 - 05:18 AM, said:

Yes, I'm registered at Arcades 3D and I also was in Duke España before it closed. Me alegra verte de nuevo en acción.

Right now I don't have much time and I don't even have any program installed to play online, but I'll test the map in SP once it's finished. I remember having played and enjoyed Europe years ago, so I guess this is also going to be a long and difficult map.

Great to know you still active and contributing to the community . Yeah Europe was a map focused on action and killing hored of enemies, I'm glad that you enjoyed it, but the map was low quality in terms of map details. This map it's builded with the same philosophy as Europe, but this time I am trying to put more effort on the map details. I hope I come up with a decent result in the end as I am not a good mapper by any means.



Thanks to Mark I've managed to continue with the map and made some progress. I listened your previous beedback and started to add some shading and details, I believe that the map starts to feel more alive but I would like to receive your feedback for improvements or suggestions.

Here are some areas near to the player Spawn, filled with some details and shadows:





And here are some outdoor areas filled with more vegetation and some details:

[ck3D]

Honestly this looks really good, it's hard to nitpick but if you ask me to:

- I know this is still W.I.P. and I notice you've implemented shadows here and there, however as of now there still seems to be some inconsistencies (to fix depending on if you end up with enough resources left), right now it seems like certain objects cast shadows when some don't, e.g.. the destroyed house in that last shot. Maybe it's on some annoying sloped terrain and I can't see it but if it's flat, you should be able to come up with great ones easily there (the shape of the house looks like it could result in some nice diagonal shadows on the ground with how the walls are slanted etc.). Some of those rocks/terrain variations should probably emit shadows as well. I like your style of 'straight' shadows in the second shot, if every shadow in your map is like this it's bound to look a bit odd though, but I'm guessing you have a reference point in your head of where the sun is emitting its light from, and don't have too much trouble with basic shadow geometry?

- the strength of your map is the open terrain, but the vertical scale of it looks rather flat, which is absolutely no problem (it's a style) but if you want to add some variety to the sceneries (for instance, the top of those trees doesn't have to look all flat like the top of the buildings do), and again if you have resources left at the end of your map, maybe you could experiment with creating narrow sectors extending outwards from the tree sectors and slope their parallaxed ceilings to shape them with a bit more irregularity and create a better illusion of nature, and better immersion (completely flat tree tops that look like the walls they technically are can be weird at times). It's an old Build engine game so realism doesn't have to be considered, but I feel like such an illusion (maybe even something completely different that you could come up with yourself) would help break the relative monotony of the flat feel of the 'sky' of the map. My trick would work on some of the rock formations surrounding the playable area as well, to similarly break the flat top look and add silhouettes to your landscapes.

- also re:shading: I still see quite a lot of walls next to one another with the same shade value which should be a technical no-no, and probably makes your map look a LOT flatter right now than it already has the potential to be with all that nice terrain work you've created. Essentially, that should add contrast to your existing map, which would really highlight its depth. I give that tip to a lot of people on here but given the style of your level, its openness and perspectives, focusing on wall shading would do even better wonders than in the average user map I think. Also, in that field I see inconsistencies too, e.g.. on that shot with the ark, the ark is shaded correctly with different shade values but the same angles of the rock formations and various walls forming the terrain aren't, which looks off. In a nutshell, if you spent maybe 45 minutes shading every wall in your level manually with great care, thought and contrast, I have reasons to think you'd be surprised with your own results and that's without even adding one sector. Mapster32 has an auto-shade function for all neighboring walls sharing the same texture, too, but manual control looks best in my opinion.

That's really all I can think of, besides this requested criticism I have a hard time finding much to complain about, those two first screenshots in particular look quite damn nice. Good luck!

edit - just noticed your post from 2014 saying you'd implement shading once you're done with the basic architecture of the map, but it looks like now would be a good time to do it.

edit #2 - re-reading this: "break the flat top look and add silhouettes to your landscapes", maybe your map is so open that it could use some recognizable elements that would act as visual clues from distance for players to always keep track of where they are in the map and the most strategic locations gameplay-wise, instead of essentially getting lost in a world of textures (which happens more often than not in big maps), but maybe your temples and constructions are very visible from distance and already act as such and I just can't see it.