[Mister Sinister]

So I was playing Liquidator...

Sludge Plunge is a map set in swamp area. I can't remember many swamp maps in Duke so here's one.
You'll be travelling through swamps, caves, small towns and etc. Exciting stuff!
Also there are lots of secret places, but there is one Super Secret I challenge you to find!

Have fun.

Screenshots:




Updated: coop support for 5 players; sky issue fix; new secret
Download:

Attached File(s)

•  mudbath.zip (147.67K)
  Number of downloads: 454

[Jblade]

Just finished it, really fantastic work! There's tons of enemies but ammo was fairly liberal once you got out of the initial cave area. It's too bad Duke doesn't have any swamp ambient sounds since that would really cap it all off, but other than that it's a damn solid piece of work (I only got 5 out of 11 secrets, finding the others is gonne be entertaining )

[Sixty Four]

It looks like its good and seems like the kind of setting that I like to see. Hope to try it when I can.


Hours later edit:
My expectations were succeeded damn good job this kind of makes me want to review maps. I been meaning to play a few that have been released recently but this one made me go. Just wanted to point that out. Now I would love to sit here and nitpick about outdoor areas xD But I am unable to with this map you got it down man. Not only that the mixture of some tech like ares were interesting. The map also wasn't linear I got lost at least twice It took me 40 minutes that might be slow lol but that's what I did. I could say more but will save it. Real good job

[MetHy]

Really cool map, great escalation of action (could be 3 maps in one).

A few glitches.

[Merlijn]

Sweet map, it takes a lot of creativity to create a swamp with DN3D textures. But you pulled it off!
The night vision goggles are actually usefull in this level, that doesn't happen very often..
I appreciated the variety you brought to the map: caves, hi-tech areas, a little town etc.. Keeps things fresh and interesting all the way through.

The sky acted buggy though, some parts moved and some parts didn't.
I never liked the moving sky effect anyway, so if you release a 1.2 version you should probably replace it.

Gameplay was solid, like Methy said it escalated nicely.
I died once at the beginning, because I walked right past the pistol and kept running around without a weapon. D'oh.

Great job!

[Steambull]

Really cool use of textures and sprites - not to mention the seamless mixing of different themes. I played CGS, and gameplay was pretty balanced - you had to look for items and they were often placed interestingly (for some reason I had to look for the pistol for a loooong time in the beginning, though). Health/ammo ratio was excellent, especially for a map with big open areas like this. Those bigger areas near the end are also really well designed and detailed, although at some point the hordes of enemies got a little repetitive (but having those murky areas where the NVGs became really useful spiced it up a lot). The boss fight was okay. Some misaligned parallax sky glitches towards the end, and a lot of those detail sprites were blocking the player, which is always a bad thing.

Great map with lots of interesting places to explore, and the basics are well executed as well.

Took me 50 minutes
358 enemies killed (0 left)
5/6 secrets found

Edit:

Quote

(I only got 5 out of 11 secrets, finding the others is gonne be entertaining )

Hmm, for me it said 5/6 at the end.

[Mister Sinister]

Hey there, thanks a lot! I'm glad t turned out good. I thought it was a bit underbalanced on CGS as I was going for vanilla approach to gameplay, but it worked out fine.

Some weird stuff though.

Quote

The sky acted buggy though, some parts moved and some parts didn't.

That's interesting because the sky isn't moving for me. Maybe I have an outdated version of EDuke.

Quote

Hmm, for me it said 5/6 at the end.

This is also weird. Take a look:

There are 11 secrets - no doubt about that. Check again, maybe your EDuke is haunted.

[MetHy]

Showed 11 secrets for me too. For information I haven't uptaded my EDuke32 version in a couple of months, Steambull probably more I'm sure .

For the "glitches" I mentionned there was:
- Some sky bits were misaligned (Sky was moving indeed) http://i101.photobuc...zpsafni951f.png
- I got killed by the closing of a wall to a secret (the secret where you push a random computer/tech texture and it opens a small area in a wall nearby with an atomic health)
- You can get stuck here (right of the bridge when you enter this outdoor area) : http://i101.photobuc...zpscp2vcaao.png

I too got a little bothered a little by small blocking sprites in the first area of the map, felt like walking on big rocks.

[Mister Sinister]

Okay, so this is how the sky looks for me.

Spoiler

I'll see what I can do about it and the rest of the glithces in the meantime though there's nothing I can do about blocking sprites. I think they are coded in such manner that the game always makes them solid.

[Steambull]

What about with the "classic" graphics settings? That's what I used and I had the same effect as in MetHy's screenshot. Edit: I actually got stuck in that very same part from MetHy's 2nd screen, but I got out after 10 seconds of jumping around.

[Merlijn]

Yeah, I just took a quick look in-game and the moving sky bug only appears in classic mode.
In polymost it looks fine.

[Micky C]

IIRC there's some kind of maximum number of sectors that the moving sky effect will work with.

[Jblade]

Yeah, I reported the problem to helix and he upped the max number of sectors from 128 to 256 but sector heavy maps like this will still have problems (I'm assuming there's some performance reasons why it can't be dynamic in classic mode)

[Mister Sinister]

Never even knew about that. Honestly, I even forgot that the sky tile was moving in the first place.
The glitch also appears in Megaton. Gonna fix it soon.

[sergey808a]

Amazing map! Very big and very interesting! Thank you for work.
But where is the Super Secret? Can anyone find them?

[Mister Sinister]

Thanks! You'll have to look hard for that Super Secret I can give you a hint: accessing it will require you to shoot some timed stuff. It is also very dirty in there.

I have updated the map with the sky issue fix, coop support and a new secret. Have fun!

[MetHy]

The map works really well in coop. It's huge and has tons of monsters, plus the layout feels like it's made with coop in mind, it works well because it never takes long to go back to where you were after dying, and that despite the map's size.

[CruX]

finally found some free time to finish this, killed all but two of the bad guys and only missed the one super secret place you alluded to (pretty rare for me since I absolutely suck at finding secrets). For the most part, I liked the design a lot. The maze like caves in the beginning were fun and the expansive swamp-lands were about spot on and the decision to place jumping lizard guys and octabrains towards the tree tops made for some really fun, frantic firefights.

Unfortunately design suffers in most of the high tech/industrial ares with it bottoming out in that large area that connects the caves and the swamps. Like, in comparison to the other areas, it looks like it was designed by someone else. The overall layout is funky and kinda nonsensical, the scaling is pretty crazy (the building itself is enormous, but the garage doors at either end are like, half the size of it), a lot of the textures weren't panned well on the floor and ceiling, giant textures were used for small trimwork areas, smaller textures were used for giant walls/doors (garage doors)... I could go on but it might start to look nitpicky, and it probably already does, but my point in mentioning it is that none of those things are in the swamps or the caves. It really, really stands out and makes me kinda curious over what the design process involving that area was like.

Anywho apart from that, I really liked everything else. Gameplay was solid and evenly paced, about the only complaint I've got for that is that there were too many drones, but that's got more to do with the enemy itself than the map's use of them. Overall, it was a fun and really well done map, just had a few parts that seemed a bit sloppy and rushed.

[Mister Sinister]

Hey, thanks! I understand the criticism, it looks sloppy to me too.

[MetHy]

CruX, on 12 February 2016 - 03:21 PM, said:

the decision to place jumping lizard guys and octabrains towards the tree tops made for some really fun, frantic firefights.

This reminds me, you see the bridge with the cars and stuff that you step onto after exiting the high-tech building? Well, I really liked the "Lizard-jump" guys coming from underneath on each side of it.
Lizardjump are usually placed in higher part, above the player, but here I thought they fitted perfectly coming from a lower point. This was one of those surprisingly great use of DN3D enemies that I sadly don't see often enough.