UT99.org | Unreal Tournament Community

I've been cleaning out my hard drives and condensing things down to make space for a big plex server to run in my home. I had forgotten that I had so many unfinished maps, both mine and a bunch of others that have been sent to me. That got me thinking that a lot of you guys have the same thing. So what could be done?

Is anyone interested in a "Map finishing service"? We each are good at certain things. Some guys light maps well, some do great pathnoding, some enjoy aligning textures and fixing offsets, I like to code small stuff, etc. If we had a project manager *cough paper cough* they could direct maps through a sort of team that would process them into a playable state. Think about it for a minute...if you only had to do lighting for a map and then you were done then you'd likely get that done where a full project sits in the 'round-to-it' pile.

Members who wanted to contribute could sign up for the specialty they enjoy the most doing and only have to actually contribute a small amount but it's doing the thing they are the best at. The community wins because a lot of concept maps that never got done/polished could see some level of completion.

Anyway, I'm just spitballing here, not sure if there is interest. Otherwise I'm going to just delete a lot of this unfinished crap. It's sat for years in some cases (and maybe that's for the best lol).

Man I'm so into this!!!!

Interesting, indeed.
But didn't we have a similar discussion years ago?

I like this idea. I would volunteer to work on one, but I am not proficient at any of the mapping disciplines yet.

But whatever you do, please don't delete the unfinished work!

How many maps/megabytes (gigabytes?) are we talking? I don't really have means to host them online - but if the total filesize is not too large, I would offer to store the files on a backup drive I have at home. I'm sure others would be willing to give the files a home, too!

Cough, I need to make free space on my drives then...
Or I'm going to buy some memory stick - what size are we talking about ?
I'm asking because I think I have more than 22788 PathNodes to spread and I need to find place for them .

Speaking of strictly my own stuff I'd need to contact original owners before posting anything that's not my own. I've go so much stuff from people that's simply incredible and it's a shame that it won't see completion.

A good example is the portal level that Bob exported. It's stunningly good and if you turn off the hud you would be hard pressed to know which game you fired up. I've also got multiple levels exported from other different games that worked as a proof of concept but they need attention from people who would lend some of their expertise and a bit of time. There's a bunch of guys (you know who you are) that mess around and do some fucking neat stuff but it never gets moved beyond "Wow, that's pretty cool." Rune, Minecraft, Left4Dead, Postal2, Killing Floor, Doom...I have maps or parts from those and that's just what I can remember without going to look.

Anyway if I have these then you guys too are bound to have maps that have a lot of work in them but aren't ever going to get done. Why not offer them up and let's get a completion team together? Nels can enjoy a well-pathed map because he did it, Barbie endorses that all the triggers and map flow are correct, our resident map contest big hitters can tighten up the texture choices and do some interior decorating, etc. It may not be the exact map you started to make but this way it gets done, it's engine correct, AND it gets released.

It might be nice if the community had central focus projects to work on that didn't require much from any single person and was open to those that had both the skills and the time.

I'd love to work on a map or 2. I love texturing, but would work on what was needed.

My possible contributions;
Breakable windows
Street and building furniture
movable decos
EFX zone audio
Wildlife
Reactive vegetation

I tend to favour real-world environments or outdoor maps, and making them a bit more used/alive.

Perhaps using google drive or similar will allow people to add a shared folder to their own drives.
I often make a new google account for a project, so the drive gets a suitable name that is distinctive when shared into my main gdrive (eg. UnrealTextures@gmail.com is mine).

Send me one

I do have a folder that has like 200 or so maps, mostly either tiny fixes, bot support inclusion, do a Unreal to IT conversion (give it the DMU treatment) or extract an RA map to seperate levels.

Interesting, would like to join as well.

Welp, I just proposed the idea and I'm happy to offer myself as someone to help but this really needs a respected member to actually run the thing. If anyone would like to take this idea and run with it please do and consider it your own and run it like you wish.

I think that this project would only grow especially after a few maps get released and more people see it as a viable path to finishing some of their work. Besides the community could benefit from collab versus conflict.

JackGriffin wrote:I'm happy to offer myself as someone to help but this really needs a respected member to actually run the thing

What if you won't find a respected member ? Let me see... we have to move on some private sharing platform (recall MH504 stage) and we can exchange data.
Simple session: This is an awesome piece of crap which needs a bit of love. You can start with introductions:
- Piece-Of-Crap - this is sektor2111.
- sektor2111 - this is Piece-Of-Crap.
Let's find a solution for getting a cake... etc. etc.
We have as advantage local time, night for you means day for me and reversal, both we can attack a bad map at different time having all changes without to mess working in the same time at the same file.

Nels, you are one of the people I really enjoy working with. You are direct, focused, and way smarter than people know. It suits my style very much when I get focused on a project and my tunnel vision Aspergers-mind kicks in. I learn a lot by working on something with you.

My biggest limit now is just time. Collaboration by text is just so slow and cumbersome and takes heaps of time when I can drop into a teamspeak and swap information as I work with someone. I get it that some people are shy to talk but (for me) text brings iteration to a turtle's pace.

So... you recommend me a team-speak which... was not one of my goals because I'm slow at understanding voices... my microphone has 22 years old or more but I think it works... (the guy who sold it to me is dead...). I'm going to check if exist a version for Android because right now I need to spent money for other purposes than computers with new large drives... etc, etc. In other point of view Keyboard with voice recognition could be good, at least for englitch it did not do too many issues, just recognizing words and writing them properly.