CTF-Blice (Release)

[Feralidragon]

I was finally able to finish this map.

Although I mentioned this quite a lot during development, beware that this is a map which pretty much pushes the engine to its utmost limits.
This means a few things:

• the map is quite big: 85MB;
• the BSP has a very high node count (58k, already optimized down from 78k) and is unstable: it doesn't have any collision bugs that I know of or any missing surfaces, but in certain odd angles in some places some parts may disappear or show a HOM (generally on corners and such), due to the super aggressive culling on the engine's part;
• there are some lighting bugs I couldn't get rid of (maybe useful as a case study for future UT99 and Unreal patches);
• there are a lot of effects going on: bloom, particles, clouds, snow, in the order of thousands (literally, in the order of 5k+ bloom effects, and several hundreds, probably up to thousands in particle effects);
• the frame rate of the map is quite hideous, even on strong machines (good to benchmark your machine against).

Other than that, everything works: the map is bot-pathed, it's been minimally tested, the gameplay is simple and flows well, etc.

Therefore I have made 2 versions, the original full quality version, but with a poor performance, here:

CTF-Blice-Alpha.zip

and a lite version, with most effects stripped from it (a literal "select all -> delete" derived from the first map), but with a good performance (at least on my machine, I cannot vouch for a good performance in old machines):

CTF-Blice-Lite-Alpha.zip

Also, keep in mind that this is a first alpha release, and as an alpha I mean to make maybe 1 or 2 more releases to fix anything severely broken, or with minor improvements, depending on overall feedback.
But I don't mean to put much more work into this map as it is, because quite honestly it's not worth it to me, since it's likely never going to be played in real servers, due to its size or due to players getting lag nonetheless even in the lite version if their machine is not modern enough, hence being more of a tech demo at this point, and a map to benchmark performance against.

Furthermore, most of the lag from the full quality version could be fixed if I made a new effects package coded in a completely different way, it's only laggy since I used a very old effects package of mine, which while has a good performance overall (it was built for high performance), I didn't put much work into it in the first place (was developed in 2 days, years ago), and this map shows its performance limitations quite clearly, so this is a map I will potentially use to benchmark new mapping effects and tools against, should I ever do something like that down the road.

And with that, here are the screenshots of the map itself:

[fudgonaut]

It is ludicrous how beautiful this map is.

[Loose Cannon]

WOW!!! Love the map. It was worth the wait! The detail is just incredible!!! Thanks for not giving up on it. I'm sure you got "desensitized" by working on the map for so long, but I'm sure UT players will rave about it.

[cromy]

Unbelievable the details... great job!

[Tyr]

Incredible Architecture. It makes my PC running like a Pentium 100 with Unreal 1 running. I wonder what's causing the massive FPS loss. Even on a corner the FPS doesn't change. It's simply overall slow.

Great Job Feralidragon.

[esnesi]

oh man, sad even the LITE version has drops here and there.
But atleast playable

it's gorgeous!

[Que]

unable to compress these maps using ucc.exe anyone got the .uz files for these?

[EvilGrins]

Looks beautiful, can't wait to test them... but I'm at work so I'll have to.

unable to compress these maps using ucc.exe anyone got the .uz files for these?

Do you not have WinZip?

[Que]

Not exactly sure what kind of compression a .uz file uses , but it's definitely not a winzip, winrar or 7zip file
.uz files are created by using commandline UCC compress <filename.*> these files are then uploaded to a Redirect Server
and downloaded to clients when connecting to a server at a faster rate then if sent uncompressed directly.
They are then decompressed client-side ready for playing.
You would upload these compressed files to public/private http server and set the following in your UnrealTournament.ini;

Example UT.ini implementation

Code: Select all

[IpDrv.HTTPDownload]
RedirectToURL=http://uz.ut-files.com/
ProxyServerHost=
ProxyServerPort=3128
UseCompression=True

The problem here is that UCC freezes and even after leaving it running "Compressing" for hours on end it does not seem to compress these files.


Will leave it compressing all day and see what happens..

[FraGnBraG]

Wow. quite a piece of work ferali! Wonderful theme and very well realized.

Played some matches with 5 vs 5 and although straight forward gameplay it works pretty well for CTF.

This is a "very-high-poly" map with some pov where polygons can hit 1200+ in high-visibility areas (stat fps), thus overall average FR was a bit lower (30-40) than usual it was not bad, imo.
Didn't stop me from fraggin'

I sent you a pm with a few comments

Thanks for the maps!
Cheers

[EvilGrins]

For some reason I thought it would be bigger.




Bot pathing works great, classic music, good usage of the full playing area. Speed wise (only tried the lite version so far) it runs smoothly with no noticable drag.

I tried 2 teams of bots, 4 to a team. Blue team was kicking serious ass...

...when I noticed a problem.

Not sure if flaw is the right word, but this is definitely a glitch.

As you can see in that last screenshot above, DELTA fell off the bridges and plummeted into the chasm with the Red Flag. Now, he respawned okay (as one does) and the game proceeded apace.

I didn't notice it at first, but you see it now, here, right?


Red Flag didn't come back like DELTA did!

Normally when anyone falls into a dead zone with a flag, the flag immediately returns to where it goes in the base... but not on this map. Instead there's no flag at all for the Red Team anymore.

Initially chalked it up to a delay, gave it 5 minutes while the bots kept playing... although whenever the Red Team got the Blue Flag they had nowhere to take it.

...and no, the Red Flag never came back.

For me this is a 1st. Has anyone ever seen something like this before?

[Barbie]

Has anyone ever seen something like this before?

A typical problem of a CloudZone: it destroys everything that enters it, also the flag (pawns are not destroyed, they are simply killed). Therefore a CloudZone should not be used in CTF, at least not in reachable areas. And yes, the map contains a CloudZone named "MyCloudZone0".

[FraGnBraG]

iirc, make sure the zone where the flag falls has painzone set to true.
that property will cause the flag to return after a small time delay.

[Barbie]

iirc, make sure the zone where the flag falls has painzone set to true.
that property will cause the flag to return after a small time delay.

Viewed from the code I doubt that setting PainZone will work:

Code: Select all

class CloudZone extends ZoneInfo;

event ActorEntered( actor Other ) {
	if ( Other.IsA('Pawn') )
		Pawn(Other).Died(Pawn(Other).Enemy, 'Fell', Location);
	else		
		Other.Destroy();
}

To fix that problem, add a condition that checks if other is a flag and send it home then (untested code):

Code: Select all

class MyCloudZone extends ZoneInfo;

event ActorEntered(actor Other) {
	if (Other.IsA('Pawn'))
	{
		if (Pawn(Other).PlayerReplicationInfo != NONE && Pawn(Other).PlayerReplicationInfo.HasFlag != None)
			CTFFlag(Pawn(Other).PlayerReplicationInfo.HasFlag).SendHome();
		Pawn(Other).Died(Pawn(Other).Enemy, 'Fell', Location);
	}
	else
	{
		if (Other.IsA('CTFFlag')
			CTFFlag(Other).SendHome();
		else
			Other.Destroy();
	}
}

[FraGnBraG]

well I'll have to check my notes regarding painzone, but im pretty sure that was the practice at unreal playground for years by all the ctf mappers there, to fix the exact problem of flags getting stuck when dropped into pits, etc. it happened all the time especially with new mappers. maybe cloudzone is coded different? I recall cloudzones were not recommended for other reasons I think they would prevent spectators or something like that. if not pain zone then it is another one of those boolean properties...