Red Planet v1r1

The first thing to say about this map is that it's purpose and direction was quality, and trying to make a Doom 3 quality map for Xonotic. I added many effects and details, and depending on how people will like it I might add even more. Since the map uses many effects, the FPS is unfortunately pretty low (I don't plan to remove any effects as that would be against the map's purpose, but I'd be happy to improve the FPS somehow).

The action of the map is on a facility placed on a red dusty planet (doesn't necessarily have to be Mars). You play inside part of the facility which has many doors and windows, as well as outdoor where you have an open area with terrain. You travel in and out through airlocks, which (supposedly) cycle the pressure between the inner and outer area.

A possible inconvenience I'm aware of are the small doors, that players may run into if turning too quickly (or two players may get stuck when passing at the same time). They're sized this way so they have a correct size compared to players. I personally don't think they're that bad, after you get used to the map in a few minutes. They also cut bunny-hopping, making the map even more challenging. Depending on how people like the map, I may be making a CTF and ONS version too, where the bases are mirrored and the outside area is in the middle

This is a first beta of the map. The file names are not versioned either, so if you wish please don't put it on a public server until the final version is out (of course it's ok if you do, I'd just rather avoid a mix or confusion ). This map is meant to be added to Xonotic if it's good enough, when it will be ready (some changes will be needed for that).

Anyway here it is. Please tell me what you think, and if it's achieved it's purpose of being a playable detailed map

Link 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?2wmdmd2zhqm
Link 2: http://upload.ps/4wscikuwwo1q/red_planet_beta1.pk3.htm



---- Beta 2: ----

Map updated to beta 2, with the following changes:

- Blocked locked doors with crates and barrels, to make it more obvious you can't go through there. Good excuse to make some crushed doors and barrels too

- Airlock doors open faster. Doesn't make much of a difference however. Since one door needs to open as the other closes, and the triggers separate halfway inside, I don't think much can be done there.

- Put V player clips around ladders as FruitieX suggested, to make going around the balustrade easier.

- Replace door glass with the normal trak5 texture, to get rid of the low FPS. This hurts me a lot to do If DP doesn't improve performance with reflections I'll probably put the old glass back in a few years, when everyone will have good vid cards.

- Lower the radius of dynamic lights, to improve performance even more.

- Optimized many hints including FruitieX's suggestion.

- Optimized smoke spawners a bit, so they appear more from the ground. They still appear suddenly, just that they spawn a bit lower.

- Tiny BSP changes.

- Better bot waypoints.

Link 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?obmzi1xmtja
Link 2: http://upload.ps/irti2o8bsg00/red_planet_beta2.pk3.htm



---- Beta 3: ----

Another update with many new changes

- Disabled particle collisions. This should further improve performance by a great amount (at least what other people reported, doesn't improve much on my end).

- Optimized hint brushes in the L shaped corridor again.

- Added more BSP detail.

- Made doors open a little bit sooner (longer trigger). Made elevator doors a little faster too.

- Added coronas to rlights. Also placed a rlight with coronas on the teleporter pad.

- Lastly, the prettiest change of them all Turned the vent above the long hallway back into a screen, using the warpzone system camera. The screen shows what's happening outside in real time, from a camera which is also visible if you look at the wall (needs reflections enabled to work).

Link 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?zynydmnkmwo
Link 2: http://upload.ps/ll1yich1pxxv/red_planet_beta3.pk3.htm



---- Beta 4: ----

Small changes from beta 3.

- Flipped camera roll to match the fix added in GIT (update the engine or the screen will look upside down).

- Compiled with updated q3map2, which should improve bounce lightning (not seeing any difference myself).

- Tweaked the color of the teleporter dynamic light.

- Added support for Clan Arena, Keyhunt, and small mapinfo fixes.

Link 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?tttlzmzekmj
Link 2: http://upload.ps/xqe9emwgelcc/red_planet_beta4.pk3.htm
Link 3: http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/6/10/1..._beta4.pk3

Very detailed, though I played in checkers (nexuiz). I liked the glass.
- Add a minimap.
- Why does the pit hurt?


- These lights are strange (their light is a textured polygon?)


- Running into the glass causes you to see a cross-section of the model in your reflection.

Some things I'd like to see in this map:

- A warpzone instead of an elevator in the indoor area
- Strength in the Pit of Hurt
- Glowing green and red buttons on the doors
- Making the indoor area symmetrical (it's already partly symmetrical, and it's easy to get lost)
- Putting some navigation equipment that might look at home on a spaceship in the area that looks like a bridge (I'm not sure if it is supposed to be a spaceship or a base or what, but some glowing green dials, switches and displays could make excellent eyecandy )
- Removing some locked doors (the locked airlock doors in the outside area are really frustrating, kind of like 'invisible walls' in some games)
- Make the doors open sooner so you can bunny hop through them
- Removing this door, which appears to lead to nowhere :


I also noticed that with reflections on the game is unplayable for me, but without them the framerate is quite reasonable.

This map is meant to be added to Xonotic if it's good enough, when it will be ready (some changes will be needed for that).

All of the things I pointed out above are minor/not required to be fixed, and I think that after a bit of play testing, this map would make an excellent addition to Xonotic

Taoki, commit this to a git repo and add the options file (see other repos for howto)
Telling from the screenshots, this is super awesome. :O

I like it from a really brief look, only irritating things are the doors. You have to either walk or get it exactly right to get through them, they are really finicky and will slow gameplay down a lot. This could be alleviated by either making them bigger or activated by being shot by laser/rockets. The doors that don't go anywhere will be annoying for new players, but I don't mind them. Balance-wise, there are 4 nexes, which should definitely be reduced. 4 of any weapon is not good . I might be confused, but I think the MH/MA rotates so 50% of the time one or the other spawns? This is an interesting element to add, but it will mean tournament play (which needs consistency) will not favour the map.

It looks absolutely brilliant... I haven't tested it myself, but if those issues above were fixed this would be "the must" map in Xonotic release.

8D Wow!

Cool map! It has a nice "mars"-feeling ;D
Like the red-look, another type of map

Maybe you could put playerclips here to "lead" the players into that circle thing. Seems a bit hard to hit it sometimes. Like this:

Code:

_____    _____
|   /     \   |
|  /  /\   \  |
| /  /  \   \ |
|/     |     \|
       |
       |

You can see the smoke puffs spawning here, so maybe you should spawn them below the surface, and disable all collision testing on the particles if you already haven't done so (you should anyway to increase performance!)


Don't do refracting/reflecting glass on the doors, please...
reflecting = 1 extra render, refracting = another extra render, total renders caused by ONE door = 3. Glass doesn't refract IRL either, and the reflection can be faked with a cubemap instead with nearly zero performance loss (I used it on over 50 metal surfaces on dance, if not way more)


These doors are a bit weird. If you still want to keep them, you should make them close almost immediately (so that you can run through without hitting the first opening door), and give them another less annoying sound


I could imagine a hint brush could help in these corners to block out VIS from another room:

Code:

.     | 2 /|
      |  / | No point from portal #2
      | /  | should be visible from
______|/   | portal #1
      /    |
  1  /     |
____/______|

I so wish I could get out there somehow


Not sure about this elevator... If it took you 3 times higher than what it does now, it'd make more sense, but currently I think a jumppad would be better.

Edit: Oh yeah, and make the nonfunctional doors obviously nonfunctional (eg. obviously broken in some way)

Thanks for all the suggestions and replies The red doors that you can't go through are meant to be decorational. I like them, but I can reduce the confusion by blocking them with barrels and crates. Also, two of the locked doors lead to the mirrored base which will only be available in the CTF version, so I'd rather not leave them as blank walls in the limited DM version. Same with the area you can't go through behind that window... I thought it would look nicer with details like doors you can't use and places you can't go to

I think the base is pretty symmetrical, with the exception that one of the small rooms is locked on one of the sides and crates / barrels are arranged differently (and the upper area has a hall to the left). Layout wise, I like it like this.

The Nex is placed in each area that's like a balcony, mainly inside and outside (2 x 2). I had to duplicate some weapons since the map is pretty large. Was hoping that wouldn't bother the gameplay.

Glowing red and green buttons on the doors... the current red / green plated on each door frame are meant to be replaced with a display texture, which will be glowing and either red or green (eg. Door Access Granted written in cyan, Door Access Denied written in red).

The glass effect on doors is something I was really hoping for, since I think it rocks like that Just for the info, DP doesn't render two reflections through one another. So if you're looking through a water texture you won't see another water texture through it (thank goodness). But if you're seeing many doors next to each other, that may impact performance a bit. I can replace them with a cubemap texture, but I sooo love the distorting glass

The airlocks (the round doors that spin and you go in and out through) are as quick as they can be, but I'll try to see if I can improve them even further. Like I said in the first post, I can't do much about the other doors, since they're part of how the map was meant to look like. Blocking bunny-hopping is something I actually wanted though, since it will make the map more challenging. On most CTF maps, you just grab the flag and bunny-hops away. Here you need to make your way back at running speed until you're outside.

As for the smoke puffs, I placed the pointparticles best I could at the time. You do see them spawning through... I would need to do more changes to fix that. Might look into it later.

The ladder is player clipped from behind, because you got stuck in the platform's edge without that. The round metal bars are a bit tight, but I'm afraid of braking the style if I change them. Player clips to lead the player in could cause invisible collisions, but perhaps I can do that at a small scale.

The elevator is another thing I like as it is. I agree it would have been better for a longer distance, but I'd still love having it there. It's very quick so it should be better than a jump pad regarding the gameplay.

And thanks for the suggestion with that portal FruitieX, I'll try to change that

Also, for the other things I missed: You get hurt under the bridge because that's meant to be an area you shouldn't stay in a lot. The excuse is that you suffocate and / or depressurize if you stay too much below And you need Xonotic to see the textures, as the texture packages were changed.

I like it from a really brief look, only irritating things are the doors. You have to either walk or get it exactly right to get through them, they are really finicky and will slow gameplay down a lot. This could be alleviated by either making them bigger or activated by being shot by laser/rockets. The doors that don't go anywhere will be annoying for new players, but I don't mind them. Balance-wise, there are 4 nexes, which should definitely be reduced. 4 of any weapon is not good . I might be confused, but I think the MH/MA rotates so 50% of the time one or the other spawns? This is an interesting element to add, but it will mean tournament play (which needs consistency) will not favour the map.

A good bunch of maps in Nexuiz had slow-ish doors, you can usually open them using electro balls or secondary mortar nades.

As for the smoke puffs, I placed the pointparticles best I could at the time. You do see them spawning through... I would need to do more changes to fix that. Might look into it later.

Maybe they could instead fade in instead of just appear immediately. Would however require engine changes I think, but at least that'd make sense

Yeah, I forgot to look into making the doors damage-triggered too. And I tried to make the dust particles fade in, but yeah there's no engine support for that which is why I didn't.

Anyway, updated the map to beta 2 See the first post at the bottom.

A good bunch of maps in Nexuiz had slow-ish doors, you can usually open them using electro balls or secondary mortar nades.

Damage Triggered is good, but these doors aren't.

WOW! ADD ADD ADD

wow, awesome

but the performance in the open are is really bad. i get 10fps while i usually get 60 (vsync enabled)

compare these pictures (note: i didn't do this comparisons on other maps. the settings may have the same impact there, although i doubt it ):

the graphics settings here are everything to the max, except particels to the min, realtime world lighting, offset/relief mapping and hdr disabled.


offset mapping enabled. you can see that this moves a lot of surfaces, which doesn't make any sense very small impact on performance.


relief mapping enabled. it doesnt make anything look better but has a big impact on performance. do the textures have a proper bumpmap? if yes, it doesnt support the sand feeling. could you make it look more like e.g. this? the small hills are important imo.


realtime world lighting enabled. this cripples the fps to less than the half, which is imo a bit extreme for the single light in this scene


hdr enabled. everything get a orange glow, and some more fps "vanish" could you make the textures more orange and arrange the lights in a way so that hdr does not affect everything? i can imagine that this would improve performance a bit.

I don't think more can be done for the performance. I changed the reflective doors which were causing most of the FPS loss, and did the hinting best I knew. Not sure if the engine will be optimized any further in time... if not there's not much that can be done afaik (since there will likely be maps with even slower performance, if future maps with a lot of detail are to be made).

- Replace door glass with the normal trak5 texture

Which sucks.
Someone should improve it by adding a good cubemap, so every map can have nice glass with zero performance hit.

Which sucks.
Someone should improve it by adding a good cubemap, so every map can have nice glass with zero performance hit.

Agreed I'll change it when such a texture is committed and I'll be updating the map again. For now, it should work with the highest FPS achievable.

I like the map very much, but I hate how badly it performs even on default settings. It performs 3 times as worse as Little Mexico (< 100 FPS vs > 300 FPS), and that map is on par with this one quality-wise, but is also a more open map. Performance is low even without the particle effects and everywhere on the map, so something is clearly wrong and I hope you can find a way to fix it.

Clarification on what I meant about lights.
Good light:

Bad light:


Also, glass does refract (I liked the refracting glass better).

I like the gradient effect on those lights, they make the looks more intense imo. I seen that on some Quake map iirc, and liked the idea.

just chiming in to say I think this is a great map.

Beta 2 seems to have largely fixed most of the issues present in Beta 1, though I'm still finding that I sometimes hit the top of the doors when I strafe.

Keep up the good work!

I downloaded Beta 2, and the performance issues had become even greater.

Framerate literally dived to 0.2fps when I went outside, at first I thought the entire game had just died. The offending option appears to be realtime world lighting, which froze the game when I attempted to enable it.

That's likely an error that somehow occurred on your client. I can't think what it could be. There are only 8 dynamic lights with a radius of 400, so this shouldn't impact performance considerably. At least here it doesn't happen... I don't know what could be causing such a weird issue.

i like turtles
and mars
and this map... a lot!
excellent work mircea... how long did this take you ?