CTF-StoneForts][

ReadMe for Unreal Tournament

----------------------------

Title: CTF-StoneForts][

Filename: ctf-stoneforts][.zip

Author: Michael 'Bot_40' Rippon

eMail Address: rip@facechange.co.uk

Website URL: http://members.fortunecity.com/bot40

Release Date: Sunday, June 9, 2002

Last Update: Sunday, June 9, 2002

Version: 1.00

Credits: k, this should test my memory :)

-Darkmagic team (Keep me relativly sane and stop me abandoning maps :) and a lot of feedback + suggestions too)
-Beta testers (Loads, I don't want to start naming people because I will forget to mention too many people :\. Mainly people from the nalicity bulletin boards, Darkmagic team and people from Unreal Playground BBS too.)
-Textures (slightly modified to make them usable for UT) from David Gurrea (http://www.davegh.com/BLADE/davegh.htm)
-Rich Eastwood for the new Tree. It comes from Operation: NaPali. Singleplayer mod for UT, don't tell me you haven't heard of it :p
-R. Wey for TexAlign
-Mychaeel for Mesh maker (made the lantern and the chain tex with it)
-A lot of the people from the Nalicity bulitin boards who keep bugging me for the map which makes me work on it :p
-Err, people who wrote the tutorials over at Chimeric. That helped me learn a bit of UScript to make the particle system and the new botpath actors.
-Hourences for his leet Architecture guide/tutorial thing :)
-Hourences (again) and Mister Prophet for making Xidia which showed me how to make some decent ambitent sounds :)
-Some of the particle system textures are from DeusEx, great game btw :)


Other levels by author: Check the uberLame site :)

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Play Information

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Game: Unreal Tournament

Level Name: CTF-StoneForts][

Game Type: UTCTF

Botmatch: Yes

Single Player: No

Teamplay: Yes

Difficulty Settings: Only For Bots

New Textures: Yes

New Sounds: No

New Music: Yes

New Mutators: No

Mods: No

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Construction

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Base: Original Map

Build Time: 7 Months O_o. I lost interest and couldn't be bothered for 5 out of the 7 monthes though.

Recommended # of Players: 16 or more possibly

Editor(s) Used: UnrealEd, TexAlign, Photoshop, MeshMaker and Windows Calculator for when my pocket calculator stopped working (I think a year and a half of UED numbers killed it lol)

Known Bugs: Errr, the trees look ghey except for the new one. I didn't want to use it all over the place because it's very high poly. Please put up with the trees and the stupid lighting on them till UT2 comes out :p

There are 4 collision errors that I can think of at the moment. One on a rock round the side of the red base, there's a tiny one on the path outside the red base as you head up the hill. Very small and you won't notice it. It's not like you can get caught up on it. There's another one on a rock near the bridge that you can see from the red base. There is also and "Instant kill error" if you translocate around at the top of the gate towers. You can fire things into it and they dissapear and if you touch it you die instantly. Don't ask me what causes that O_o.

The water texture is ugly. It's the best one I could find from the UT selection and I'm not up to making my own water textures. Looks like you'll have to live with it :)

The shorline is ugly and has poor brushwork. It's one of the bad bits in the map. To lazy to fix:\

There are some pitch black triangular smudges in 1 or 2 places on the terrain. 1 of them you can see from the top of the gate towers. I think there are more but they are out of the playable area. This is a BSP bug. The engine doesn't like terrain maps of this complexity I don't think.

err, that's about all I can remember for now. If you find any bugs, please don't tell me unless they are serious, I probably won't be bothered to fix them then I'll just feel guilty for not :D

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Inventory

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Weapons: Flak Cannon, Sniper Rifle, Minigun, ASMD Shock Rifle, Rocket Launcher

Armor and PowerUps: Thigh Pads, Health Packs, Health Vials, Armor, Shield Belt

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Mods

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[pimp] www.planetunreal.com/ucz <- darkmagic 0wnz j00 [/pimp]

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Installation

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Unzip ctf-stoneforts][.zip

Store the *.unr file in your Unreal Tournament/Maps directory along with the others
(see guide below), then either doubleclick on it, or type

open CTF-StoneForts][

in the console, or select the Map in a Botmatch or an Internet game.

Guide:

*.unr files go in Maps/

*.utx files go in Textures/

*.umx files go in Music/

*.uax files go in Sounds/

*.u and *.int files go in System/

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Extended Description

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Hmm, I feel kinda lame for spending so much time building a large themed map then not being able to think of a storyline for it :\
It's just a large open terrain map with quite a few neutral buildings to make it feel more realish.
The blue base is supposed to be devided into 2 sections, the old bit (the front area) and the more modern section (the flag room and a bit more). Some areas are still under construction and are just caves waiting to be finished (I don't mean I'm too lazy to finish them, it's part of the theme ;) )

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Author's Notes

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Err, not designed to be a gameplay map at all. I guess it was sort of at the very start but the moment I finished the terrain it stopped being a proper map and more of an experiment. The main aim is to make a medium to large terrain map that feels much larger than it really is. If you look at the basic layout, it itsn't actually that complicated though the buildings and caves and secret areas make it feel much larger. You should have fun trying to explore.

Also, I'm sick of seeing terrain maps which suddly come to an end. They normally either have a cliff round the edge which doesn't give the impression that the map continues past that cliff, or you can actually see the map border (ProjectX2 is an example, look at the border of the map). I wanted to try to build terrain where it appears that the map is actually a part of a world, not just a subtracted cube with a terrain brush in it. This is why the terrain continues for a long way outside the 'Playable area' of the map. You can look right into the distance and see hills far away and it looks much more real. Of course this is a challange to do with the polygon limits of UT, the entire layout of the terrain is designed to stop you being able to see to many polys at any one time. There is always a ridge or a hill that blocks your view. This is probably one of the things I am most pleased with in the map.
As a result of this design, the polys are surprisingly low. On average, when you are outside, you have about 200-250 in view I think. There are about 4-5 points where you can get 300 odd polys if you look in the right direction and I think there are only 2 points in the map (On top of the right hand gate tower and at the sniper post on the rock near the red base) where you get 350 polys.

Before you moan about the quality of any of the map. I'd just like to say that I made this map over and extremly long time period so I have improved massivly from when I started. There are many areas which I am not pleased with but I'm so bored of the map it's not realistic to think that I would redo those areas. The places I don't like are:
The neutral base in the middle: No good architecture or lighting, bland textures.
The red base: Too small, no decent architecture, what is there doesn't really have a theme, just nice shapes thrown in here and there. the lighting is a bit better than the neutral base but not much.
The beach: Just ugly and bad brushework where the river meets the sea.
The cave near the neutral base: Looks too empty, lame rocks thrown in to fill it up.
The outside lighting: Boy what a Biatch lol. It is lame and there are no shadows on the ground. I should have used cylinder lights although it might have been tricky to do what with this being a very open map and all.

Bots have 3 new scripts although the noisy health vial is pretty usless. The SmartAlternatePath is the best. When bots use a particular route, the selection weight of all the others increases so the less frequented paths become more attractive to the bots. This happens ingame so if you ask all your bots to cover you and move along 1 route all the time, the enemy will start using other routes to avoid you :)
The new SmartDefensePoint works ok I think. I haven't really noticed any difference. It doesn't make the bots any worse so I'm not bothered.

Included is my own particle system. Feel free to use it in any of your maps provided you give me some credit. You can do some pretty cools stuff with it and it's very flexible. Just make sure you don't have too many particles spawned at once (anywhere in the map) because the particle system will still spawn particles if it is not in view so you will get some lag if you use it too much.
I haven't used it extensivly in this map (in about 5-6 places I think) but it livens it up a bit I think :)

The parts I AM pleased with are:
Blue base: (Flag room mainly) Massivly improved my architecture there. Before (Like in the red base) I though all it was about was thinking up nice shapes. There was no structure to my architecture before the blue base.
The terrain: Err, yeah. Probably mentioned above somewhere.
The new bot scripts: the bots use all the routes evenly and bypass the routes that are frequently used.
The atmosphere: Turn your music down and enjoy :)
The sun: I like my 9pm sun :D

</long rant and stuff>

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Copyright / Permissions / Some ghey stuff

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This level is copyright 2002, by Michael 'Bot_40' Rippon

Authors may NOT use this level as a base to build additional levels without explicit
permission from the Original Author.

You are NOT allowed to commercially exploit this level, i.e. put it on a CD or any
other electronic medium that is sold for money without my explicit permission!

You MAY distribute this level through any electronic network (internet (web/ftp),
FIDO, local BBS etc.), provided you include this file and leave the archive intact.

UNREAL (c)1998 Epic Megagames, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Distributed by GT
Interactive Software, Inc. under license. UNREAL and the UNREAL logo are registered
trademarks of Epic Megagames, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are
properties of their respective owners.

UNREAL TOURNAMENT (c)1999 Epic Megagames, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Distributed by
GT Interactive Software, Inc. under license. UNREAL TOURNAMENT and the UNREAL
TOURNAMENT logo are registered trademarks of Epic Megagames, Inc. All other
trademarks and trade names are properties of their respective owners.

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