This is a development thread about a new DM map, I'm working on, to have a sneak peak, and to ask for some help I might encounter.
A few weeks ago, I was listening to Quake 3 Arena: Noize, the official soundtrack for Quake3. There's a song in it, named "Velocity of Fear" , that inspired me in a way.
The idea of a new DM map was formed:

Eons ago, there were two powerful mages on a distant planet. The two magicians have had a terrible row, about who's more powerful. To decide, both of them tried to open a large, interdimensional portal. But their magic has became unstable, and their portals have gone out of control: apocalipse has come to them, and their planet. The massive blackholes they've created have virtually torn their planet apart, instantly killing everybody.
But magic can be strange. The tower of the magicians _almost_ remained intact. A few rocks stayed in the center of the gravity zones of the two massive portals, rendering them floating in the middle of nothing for enernity...
... or untill the constant battle over the place doesn't destroy it all. HappyRocket Corp. has recently found the place while searching for new arenas to fight for Nexuiz. Thanks to the projection technology in teleportation, they can easily spawn players to anywhere they want. Everybody at the Corporation's HQ agreed, that the post-apocaliptic scene would be a perfect place for the most fast paced battles anyone could imagine - because the players have to bare with the constant danger of two enemies: the other gladiator's fires, and the gravity of the two major blackholes.

This is the story so far. I've started the basics of the map: I have a halfy torn tower, and a few rocks floating in a very foggy air. This will be the tower, where the Quad damage is placed. You can get back to the main fighting area by jumping from floating debrish to debrish, while in constant danger of falling down. The main area will be a ruined castle. Te basic concept is to make a spooky atmosphere, so I'd like to have dead plants (eg. a dead tree), skulls and skeletons all over the place, and fog. Grey, thick fog. There will be two large swirling blackholes in the top of the sky, and in the deep too: the upper one will have a "gravity zone" too, so those, who rocketjump or laserjump too high, will be caught, slowly dragged, and killed by the portal.

However, as I lack some skill, I need others help too. I've decided not to map in secret, but I'd like to ask others too to help me. Eg. with the skeleton/skull models, or the blackhole textures ( I've made some by myself, but they aren't looking so good, and I haven't found any free, GPL compatible skeleton models either).

What do you think about this map idea?
I'll post screenshots tomorrow, when I get home.

*edit: corrected some typos

I need screenshots :\

torus wrote:I need screenshots :\

me too

For some reason warp portals and chaos marines come to mind.

Screenshots

Braaaaiiins...


Err, sorry, screeeeenshots...

Here you go, screenshots:

Cool

Looks good! But it seems to me that the floating debris should be bigger (some of them I mean). Will players be able to get on those debris?

Agreed, I'll make those larger, that was only a test for me how floating debrish looks like
And yes, players should be able to jump on them, that's exactly the plan

looking interesting. I would say, on what you've got right now, you should

a) make the tower itself more interesting. The room part that is open is just fine, but the tower itself is kind of boring, and also way too narrow (imo).
Also, you should try to find a better texture for the tower-cylinder than those bricks- they repeat in an ugly way. Either that, or scale them up.

b) More light pl0x!

Spining, rotating and bobbing debris!

Hey, looks nice! [had some question, but I reread your post and realized I overlooked something, sorry]

P.S.: The Q3 OST ftw!

[edit]: I agree with Agama. Also, the furthey they are, the more unstable they should be .

Progress:

I've made the blackholes, the lower one does actually kill you... and I think the texture is pretty nice too



Added the floating debrishes: they are larger and some of them rotates, others bob:



A screenshot from the deep:



Also, I've made a simple teleporter model, but I'm not very contented with it. In case anybody has better ideas, feel free to share:



ai kindly helped me, with the skeleton and skull models. I've found a nice, free model resource site (http://www.3dxtras.com), and I already have a eorking md3 model ready for mapping:

http://www.3dxtras.com/3dxtras-free-3d- ... rodid=8568

Low poly (thy to ai):
http://ai.planetnexuiz.de/Pics/polyReduction_01.jpg

Skeleton model:
http://www.3dxtras.com/3dxtras-free-3d- ... rodid=8595

That's all for now.

Erm, the defining feature of a black hole is that it is BLACK. No light can get in or out, past the event-horizon.



Yours looks like a hurricane

That's perfectly fine, if you want a vortex of wind. But a black hole would look like the image above (a black disk, warping the stuff behind it.

Hmm... you were right!

I've followed your advices, and I've got tinkering with the map a little:



Too bad, I cannot make a 100% circle in radiant, and the texture is oddly shaped either at some parts. I think this woul be better with a flat model, projected onto the sky...
Yet again, I lack the skill of modelling

Some spookiness

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=034hyDWq-L4&fmt=18

lol
make it a bit bigger

hey i found a site long ago containing all sorts of models . here is a link to a few diff skeletal ones . http://www.wemakemaps.com/mapmodels5.htm
there are more just randomly placed so have a look

Grasshopper wrote:hey i found a site long ago containing all sorts of models . here is a link to a few diff skeletal ones . http://www.wemakemaps.com/mapmodels5.htm
there are more just randomly placed so have a look

Thx, I know the place. The problem is, that most of the models there aren't GPL compatible, or the author's email adresses aren't working anymore

Progress:

After I've put up the ghost video on youtube, I've got a text response:

please make it speak something backwards

So I've tought: hey, why not? But there was a little problem: namely, that Nexuiz train's can't emit sounds. But thanks to divVerent, there's a workaround:
There's a new entity in SVN, called: misc_follow. From entities.def:

Makes one entity follow another. Will not work with all entities.

Hurray! So we can make a target_speaker follow a func_train! But... there's another problem (target_speaker in entities.def):

If targeted, it plays the sound file every time when triggered.

So, if we target the target_speaker, it won't loop the sound...
Another workaround was found: trigger_multivibrator!

"Multivibrator" trigger gate... repeatedly sends trigger events. When triggered, turns on or off.

So... all in all: you can make a train emit sounds, if you place a target_speaker next to it, give it the proper noise, target it with a misc_follow that is killtargetted to the func_train, and a trigger_multivibrator, that has spawnflags 1 (=STARTS ON), and has the exact wait time as the lenght of the audio file (so it triggers the sound every time it's over )

Code: Select all

{
"classname" "func_train"
"targetname" "train"
"target" "train1"
"speed" "50"
}

{
"classname" "target_speaker"
"origin" "0 448 -12"
"angle" "180"
"noise" "sound/cb_skullznbones/cb_ghostwhisper1.ogg"
"targetname" "speaker"
"atten" "3.9"
"volume" "1"
}

{
"classname" "trigger_multivibrator"
"origin" "-112 484 -12"
"wait" "4.7"
"spawnflags" "1"
"target" "speaker"
}

{
"classname" "misc_follow"
"origin" "-96 400 -16"
"killtarget" "train"
"target" "speaker"
}


Simple, isn't it?