CTF FNB ID4

CTF FNB ID4

UT CTF - Large, 10-24 players. Urban "Independence Day" city map. January 2002.

New year, urban inspiration! At the beginning of 2002 I began building a giant CTF map based on the flick Independence Day. It was intended to be a blasted city beneath the massive alien mother ship. For some strange reason, a CTF match is taking place :P Okay, maybe a bit of a silly premise for an unreal CTF map but what the hell, eh?

To start off with, I wanted to see what it would take to make a wrecked up looking city. I mean, Enemy-At-The-Gate style of wrecking but on a much larger scale, and obviously in a more modern city setting - so I tested wrecking up my City Intro hack and it quickly became a HOM-CITY ( ha ha I made a pun :P ) and it didn't really look all that convincing.

So instead, I changed my plan to a dark city (power outages and a few fires) with the mother ship looming in the sky over too one side a bit, so the beam blasts down but some distance away.

This format came together in little spurts over the next two years, until the map, end-to-end, was almost the width of the UED2 grid. Absolutely huge map.

So I then got a script from Professor @UP which allowed Flag caps to fire the beam, which also causes explosions and quakes. Adding in speedy movers to shorten the players trip the plan is for enough planes, trains, cars, and boats to be available for getting around.

This is a sticky point, since the various types of UT movers are not well suited for winding key-frame paths (like cars turning on roads looks quite silly, etc.). I have basically cars and boats done so far, but the movers are not working the way I want them to (they still move backwards when resetting)

I worked on this map on and off until 2005, when I more or less completely stopped. The hope is that eventually it will be completed in one way or another, just not really a big priority right now. Giant CTF maps are NOT VERY POPULAR anymore, if they ever were.

During 2010, I did kick the carcass a bit and modified it to use XPickups. That made gameplay a bit more interesting but not really an improvement. TOO DAMN BIG!

This might even be too big and spreadout to work well with Strange-Love? Not sure if anyone is even playing StrangeLove any more. DM is another story. Might do that if I get arsed to convert this behemoth into a Giant deathmatch map

CTF FNB UT City

UT CTF - Large, 10-24 players. UT City Intro hack for CTF. Nov-Dec 2001.

The last map I worked on in 2001 was my own hack of City Intro for CTF. Basically, I took the UT product map, duped and flipped it for bases, and added a lake to the form the middle. The city bases were altered quite a bit to form multiple routes.

The flag was on top of the highest parking garage (near the back corner where the curved monorail track goes into a wall tunnel). Ramps and tunnels were added to access flag area. Mover boats were supposed to be added to get across the lake, but these were never finished.

IMO, the main problem with this map (the UT City Intro product map in general) was that I don't think it was ever intended to be used as a game play map. What I mean is, it is a huge amount of BSP arranged in such a way as to serve the CAMERA flight path POV, obviously Shane Caudle drew the card to slap it together quickly for the game's "intro" sequence, and when you study the map in the editor you really see that.

Now that said, there are a lot of things (like certain building pieces) which could be easily pre-fabbed (take a look at Ghandi maps and you'll see what I mean, lol!).

Well, all that's okay, I suppose, and I think Shane (if he happened to look at what community mappers were doing with his creation) must have had a good chuckle.

For someone starting in the editor, it's natural to open up that one due to the sheer curiosity of it). For me, I found the Camera-path stuff really interesting, but not so much that I ever used the techniques in any of my own maps (it was obviously a device for single player games).

Anyhow, hacking City intro is kind of implicitly encouraged as a learning step simply because a mapper will face a host of problems trying to get it all to work (assuming of course, the mapper is attempting to alter the BSP, lighting, and add a path network, etc, and not just throwing in player starts and 200 redeemers and changing the game type property). It will almost always fail on so many counts because it is not designed for game play to begin with and was never intended to be (it is really a collection of props - like a stage production).

After that experience, a mapper will usually endeavor to make his/her own city map - cleanly built and free(er) of bugs. And this, of course, is what happened to moi. So all of my hacking around with the City Intro map led down the path to my huge Independance Day (ID4) project.