CTF FNB Space Pods

CTF FNB Space Pods

UT CTF - Large, 8-16 players. Space-based orbital missile station. Released April 2004

Space-based orbital missile station CTF. Started off as my answer to the very fun CTF-433, a popular but rather silly looking spaceship map played regularly on Unreal Playground servers. Of course, Spacepods looks awesome compared the much older 433, but does have complicated routes, and thus may be a bit of a challenge for players who want continuous action. Fair to say, not a map for everyone.

This map sat for a year before I decided to finish it. Two maps inspired me enough to get this Spacepods done: CTF-1HS-Orbital2 (Howard Stern) and CTF-SiberiaN23 (kaMi) both quite different looking but both excellent maps. The thing they had in common was they both used UT2003 textures. So this was the first time I used UT2003 textures in one of my maps.

It was also the first time that I used assets from other Unreal-engine (but non-Epic) games. Not something I thought a lot about at the time, since I had downloaded many UT maps already that blatantly used the assets of other games.

Yeah, I got publicly slapped by reviewers for doing it, probably because I was up front about including foreign textures whereas all the other mappers just quietly ganked them :(

I think it was a bit unfair but alas one good thing came from that experience - I started down the road to making my own textures, artwork, and composites from photos, base stock, and any textures used from other games were either graphically altered or composited into other creations. So there!

The music track is NYCStreets_Music from the game DeusEx.

DM Space Pods

UT Deathmatch - Medium, 4-8 players. Low Gravity Space Station. March 2001.

This one was another attempt at unique game play, only this time using low gravity and directional velocity zones. The map was actually pretty large (those pod thingies were actually quite spacious). So this was intended to be a space-station of sorts made up of connected cylindrical pods (hence space-pods).

Each pod ended up with a zone-portal "core" (a cylinder actually) with directional velocity to propel players from one end to the other - usually from a doorway towards the big window where an embedded teleporter zone would transport a flying player to the next pod.

I messed around with this stuff for a good month, and at one point had it so you could follow a continuous path through all of the pods.

Trouble with this idea was it was not really as fun as I thought it would be - when you got bounced out of the "core", you'd have to then jump back into the core somehow and carry on :/ I could do it but there was no way the bots could get back in - so bots were stuck a lot and not much action happening.

Although I learned a lot about zones, teleporters and ut kickers, I think I was getting ahead of myself a bit on this one. I did make use of the windowed "pod" prefab in DM-OrbitalNukes and later on in CTF-FNB-SpacePods.