CTF 300K Ides Of March

CTF 300K Ides Of March

UT CTF - Medium, 6-12 players. Facing Medieval Forts. Released December 2008.

Map #7 for Blito3's Annual 300k Contest, Nov-Dec 2008. Actually, this map had a somewhat Shakespearian feel to me, hence the title :) A dusky medieval CTF arena, this layout is an extreme reduction of a big valley type layout I was playing with at the time of the 2004 Thunderstrike 400-Poly contest. I ended up abandoning the terrain map went with a small DM that evolved into DM-FNB-DeadlyWorship.

So, I figured I'd give this valley CTF a shot for 300k, just to see if it could even come close :) It was over 1000K (with lights and all) so I scaled it down to half-size, then went a few rounds of simplifying it by rebrushing using a larger grid (i.e. less triangles, but bigger ones)

Well it almost worked - got it down as far as 450K but that was just the skybox, terrain, flags, nodes and some lights - no ramps, buildings or deco.

So I chucked the terrain idea and made the thing an arena, with a little bit of rock along the sides. This worked out, and it feels more or less the same mood as the original map, just a helluva lot smaller and a helluva lot more fighting ;) Sorry about the skybox - it went a bit funny but I'm not arsed to fix it - this map is as good as it'll be. Altogether took about 12 hours, including the time on the original terrain map.

Thanks to Blito3 for having the contest and to Tom_caT for testing the map. Music is BotMca9 from the game Unreal Tournament.