CTF AMC Big And Ugly

VCTF Big And Ugly ( 2004 )

One of the game types I really enjoyed from UT-2004 was Vehicle CTF. After playing 2004 for a couple of months I decided to experiment with VCTF and so chose to convert/import the Big And Ugly map (since it was so BIG in UT99 :P ). One I got the basic map together (still mostly CSG brushes for the most part) I pathed it for VCTF (according to tutorials) and began testing away. Well I'll say this: It was rather interesting but i began to realize "Big And Ugly" was not really so BIG in UT-2004 :P in fact, the overall map was a bit cramped, even though it had been scaled up during the import (I might have used MapScale or some such tool at the time).

The larger vehicles were getting stuck all over the place (or couldn't maneuver to well) and the smaller routes were just back and forth. The flying ones were a bit more interesting, but none of it amounted to any real fun. Long story short I think Epic intended VCTF more for terrain based-maps - wide open spaces - which I noticed were the usual type of VCTF maps people were making. Anyways, experiment over - this one was dropped pronto.

CTF Big And Ugly ( 2001 )

By the summer of 2001 I was playing CTF online fairly regularly and was impressed by the size of some CTF maps. I found the gameplay in those maps usually pretty boring as did most of the others players. Flags runs were a pain So for my first attempt at a CTF map, naturally, this one was a very large layout. In fact, this was ridiculously huge! Big, weird looking, and with loud red and blue lighting, there were 4 elevations for most of the map. The fleeing flag carrier usually looked like a speck! Amazingly, the map actually ran pretty well, likely due to the huge simple geometry.

Since the flags were miles apart (on foot that is), I added some features to try to speed up the travel: long zoom-tubes in the spine; some long-range kickers; some minus-grav lifting pads, Visible teleporters every so often, and also had some very fast moving lift platforms. When you consider a map this size, you'd be surprised how quickly you could go from one end to the other. This map almost worked, but sadly, it had a fatal flaw - the dreaded "1000 path nodes reached" log error which plagued the map when it was nearing completion.

That was a path-network related error that caused bots to become unable to find the flag bases. If a bot actually did grab the enemy flag he would just run around in circles with it as if having a deathmatch, instead of heading for his own flag. Back in 2001, I had no idea how to fix the problem, although I'm sure I could fix it now. Would I bother? Naw. well, maybe someday :)

Note from the future: Hell yeah I fixed it.. It only another took 16 years LOL! The 2018 AMC Contest map was the result...