CTF CTC Thadaus

CTF CTC Thadaus

UT CTF - Large, 10-20 players. Ancient Medieval Fortress. Released (CTC Vol.3) November 2005.

Originally, the environment was a hazy daylight, high clouds, bright western sun, with lengthy shadows of a late afternoon. There were trees and palms around, and rock among the aging gothic structures, advancing into decay at the hands of time. Winter spoke to me of a different environment: isolated, desolate, cold, lonely, dead, decayed, remembrance.

The map Thadaus Lament rather became that. Without a doubt, this is the one piece of work that puts me in awe a bit - meaning exactly, that I can't believe I made a map like this. It seems better than me. Okay, maybe I'm blabbering on a bit much about this, so I'll stop.

Now, with the bleak preamble out of the way - this map is big, but straight-forward once you know it. It is good for xLoc, so mobility not hampered at all - lot's of room to manouver in your flag-run. There's a few deep pits around so you do want to watch your step at times. A great deal of attention was paid to optimization in the face of extremely dangerous brushwork. What can I say - no pain, no gain.

I also spent some time leading up to Thadaus, refining and reworking WoT textures collected from the many disjointed WoT utx files (ANC, ANC2, ANC4, ForSakenT, WOTx1, WOT1, others). The resulting package WOTabulous.utx was used here along with some Unreal NaliCastle and Crypt textures. UE1 renders Thadaus very well, except perhaps for the SilverIbex deusEx Eagle meshes when those are viewed at a distance. That aspect aside, I was very satisfied with the way Thadaus turned out in the end.

Many thanks to the UP folks who BETA tested the map; Special thanks to King Mango for (once-again) providing excellent Terragen Skybox images; and to Hourances for the nice natural textures from hourpitores_ut; and to bot_40 for the Smart ALT path actor; and lastly to the creators of Wheel-Of-Time, whom should not be forgotten.

Finally, big thanks to Flying_Killer for organizing the CTC map packs, of which this map was originally released in Vol.3. I'll say it again, music is Winter by Rickard Sviestins.

I like to write poetry from time to time. Some of it is good, some is not-too-good. Thadaus Lament is a nice bit of poetry I wrote for this map, and is included here. The poem was written while i was listening to Winter, a trance track that inspired this map:

"Thädaus Lament"

As night decends upon this place, The dampness chills my bones,

Eternal stone both cold and dark, The North wind calls this home.

In long ago forgotten times, This land the sword did rule,

These tortured walls still tell of it, The barbarous and cruel.

Infidels, who took this land, In gods name, shed our blood,

Our fathers fought them, gave their lives, upon this frozen mud.

Many came, and many went, And many paid the cost,

Of freedom, for the vanquished souls, Our spirit, never lost.

The cold North wind she weeps and moans, Remembering the past,

No Sentinal will come again, In death, I am the last.

Thädaus

CTF FNB Base Ancient 101

At this time, I was trying to make some sense of all the Wheel-Of-Time (aka WOT) texture packs, so I merged them all together into one UTX file collection, which I'd called WOTabulous.utx and made a demo map out of the middle section of this Ancient CTF (see DM-WOTabulousDemo).

I think I was quite sick of mapping during summer 2005 and so was not to keen on finishing this project. I then attempted to pawn the project off on another UT99 mapper (HomeSlice) whom I thought might like to give it a go. This is why I called this a "BaseMap". Anyways as i turned out (HomeSlice) wasn't interested in finishing it off so I just hung onto it until eventually it was used as the basis for CTF-CTC-Thadaus.

DM WOTabulaous Demo

UT Deathmatch, Medium, 6 - 16 players. Multilevel Gothic Medieval Arena. Created July 2005.

Demonstrator map for WOTabulous.UTX : A collection of commonly used Wheel of Time textures. The textures have been GAMMA corrected to appear more detailed and illuminate better under UT ambient lighting. During 2005, I was trying to make some sense out of all the various Wheel-Of-Time (aka WOT) texture packages that were circulated throughout UT99 mapping. After rounding them all up and sorting them out, I merged them all together into one collection.

Since many of the textures were ridiculously dark I upped the gamma and made small color palette adjustments on several to harmonize them. These updated textures looked much better than the originals, IMO, so I made a quick demo map out of the middle section of the 2005 Ancient CTF and released it at UP for month or so to show off the WOTabulous.utx collection in a real map.

Unfortunately, there was little interest in a single WOT texture pack so I removed the Demo. I did use the new WOT textures package to re-texture the entire 2005 Ancient CTF map. This map became the basis for CTF-CTC-Thadaus but all textures from the UTX imported into MyLevel.

CTF FNB Shock Pits (2004)

This was the original mockup project that was first developed into the CTF FNB Base Ancient 101 map, which was further developed into CTF-CTC-Thadaus later in 2005.

The original idea for this came from a May 2004 CTF experiment called CTF-FNB-ShockPits where I used the 2002 instagib map DM-Shockpit for the flag bases (that would be two Shockpits :) and adding a fairly large middle area consisting of these big templey architectural structures and some other things here and there.

The result was basically this sprawling Ancient layout . The CTF base design further evolved into a much larger collection of radially arranged brushes and the planned ancient theme also changed to incorporate mostly WOT texture sets.

This led to development of the WOTabulous UTX texture collection.

During mid 2005 I developed a map called DM Wotabulous Demo to show off the modified WOT texture UTX, and subsequently used it in the CTF FNB Base Ancient 101 project, where I imported the textures into MyLevel.