DM FNB Once Upon A Time

Note that there was also a DOM conversion of this map (see DOM-FNB-OnceUponATime ) and a little while later a CTF project was started based on the DOM (see CTF-FNB-HolyGrail) but that one was a big FAIL.

In dusting this off, I worked for few hours on the original, mainly on the bots and placements, and fixed a few other minor things with the build. I also added the TechnoJF monster-no-kill script so killing the critters won't count in the scores.

The original lag was caused by over-use of the High Shadow Detail setting on textures and also having flicker on all the lava lights and torches, really killed the FR. Turns out the map's high poly/node counts were actually LESS of a contibuting factor to the original bad performance.

So just to help the old engine along, I shut off all costly lighting effects and killed HSD. Now it runs better without looking much different (at least on my current PC). Thanks to the folks at Unreal Playground who tested this map and provided feedback back in April 2003, and thanks to TechnoJF for the Monster no score script.

The music track is Lock from Unreal Tournament.

CTF FNB Holy Grail

This was a CTF experimental map I threw together in July 2004. Based on the original version of DOM-FNB-OnceUponATime, which was a slightly larger development of the original DM-FNB-OnceUponATime.

The map was quite a large layout consisting of a grid of 12 rooms. These were placed at different heights relative to one another and were connected using arched doorways, small tunnels and long narrow hallways/alleyways - it actually felt kinda like an urban city map, except it was medieval and had pretty straight roadways full of medieval junk between tall castle-like buildings.

Needless to say, this was very R-C-R, but didn't feel that way initially due the rooms being so large. That said, it was easy to get lost in there, since the hallways all ended up looking the same, even with CTF markings it would have become redundant. You'd typically be running down the alley, and have to run up or down stairs to peek in a room and see if that was the one you wanted, then run back down and carry on. If you just kept running through, i.e. evading pursuit, you'd end up criss-crossing the map, and after open fighting you could easily become disoriented and find yourself running back the way you came, lol! Now this sort of thing is fixed by using landmarks and a somewhat more open layout, but if this were more open it would have suffered horribly from bad framerate due to the amount of polys in view.

The map also used the "terrain poking through the floor" method for much of the ground detail, which looked quite satisfying in some of the rooms, but there was a lot of it in the end, and this led to a lot of HOMs and such once it was all in. On that note, the rooms could have been made using terrain-brushes, but that might have been a worse situation since I needed 12 of them and would have to of made a large number of subtracts for doorways and windows etc, and it's never a good idea to do more than a couple of subtracts in any one-piece terrain brush.

The thing that really killed this one was a lack of theme elements - This map was meant to be a celebration of sorts of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail movie - but after spending a good amount of time looking for suitable MP sounds and base images to use I came up rather short. It seemed (at the time) the IP for MPHG was pretty locked down. I gathered some stuff, mostly audio sound bytes, but for images nothing was matching what I had in mind so I became rather disappointed with the whole project.

What would normally happen at this point is I would clean up the map's projects folders and archive the mess (aka putting the map on the shelf) but being in a bad mood I just deleted all of it! Well, I did feel bad about that sometime later on but what's done is done. I don't even have an old copy of that map anywhere so now I only have that rather sh$$ty screenshot and some memories, oh well...