DM FNB SimpleX

DM-FNB-SimpleX

UT Deathmatch, Medium, 4 - 8 players. Gas processing Station on Mars - Released May 2006

Simply put, this is an Industrial Gas Refinery Rig located on Mars (heh, I made a pun :). There's a story in the readme that explains the locale and details. This is the original SimpleX design, the "Full" map, and it was never meant to be played on anything less than my old P4! Still, some people complained about bad performance, because it wouldn't run on their shitty old P3 or whatever. Fast forward to today, current hardware, and you have no issues at all. In fact, it runs great on my "old" core duo, lol!

DM-FNB-SimpleX is the map I'd wanted to make since I began mapping. In my past, I had a job that gave me opportunities to see locales like power generating stations, pulp and paper mills, and industrial steel plants - up close and personal. On the insides, these places impress!

You see huge, gigantic machinery, massive boilers, turbines, tanks, steel tubes, concrete forms, girders, rigging, all sorts of pipes, some very huge pipes! Some plants are very clean and spacious, and some are the opposite - neglected, rusty, dangerous. Perhaps this is why my tech maps usually feature some kind of huge reactor or other gizmo as a deco piece.

In the beginning, SimpleX was an new design developed for the CyberSerious "Low Poly Map Contest" held during mid 2005. The maps were to have no more than 107 polys per scene. After starting a simple map using some Unreal2 based textures, I bailed out of the contest because I wanted to do more with the map, like add in curves everywhere, huge equipment, rigging, massive pipes, and a much higher level of detail.

So raising my poly-budget from 107 to 400 polys per scene, I began adding on the good stuff! Later on, as the map progressed, I has to boost the budget to 500.

I got the idea of releasing SimpleX in CTC v3, but decided I didn't want to rush it and instead finished two CTF maps (Warpcore, Thadaus) for that mappack. When FoT started up again, this time for DM, Swanky suggested I finish it for Frags-Of-Time. In the end I submitted a slightly simplified version, DM-FoT-SimpleX, which had the high detail perimeter deco and some of the large overhead pipes removed to shave off polys.

This "Lite" version was the first SimpleX map to be released. The original "Full" version followed a month or so after the mappack release. There was also a 3-CP DOM-FNB-SimpleX (a version of the "Lite" map) which I banged out at the same time.

SimpleX was a very popular map for me, and was well received by UT reviewers. I was very flattered when some highly respected UT mappers acknowledged the map. At last, I'd made a worthy map. The "Full" map was the featured map at NaliCity for a few months in fall 2006. That was a very satisfying experience, considering the huge effort I put into making the map. Altogether, the map(s) took about 100-120 hours to make, with much of that time spent on artwork.

Many thanks to the UP folks who gave me so much feedback and BETA-tested during Feb 2006; Special thanks to Derdak2rot for the music track, and big thanks to Milb and Swanky for inviting me to include SimpleX in the FoT mappack collection! For additional credits and information, please read the Readme file.

Music is Kalydon-EX (Remixed by Derdak2Rot) from the game Unreal II.