DM FNB Space Port

DM FNB Space Port

UT Deathmatch / Team DM - Large, 10 - 24 players. Liandri Orbital Resort Complex. Released September 2012.

This is a Deathmatch conversion of the Multi-elevation Spaceport map for up to 24 players. Works well with 4-team matches using teams of 4 to 6 players per team. For best results, use Masterful or Adept bots (unless you have humans handy, lol :) This map has a lot of pickup - it uses UTR XPickups from UT99.org which by now is a well-known addition.

There are a lot of double- speeds, jump boots and several wildcard pickup bases around. It might seem like there's a lot of guns and pickup around at first but it disappears quickly when there's 20+ players.

I could have used less I suppose but looking at the map it's a pointless debate. With masterful or adept bots the match can get difficult depending on your approach - it is not as easy to DMinate the map (as a human among bots) because there are 5 controls points.

The CTF4 version was easier to win than this DM version. This is probably a better map for DMination anyways. I still would not recommend this map for the serious hard-core player (it's more of an FFA floater). Can get laggy as well, if you do a lot of high jumping over the top of the map - oh well - is what it is :)

Note there are also CTF4 and DOM versions available.

Build Info/History:

Original base map DM-Spaceport was built in mid-late 2001. A regular CTF version was also built at the time and then in 2003 a DOM version was tried. Spaceport was alpha/beta tested a few times in those early years - the last beta was at Unreal playground in May 2005 for the DOM version. After 2005 the map sat dormant for years - due mainly to various annoying bsp, lighting and path network bugs. I guess at the time I decided it would be a wasted effort and so carried on with other projects.

At some point I decided to play around with CTF4, and Spaceport was one of the maps i fiddled around with. So I fixed most of the known bugs and then made a few minor modifications to the bsp and voila - a big stupid retro-looking CTF4 map, lol :) So with that done, i just focused on getting the thing stable, getting the BOTs to work in some efficient manner and to that end I think I succeeded.

There's still lots of bugs but no real show-stoppers are left. The odd weird crash happens from time to time, usually when there's huge numbers of bots running around. BOTs do get stuck in variously places since the map is not pathed everywhere (as it is, it is at the limit of UE1 path network size - so if you see stranded BOTs, just kill them). I was not interested in changing the visuals of this map, or the lighting for that matter, mainly because it remains an old concept/idea and i figure anyone who would try this thing out is not going to care too much about it's appearance.

Another compelling reason to leave the bsp and lighting alone is UED crashes. It got to the point where adding just one more brush or one more light would crash UED2. The editor log is pretty scary reading as well (i have seen far worse in many other maps but this one's pretty nasty, considering it's less than 1000 brushes, lol :)

I re-textured some of it mainly to cut down on number of textures used, and somewhat unify the mess (it is now mostly SGTech1) but I did add a few custom textures and also borrowed some of AngelHeart's darkcity skyline textures (mainly because they are colored) the map has always been a garish mess of saturated hues - at least now it's more obvious as to where the flag bases are located.

I also added the two extra flag base corners (one for green, one for gold) and a new quick and dirty rotating skybox. The earth planet texture is a composite reduction of four corner images from one of the DS9 planet texture sets. I mucked a bit with it as well but to no avail - it is still pretty blurry, but at least it's not that old stock ctf-face skybox anymore.

So now FNB Spaceport is done, for whatever it's worth - and I know I won't edit this freak ever again (I've got many other maps to finish).

DM Urban Space Port

Orbital space port resort : October - November 2001

It was October 2001, and i was getting frustrated - I'd been mapping in UT for nine months and not released one map yet! I figured I'd give my "Space Port" one more chance. I got the idea to make the port into a small city - some sort of Liandri orbital resort - "Vegas in Space".

Spent some time trying to make this thing look the part, meh, more or less. Fixed the bot issues by not pathing everywhere, but they'd still get stranded.

Although the added big stuff gave this version better FR and a more futuristic appearance, I got the idea it would be better as a CTF or a DOM and with that the DM version essentially died. So the CTF version followed a month later. This map re-surfaced briefly some time during 2003 (iirc) when I got an email request specifically for the DM map from a nice chap.

Since this was NOT an official FNB map release, I uploaded the map to Unreal Playground as a BETA but then pulled it after a few days. Note that the uploaded map was renamed to have the FNB identifier in the file name, since by then I was known as FraGnBraG, but the map was not changed in any way from the 2001 version.

DM Space Port

Orbital space port cargo station : June - July 2001

This was a huge LG map, built out of the bottom half of "oddity". A large boom was added beneath where platforms protruded to catch falling players and teleport them back into the match going on above. Essentially "floater" game play, the lowest cargo level was normal G.

The comm dish prefab was used, and some directional gravity zones allowed a deemer to be grabbed from out in space by "flying" players.

This map was tried out with people on a LAN and was rather fun but unfortunately the bots really sucked in this map. They did not change levels easily and were often stranded or got lost (obviously, the path network was too big - but I did not know this back then).

While the map had good frame rates when players were on the ground, it would lag badly when viewed from out in space by flying players, so I ended up killing this version. A slightly bigger and more detailed version of this map appeared about three months later.