Valley of Death

"Valley of Death" is a custom level I made for Gearbox Software's acclaimed RPG/shooter Borderlands using the version of the Unreal 3 editor that shipped with the game.

It took me roughly 6 months to make in my spare time between October 2010 and April 2011.

The plan was to make a large map with loads of missions given by all the major NPCs from the game & using all the enemy types from the main game & all of the DLCs.

I was succesful in achieving this as the map can take 3+ hours to complete and upon completion has teleporters to take the player to one of 3 key locations in the map

that trigger a unique kismet setup that adds more areas & alters already visited areas with new props & enemy types and a few new missions.

So it's actually possible to use up a whole Sunday afternoon on this one map if a player feels so inclined.

The one drawback of such a large map with so many props and such complex kismet scripting is the memory requirement. An average Gearbox made Borderlands map will run Borderlands.exe using roughly 1.6-1.8 GB of ram, while this map runs Borderlands.exe just shy of 3GB...making it hard to run on anything less than a computer running 64bit Windows with a minimum of 4GB of ram. This is partly down to the editor's inability to 'cook' the custom umap & upk files to optimize them and partly due to me building the map on a computer with 8GB of ram running Windows Vista x64, Good for workflow & speed but bad for gauging how well it'll run on an average home computer.

As a result of my dilema with the system requirements for this map I made 3 versions. The 'Full Fat' version that has all the dynamic lights, shadows, meshes etc, the 'Regular' version that has a less demanding dynamic sky and a few less 'bells and whistles', and a 'Light' version that has no dynamic lights, no dynamic shadows, and was built with a static precomputed light-map to save on cpu cycles and vga strain. The actual difference in ram requirements for all 3 versions sadly is negligable but the frames-per-second increase when using the 'Light' version with 'Dynamic Shadows' turned off in the game's options is noticable.

Update 6th September 2011

Just released v2 with updated graphics & optimizations and secret teleporter room in the start town for skipping chunks of the map.

The 2 videos are a comparison between the beta from 6 months ago and version 1.5 from a month ago

The music is by Team Headkick

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Comparison pictures

I've made a small slideshow to show how much better the 'light' version looks than the regular one with dynamic shadows set to 'off'

Included a picture of the 'Full' version with DS 'on'

If the embedded version won't play there's a web-player version here