3 June 2007 · Peterstorm

With just a little bit of coercion from some of the dev members TwentySeven has started his own blog. If your at all interested in the future direction of Frozen Sand go have a look.

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2 June 2007 · Remaking old maps pt.3

In my last post I looked at the reasons why remakes are a good idea. In this post I'm going to go through the negative side of remakes.

First I want to make it clear that if someone doesn't want a map remake made that is the end of the argument. It doesn't matter what the reason is; good reason or not. They could choose that they don't want people making remakes because they believe evil space monkeys will use it as a training simulation for a great invasion. It's their work, it's their choice. No explanations needed.

So having said that: these are the negatives as I see them. None of these really got mentioned on the forum thread which is why I want to go through them now. I personally don't think these outweigh the good points, and some of these are just facts of life.

• Plagiarism

  If someone was to take my work and claim it as their own I would pretty pissed off. I think everyone feels the same way. If someone was to do that and try and make money from it that's even worse.

• Authorship Confusion

  I don't want people to confuse my original work, with other peoples remakes. I think most other mappers would feel the same. It's not as bad as plagiarism, but it can be quite annoying. People can either think I (the original author) did a crappy remake, or that the author of the remake is responsible for the original.

• Multiple remake Confusion

  If for some reason we allowed a map like casa to be remade by any old Joe just imagine the consequences. Every man and his dog would want to release their own special 'best ever' version. For regular players that would end up very confusing.

• Polishing by others.

  Lets take a hypothetical situation in which someone was to make a copy of ut_algiers, moves some boxes around so that it plays better, and posts the updated version on the forums. They then get a whole bunch of positive posts about how great the new version is and how well it plays. It's pretty disheartening to see someone get all the credit for spending 5 minutes changing something it took months to create.

  Ok so I haven't seen this happen in UrbanTerror yet, but I've seen it happen in a lot of other circumstances. With add-ons to firefox, with mods for Oblivion. Someone makes a small change and the users all applause the genius of the change, and bemoan the original developers for their bad implementation.

• Overshadowing previous maps

  Lets say I release a map update and a whole bunch of people say, this is crap, and they promptly release a remake of the previous version and play that. Or the same situation but with a new map, where people just go back to playing an old map. Most mappers are going to pretty unhappy in that circumstance; me included.

I'm sure there's more reasons than that to not allow remakes, but they're the main ones for me. Still for the most part I don't think they are all that bad. Maybe with a bigger community the problems would be far worse, but with the size of Urban Terror they don't seem to play out much.

In the end it's all about the people who play Urban Terror, and if they want to remake and play an old map, then I personally don't see any point in stopping them.

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22 May 2007 · Remaking old maps pt.2

So to continue on from the last post: if all of the other dev members oppose remakes, and even I was reluctant, why do I allow it?

Well, because it doesn't hurt me in any way. On the other hand it does help new mappers learn, and people enjoy playing old maps. Let me grab another of my posts from the same thread to explain it in more detail:

• New mappers often learn how to map by copying and redoing older maps. The first maps that I did were a copy of goldeneye's complex and q1dm4 for q3. I never released them, but that was always the intention. By copying and extending older maps I learned the aspects of map construction without having to worry about design issues. It's hard enough building brushes correctly without worrying about getting the layout and aesthetics right. Even the first map I released borrowed a lot of ideas from q1dm4 and q1dm6. So if new mappers feel like remaking one of my maps I'm only too happy to let them.


• Most experienced mappers want to create their own maps, not copy someone else's. I don't think any mapper is going choose to copy my maps when they could release a brilliant map of their own.


• I'm fairly confident my current maps are pretty good, and a mapper would have trouble improving them. And if they do, I can steal their ideas and they can't do a thing about it. Murhahaha. :)


• I've hardly ever seen a remake actually get played much in the wild. Maybe auto downloading will change that, but I doubt it. The only case I can recall is with abbey2 in 3.0. When it first came out it sucked for TS play and clans often played a copy of the original. For a later release I fixed Abbey and the copy ceased to be played. So in that specific case the copy/remake helped to make me realize that the map had issues and made future versions better. :) So if I stuff something up. The community has a recourse


• Outside of these forums it isn't really possible to stop someone making a remake. So better the devil you know I reckon :)

Of course the most important point is missing from that list: people get to play and enjoy a map that is no longer supported by the original author!

So if there are so many reasons why remakes are good why do so many people generally oppose the idea?

That's what I'm going to look at in the next post. The arguments against remakes.

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21 May 2007 · Remaking old maps pt.1

Rebuilding old official maps. Should it be allowed or not. That's the topic of quite an interesting discussion that's been going on in the Level Design forums recently. You may have also heard it on Oswalds radio show.

Now I've been quite flexible on this in the past. For instance after 3.0 came CAL (an on-line competition) asked quite nicely if they could use the original abbey map for match play. They were unhappy with how abbey2 played in TS at that point. I was a little bit unsure at the time; but I let them go ahead with it. I also gave the go ahead for the_hat to do a village update called reville. I even tried to get it included in the 3.5 release but that didn't pan out.

In all that time (4 years) I've never had any issues with people making remakes*. So when runy asked to do the village2 remake I didn't really have any problems with it and posted the following:

I'm fairly flexible on this issue actually. If people want to remake my levels I consider that to be a flattery. I do have three requests if you want to remake one of my levels:

1. It must be free, and it must be for urban terror.
2. Use a different map name. Reville is a good example.
3. Acknowledge me in the readme file, but other than that make sure it's obvious that it was NOT me who made the map.

But note, I'm the exception to the rule. Most other dev team members are strongly opposed to this. You shouldn't do a remake without permission.

Let me just explain those three points.

• The first is rather obvious. All my maps are free urban terror maps, any based on them should be as well.
• The reason for the different names is so that people don't get confused and so there are no naming conflicts. I don't want people to be confused over what maps are official or, which maps I've made. Nor do I want to try and release a village3 after someone else has already used the name.
• The third point. I want some credit for making the original, but I don't want people confusing my work with others. Most people think I'm a bad enough mapper without needing any extra assistance thank you :)

I'd like to cover the rest of the forum topic, but this is enough for one post.

* Well someone did make a de_abbey copy for couterstrike in which they didn't even bother to acknowledge me. I don't think being less flexible would have changed anything in that case though.

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7 April 2007 · 4.0 & Turnpike

As you all know by now the fourth major incarnation of urban terror has been released. The release went smoothly and turned out bug free for the most part. When I say for the most part, yes, there were some issues with performance on some of the maps. One of them being turnpike. I'll get to that in a moment. First of I want to finish off my turnpike diary.

Lighting and the rest

After finishing off the garden area there wasn't a whole lot of time left. I would have liked to have done more with the outside buildings, but it wasn't to be.

The version that I had been given was missing all outdoor lights around the map. So with the time I had I placed all the lights around the outside of the map, and made sure the lighting was ok. Because of the lighting changes in 4.0 I needed to brighten up a lot of the outside textures, or it wouldn't be bright enough. After that it was just a matter of fixing small bugs.

I gave the map to Maureen a few days before release and she fixed up some other minor issues. And that's the map you get to play today.

Performance Issues

Turnpike has an issue with low frames per second. Not for everyone, but quite a few have experienced it. You can read more about it on this forum thread, but basically the the map isn't optimised as well as it should be. You could blame it on the fact that the map is a decompile, or that four mappers have worked on it over the last year, or that qa never reported it as an issue, but ultimately I should have have checked it more thoroughly before handing it off. At any rate turnpike will be fixed for the next patch.

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18 March 2007 · Turnpike: Metro and Garden

The Metro Station

Unlike the office interiors the metro station had no lighting at all in the version I received. That was both bad and good. Bad because I would have to do all the lighting from scratch but good in that it basically gave me free reign to put it together how I would like.

The metro station in turnpike isn't that interesting architecturally. It's basically a big box with a wall in the middle. I was fairly constrained in altering that so I went with a simple solution and added supporting struts along the wall. That worked well in a couple of ways though.

1. It was fairly believable. There is a railway above the building, and the walls are quite thin, so extra support makes sense.
2. It worked well when I added uplighting along the wall. The lighting accentuated the supports.

From there I made a second copy of the tile texture that was already used. I lightened it a bit, and used that for the floors and top half of the walls.

The only other changes I made were to add models and move the ticket both to one end of the station.

The Garden

I wasn't exactly sure what to do with the garden. To be honest I probably could have left it exactly as it was. Maybe I should have, but it was on my list and wanted to see what I could do with it. One thing I didn't want to do was replace it with an abbey style garden. That style may have worked ok, but this was Wu's map, not mine, so I wanted to try and do something that would match the style of turnpike.

I tried a number of different things. I extended the existing garden further but that felt entirely wrong. The fact that people would have to walk through or around the garden to get the the station seemed strange enough in the original. Making it worse was, well; worse.

In the end I went with a garden that would give patrons good access to the station, and also fit in with the office feel of the building next to it. Gameplay wise it should offer some interesting combat without getting in the way too much. It's not the greatest looking thing in the world. I think it fits the map well though.

Next: Lighting the rest.

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12 March 2007 · Turnpike: End Week 1

I've been too busy to update for a little while. Hazard of the job really. I'm either too busy mapping to write, or I'm not mapping and have nothing to write about!

After fixing up the indoors I needed to give QA a version to test with. That entailed finding all resources the map was using and packing it all up into one pk3. Now that may sound like a fairly simple task, and it probably should be, but that's not how it ended up. Not this time at least.

Problems. The first problem I ran into was the texture organisation. I wanted all the textures to come from one directory, ut_turnpike, but the version of the map I had was pulling them from all over the place. Now I could have written a script for all of this, but silly me thought, “How many can there be. I'll just find and replace them all manually.” Not the brightest ideas. It must of taken me the best part of an hour and a half. On the upside though I did manage to remove some textures that weren't really used a great deal.

The other big problem was that some of the id's baseq3 textures were still being used. Apparently they had been replaced somewhere along the line, but for the version I got the replacements were nowhere to be seen. So I went through and replaced them all. Some were fairly easy to replace. On the other hand, the lights and shiny metal surfaces were a real bitch to replace and I spent a good chuck of time photo-shopping.

After that was the fairly simple but tedious task of finding all the model, model texture and sound resources, and packing them all together. Then it was sent off to QA to cast their eyes over.

Overall it took me almost as much time to put the pk3 together as it did to redo the entire indoor area.

Next time: The metro station and garden.

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4 March 2007 · Turnpike Day 2-5

Sunday morning's where it all started. Rabid Cow (Jeff) and Lt1 (Rob) both came up with the goods and I had a hot new skybox and a whole bunch of indoor models.

I quickly put the skybox into place and fixed a few shader issues with my setup. That gave me a version of turnpike I could run around in and start the real work. To overhaul the office interiors.

The floor in the indoors area had always bothered me a bit. Maybe it's just me, but green marble tiles and solid slabs of white marble never quite struck me as a realistic office setting. So the first thing I did was to rip those out and replace it with wood and carpet flooring. They were for the most part a one for one swap. The only chages I made were to:

• Cut up some larger chunks of carpeting so that the carpet colour wouldn't overwhelm the area.
• Add small borders to all the carpets. It looked ugly when the carpets bled into the wood.

The next thing was to improve the lighting. That was achieved with wall mounted uplighting fixtures which I had asked Rob for. After a few recompiles and tests all was good. The extra lighting cleared up some dark spots on the stairs, and generally improved the look of the whole place.

Most of the doorways didn't have frames so I went through and added those. I also added little bit of wood trim in other places that looked like they could use them.

I then went through and replaced Wu's brushed based desks, chairs and waste baskets with the models that Rob had given me. I also grabbed some photocopier models from Robs web site and dropped those in. All the models were then player clipped.

And that was basically it for the indoors area. It was time to pack it up and sent it to QA for testing.

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1 March 2007 · Turnpike Day 1

I started working on turnpike last Saturday. First off I wanted to look around the map and see what needed to be done. That mostly consisted of flying around the map in the level editor and taking note of any issues. From there I came up with the following 12 step development plan.

1. Acquire a new skybox
2. Fix-up any bad textures/shader references and get the map to compile.
3. Improve the indoor area
   • Add more lighting.
   • Add new models to the indoors.
   • Update the indoor textures
4. Build a release that would work in ut standalone, which I could give to QA to test.
5. Respond to any issues QA found in the indoor area.
6. Get the general outdoor lighting to a good level
7. Do any fix-ups in the metro station and nearby garden
8. Do any fix-ups in the underpass area. Extra lighting.
9. Release an intermediary release. Respond to issues.
10. Do any fix-ups on the Blue side
11. Do any fix-ups on the Red side
12. Release a release candidate and whack bugs until done.

After that I contacted RabidCow and Lt1 to see if they could furnish me a sky and some indoor models respectively. RabidCow had already been working on a skybox for Hybridesque so he managed to get me one the next day. Lt1 also pulled a rabbit out of his hat and gave me an entire set of indoor models by Sunday. It was time to get into the thick of things.

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27 February 2007 · A bit of Turnpike history

Turnpike was originally created by Wu for the 2.6 release, and since then has remained largely unchanged. For 4.0 the lighting has changed so a new version was needed. Unfortunately the original .map file is no longer available.

Hybridesque initially took over turnpike development and worked at it using a variety of techniques. He spent some time in sketchup and 3dsmax converting much of the level to mesh. At that stage the tools for model conversion weren't up to the stage they are now, and he essentially hit a brick wall with that path.

After that he decompiled the bsp in to a map file then proceeded to clean-up the map and change some of the textures. As part of the texture change he replaced all the paintings with MidgetKiller and BladeKillers help. He unfortunately got caught up with personal commitments and had to give up development on the map.

A while after that ShimkyBoy took over development. He did some more tidying up of brushes and added some models. He got caught out with lots to do on his own maps, and little time to spend on turnpike.

And that's the stage that I got it. Most of the issues with the brushwork have been cleaned up, the textures are in a pretty good state, and there are several models to work with.

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