Blood Run [Release Candidate 1]

[themuffinman]

Blood Run [Release Candidate 1]

ztn's classic, Blood Run, is now available in Quake II in two sexy variants:
 - Vanilla (same old item layout you know)
 - Tourney (no powerups) [uses override included]
* Location files for team play.
* Gladiator Bot support.

Installation:
Extract to your Quake2/baseq2 folder

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?3iduc51ye8m31tw

Play It Online:
IRTDM2 (Thanks to Whirlingdervish for uploading it - mapname: bloodrunt)
74.86.171.204:27911

[naymlis]

screenshot looks good enough to make ztn angry

[Arm0r]

SICK, this map is awesome.   

[Er!c@]

oh its sooo pleasant to look at! gonna try this out soon as i can

[VaeVictis]

looks like a much better attempt than the other two q2 versions

it doesnt look all that great (lighting/texture) wise with a higher modulate though and coloredlightmaps 0 lol but no map is intended to

your doorways are a great size, but some things feel a tad off here and there, like most of the spaces that feel really tight in the q3 or ql version feel too large, the RL room feels a bit large, the back end of that room at the top of the jump pad is a bit large making rocket punishment after the jump pad tiny bit less effective, the tele under RA seems to have too much room... its a bunch of small things like that, but idk never played a good bloodrun in q2 and only really have the quakelive and quake3 versions to go off, might just be me i used to think blood run could be pretty fast paced in quakelive, but it also could be a very tight slow game, and with large open areas maps tend to feel really aim based :/ the GL spam on mh would be significantly less effective on your version of the map as i found you could stand just on the corner of the hallway there and not get hit by nades exploding on mh

will really have to take some good play to figure out if everything works good in q2 as it stands, i think you did a pretty good job

[themuffinman]

screenshot looks good enough to make ztn angry

Is that a good thing or a not-so-good thing?

it doesnt look all that great (lighting/texture) wise with a higher modulate though and coloredlightmaps 0 lol but no map is intended to

Every map looks crap with high modulate and no colored lights. It just happens that official Q2 maps look a little better without their overdone orange tinge. The screenshot I did there was done in KMQuake2 (which I recommend), with all settings cranked up and light bloom with a reduced intensity. But yes, the lighting in this map does need some adjustments in places and lighting glitches fixed.

the RL room feels a bit large

Well it is 64 units shorter from the wall by the top doorway to the wall behind the RL than it is in the Q3 version. I think it's just the vertical difference that makes it seem bigger horizontally. Pushing up the RL bridge closer to the lower doorway would likely block the mega from view while at RL, which is a no-no. Also, I only have about 48 units to spare if I were to move it up a bit.

the back end of that room at the top of the jump pad is a bit large making rocket punishment after the jump pad tiny bit less effective

Ok I'll probably lower the ceiling then.

the tele under RA seems to have too much room

Yeah the original Q2 tele-pad is a bit small. I think replacing it with a Q1-style tele will solve that issue.

the GL spam on mh would be significantly less effective on your version of the map as i found you could stand just on the corner of the hallway there and not get hit by nades exploding on mh

I think that just highlights the less bouncy Q2 grenade. Q2 grenades are more 'sticky' than the bouncy Q1/Q3 grenades and thus less efficient at spamming areas.

What do you think of the 8 unit stairs? Should they be doubled to 16 units as is the norm in Q2 maps since Q2's stair-climbing physics is kind of bad? Or should I clip ramps to the stairs to make you ramp jump instead of getting stuck on stairs?

Do you know whether there are any servers which could be used for beta testing the map (and server host willing to host it obviously)? It really could benefit from people actually playing it and giving feedback from their experience.

[Whirlingdervish]

I'm going to put it up on irtdm2 for testing when I get some time this morning.

Looks like fun!

 

edit: ran into a couple of things right off the bat running the -t version. (It's voteable as bloodrunt on server)

* It crashed the server (r1q2ded) when I tried to run a gladiator bot for the first time. I'm going to try to do the calcs locally for the first run of the .aas and then upload to see if that fixes it.

* ran into these item errors on startup

[2011-08-22 10:09] droptofloor: ammo_bullets startsolid at (696 384 138)
[2011-08-22 10:09] droptofloor: ammo_bullets startsolid at (616 384 138)

* it's calling for a caulk.wal texture, but that isn't used in q2, so it just spams the console with attempted downloads of the texture

I'll keep poking at it till I get it working.

[Whirlingdervish]

fixes:

I had to run the first time .aas calculations using the old quake 2 v3.20, but after that and uploading the .aas file to the server I have had no more crashes.

I made a copy of the quake2/textures/common/black.wal in my pak0.pak and renamed it as quake2/textures/common/caulk.wal and the tons of failed download messages on connect went away. I uploaded it like this to my server, so anyone needing it can dl easily.

I can alter the bullet pack placement with an override for now, but startsolid errors aren't gamebreaking so I haven't bothered yet.



All told, I think it will be a great addition to the q2 duel maps with a little bit of additional effort to bring it from beta to full release state. The map is sized appropriately for q2 movement in most places and the jumps translate well ( a big challenge for cross quake remakes)

Very nice job. 

If you want to test it vs some gladiator bots or another actual player, you can load it up here:

IRTDM2
74.86.171.204:27911

[VaeVictis]

the 8 unit stairs are kinda... eh they move well as you are traveling but they make stairs jumps kinda difficult... spent like 5-10 minutes at the stairs by RL trying to double jump off them to the ledge above the shards (that back little L hallway by RL if you dont know what im talkin bout) and couldnt manage to do it because the stairs were too small

[Whirlingdervish]

btw, I removed your ban on irtdm2 vae, so you can test it on a server with ping if you want.

 

[adz1La]

the only thing that felt odd to me was the ceiling of the mega hall...seemed a tad bit low 

[adz1La]

the 8 unit stairs are kinda... eh they move well as you are traveling but they make stairs jumps kinda difficult... spent like 5-10 minutes at the stairs by RL trying to double jump off them to the ledge above the shards (that back little L hallway by RL if you dont know what im talkin bout) and couldnt manage to do it because the stairs were too small

i managed to do it just fine, keep trying.

[VaeVictis]

the 8 unit stairs are kinda... eh they move well as you are traveling but they make stairs jumps kinda difficult... spent like 5-10 minutes at the stairs by RL trying to double jump off them to the ledge above the shards (that back little L hallway by RL if you dont know what im talkin bout) and couldnt manage to do it because the stairs were too small

i managed to do it just fine, keep trying.

got it no problem with a run up jump, i was trying it starting at the stairs before which was impossible lol




ALSO, i played around with my lighting settings a bit on the map, overall it seems very bright :/ might just be cause im comparing it to other ztn maps for quake2 which happen to be fairly dark, but it might look better if it was a tad darker maybe you could mix up some areas too, like how ztn has both orange and blue lighted areas rather than something like dm1 thats just an overall orange, or dm7 thats an overall green...

i also messed around with my fov, dropped it to 90 and 100, and the scaling looked PERFECT at 90 guess my 110 fov is why i feel like the rooms are a tad over sized...

[themuffinman]

@Whirlingdervish:
Cheers for the upload. Just don't expect to see me joining too often though - I rack up an impressive 250+ ping to TS   Hopefully some people can test it out though and give feedback... although it is instarail it should still provide some good ideas on what to change to better cater for movement.

1. Bullet spawn issue will be fixed (they're meant to spawn on both sides of CG, but are stuck in the 2 unit floor detailing). So the 138's should be 140's. No worries though - it's not a major issue.
2. I forgot about the caulk texture. Right now it functions as a nodraw, but I'm looking to see whether I can get it working properly as caulk.

the 8 unit stairs are kinda... eh they move well as you are traveling but they make stairs jumps kinda difficult... spent like 5-10 minutes at the stairs by RL trying to double jump off them to the ledge above the shards (that back little L hallway by RL if you dont know what im talkin bout) and couldnt manage to do it because the stairs were too small

Yeah agreed. I dunno whether to go 16 unit or ramp clipping. Probably the former, especially since ztn himself used 16 units in Q2. I might as well appeal to authority and ask - are there any popular Q2 maps with 8 unit stairs?

btw, I removed your ban on irtdm2 vae, so you can test it on a server with ping if you want.

 

ROFL  

the only thing that felt odd to me was the ceiling of the mega hall...seemed a tad bit low  

It seems the sides can be touched while jumping, but only on higher FPS. I'll put the ceiling up 8 units - that should do the job.

ALSO, i played around with my lighting settings a bit on the map, overall it seems very bright :/ might just be cause im comparing it to other ztn maps for quake2 which happen to be fairly dark, but it might look better if it was a tad darker maybe you could mix up some areas too, like how ztn has both orange and blue lighted areas rather than something like dm1 thats just an overall orange, or dm7 thats an overall green...

i also messed around with my fov, dropped it to 90 and 100, and the scaling looked PERFECT at 90 guess my 110 fov is why i feel like the rooms are a tad over sized...

Yep it is too bright overall, and I plan to make it darker like the other ztn maps. I've never been good at lighting a map, it's time to beef up my skills. I'll probably decompile ztn's Q2 maps and see if there's a method to how he lit a map. As for colors, I do have the blues mixed in, but I want to keep mostly warm colors for it to feel like the other Blood Run's.

[Whirlingdervish]

All told, I noticed the same thing with the lights: Even with gl_modulate set to a stock value of 1, there are very few full or nearly full shadows. The median lighting value is almost bright as day in most of the rooms open to the sun.

Perhaps a drop in the sun light value, and an overall scaling down of the entity light values would help.
If that drops the overall light level too low you can always throw in a "_ambient 15" in the worldspawn to make the deepest shadow areas bright enough to navigate, while not washing out the whole map.

If you get too many lighting glitches, sometimes it's even best to remove the sun entity, and instead put a texture lighted 'sky' in place. I've done this before with values of 200 in the surface lighting flag, and used colored textures to generate an overall theme color throughout the map. As long as the texture you use on the sky in the editor has similar coloration to the actual env that you choose for the map, it can yield some nice results with more even lighting and less of the odd shadow glitches that I've seen from using the sun style lighting. Whiter and more neutral colors seem to work ok even with the orange colored stock skies.