View source for DM-Deck16 Tech day and night

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'''Concept:''' The basic idea was to refurbish the map while keeping the original structure intact. Right here I have to admit a certain mistake that I made. I don't know why this map (the original version) is one of the most, if not the most, played map from all the default maps. There are even some servers that run this map alone. When I played this map it always felt bland, with ugly lighting and textures. I thought that if I could make this map better looking it would play better. I guess, the fact that I've once joined a server with players playing my version of this map, chatting about how this map was too heavy or bad (without going into details) proves that I was wrong. I did advertise this map in some forums and I was expecting applause, praise, to the point that I was expecting to make some strong impact. I did receive positive criticism here and there, but with so few responses I have to say that having unrealistic expectations is bad.


'''Architecture and design:''' I didn't change the original floorplan, I kept it. All my focus was on making the map prettier, with better lighting and textures. This is the other part of the same mistake I mentioned previously. I began this map with the assumption that the ugly lighting and textures were the result of bad level design. We could say that this map spanning multiple clones from hundreds of users and having servers named after it disproves my assumption. The final version of my Deck16 would never run on computers from 2000. All the default maps that came with the game have extremely low triangle counts and extremely low resolution lightmaps because they had some severe hardware constraints at their time. We can't judge some work if we forget the unknown constrains that whoever made that work had to deal with. This is a lesson from Mark Rosewater.

I changed the corridor's geometry a bit because I didn't like the extruded trapezoid shape of them. I kept the same height and width though. One thing that I'm not quite happy about is that I broke up the corridor's walls and ceiling with some square pillars and concrete support structures. I felt that the flat surfaces needed some more detail and I went that route. Visually it's kinda of strange because that concrete structure isn't required to support the structure's weight and nobody needs to be an engineer to see that. There were also some side effects regarding gameplay. Those concrete pillars and extra geometry inside the corridors disrupt the Flak Cannon shards and Ripper's blades. These two weapons have projectiles that ricochet off surfaces and work best with flat surfaces.

The geometry surrounding the redeemer's place has changed as well. I thought that the pillars and beams were ugly and decided to open it up. There is no geometry blocking the player's weapons now, but I didn't foresee a consequence of doing it. This again is about gameplay design. I didn't know that the players could grab the jump boots and use them to power up the lift jump to reach the redeemer without using the teleporter. The way I changed the area made sure that jump boots + lift jump is now impossible.

The teleporter was replaced by a one way portal. One way because once the player crosses it, there is no way back unless they hammer jump. This didn't change the gameplay much because hitscan weapons do not work with portals and a player would rarely fire rockets or other weapons through the portal.

One player told me that strafe jumping, from near the boxes where the damage amplifier power up is, to the shield belt was impossible because I changed the original position of the thin bridge where the shield belt lies. Again, another change related to gameplay design. After that I added a second pipe bridge to make that strafe jump possible again.

I didn't have skills to make new textures from zero. The industrial theme was chosen based on the already existing textures. I think that the large pool of acid made me feel that some factory oriented theme was the way to go. That meant pipes, lots of pipes. In a very old version I had very thick pipes running in the corridor's walls. I abandoned it because the BSP was horrible with too many collision problems. It wasn't clean, having to aim at players with a flat wall behind them is cleaner. The pipes under the grates are purely eye candy.

The large pillars aren't really required from a structural viewpoint. They were more about adding detail than anything else. As you can see the pillars are all embedded in the walls to keep the geometry flat and avoid players colliding with them.


'''Textures:''' I learned in some old unrealed tutorial that trim makes map look better. I used trim everywhere I could. Hourences in his book tells that trims break up repetition of textures and I went all in with that in mind. There is one mistake though. In the corridors the walls have a texture with what seems to be pipes or cables at the upper part. With the pillars and concrete support that I added to break up the geometry I ended up breaking the wall's textures too. It wasn't the best idea. Everywhere I made the effort to properly match the floor's dimensions with the texture itself. To make sure that tiles weren't cut in half. Same for the ceiling.


'''Lighting:''' For the lighting I matched green at the lowest level with the green slime. It felt the right color. For the pipes I went for gold color because red is too strong. Blue wouldn't make sense to highlight pipes. The textures depicting rusted metal also asked for yellow. For the main area I used pale blue to match the night time. Inside the corridors the lights are pale yellow, close to white. I felt that with the outside being blue, inside the corridors I would use yellow to compensate. Pure white would have washed out the environment.

I placed orange lights at the portal and at a fan. The original teleporter had turquoise light. With the yellow and green lights that I placed I felt that orange was a better choice to give contrast while not giving too much contrast by going for red lights. The fan is placed in a hole and with the orange light being placed behind the fan it wouldn't disrupt the composition of the main area, which is dominated by blue lights. The portal has a super weapon, whereas the fan has nothing. It was intentional to place the fan in front of the light to prevent the strong orange hue from disrupting the blueish night.


'''Item placement:''' There was a toxin suit meant for players to swim in the acid without taking damage. It was located at the boxes, near the sniper's alcove. I thought that players would pick it up and dive in the pool without taking damage by falling from a high place. One player told me that the suit was useless because they thought it was meant to dive in to pick up some valuable item hidden in the pool. There wasn't anything in the pool. The suit was there for the player to have a way to jump down the lowest floor without taking fall damage. I guess this is a lesson from Mark Rosewater as well. Don't fight against human behavior or do counter-intuitive things.

I have to highlight a change that I made that appeared to be innocent, something so small that nobody would ever notice it. Wrong! Near the damage amplifier power up there is a large stack of boxes and two health packs. I don't know what the level designer was thinking, but the boxes split the corridor in left and right. The health packs were placed in one of the sides. What did I do? I thought that it would be cool to remove two boxes from the large stack of boxes, creating a tunnel in the middle and placing the two health packs there. In the original version a player would naturally be drawn to the side with the two health packs, which is clearly intentional. With the changes that I made the player now can take either the right or the left and then they take the tunnel. After they collect the two health packs they can again choose to go to the right or to the left. With a very small change which seemed unimportant I made that single spot of the level way more complicated than it was originally intended to be!!

The flak cannon was placed in a dead end. I kept it to not change the map's floorplan. However, I did rearrange the two boxes. In the original level the boxes create an opportunity for the player to hide in the shadows. There are some heal vials between the two boxes that alert nearby players that somebody is hidden in the shadows. I always felt that the shadows in the corridors were wrong because the light is so bright. UT does not have indirect lighting but I forgot one important aspect. Were the pitch black shadows intentional? I don't know. By rearranging the two boxes and the lighting I may have changed the original intentions. For better or for worse? I didn't playtest it to know.


'''Audio:''' Apart from the fan and the lifts, nothing in this level makes sound. What I used was an extension that adds EAX audio effects to the game. They are pre-computed though. There isn't real positional audio. It adds some nice reverb based on some fixed presets but there is no real calculation done to propagate the sound waves in a physically correct manner. I didn't place any sound effects near the pipes because most of the time the gunfire and player's own sounds would render any sound from liquids flowing inside the pipes inaudible.

= Day version =
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I changed all textures but kept the same geometry and architecture. I had to adjust the brightness of all lights to adapt it to day time. Other than that I kept the same light's colors. The only color that I changed was the orange from the portal. I decided to go for indigo to have a stronger contrast with the sun's light.

The remaining change was to replace the super weapon with a super health. I didn't playtest this. It was all but a whim to differentiate one version from the other.

= Original deck16 for reference = 
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