Beta testing/final polishing

Started by Micky C, 11 July 2012, 12:10:12

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Puritan

Quote from: Micky C on  13 July 2012, 15:04:50

Ok how about this?: "In a space-city, no one can hear you scream"


"Alien" style  ;D
Bitter words mean little to me. Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time, when they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine, and the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

MikeNorvak

#16
Quote from: Micky C on  13 July 2012, 15:31:02
Norvak, is there an ETA on the music? The map could potentially be ready for release right now.

No, there isn't, the project is on my HD. And installing the DAW and VSTs in someone's computer would be complicate.

I'm not sure but maybe I can buy a new power supply tomorroy... but I don't want to delay the relese anymore, so why don't using a DN2 song, like Supertanker said?

@Forge: well you could add these lines to the template also: "I built that phallocentric spire raping the space in the middle of the map"

EDIT: I know not everybody likes my remix of Aliens say ur prayers, but why don't using that track?

quakis

Subtitle suggestions I've been thinking about. I prefer either one of the last three though, but I'll just dump them all here.
  • Urban Void
  • Metropolitan Starlight
  • City in the Cosmos
  • Voided Utopia
  • Starcadia
  • City Amidst the Stars

Puritan

^Man, I'm lost for words....
I've been going through all six suggestions and I'm facing a wall.
A wall of uncertainties...
Ok, I'm not a part of this project at all. I've only a citizen on the side path here.
But it's hard to point out a winner.
Good luck guys... ;)
Bitter words mean little to me. Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time, when they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine, and the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

High Treason

I've been trying to correct the parallax problem with my section but the problem refuses to go away, I do not wish to hold the project up further so the problem can be left alone...

I am, however, wondering wether it is worth me adding a note to my text in the map template, I finally brought something half decent out not long ago and this has the potential to affect my reputation. I shall edit this post or make a new one when I make my mind up what to have written there.
[glow=black,2,300]sprite[].sectnum -1[/glow]

Micky C

#20
I'm leaning towards Metropolitan Starlight.

@Norvak, don't worry we won't do anything until Gambini gives his report, and he says he'll play it tomorrow and tonight. I don't think I'll send him the latest copy from the one I sent SuperTanker.

@High Treason, if neccessary I'll post that section to Plagman and see what he has to say about the bug. BTW what are you talking about affecting your reputation? Are you talking about how you think that mini episode you released a while ago is better than this? The only thing I'd bother complaining about your section is that it could use a little trimming, but that's also the case for a few other parts.

SuperTanker played a bit of beta 12:
QuoteI didn't get very far because performance seems even worse now on my ancient video card. Possibly, it's the underwater section, and/or I broke the last eduke build. It's a shame Polymer still has so many issues...

I really like the new underwater section! Only suggestion is to pan the underwater grate texture up/down--it might look better if one of the cross-bars of the texture is level with the surface of the water. Remember, I'm playing with an ancient card right now, so the slightly performance drop will be worth it on modern hardware.

Also, one other thing I noticed. I got to the ledge in the main giant room with the Freezer ammo on it by jumping from the slanted part of the roadway before it goes vertical. For some reason, at the narrowest part, the player gets caught on something unseen if Duke hugs close to the wall.

Found the Shrinker, too. Nice secret area! The switch was a little hard to hit though...

Cheers,
Supertanker

I've updated the map. I fixed a slight gap in one of the bridges, removed the floating water effect in Mr Sinister's section, re-added some sprites that had their sectnum changed in the underwater section, fixed the pulsating lights on the bed in my section, lowered the switch a bit to the shrinker secret so you don't have to jump or kick to use it.

And

As an experiment I added fogpals to the underwater sections. Blue in the main pool, green in captain awesome's slime pool, and green in HT's acid pools (but you can't really notice it here).
Do people like how it looks or is it ugly? It's quick to remove if needed. It feels a bit gimmicky to me..




I think the clipping thing SuperTanker talked about in his report on the platform with the freezer ammo is the same problem as that along the edge of the platform in the middle of the pool that the tower is on; there's some kind of overclipping due to the slope of the adjacent sector.
Wall whore.

High Treason

Quote from: Micky C on  14 July 2012, 05:49:29@High Treason, if neccessary I'll post that section to Plagman and see what he has to say about the bug.
I wouldn't worry about it, I don't want to cause further delays. Just chuck it into the "Known bugs" section or with my text in the map template "There is a glitch that causes a parralax sky to draw in the subway sector here, this was caused after I built it, I believe it was an accident. Not my fault."

QuoteBTW what are you talking about affecting your reputation? Are you talking about how you think that mini episode you released a while ago is better than this? The only thing I'd bother complaining about your section is that it could use a little trimming, but that's also the case for a few other parts.
It has the potential to affect my reputation because people will think I put random glitch/badly textured sectors in my levels, my only consolation was that my area at least ran at a decent framerate but that seems to have gone now as well.

You know, I never said I thought my mini-episode was better than this, but I regret ever offering to work on this if I am entirely honest. I'm not pointing the blame at anybody at all, because if I was I'd say who I was blaming. I could go on about what's wrong with stuff all day, but in short what I was implying in my previous post was this (Prepare for wall of text - it's 8AM and I haven't been to sleep - feel free to TL;DR the following) ;

I don't count the NBCBP as anything much as that was a team effort so I take no credit for anything in that.

Prior to the release of my mini-episode, I had released maps designed for Polymer and the HRP which were relatively crappy, I'll still arrogantly state that I created the first real 3D Structures, but they're not worth remembering and they're better off brushed under the carpet. My first map took a year to make and I could probably make it in a day now. As far as I could see, my reputation was heading for one of a guy who made overscaled, broken, unplayable maps with hackish gimmicks. Luckily everyone seemed to have forgotten about my failed attempts at some TCs though, but I was still bitter as I felt that most people had been rather cold and unhelpful towards me.

I decided to rebel against the community and set to work on a Polymer/High-res exclusive mod, good luck finding a copy anywhere. All-in-all that was a collosal failure and I suspect I was probably the only person that saw the potential in the idea though my implementation of it was poor, probably wasn't helping my reputation.

Eventually I decided to try again, taking a different approach, there was one top secret project that I can probably never finish now, it was large-scale and has I have not suffered from hardware failures and lack of money I would have been going public with it by now, I would have likely been approaching 75% completion on that. Alongside this, I began work on my mini-episode, this time I was determined to actually make something worth playing to some extent, probably a one-off because I was using classic textures and shading, I put everything I had into making that and I finally made something that was actually decent, finally I felt I had broken my track record of making unplayable maps and writing awful code, except where it shares code with my old mod.

Now we have this CBP and the TC I am working on, with this CBP I was determined to uphold what I had achieved which was why I had a strong determination to not use TROR and other fancy features, it's likely the last time (at least for a while) that I will use the classic textures and gameplay mechanics, I was quite proud of what I had done, my section was small but it worked, it wasn't easy to make, the map was built at some weird height making it hard to work with and I was met with framerates that made it impossible for me to build anything, did you know I actually had to build my section as a seperate map and merge it? You can immagine how annoyed I was when it got connected to the stacks and messed about with, I saw this as my hard work being undone and it was a bugger to put it right as every time I faced the entrance the framerate crapped itself and there were sectors overlapping everything, I don't know how the heights were achieved on those windows, but I couldn't put them back without using F7 in 2D mode, but due to overlapping sectors I could not do that. Now I test the beta only to discover things have been broken more, given my track record I feel that I am more likely to get the blame than the rest of the team, which I really don't want to do, do you know how long it was before people would even read anything I bloody wrote? I've had to fight to get to where I am (Likely peasent class community member) - there was actually a time when I released something, it got ignored, another guy released the same thing and everyone had to have it, it became a component included in the HRP and my version was never widely used and long forgotten about, just to make it clear, I don't begrudge the bloke for that at all and I will admit that his version was better.

I don't know, is suspect half of this is just my interpretation, but that was what I was implying.
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Micky C

It would have been easy to use F7 on your sectors despite the overlapping, if you used side view mode activated by F3, then rotated the view a bit. Or used ctrl-a to restrict the vertical editing heights. The good news is the problem seems to be gone now in the latest eduke32. I could have sworn I saw one of the train sectors move partly out of the track sector, which would explain the glitch, but I only saw that once.

Does anyone know what these sectors are about?
Wall whore.

Mister Sinister

Those sectors may be mine. As I remember, originally I wanted to make an elevator to the dam roof and the something has gone wrong, I tried to erase them, but instead it erased half of the dam, so I moved them somewhere. Also some of these sectors affected the road part and I moved them to. You can try to delete them, but it can screw up my part. Sorry for this.  :-\
Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm

I zimbra!

Forge

#24
i've been using the r2752 snapshot. I seen the paralax glitch with the High T subway section using this snapshot (right after quakis added that area outside the window in my section). However the latest map beta does not seem to have the paralax problem and I'm still using the same snapshot. I tried polymer and classic and attempted to look at the subway from every angle, and was not able to re-create the glitch.

I think Micky may be right. something was causing one of the train cars to go rouge, but then something's been done since to keep it under control. If it's still a problem I would suggest widening out the track and re-centering the  SE's just to be sure no cars clip the walls

edit: @High T - if you're having performance issues with mapster you could try changing the render mode. If it's 4 change it to 3.
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

Micky C

#25
Quote from: Mister Sinister on  14 July 2012, 12:08:56
Those sectors may be mine. As I remember, originally I wanted to make an elevator to the dam roof and the something has gone wrong, I tried to erase them, but instead it erased half of the dam, so I moved them somewhere. Also some of these sectors affected the road part and I moved them to. You can try to delete them, but it can screw up my part. Sorry for this.  :-\

Ok I got rid of those excess sectors. When I was messing around with TROR in the early days of its release, I had all kinds of sector problems such as this, and gained a lot of experience in fixing them  ;D

Mister Sinister can you just check it yourself and see that nothing is wrong with your section? I had a quick look all around in mapster and it seemed fine but I don't know the area as well as you. Plus it's past midnight and I need some sleep. Oh, and that freed up a bit over 40 walls, and I'm considering adding some kind of pool (you probably won't be able to swim under it) in Mister Sinisters section with fogpal because it looks weird with some of the water glowing blue and the rest of it not. At least now the parts not glowing can look like they're darker because they're under the brick area. It's not finished though. Although actually I might just get rid of the blue fogpal it looks surreal, and use those walls to create shadow under the bridges in the hub.

I also moved the TROR boundary in the drop to HT's section up near the top and retextured to the top bit so that there's no ugly change in texture allignment on the way down.

Gambini has started giving me his report with some useful information, mostly sprites having their hitscan/blocking bit set when they shouldn't be. Apparently he was low on health and ammo by the time he got to the battlelord after the blue keycard, so I'll definitely add a touch of health there (there were a lot of enforcers).
And he couldn't find the manhole to HT's section, which I thought was strange. I've pointed its location out to him and he'll continue the map, but once again I need to sleep now. I'll start fixing Gambini's stuff in maybe 28 hours, after I know Mister Sinister's section is ok; I don't want to waste time making changes only to find the map is broken or corrupt or something.

Everything indicates this map is only days away from release. Hopefully that's enough time for Norvak to finish the music, otherwise we'll release it with the current music, or use another track as per the general consensus.
Wall whore.

Mister Sinister

Micky, seems like everything is fine with my area.
Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm

I zimbra!

Micky C

Yeah I played it and it seemed ok too. I might actually leave that deep pool in your area (I'll need to touch it up a bit) because I've grown accustomed to it, unless you're personally against it.

BTW, say what you want about the HRP, that skybox looks delicious.

Wall whore.

Micky C

No I haven't forgotten or given up on this project, I've just been waiting for Gambini to finish playtesting the map. Apparently he got caught up in Deus Ex HR  ::)
Wall whore.

Merlijn

Metropolian starlight sounds cool. Also, if authors don't add their own descriptions, I suggest we use Forges contributions. They're pretty funny.  8)

I played the last version and everything seemed pretty balanced to me. The added devastator ammo made Forges part more fun, mindless violence ftw. :P
The end sequence is very cool now, good job Micky! I also liked the TROR additions, they do compliment the map nicely and the work perfectly fine in classic mode. The fight in the big room with the pillars is also a lot cooler now, the exploding pillars are a nice touch.

There was one small TROR bug though, I'm not sure if it only pops up in classic mode: when going under water in the central spire area, you can see one of the TROR "layers" as a slope with texture 0. See attached screenshot. Not sure if it can be fixed or not.

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