Parkade released!

Started by Micky C, 05 January 2012, 11:07:45

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Micky C

It's taken a while for me to post it here, but the map's finally arrived!

Parkade is large city themed pure TROR map by Paul B and myself centred around a city parkade and its surrounding building. The map uses 4 layers of TROR, allowing for the creation of several multiple story buildings. The map might not look that large, but that's because the sectors are stacked vertically rather than spread out horizontally. It's very open, with several ways to get around to the different places. The map will take 20-40 minutes depending on your skill and luck. It comes with a custom ogg and requires atomic edition.

It's designed with polymer, and uses a mix of sector based and polymer lighting. It has not been tested with the HRP, DukePlus or any other mods, so use them at your own risk. The map doesn't use that many lights, so any slowdowns would be due mainly to polymer's unoptimised state and the size and compactness of the map. If you absolutely cannot run polymer at all, then use software mode. It has the occasional visual glitches but is surprisingly stable.

The story: A suburb has gone silent after a piece of alien technology was discovered on the roof of a parkade. Your mission is to get in and find out what what this device does, and neutralize any threats you find.



SuperTanker and I attempted to release our maps on the same day as the first two maps of 2012 as a nice suprise for the community (how often do you get two maps released on the same day?), so be sure to check out his map as well!
Wall whore.

Puritan

Awesome II  :)


Will check it tonight.
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

Loke

Took me roughly 46 minutes on LR. Overall it was a fun ride unfortunately I couldn't appreciate the nice lighting effects in Polymer since the map ran terrible (read: unplayable -- ATI card here) so I had to resort to the good 'ol 8-bit. Sadly there were a bunch of visual TROR glitches here and some of them looked really ugly.
Anyway, I enjoyed it though the layout was a tad confusing at the first but I got hang of it after a while.

James

I also had to play on classic since Polymer is unplayable, but it didn't stop me enjoying the map (I ignored glitches since I knew it wasn't your fault)

Great stuff! TROR wasn't used just as a gimmick here since there are several parts which make good solid use of it - the gameplay was also fun and I liked that you gave the freezer as the gun with the most ammo (at least I found so!) and you didn't find the shotgun/chaingun until a bit further into the map. I did get lost a few times since obviously the 3D nature of the level made it harder to navigate than normal, but no worse than other maps for older Duke.

Puritan

My sucky comp imploded even on 8-bit mode  :'(


But an upload it'll be!
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

pbolduc

Maybe more like an upgrade it should be! =)

Puritan

Quote from: pbolduc on  05 January 2012, 21:44:40
Maybe more like an upgrade it should be! =)


Yeah, I'll buy a new comp in June.
Welcome aboard, pbolduc  ;)
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

pbolduc

Hi Puritan,

Great site,  I'm glad to see you're keeping the best game alive! I'm looking forward to seeing our new map on the site with a rating & review! =) Thanks also for posting my RCPD map! However, RCPD sure looks plain jane compared to our new map.

Micky C

Quote from: Loke on  05 January 2012, 19:52:58
Overall it was a fun ride unfortunately I couldn't appreciate the nice lighting effects in Polymer

You're not missing a great deal in that department. Most of the areas that used polymer lights had at least basic shading. We cut out as many lights as possible to help with performance, so maybe one day I'll revisit the map and give it a polymer makeover once the renderer has been optimised. The main reason to use polymer is the lack of glitches.

Can you hold out on the review and upload for a day or so? Its just that I might upload a new copy with two or three small shade and texture allignment fixes if that's ok.
Wall whore.

Micky C

#9
Ok Forge I've attached a slightly improved version which you can review and upload to the site :)
Wall whore.

Micky C

#10
It seems the modify button is missing from my posts?? I can't edit them  ???

Anyway I forgot to update the .txt file, so this zip is the one to be uploaded:
Wall whore.

Forge

#11
kinda glad you wanted to update. finished bedrone yesterday and took the rest of the day off  :) I like to play Duke, but you wouldn't believe how fast writing a review every day gets old.
should have this and SuperT's done in the next couple of days.

edit: started playing this. I can get polymer to work with everything maxed except i have to turn the resolution down to 1024 x 768. No big deal.

i like the layout so far. lots to explore. aesthetically it's hit & miss from area to area. Polymer lighting isn't applied that heavily, so players not using it aren't really missing anything other than maybe avoiding a few visual glitches.

edit2: polymer is pissing me off. it won't let me load a saved game without crashing eduke. i can load the saved game without it enabled just fine, but as soon as i check that tick mark on the load up screen, launch the program, and try to load my save: lockup! Restarted the map and did a fresh save, tried to load that new save, same shit.

I can either start over and finish the map in one session, or load my save in polymost and then have mixed screen shots. I hate mis-matched screenies

edit3: updated my snapshot, now eduke loads polymer save games. of course this means i have to start over
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

Forge

finished. took around 35 to 40 minutes. Not the best looking map out there due to some inconsistencies in detailing and trimwork from location to location , but the extensive exploring was great fun. I got to where the last red key lock was and realized I had to go back and get the card  :P
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

Micky C

Thanks for the review Forge, it was a good read. I'm also quite happy with the score, it looks about right (I even predicted the score a few days ago).

Out of interest were you, or anybody else, able to tell who did what areas based on the styles used?
Wall whore.

Forge

tbh, it was pretty hard to tell the difference.

If i had to guess I would say the hotel and the office building were done by the same person. The parkade, the edf base, and the other portion of the map between the yellow key lock and the last red key lock (kind of office building lobby styled areas) were done by the second person. I'm basing that off of shading, texture selection, and trimwork, but I'm probably wrong.
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass