Highlands2 Progress (Alpha)

[Thothie]

You know, with a little bit of recompiling, this map is really pretty. In all honesty, Crow had a really good map going here, he just didn't know it due to the way he assembled it.



This is the ALPHA remake of highlands. I say alpha because it has some serious visual issues. It should be, more or less, fully functional though. It's still using the single player monsters, so it'll be way too easy for multiple players, or a single high level character. I'm just distributing this to show the map's potential. It actually looks better than most (if not all) of the Vanilla MS maps.



Screenies:

http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_alpha1.jpg

http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_alpha2.jpg

http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_alpha3.jpg



It's really pretty. I was floored. All I did to it was trim it so it would compile right.



Issues (all but one of which are entirely my fault):

- Can't get to primary jumping sequence without bowing (will fix)

- Didn’t lock trees back to walls properly when I sliced them (will fix)

- Hole in roof of spider cave (d'oh, will fix)

- Castle top stretches into sky (will raise sky and fix)

- No way to access spider key without bowing (will fix)

- Several bushes no longer touching ground (will fix)

- Screwed up some textures (will fix)

- Inner Spider Caves need more lights (will fix, but not my fault)



I get 100fps everywhere on this map, the poly counts are more than tolerable, and it looks really nice the way all the mesa's cast their shadows. Even in its alpha state, it's really beautiful. Hats off to Crow here.



What I've done so far:



- Completely deleted the floor - which was made up of about 200 brushes.

- Replaced floor with one single huge brush

- Raised all mesa ceilings to same height, lowered all mesa floors to same height

- Search & Replaced all sky textures (dont make partial sky brushes!)

- Deleted Sky (again, made up of about another 200 brushes)

- Added new sealed sky (1 skybrush on whole map)

- Simplified a bunch of objects

- Got rid of most all 2 pixel thick walls (DON'T DO THAT!)

- Added red lighting hints to spider key and spider cave entrance

- Removed several tiny shape 'fragments' (so many I wonder if the RMF is made from some decompiled BSP? Not sure where they all came from)



- Total time spent (save for compiling): 45 minutes



It still takes HLVIS about an hour and a half to process the whole thing because I haven't touched the spider cave (and don't think I need to, aside from lighting). The insane compile time is due to the fact the map is made up almost entirely of cylinders, most of which overlap (DON'T DO THAT!). Lots and lots of tiny little crevices it has to calculate.



This was JM's job, but he gave up, I guess, so I took over. Morale to the story: Fix map compile problems before adding new ones.



Download: http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_alpha.rar

(Includes map AND source)

Rar unzipper here.

_________________

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead

Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Hehe. Yay highlands finnaly gets some use. Dont do 2 block walls? I'll remeber that. I always figured the smaller the better. The floor was that way to give it a little bit of hillage.

Anyways nicely done and thanx.

 

[Thothie]

Small brushes bad, and fewer brushes good. Your castle in the back, for instance, had two small walls on either side behind it, easily replaced by a single large block. Larger brushes create fewer visual planes and clip nodes, in addition to being better at sealing leaks. I managed to reduce the number of brushes used in the spider treasure area to a tenth of what it was, by using large conjoined blocks instead of thin walls.



Overlapping brushes also bad... I didn't fix all the ones you had in this map, but it seems HLVIS set to full cleaned up most of them on its own (albeit, took forever to do it). If I took the time to clean it up I could squeeze more performance out of it - but that's a hell of a lot of overlapping cylinders - and I didn't want to risk fudging up your jumping sequence. Sometimes too many overlapped complex brushes will create a co-planar texture not caught by the compiler, and this is apparently resulted in the crash issue on the old version of this map.



Simpler brushes are also good. More vertexes = more render time and greater chance of compile errors. This is again, why cylinders = bad.



Carving in general not good... Carving with cylinders = satanic.



Also the ground in highlands was almost all flat... but still chopped into like 200 bits, which is what confused me... Of course, the sky textures facing outside of the map also really confused me (everything was wrapped in partial sky brushes). If you have a light_enviroment (which you do) in your map, sky textures emit diffused light. Emitting light off the map makes Hlrad suicidal, and again, a sky brush must be sky on all sides to work properly.



And conforming to the grid would have also been nice. You should most often be snapped to grid of 16/32/64 and only using anything smaller than that on rare occasions. Without the grid, one can't grantee that vertexes will meet, which causes leaks, unnecessary rendering lag, and sometimes odd visual effects. Even if you line them up on maximum - they may get disjointed after scaling or rotating. I don't normally preach conformity, but tis crucial here, even if you have to vertex manipulate to do it.



I g2g just now... but I think I'm done with this thing. I'll upload final with descript of what I did and source when I get back. I would have been done sooner, but been busy, plus I got really carried away... (you'll see...)

_________________

"Let me introduce you to Lolth: Demon Queen of Spiders." - Venger, Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon

Saint Thoth

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

The carving feauture should be permanently removed from Hammer because it has fucked up an an amount of maps beyond limits.

 

[ante_delonge]

Thothie = Mastah of long posts

 

[Crow]

i guess you learn somethin new everyday.

Maybe I should just give you the rmf of all my maps when I'm "done"

Btw goldmoonnorth is now on your server.

 

[Thothie]

Like my namesake, I am the Grand Lord and Master of long posts. This comes from a combination of age and being able to type 200WPM.



Anywho...



I dub thee: Highlands2 beta.



I say beta, because I haven't tested it with any players thus far... But it has been tested fairly thoroughly single player and is ready for action.



Ye download: http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_beta.rar

Ye source: http://www.thothie.com/ms/highlands2_beta_src.rar



(PS. Crow, tell me if you don't want your source distributed, I know some developers are quite greedy with their work.)



This map is intended for three or more players with 200+ hp a piece. Single player is not recommended. Saint Thoth's current incarnation, with 477hp, can get through it, though he died four times.





Changelog: INCLUDES SPOILERS

Fixed all the errors mentioned in previous post.



Added spawn room, with sign. (Screenshot) For the roleplaying people, and those who like to read.



Connected spiders section to main section via a long tunnel (via a sloppy carve that no sane person should imitate, but works alright). This leads to Hatchery.



Screenshot: Hatchery

Hatchery: Here we have a bunch of spider eggs floating in spider... Liquid... of some sort... Which you are now thoroughly drenched in (lovely). You will be attacked by a bunch of baby spiders and the nurse who will walk ON THE LIQUID to get at you (but hopefully not fall into it). This area has been completely remade from the original spider entrance. Once the nurse is killed, evil glowing crystal #1 is broken, babies vanish, and it gets a bit dark. (Not so dark that you can't play flootball with the func_pushable eggs though)



Screenshot: Crystal Chamber

From there you move through some webs, get hit by a few more spiders, to find the mother of all giant green evil crystals. In the center of the room is ye old egg, but you will also note a network of ominous looking eggs on the ceiling, much larger than those in the hatchery. Evil sounds emit from the, presumably, evil crystal that serves as the massive chamber's light source. Presumably players will walk up and break the egg, having found such activity so productive in Thornlands.



This leads to a sequence of bad things.



The eggs in the ceiling will crack and spiders will come raining down on you (surprise surprise). Somewhat less anticipated, is the fact that there is a second egg inside the first one, and this egg is now protected by a force field being emitted by the, now very angry sounding, evil green crystal.



After several increasingly hard waves of spiders release themselves from the eggs in the ceiling, the force shield eventually sputters out, allowing you to break the center egg. This causes a series of beams to shoot out from the, now even angrier, evil green crystal. Where the beams end, teleport in yet more spiders, presumably from some evil Lolth dimension that seems to have lots of them to spare.



Should you defeat these, the evil crystal gets so angry and frustrated, that it blows up. Bits of crystal fly everywhere, and you are awarded with a series of "super" healing potions, in addition to the original chest (which you will need a key to access). Oh, and one last baby spider will come to say "Hi" - just for good measure.



The mesas: haven't changed a whole lot. It's patrolled by orcs of just about every variety and a few trolls. There is a bit of a challenge here for archers however (since I figure archers are really going to hate the spider pits - as there's no where to run). This challenge comes in the form of orcs rangers, who are way up high on the mesas and the castle towers, and who are quite eager to play a game of sniper with any would-be archer whores.



The jump sequence you have to go through to get to the castle, as annoying as it is, is still intact. If you are too encumbered, you will find some of the jumps impossible - although you can bypass most all of them by bow climbing.



However, only ONE player has to complete the jump sequence to get inside the castle. He can then open up the gates for the rest of the players by breaking the siege bar on the inside of the castle gates. I've made it glow, on the off chance this isn't immediately obvious. (We do have some slow players.)



Most all the other changes are minor or optimizations, far too numerous to mention, although there's still a surprise or two in there I haven't listed. Most of you are sane enough not to have read all this, and should be pleasently surprised by everything in anycase.



If the tests go well, I'll distribute this and the entire Crow multiplayer series in a self-installer. Although I'm tempted to ask Crow for the source for Orcplace and Lostcastle so that I can re-optimize those too. Skycastle, however, I think is tollerable.

_________________

"A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions." -Oliver Wendell Holmes

Saint Thoth

 

[ante_delonge]

Do you know what? I´ve never read a SINGLE ONE of your posts They´re waaay too long for me.

 

[Thothie]

Mission accomplished.



My posts are for the few, the proud, the bored with way too much spare time.

_________________

"Why is 'abbreviation' such a long word?"

Saint Thoth

 

[Crow]

Five stars and two thumbs up.



F r i k i n A m a z i n g



Now i have so many questions, and a million more possabilities have just jumped into my head after playing this. I gotta learn how to do some of that stuff. So i guess i'll just start(with both questions and compiments):



First off, how'd you get the crystal shards to stay around and actually be physical peices and not be able to walk through them?



Nice sound additions. How did you make everything echo in the cave?



I noticed when the web floor broke, you didnt use the flesh model as gibs, you used something else. Is that custom? How do i get to it? i want it its looks alot better than flesh when dealing with spiders and webs and such.



How did you do that force thing with the egg (it pushes you away in all directions)?



I like the little red thingy for the key. Makes it a bit more clear. I always wanted to have that one thing in my map that no one could figure out and everyone wanted to try and find it, that special secret place. I guess having it be the key to the treasure was a bit lame Anyways. cool.



How did you make the little spiders dissapear when you killed the big one?



How did you make the lighting at the end? THAT WAS AWSOME!!! it was all like cool and like real lighting it was sweet. I gotta learn how to do the beam thing also. Maybe its the same.



And the potions? Was that the msitem_spawn thing? I thought that didnt work.



How'd you make the bar glow like that? it looked like you just put a brush around it that went from white to transparent. How does that work. That would really help it making certain things obvious



Edit: Sure ill send ya the source of those. After a show like that how could i not?

 

[Thothie]

First off, how'd you get the crystal shards to stay around and actually be physical peices and not be able to walk through them?

I didn't; it's an illusion. The lights go out when the crystal explodes so you're less likely to notice the slide of hand, but all those crystal shards are part of a complex func_wall_toggle that appears when the lights come back on (and the glowing shards provide the new light source). This is accomplished by the multi_manager's "queenwave_dead" and "crystal_break". Note that you can only tie sixteen events to a multimanager, so it's best to find ways to merge events under a single heading when dealing with sequences that complex. (in this case: sound, sprite, push explosion on, turn center lights off, turn on fade in lights, push explosion off, fade in broken crystals, turn off fade in lights, turn on permanent crystal shard lights, turn off evil crystal ambient sound, break treasure wall, etc. etc. Tons and tons of crap running in that sequence. )



The push explosion when the center crystal explodes isn't just for effect - it's also to stop you from being lodged inside the func_wall_toggle crystals when they appear - as it would suck to have to suicide during the treasure raid. If you try to stand where the red crystal shards appear when the nurse dies in the previous room, you'll get the same launching effect.

Nice sound additions. How did you make everything echo in the cave?

EAX effect. Only affects users with EAX enabled sound cards, but most people have those these days. They are controlled by the point entity env_sound, which you can read about at VERC, your end-all be-all half-life developer's webpage.



I find ambient_generic's add a lot to a map. The subtle ones moreso than the big noisy ones, like I have there... I shoulda added some hawk and wind noises to the mesas, now that I think of it.

I noticed when the web floor broke, you didnt use the flesh model as gibs, you used something else. Is that custom? How do i get to it? i want it its looks alot better than flesh when dealing with spiders and webs and such.

The only custom content on that whole map is the sprite with the storyline on it.



webgibs.mdl is part of the standard valve set. If you want to use it, put "models/webgibs.mdl" in the GibModel property of the breakable. It will override whatever default model you use.



Explore the half-life.GCF thoroughly - just about everything you could ever need is there. Lots of mappers seem to add unnecessary custom content that just bloat their map's download time.



Note: if the center of your breakable brush overlaps another entity, the gibs don't get rendered (or they do - but off the map or stuck inside the other brush). This is why your crumbling cliffs didn't originally leave little pebbles. (I sliced em a bit to remedy that)

How did you do that force thing with the egg (it pushes you away in all directions)?

It's a toggled trigger_push (starts off). I started with a box drawn out with the egg at its center, and then sliced the box, via the clipping tool (shift-x), from corner to corner. You then have four separate brushes radiating out from the egg. Assign each to the same trigger_push entity targetname, then give each a Yaw in the appropriate compass direction.



A few warnings about trigger_push with MS though: Trigger_push deflects arrows, as well as most monsters and players. Some monsters just go absolutely insane when they collide with a trigger_push. Spiders seem to handle it fairly well, but Trolls will actually start attacking where the player isn't, or ignoring him completely, or even wander straight off the map after being struck by such a trigger.



PS. Originally I just boosted the egg to 500hp, and figured the players wouldn't ignore the spiders trying to kill them in favor of the egg. If you broke that egg while the first waves were still going, however, you'd have so many spiders it would lag the server to death... Then I realized a hacker could take it out in two hits or less. So, to avoid hackers ruining the game for everyone anymore than they already do, I added the shield. It stops arrows fairly well too... But a determined hacker may still be able to break that egg prematurely. If it becomes an issue I can put an invisible wall around it as well - but I like the push effect and beams better.

How did you make the little spiders dissapear when you killed the big one?

All the baby spiders (save those triggered by breaking the eggs in the pool) have the "targetname" "babies" property attached to them. In the nurse_dead multi_manager, it launches a trigger_relay named "killbabies" with the property "killtarget" "babies". This eliminates all the entities with that targetname when fired. All the Trolls in my Helena update are removed the same way when the War Wagon appears (to prevent them from blocking it).



Confusingly enough, but worth noting, "nurse_dead" is launched by adding "killtarget" "nurse_dead" to the giant spider in this case. Obviously the property doesn't behave the same way when used by the msmonster entity. (In this case it triggers, rather than removes the target)

How did you make the lighting at the end? THAT WAS AWSOME!!! it was all like cool and like real lighting it was sweet. I gotta learn how to do the beam thing also. Maybe its the same.

env_laser is easier to use env_beam and less likely to screw up MS in my personal experience - although both entities are much more dependable in Half-Life than in Mastersword, so you must be conservative with them. With env_laser, all you need is an info_target entity with the same targetname that you define in the env_laser's "LaserTarget" property. If you use multiple info_target's of the same name, the laser will toggle between them in sequence (the beam running from the env_laser to the info_targets). Multiple env_lasers of the same name will target separate laser_targets in sequence (but again, too many and MS will croak). For the wild lightning effect, simply increase the noise level. High levels of noise create lightning effects (200 for the wild lightning used at the end there). For a laser effect, set it to 0. There are also sprite options, for more varied or unusual emitters.



Both env_laser and env_beam can be set to damage, but I don't know (and severely doubt) it works in MS... I can't remember if I tested that or not... If it did work, I had an idea for bringing Undamel back as some sort of undead lightning mage.



In case you mean you want that exact lightning effect, here's the settings I used:

{

"origin" "-2928 -257 256"

"width" "20"

"angles" "0 0 0"

"LaserTarget" "qlaser_target"

"TextureScroll" "35"

"texture" "sprites/laserbeam.spr"

"NoiseAmplitude" "200"

"rendercolor" "0 255 0"

"renderamt" "255"

"renderfx" "2"

"targetname" "qlasers"

"spawnflags" "48"

"classname" "env_laser"

}

And the potions? Was that the msitem_spawn thing? I thought that didnt work.

It works fine as described in this thread (middle with code quote):

http://msremake.fragism.com/gl-bin/foru ... 0&start=15



Just be sure to use "spawnstart" "1" and attach a trigger to it. The msitem will only stay as long as a dropped weapon would, no matter how high you set the duration. Still more than long enough for the player to decide whether or not he wants it - just make sure that he sees it.



Feh, even those super potions don't seem to provide the health I need these days though, I should add more.



Also really need to get started on that MS entity thread so we can gather all our collective data on the subject for future content developers.

How'd you make the bar glow like that? it looked like you just put a brush around it that went from white to transparent. How does that work. That would really help it making certain things obvious

I made a func_illusionary about 4 pixels around it set to rendermode "color" (white) with the RenderFX "fast pulse" (and renderamt around 255). Fast pulse causes it to fade in and out. The entity has the same targetname as the door, so it's turned off when the player breaks the door open. The evil green crystal's effect is accomplished in much the same way (slow wide pulsed green over a glass texture).

_________________

"People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Saint Thoth

 

[ante_delonge]

Come on <.<

 

[J-M v2.5.5]

After reading all the essays here (don't worry Thothie, I honestly always read your entire posts and they're informative, so don't mind the 'essay'/'long post' thing) it has become clear to me you did a fascinating job on the map! Gotta try sometime.