Name: 12Castle File: 12Castle.bsp Author: Bruno & Spook Start Date: --AUG2002 End Date: 28JAN2003 Email: bbuehler@houston.rr.com Type: DM Size: Huge (8+ Players) Previous Maps: fe2002, wth, rfyl_troix, rfyl, rfyl_oz (the oz compatible rfyl), rfyl_deux, SOIR, LS1, Scourge,Tauxyx I,II,III, V14 (still in beta (rev 2b) though, I'll never get it done!) plus far too many that have gotten corrupted at some point towards the end resulting in a complete and tragic loss :( System Data: Pentium III / 960Mhz, 128 mb ram, 1.4GB swapfile, Video - 32MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS secondary for netvis (700MHz 128MB Compile Data: csg: Texture usage is at 5.27 mb (of 6.00 mb MAX) 141.54 seconds elapsed [2m 21s] bsp: 90.79 seconds elapsed [1m 30s] netvis: 2621 portalleafs 7704 numportals models 372/400 23808/25600 (93.0) planes 18234/32767 364680/655340 (55.6) vertexes 18165/65535 217980/786420 (27.7) nodes 8328/32767 199872/786408 (25.4) texinfos 2735/32767 109400/1310680 ( 8.3) faces 14139/65535 282780/1310700 (21.6) clipnodes 25199/32767 201592/262136 (76.9) leaves 5254/8192 147112/229376 (64.1) marksurfaces 16491/65535 32982/131070 (25.2) surfedges 64669/512000 258676/2048000 (12.6) edges 33663/256000 134652/1024000 (13.1) texdata [variable] 5527588/6291456 (87.9) lightdata [variable] 0/4194304 ( 0.0) visdata [variable] 267834/2097152 (12.8) entdata [variable] 108709/524288 (20.7) 144 textures referenced === Total BSP file data space used: 7877665 bytes === ================================================== Netvis Server Statistics [15408 portals total] System Progress : [15408 portals] (100.00 percent) Server Progress : [10486 portals] (68.06 percent) Client #1 Status : [ 4922 portals] (31.94 percent) [Julie] ================================================== 4381.55 seconds elapsed [1h 13m 1s] rad: 102657 base patches 253 opaque faces 1441107 square feet [207519424.00 square inches] 48052 direct lights (Doh!!!) I took a snapshot of the text file while it was compiling so I could see what was going on. Unfortunately it fiished soon after that I ran it didn't like the attributes of one entity and overwrote the entire log file with an entsonly compile, argh! It took about 11 hours to run HLRAD in sparce mode. Using Zoners Half Life Tools Rev. 2.5.3 _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ This is an adaptation of Spooks 11Castle.bsp. It has many secrets too many to list in this text file. A file listing those secrets is bound to end up circulating soon. In the meantime Spook will have this map and the mysterious secrets file on his site. It's a PDF and I don't want to hear about the glitch in the layout of one of the graphics. I'm a mapper not a bloody publisher. There are two stories about this joint project the short version and the long one. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Short Story: A lot of thanks to Spook for being a real trooper, good advisor and friend during the project. Thanks for letting me continue the project your castles and castle maps are great. And I can't wait to start a grassroots project with you soon. The Long Story: (probably boring if you're not a mapper, heck it's probably boring if you are a mapper!) This fun project started out in August 2002 as I took a look at a beta copy of Spooks map 11Castle.bsp I had the insane idea of adding a landscapeand visual bariers between the castles in order to increase framerates. By the by, Spook got the framerates down on 11Castle so the idea of adding the landscape between the castles on 11 castle was ditched in favour of releasing it and starting a new joint mapping project wherein I (Bruno) would build a barrier land between the two. While Spook prepared the castles for dropping into spaces that I left for them. Fate decided to give deal the project a blow when gremlins destroyed Spooks PC. So I kept building and building and building. I soon came to realize that I had eaten up 57500 patches in my area of the map. Gadzooks, so I started deconstructing and doing some brush simplification. I spent at least a weeks time doing several compiles of the area in order to check for stickies and ensure that I wasn't going to have problems when Spook landed the modified castles. With work (yeah the job that pays the bills around here) eating up most of my energy and time for the following month. I got concerned since Spooks PC was still on the blink and time was finally getting freed up. So we talked about the situation and decided that I'd land the non-modified castles into the map and trim the edges up to fit if need be. Well, by then Spooks paying job started giving him no excess of free time to play with it. So we decided that I'd complete the map. So I got started in fitting things in really well so they looked as if they were made to be there. I soon found that my initial measurements and angles didn't quite fit and there were gaps all over the world around the castles and overlaps where I didn't suspect there would be any. After spending a weeks worth of free time sorting that out. I did a compile and while I wasn't shocked with the results I found the textures for Hell were too ordinary and the textures from Heaven were a bit too drab. So having free reign and now an incredible amount of time on my hands at work. I started to make Heaven and Hell specific textures. Oh yes they started out with the same textures. Hellification of a texture includes an increase of gamma, red of rgb balance of 10-20% and an increase of contrast with a reduction of brightness by 5%. Heavenification was the other way around except no color tweaking just the application of a Hue map to make the colouring a bit interesting on a very small scale. It's actually not noticable in 256 color mode. After I modified all the textures I packed them back into the wad file we were using and did a selective replace on each castle. This was a very time consuming process as after hellification the textures didn't look quite right. In fact they were all off for some reason. The reason was that I had rotated the hell castle 90 degrees and although texture lock was on something happened. so I realigned all of the textures. Heaven was far easier though. So I had two more months on my hands before the slated release to beta. The first thing I decided to do was embelish the castles a wee bit, change this or that around for effect add a title display and more teleports than I can remember. The second thing I decided to do , was experiment with the custom build of zoners tools and using the null texture. So what did this ace do? I did what any insane person would do on a map of this scale. I replaced everything that wasn't a ladder or ~aaatrigger or water or any other entity type texture. I then spent an entire week re-applying textures to the faces I could see in the map. I would soon see the folley of my ways but not recognize it for what it was until I had wasted an entire week and a half trying and retrying to compile the map. HLRAD seemed to complete but wasn't finishing the text file, it was always stopping its appending to the text file on the third bounce! After this I was sure that I had cocked it all up by trying it although it did reduce the patches back to 72k it never could handle the file size by my reckoning. So I went back to the original zoners tools (version cited above). And it compiled nicely in about 12 hours start to finish. But then I wasn't happy with the framerates and knew I could improve them so I went in and framesd off all beveled parts of the castles that could not be climbed on with clipp brushes. Then started doing it to rock formations, then carried it into tunnels and such just to cut the portals down from 17k. Then I started applying hint brushes wherever I could see a need to force vis to not see around the corners. The end result was an increase in the slower areas of 5 to 10 frames, good enough for me! Finally after two more alpha compiles finding I had too many temporary entities, a few mismatches by testing between J, Spook & I, that I released it to beta. There were only three very noticeable problems with the 15 beta testers on at once. Two sticky brushes and there were some null textures that I missed. I think I've got it all fixed. A lot of thanks to Spook for ending up letting me use his castles. I know how difficult it was to see the project come to a close and not being able to do much more than alpha testing and give input. He's a great guy for sticking through and doing what he could to help finish it. I did not change them very much so he really deserves a good share of credit. Hopefully fate won't deal the project a blow by blowing up my pc should we try another attempt at a joint project LOL. Best Regards to all that have had the fortitude to read this far. If you like the map please tell both of us. I'd like a reason to suggest starting another joint project from the ground up. If you don't like it direct it it at me, it's my fault. Additional Thanks to: [CBS] TJ & [CBS] Kentucky Shan for both hosting and beta testing and the other Beta Testers: [RDC] Spook Juliette [CBS] Tech 22 [CBS] Sniper7 Omicron [CBS] Scooby1 [RDC] TinHead [RDC] GoonieGooGoo [RDC] JohnStud [CBS] DIH [CBS] Sir Outlaw [RDC] Slayer II ________________________________________________________________________ Copyright / Permissions 2003 All rights except those expressly waived are retained. No one may distribute this level unless this file is included with no modifications. This BSP may be distributed over the Internet and/or BBS systems without permission. Permission must be obtained from Bruno and Spook before this BSP may be distributed by any means other than over the Internet and/or BBS systems. _________________________________________________________________________ Thanks: A special thanks to my girfriend and fellow player Juliette for helping me Alpha test and understanding that when I start messing with the map at ten o'clock I will zone out and not realize the time has passed till it's midnight or later. Oh yeah and for waking my dumb ass up after zoning out so that I can go to work.