==RTCW MULTIPLAYER MAP==================================== Title : Valhalla File Name : mp_valhalla.PK3 File Size : 9,115 kb Author(s) : Reggie 'Panzer Dragoon' Carolipio Date of Release : 7-08-02 Recommended number of players : 24-32 Type of map : MP only Email Address : dungeonbuster@hotmail.com Misc. Author Info : This is my second map. My first didn't turn out quite so well so I started from scratch with this one. The first one was a concept similar to this one where the Allies would fight through a small town to get to the bunker beneath SS headquarters at Nuremburg. Description : (disclaimer: there is no truth to the following save that the Nazis did have the beginnings of an atomic program which was aborted after the destruction of key assets during the war, such as their heavy water experiments) Operation Gotterdammerung Target: VALHALLA It's February, 1945. The Allied advance through Europe on the West and the Soviet rush through the East have caught Nazi Germany in a vice. The failure of the Ardennes Offensive has nearly sealed the fate of the Reich. Refusing to admit defeat, Hitler continues to direct the war from Berlin. Allied commanders want to make sure that he does not escape. Intelligence gathered indicates that a command bunker, codenamed 'Valhalla', was constructed under great secrecy in the late 30's to the early 40's. Location has now been verified, placing the complex deep beneath the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden. At the same time, OSA and OSS intelligence operations have discovered the existence of the 'Gotterdammerung' project, similar to the United States' own Manhattan Project. However, it appears that these particular scientists may have actually managed to build a working weapon. Although we do not believe that they have the necessary materials to finish the warhead, we are not taking the chance that the prototype rocket could be used in desperation by the Fuhrer against Moscow or London. It must be destroyed. We believe that the Gotterdammerung project was moved to a secret staging area for the final testing of the missile components. We believe that this area is beneath Valhalla. This provides a rare opportunity for us. The destruction of the bunker, the last bastion for the Fuhrer and his cohorts, and the end to the Nazi atomic program. If the rocket is being readied, there must be stores of rocket fuel at the site. Blowing the stores of volatile rocket fuel should destroy the bunker. The enemy may have taken precautions to protect the fuel. Dynamite planted somewhere in a key location in the system should set off a chain reaction that will blow the rocket, and the fuel. Allied bombing over the site has worn down the Axis defenses set up over the bunker, allowing us to send in a team of specialists. Taking control of the bunker's main elevator that runs into the heart of the mountain, the team has entered the tunnels beneath the Bavarian Alps and are on their way to the bunker. This is almost certainly a suicide mission, but one that must succeed. One thing is clear...STOP THE FUHRER! Additional Credits to : Too many wW2 films, anime ^_^, my brother for putting up with my insane map testing sessions on his machine (Schnell! Schnell!) Development machine : Dual Athlon MP 1200 with 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 Machine(s) tested on : Pentium III 933, 128MB, TNT2 Xtasy GeForce 4 MX 440 Dual Athlon MP 1200 with 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 ================================================================ * Install Information * Unzip the file to your machine. Make sure you unzip it into a location where you can get to it. You should see two files: mp_valhalla.pk3 rtcw_readme.txt (this file) Copy mp_valhalla.pk3 into the /Main folder located where you had installed 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein'. You'll know this from seeing other .PK3 files in there as well (windows 2000 owners may have to make sure 'hide extensions of known file types' is not checked under Folder Options to see them). More to the point, you'll see a bunch of files under /Main that begin with 'mp'. That is the right place. Once you've done it correctly and start up a server, you should see 'Valhalla' listed as one of the maps that you can use if you wish to host a game. That's all there really is to it. * Play Information * Level name(s) : Valhalla RTCW version required : It should work with any build, although I suggest the latest patched version (1.33). It was tested before, and after, the GOTY patch and it works fine as far as I've been able to tell. New Cutscenes : Yes; ROQ for overview -=Gameplay tips=- The map emphasizes teamplay. Working as a team will lead either side to victory. Lone wolves will have a harder time at it than a team that sticks together. This is also a long map to play. The default time for it is 12m to allow for spawning and running from one end of the map to the next. It's a huge map. More daring souls might want to play the map in a much shorter time span. There are a few things in the map that players should know about the spawns in order to get the most out of it. Axis' initial spawn is at the top of the bunker, in the main entry. This is so they can ready their defenses. This is NOT a designated spawn area. Axis players will have to secure the Fuhrerbunker (hit the flag) in order to activate their mid-level spawn for reinforcements. Otherwise, they will spawn in the V-5 Rocket area at the extreme bottom end of the map. Late Axis members coming over to the game will spawn at the bottom of the map, if the mid-level spawn was not activated by securing the Fuhrerbunker (taking the flag). There is usually more than one way to get to a particular section of the bunker. Some ways are sneaky, others more obvious. The support scaffolding around the rocket can be climbed. The silo motor objective is there more as a bonus than anything. If anyone is crazy enough to try for it (if you have to get every point possible on the map), it's there for you. ================================================================ What follows below are most of the technical aspects of the map, problems encountered, tips for beginners like me, and a list of resources that I had used to create the map. You don't have to read the following to play the map. ================================================================ * Construction * Base : New level from scratch Editor(s) used : GtkRadiant 1.2.1 - 1.2.9 and assorted nightly builds, Ydnar's Q3map, www.planetpointy.com for WolfCompile, bobToolz, portalviewer Time to compile using GTKRadiant's q3map -vis -light : 1h34m ROQ facts : Screenshots for pjBmp2Avi taken at 800x600 This produced fast, nearly 'real time' results and dramatically reduced the size of the ROQ in compiling. Your mileage may vary depending on your machine, settings, etc.. Final TGA sequence exported at 256x128 Inolen's ROQ creator appears to be able to support sequences of about 400+ images. Scripting : Examples taken from mp_beach and lessons learned Total construction time : Off and on, three months Known Bugs : Lighting is very off in several areas. As a result, players may look a bit overexposed in areas where they should not be or exceptionally dark. The same with the red lights scattered about. In some areas, they work correctly. In other areas, they obviously don't (the ducts). This affects only the dynamic models, although the Recreation Room suffers from a severe case of hard shadows on dynamic models. I am still trying to figure that one out. Even using more junior lights did not help. There were some funky flag bursting problems. I have one instance where this works correctly, but for some odd reason, my map won't accept anymore (i.e. they compile wrong and DON'T explode, the invisible part of the flag flickers in and out, etc.). If you see a flag and it doesn't explode when you shoot it, it's because I made it 'unshootable'. The V-5 rocket area used to have catwalk brushes with the fence texture, allowing the player to look through the texture, and the 'missile clip'texture, allowing players to shoot through it. However, compiling the map introduced some odd problems, such as some of these floors turning solid (you could still see through them), making them no longer 'shoot through'. Fixing the problem floors solved the problem with those floors, but broke other ones, and vice versa, for some reason after compiling them. This happened with the q3map that came with GTKRadiant(1.2.9) and with Ydnar's own q3map. I soon gave up trying to get this particular feature to work and replaced the catwalk textures with solid steel and wooden planks. Sorry, but at one point it felt a lot like playing Russian roulette with the compiler (can I shoot through the texture or can't I). Glass doesn't work right (i.e. it's not transparent), but it's destructable. As a result, the glass suffers from a severe case of glare and is opaque. You can shoot out the glass, though. Shadows have very rough edges in several cases (pixelicious). The lightgrid was raised to 512 in order for the map to compile. Given the size and complexity of the map, it's also unstable from a .map point of view? The addition/use of new textures (new, as in using more textures from the existing RTCW list that have not been used anywhere else in the level to any great extent) and additional brush changes have caused severe problems in some backups (i.e. the map compile failing at the last stage of StitchVertexLighting, the dreaded 'MAX_SHADERS_EXCEEDED' issue, horrible performance issues, spawns no longer working as they should, etc). This, more than anything else, is probably why I am more than a little wary of making even small modifications to the map at this stage. Some of the issues faced, though, seem focused more on RTCW mapping than anything else from what I have read in the forums. Most of these issues surfaced at the end of this particular development cycle and it was either scrap the level or spend weeks more in tracking down exactly what caused the errors above (Argh! But it worked yesterday and removing that brush STILL didn't fix it). Whatever the invisible edge was, I managed to get back on the safe side of the tracks and decided to release the level as it is. Hopefully it will be fun for someone out there as it stands. Since this is my first 'official' map, there's probably a ton of other problems that I haven't noticed but lots of others will pick up on. Please let me know and I will see what I can do to help. Thanks! ================================================================ Lessons learned: There were a few things that I learned the hard way. I'll list a few of them here if you're a beginning mapper and need some tips on where to get started. Beginning mappers (me) should try something out small first and then move onto the bigger stuff later. Much frustration and confusion can be avoided. :) Read. I cannot stress this enough. Read as much as you can on the do's and don'ts of level building. If you can, work at the same time that you are reading the tutorial for it to sink in. Play with the editor. Make silly stuff before getting serious. You'd be surprised by how many times you find yourself doing things you said that you wouldn't be caught dead doing early on...even later on! There's a lot of GREAT resources out there and the community is growing all the time. There's a lot of incredible talent that is willing to share their knowledge out there. Learn to find it, use it, absorb it. Make a printout and carry it with you to the bathroom. ;) Just don't sit on your butt expecting to be the best mapper in the world without consulting those who have already gone before you. I left a list of resources that I tapped below at the end of this readme. Don't rely on only one tutorial. Some tutorials explain things better than others, but combined may give you the answer you're looking for (i.e. my search for hint brush explanations and implementation demonstrations). I found out that there is really no one 'right' way to do things. Learn as much as you can from what everyone has posted and experiment! Search the community forums. They're chock full of great info from other mappers, programmers, designers, etc.. They're one of the best sources that you could ever rely on out there and will keep you up on the latest changes and problems that other mappers/designers/programmers are having. Issues you are dealing with might be someone else's problem, too. If you get massive performance issues when testing your map, be sure you've exited your editor so it's not up in the background. :) Level building is a very different animal than traditional CAD or 3D content creation. Since you're making an interactive environment, there's a lot of nuances that you'll run into. GtkRadiant usually won't tell you if you've gone too far in many cases, until you decide to go ahead and try to compile your map. Be sure to make backups and to 'test' compile your map using BSP with no flags just to see if it compiles correctly or spits out errors for you to track down. This is best for when you're getting into the scripting part of it. A leaky map is easy to fix, but some of the more esoteric problems (MAX_SHADERS_EXCEEDED, your script suddenly NOT working with your map even though NOTHING was changed other than compiling a new map, etc.) are a little more tricky. Test, test, test! Especially when you start with lighting. ================================================================ Other Changes: The GOTY edition/patch of the game changed a few of the textures, de-Nazifying them. I can understand why it was probably done (PC reasons). For the sake of keeping the level in it's original state, I have included the original textures, renamed so as to be used in the game. The textures that I used that had been changed were: brick_c04 (now orig_brick) wood_c22 (now orig_wood) No shaders were changed to accomodate these textures, but they appear to work just fine. The original textures shipped with the original copies of RTCW and were changed with the GOTY patch from what I was able to gather. An insane amount of thanks to the following: Id Software www.idsoftware.com -for just being Id Qeradiant www.qeradiant.com -for the excellent forums and providing the community with a wonderful tool. Tram Design www.planetwolfenstein.com/tramdesign/ -for their excellent tutorials on many of the basics; their spawn tutorials solved a big problem I was having with the spawns on my map. They also have a good tutorial on how to make AVIs out of your demos, some of which was used in the making of the ROQ for Valhalla Shaderlab shaderlab.com -for Ydnar and his excellent q3map tool. I hope to see the next one out soon! Planetpointy www.planetpointy.com -for WolfCompile Return to Castle Wolfenstein 4 Dummies http://www.kan.org/michael/RTCW/ -for Ifurita's excellent RTCW FAQ. If you need the basics explained about RTCW in general, this is a great resource. It is where I found out about Inolen's ROQ creator, and the rough procedure on what goes into making one. Inolen www.inolen.com www.fileplanet.com/dl/dl.asp?madness/q3progs/roq.zip -for his ROQ creator front-end Paul Roberts bmp2avi@cherryjam.prestel.co.uk -for his pjbmp2avi program that helped put together some of the demo footage for use in the Valhalla ROQ; unfortunately, the site that he indicates for the tool is no longer working but the package is available from Tramdesign in their rtcw2avi tutorial. Surface www.planetwolfenstein.com/surface/tutorials/objectives.html -for eyeronik's great tutorials Gonnakillya's Smackdown Schmeglio www.planetquake.com/smackdown/hinttutorial.html -for finally putting into simple terms what hint brushes actually do for a map and more importantly, how to implement them. A must read for beginner mappers like me. Thanks! Bubba's Arena Mapping planetquake.com/bubba/mapping.html -another must read for beginners and experts. Great foundation materials for getting started mapping. I started off with a lot of what was in here and am still finding more stuff to do. V2Rocket.Com www.v2rocket.com -for the wealth of knowledge about V2s and the WW2 launch footage used in the ROQ If I have forgotten someone or something, please let me know. * Copyright / Permissions * Authors may NOT use this level as a base to build additional levels. THIS LEVEL IS NOT MADE, DISTRIBUTED, OR SUPPORTED BY NERVE SOFTWARE OR GREY MATTER INTERACTIVE STUDIOS. ELEMENTS TM & (C) GREY MATTER INTERACTIVE STUDIOS, NERVE SOFTWARE, AND ID SOFTWARE. You MAY distribute this level, provided you include this file, with no modifications. You may distribute this file in any electronic format (BBS, Diskette, CD, etc) as long as you include this file intact, with NO charge (other than incidental charges for time spent on-line).