Tremulous Classic community map pack

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illwieckz
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Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by illwieckz »

⚠️ Update on 2023-05-01: see this post. ⚠️


So, I released my “Tremulous Classic” community map pack yesterday. :grin:

Here is a screenshot taken in game yesterday during the community game:

Image

You can download the “Tremulous Classic” community map at this address:

http://gg.illwieckz.net/dl/unvanquished/pkg/trem/

The whole map pack takes only 60Mb. :tongue:

This map pack is based on the last Tremulous gpp packages and heavily improved. A lot of work was done:

  • The textures were deduplicated and a fallback shader was added for each deduplicated file (the *_compat.shader files).

  • The outdated entity keywords were updated.

  • Each map now have a colorgrade, the mainly purpose of these colorgrades is to fix the gamma and some lighting stuff, but sometime I made some color tricks too.

  • It's a binary port, no one map was recompiled (most of them don't have source), I used my grtoolbox to do that.

  • All maps now use external lightmaps, it allows to compress them (embedded lightmaps are stored as uncompress bitmaps).

  • Some lightmaps were fixed by hand (paintover) like some Transit lightmaps that were very aliased (it's a very old map).

  • All textures are compressed in crunch format or webp format when it can't be crunched.

  • All sounds are now compressed in opus format.

  • A very High Res levelshot (4K) was remade for all the maps, so it looks good on your display when the map is loading.

  • All the map rely on a res-tremulous resource packages that ship all the common tremulous textures.

  • The ATCSHD replace ATCS and is the only map that ship textures itself since it the texture set is not part of the original tremulous texture set, if a post-gpp map rely on the ATCSHD textures, this map can use the map-atcshd as DEPS.

  • The Wasteland skybox (for the ATCSD map) now useq high quality webp compressed from png instead of the previous very ugly jpg.

  • The res-tremulous package ships ATCS textures even if the ATCS map is not shipped and if ATCSHD does not rely on them, it will allows future port that rely on them (like ATCS Zone Alpha).

  • Many issues were fixed, like some uppercase filenames when the shader name is lowercase (and vice versa), or sound path that uses backslash (windows style) separator path. So, this release can fix some issue that are as old as Tremulous.

  • All the sound and texture paths now are extension independent paths.

  • And many more things…

All the maps are auto-downloadable on my unvanquished servers (just callvote them). I started a server named gg.illwieckz.net { tremulous memories } with the [url=unv://gg.illwieckz.net:27966]gg.illwieckz.net:27966[/url] address and it has a tremulous map rotation list for the nostalgeek players. :wink:

All the maps ship navmesh and minimaps.

All the work I've done is versioned and stored on a git repository per package. You can find all the links for each package repository at this address:

https://github.com/interstellar-oasis/i ... llar-oasis

These maps are probably not the more expected by players but more are coming, but it was the first maps I must port (especially the res-tremulous package) to be able to port other ones, more shiny and more awesome. :cool:

It takes me about 8 months to design useful and reusable tools and thinking about “what is a port done right” and fixing Unvanquished issues raised by this project and adding functionalities needed by this project. So, this port also means the Daemon engine is more robust than before and more convenient for mappers than before.

After those 8 months of thinking, designing tool and elaborating good practices, it takes me only 3 days to port the whole tremulous package and I just waited 4 more days to take the time to refine some details with more hindsight.

So, it means porting other maps will not takes 8 months. :wink:

The first objective of this project is not to port maps, it's to crash test the daemon engine and mapping tools and the way people works with them (q3map2, I think about you). Because you can't workaround design flaws when you are porting dozens of maps, the only way to see this maps ported is to fix what is wrong or not as-good as it must be. :thumbup:

You can browse my Interstellar Oasis map port project where you will find more maps since now and even more soon.

:advgranger: :beer: :granger:

Last edited by illwieckz on Mon Aug 17, 2015 2:01 pm UTC, edited 1 time in total.

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Tom
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by Tom »

Image

And with a server... What to say... Great work! :wink: It's so bad that some authors of old maps did not gave the sources.

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Matth
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by Matth »

I see the effort that run into this and thank you for that, you did a great job!

Even with the new enhancements they still look like shit.
I understand the nostalgica and the word 'classic' but for me personally they are an unvanquished downgrade
and i hate to see them in unvq, at least if you port them nearly 1:1. :bomb:

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illwieckz
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by illwieckz »

I understand the nostalgica and the word 'classic' but for me personally they are an unvanquished downgrade.

Yes, it's not an official map pack at all I I'm the first who do not want to make it an official one for the exact same reason: they are very outdated maps. It's also why I launched an extra server for these maps, I don't want to put these maps in my rotation list on my regular unvanquished server, I don't want a newbie joining the server thinks these maps are the current unvanquished state of the art. :dazed:

But the most important part is the tools around: it will allows me to port maps that looks far far more better than these ones, and update them for community purpose (i.e. “fun”) and some looks great. You know, vega was in my list before Ingar ported it itself (and he did much than me: he updated it nicely).

I ported vega some month ago and never released it because the tools was most important in my point of view: I want tools that can be used by someone else than me, so I release the produced files only when someone else can redo them himself. :wink:

I hope these tools can be used by mappers that are doing new stuff like you. That's why I write those tools and I'm modifying other ones (like q3map2) to make the life easier to mappers. :wink:

These maps, and other ones in my repositories, are primarily a testing ground. For example I fixed the way Unvanquished allows player to list maps in-game because the issues were raised by this testing ground. Also, these bad-looking maps all use not-deprecated entity keys, which is not the case of official maps except the vega one, so this playground also spotted some issues. :thumbup:

And there is one last thing, during the last community game we played these maps, and the arachnid2 play was very special: the game was a long game even if aliens lost their base more than three time. I not remember who have win or lost (perhaps the alien lost, but they were near to win) but you know, the arachnid2 map is a well-known map for this game pattern. I've played many games on it with this pattern. :grin: On the arachnid2 map, I already experienced to be the only one human alive with a complete destroyed human base and still holding a construction kit, while tyrants and advanced goons were looking for me, then rebuild a telenode, a reactor, a medistation, an armoury, and see the reviving human team wins the game. I never get this feeling in any official Unvanquished map, and the first time we played arachnid2 on unvanquished, this pattern was reproduced. Even if this map looks bad and outdated, this map has a game play that can enjoy people a lot. :thumbup:

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Matth
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by Matth »

illwieckz wrote:

Yes, it's not an official map pack at all I I'm the first who do not want to make it an official one for the exact same reason: they are very outdated maps. It's also why I launched an extra server for these maps, I don't want to put these maps in my rotation list on my regular unvanquished server, I don't want a newbie joining the server thinks these maps are the current unvanquished state of the art. :dazed:

I see it exactly the same way. Would be a shame when new players think that those maps are regular unvq maps. I don't know if your idea of spawning a special server for it will fix this issue. New players may not know trem so the server name doesn't mean anything to them.

illwieckz wrote:

But the most important part is the tools around: it will allows me to port maps that looks far far more better than these ones, and update them for community purpose (i.e. “fun”) and some looks great. You know, vega was in my list before Ingar ported it itself (and he did much than me: he updated it nicely).

I fully agree. Thats a good thing. And in addition to this i was thinking about a map-policy to mark maps in a more reasonable way.
Like marking maps as stock[name] so that players know that those maps a stock unvq maps or fun[name] for maps that are more or like 'troll' maps and those are not meant to be serious. Also a way to differ crap maps from good (but who judge this anyways?).

illwieckz wrote:

I ported vega some month ago and never released it because the tools was most important in my point of view: I want tools that can be used by someone else than me, so I release the produced files only when someone else can redo them himself. :wink:

I hope these tools can be used by mappers that are doing new stuff like you. That's why I write those tools and I'm modifying other ones (like q3map2) to make the life easier to mappers. :wink:

I'm not sure if your tools are powerful enough to make compiled map reach unvq-quality-state. It's also not possible to do 'real' quality ports when it comes to map geometry. Also what about normal-mapping? This needs creative work done with the map-editor or art-tools. So i'm not sure what real value your tools have when it comes to this. But at least we now have a tool-set to make old maps work in trem with enhancements and i thank you for that.

illwieckz wrote:

These maps, and other ones in my repositories, are primarily a testing ground. For example I fixed the way Unvanquished allows player to list maps in-game because the issues were raised by this testing ground. Also, these bad-looking maps all use not-deprecated entity keys, which is not the case of official maps except the vega one, so this playground also spotted some issues. :thumbup:

:thumbup: :cool:

illwieckz wrote:

And there is one last thing, during the last community game we played these maps, and the arachnid2 play was very special: the game was a long game even if aliens lost their base more than three time. I not remember who have win or lost (perhaps the alien lost, but they were near to win) but you know, the arachnid2 map is a well-known map for this game pattern. I've played many games on it with this pattern. :grin: On the arachnid2 map, I already experienced to be the only one human alive with a complete destroyed human base and still holding a construction kit, while tyrants and advanced goons were looking for me, then rebuild a telenode, a reactor, a medistation, an armoury, and see the reviving human team wins the game. I never get this feeling in any official Unvanquished map, and the first time we played arachnid2 on unvanquished, this pattern was reproduced. Even if this map looks bad and outdated, this map has a game play that can enjoy people a lot. :thumbup:

Ofc we can learn of all good trem maps esp. when it comes to gameplay so yea, i agree. :smile:
If i remember correctly the unvq "map-system" was changed (among other things) to exclude tremulous maps being loaded into the unvq world. I'm not sure about this, i could be wrong but makes sense to me. I'm not part of unvqdev but for me i don't want to see a clusterfuck of bad maps in unvq. Maybe you opened Pandora's box? I still see positive and negative effects of all this. Let's see where this leads us..

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illwieckz
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by illwieckz »

If i remember correctly the unvq "map-system" was changed (among other things) to exclude tremulous maps being loaded into the unvq world. I'm not sure about this, i could be wrong but makes sense to me.

There was nothing done in order to exclude tremulous maps, but upstream compatibility was explicitly broken in order to have some better behavior, and (that is a good thing), the old maps must not prevent unvanquished to go ahead, so it already broke in the past and it will probably break again in the future.

There was minor changes that can break some stuff like the levelshot path and the .arena file path but the big change was the pk3 versioning system that brokes all the old maps. The thing is all old maps without a version postfix string are broken, and all maps with a version postfix are broken too since the bsp names must not have that prefix but old maps had. Also, all old maps without map- prefix are broken.

These breaks were not made in order to exclude old maps, it's just it was impossible to get this versioning system without breaking old maps, and old maps must not prevent unvanquished to go ahead, and I fully agree with that.

I'm not part of unvqdev but for me i don't want to see a clusterfuck of bad maps in unvq. Maybe you opened Pandora's box?

Yeah, I thought about that. The thing is you will never prevent people porting maps or making maps, the pandora's box was never closed, and the best you can do is to give good tools so they do it right.

Every month I see some people asking on some various channel/forum how to decompile a map. When other people ask why, they explain they just want to change some spawn place or port an arbitrary map from <insert a game name here> to <insert a game name here> .

The thing is people do that, and if they have no good tool, they will do it wrong. You see, these two cases can be done without decompiling, but people do it with a decompiler, they do it wrong, they do it bad, they lose hours of their precious time and they get a very ugly result and the result is an insult to the former author.

Here is an example, you probably know I have fun to port the terminus map for the UrT metro map, I was not the first guy who attempted to port it.

The first guy who tried to port this map did it the decompilation way (like every script kiddie), and this guy was more skilled than me on a mapping point of view, but the result is ugly (and have some allocation issues at map load). The guy loses hours of his time to get something wrong and something no one played because it was ugly or it was just crashing the engine.

This is a comparison between the emetic work an unknown decompiler guy did before me (take a
sickness bag) and the work I did:

Image
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So, my tools will not prevent people to port maps, but when they will try to do it, they will be able to do it right.

Also, some people just have fun to hack existing stuff. Look at this guy for example, he ported thousands maps from foreign games to Xonotic. Hopefully he did it the right way, with some tools that look similar to the ones I wrote.

So, people (like me) just have fun to put their hands on existing stuff to see what they can do with it, and sometime it's very good to do it because trying unexpected things is the better way to find bugs (see for example issues #780, #782 and #799).

There is many things I did on my computer only to have fun and I will never release them. If it's not illegal to hack stuff I get my hand on, sometime it's just illegal to redistribute what I did. So it's only for fun in many case, but doing this is very good to test the engine, because the more maps you have, the more features you test.

Sometime there is some deliberate regressions due to new stuff introduced, it's not a problem. But for everything else, having some maps from many different mappers and teams is a very good benchmark to look out for unexpected regressions. See #799 as an example, testing an Wolf:ET map (changes I can't distribute) showed it's needed to handle shader warnings and errors in a better way, and that is something needed by people who do legal stuff (like porting an existing game from an old engine to the Daemon engine).

i don't want to see a clusterfuck of bad maps in unvq

You can't prevent people to release bad maps. People don't have to port map to do crappy things, they just have to use radiant. The only thing you can do is to release good tools so the crap is less crappy.

If people want to port map, it's better if they have a tools like the ones I wrote, because they will do it, with or without good tools. If people want to make a map, it's better if they have a better radiant than the one we have today, in order to help them to do beautiful things easily.

But if people just want to make crap, they will release crap, and nobody can do nothing about it. Good or bad tools will change nothing. When Unvanquished will be more popular, it will be inevitable people will do things that does not fit at all with Unvanquished gameplay. You can't prevent people doing things like highrise, rotcanon or mission-one, they will just do it, even if playing these maps means you are not playing Trem/Unv (the point is, when the only servers available are all playing these maps, it means the game is dead).

Last edited by illwieckz on Wed Sep 02, 2015 10:02 am UTC, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by lamefun »

illwieckz wrote:

You can't prevent people doing things like highrise, rotcanon or mission-one, they will just do it,

Because these are great maps that have interesting quirks.

illwieckz wrote:

even if playing these maps means you are not playing Trem/Unv

I don't get this "logic". Well, in mission-one you have to clear obstacles to get to your base, but it still doesn't make it "not Trem/Unv".

illwieckz wrote:

(the point is, when the only servers available are all playing these maps, it means the game is dead).

Might there be a reason why "bad" maps are the last ones to go?

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illwieckz
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by illwieckz »

Might there be a reason why "bad" maps are the last ones to go?

Yeah, there is a reason but it's not in the topic, and it's not easy to hear, so I'll just refrain.

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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by illwieckz »

Here are some previews on enhancements I did on Arachnid2! :bsuit:

First, the vis was absolutely crazy:

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So I fixed a lot of this! Basically, many details were not details…

I also caulked almost everything I could! Basically most structures (pillars etc.) were full of internal but rendered faces.

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I also deleted some useless brushwork that was not visible and blended within other brushes (probably some traces of older iterations). There was also some useless brushes that were like copypasted on themselves…

Then I redid the lighting entirely, based on light emitting shaders instead of point lights!

Then I almost retextured everything (Chameleon is awesome!) trying to keep the looking of the original materials (more cement and strong rock than metal), hopefully the ex texture set is close to the e6 one that was partly used, for some textures I mashed up and recolored some textures from texture sets we have to create new ones (like the floor texture in large crate room), for some others (mainly dirty cement textures for walls) I upscaled existing ones in GIMP applying some expensive algorithm to get petter results than the very naive engine built-in rescale algorithm, then I produced some normal maps for these upscaled textures using the NormalMap GIMP plugin. For the dirt texture, I found an nice high res cc0 one on opengameart.org, tweaked the colors and generated a normal map too. I'll probably swap some remaining textures but it's already great!

I sometime took the freedom to make some slight minor changes like the amount of crates in large crate room, I just removed two of them to make them less bulky, we can suffer some more tris in 2018… :smile: The rule behind my changes I did is that if you don't notice them at first glance or without side-by-side comparison, they are good ones.

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So, the idea is to keep the original atmosphere, but with better texturing and lighting! :-)

The map repository is hosted there: github.com/InterstellarOasis/map-arachnid2_src.dpkdir, it still needs the res-legacy package.

People building the for-0.51.0 branch (see here for more information) can mapvote it on my development server (currently not up to date, I'll upload the one from which I produced the screenshots soon, because I just added some fixes and map compilation takes 1 hour and I have to got to bed :wink: )

:advgranger: :beer: :granger:

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Tom
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Re: Tremulous Classic community map pack

Post by Tom »

Nice work! God, I liked playing Marauder on Arachnid2.

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