Update on 2023-05-01: see this post.
So, I released my “Tremulous Classic” community map pack yesterday.
Here is a screenshot taken in game yesterday during the community game:
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.
This map pack is based on the last Tremulous gpp packages and heavily improved. A lot of work was done:
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The textures were deduplicated and a fallback shader was added for each deduplicated file (the *_compat.shader files).
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The outdated entity keywords were updated.
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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.
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It's a binary port, no one map was recompiled (most of them don't have source), I used my grtoolbox to do that.
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All maps now use external lightmaps, it allows to compress them (embedded lightmaps are stored as uncompress bitmaps).
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Some lightmaps were fixed by hand (paintover) like some Transit lightmaps that were very aliased (it's a very old map).
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All textures are compressed in crunch format or webp format when it can't be crunched.
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All sounds are now compressed in opus format.
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A very High Res levelshot (4K) was remade for all the maps, so it looks good on your display when the map is loading.
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All the map rely on a res-tremulous resource packages that ship all the common tremulous textures.
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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.
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The Wasteland skybox (for the ATCSD map) now useq high quality webp compressed from png instead of the previous very ugly jpg.
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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).
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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.
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All the sound and texture paths now are extension independent paths.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
You can browse my Interstellar Oasis map port project where you will find more maps since now and even more soon.