Moon base map by bsp1t, the revival

Post by **illwieckz** » Wed Nov 01, 2023 9:03 pm UTC

Current download (0.7.2)

The map features an infested human base on the moon, for some reasons the infestation started from the garden!

A peaceful garden on the moon waiting to be infested by aliens.

I've found on my hard drive an old backup of map-moonbase_a7.zip by bsp1t from 2014 (backup here), and there was a source in it, so I repackaged the map and even rebuilt it.

See the original thread: moonbase map concept.

Let's welcome map-moonbase 0.7.1!

I did more than repackaging:

I did a strong revamp of shaders to fix syntax issues and to update to the more efficient syntax.
I also fixed all the texture paths in models (editing 3ds files the hexadecimal way ) and then dropped all the workarounds for them, especially the workarounds that were done for older buggy versions of q3map2 that were not looking for absolute texture paths when model had relative one.
I noticed almost all walls/ceiling/floors materials were disabling culling, meaning every non-visible side of the map had lightmap computed for them -and rendered in game, this is now fixed.
I added proper metadata files (levelshot, arena file…).
The default bases were redone to be ready for bots (have armoury, medipad, drill, leech by default).
I moved and oriented properly the intermission cameras.
Flying objects are not flying anymore.
Lightmap is applied on blood splat.
The map now uses standard common materials.

The dpk is huge, 48MB, but that's in fact the demonstration of how Urcheon is powerful at producing optimized dpk maps, since the original one was weighting 114MB! This is specially impressive since there now more data in the repackaged map dpk: 4K levelshot, deluxe map for every light map, etc.

The repackaged dpk can be found there:

gg.illwieckz.net/dl/unvanquished/pkg/map-moonbase_0.7.1.dpk

The repository is there:

github.com/InterstellarOasis/map-moonbase_src.dpkdir

I already noticed various things that should be fixed:

Doors only clip weapons one way (lol), major gameplay issue .
Goldfish eye may have to not be culled, very minor texturing issue .
Some blood textures may be applied in better ways, as some of them look to be suddenly cut down in a unrealistic way.
Many lights are just point lights without any visible source, it would be better to have light-emitting shaders instead.

So please host the map and play it and make any comment about issues you find, and if you have suggestions for fixing the door one-sided clipping issue, please share your thoughts!

Post by **illwieckz** » Wed Sep 30, 2026 1:09 am UTC

Here comes Moon base 0.7.2.

I do remind this is an unfinished map.

Download

The map is playable on my server: gg.illwieckz.net
The map is autodownloadable on it.

Changes

It fixes some short light falloff due to some pointlight's spawnflags mistakes in the map source.
Nothing else is fixed in the sources.
The lights are still pointlight placeholders and ugly.
This is also rebuilt with noFast q3map2 light falloff and with linear lighting.

I have not increased the lightmap resolution, so there are remaining places where shadows are ugly. This would have to be done once the lighting is actually done properly, not just relying on placeholders.

How it now looks

How 0.7.1 looked at the time on Unvanquished 0.54 (on setviewpos 1996 -760 -200 -50 9):

How 0.7.1 would have looked when rebuilt with noFast q3map2 light falloff and with linear lighting but without fixing the pointlight's spawnflags mistakes:

How 0.7.2 looks, when the pointlight falloff is fixed, the q3map2 light falloff is correct, and linear lighting is used through the whole baking and rendering pipeline:

The factsit may be too bright in some places and the lights looks too round, and other things like that just comes from the facts those are pointlights placeholders floating in the air in the middle of the corridor. They should be replaced with light emitting surfaces instead.

If gloomy atmosphere is preferred, then the light intensity should be completely reworked, but such taste topic was out of the scope of that release, that release was meant to fix the bug in the map source.

I remade the levelshot (setviewpos -4705 31 -373 -75 -6, without alien models), before:

After:

We can see how the lights and colors are now correct with the linear pipeline (the sRGB thing), before, the light was dim, but there are no clouds on the moon! It looked like the whole screen had a grey filter over it! The grass wasn't supposed to be gray… Also, before, the shadows were too darky to be natural.

But more importantly, we can compare the Earth colors compared to the skybox: the Earth colors are now rendered in game as it was always expected to be:

That's exactly why we need the linear pipeline, to render the textures the way the texture artists expected them to look, and about Earth, the way things look like in real life (like the real photo, at least)!