Octopus Overlords

I'm a big fan of map editors. Many times, the fact that a game has one will tip the balance of the game in it's favor. So, what are your favorite maps and/or attempts to make maps?

Mine:

Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic - The premise was this: Elves and dwarves lived peacefully on a land until they pushed off of the island by a band of Undead and Orcs. These had been brewing underground for millenia, awoke, and pushed through, destroying their land and sending them running to an island to rebuild and reattack. The map opened with you getting ready to make your push back onto the island. I gave the good heroes Rings of Life that they could replenish their land that was now wastes and desert. Basically, it was designed so that two people could ally to destroy the forces of darkness, or it could be played alone. Alas, a computer crash destroyed the map.

So, what's yours?

Mine was designing a beloved level for Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games. It was called Winter Wonderland, and may still be available today.
I don't totally recall the premise, but it had something to do with rescuing Joey Joe Joe, but the doors to the building he was held in were mined, and stepping in the wrong place would set of a chain reaction of explosions, killing most of your squad.. It was FUN!

Eel Snave wrote:I'm a big fan of map editors. Many times, the fact that a game has one will tip the balance of the game in it's favor. So, what are your favorite maps and/or attempts to make maps?

Mine:

Age Of Wonders: Shadow Magic - [snip]

So, what's yours?

<preen> I wrote the official documentation for the Shadow Magic editor, even if it did get bumped onto the disk. My favorite map, then, would be the one for the tutorial, including the city of New Stratos.</preen>


I also once designed a complex shooter training map for the original Unreal that I used to introduce some friends to FPS games. It was basically a tutorial map, but designed for an experienced player to actually stand over the player's shoulder and explain as they played. It went all the way from basic movement and jumping to sniping techniques, rocket techniques, and circle-strafing. It worked exceptionally well, too.

I'd also point to a couple of Morrowind plugins I did, but they were private ones. They were houses, very nice ones, but I used so many elements from the other assorted plugins that I had that I couldn't release them to others.

Well I enjoyed my brief Morrowind modeling forray - I made a few mods with custom graphics - before I could no longer use 3ds MAX (and i wasn't about to buy it myself!) - I worked with a few people and on the forums we slowly figured out morrowind animation - i had the first dragon out there (though it was crappy hehe) - and my boneraptors saw a fair bit of use, and my ent type things and bat type thingies were used also (mostly in giants and my own woodenfel).

But since then i've lost all hope for modding - *almost* - XSI holds new hope - they have XSI:EXP for free for Half Life 2 - but they also have an entry level package for $500 now! I have money sunk into Cinema 4D - which is great for prerendered stuff - but XSI holds the promise of future modding projects for me yay! (And I believe both apps support the new .fbx de facto file standard for interchanging projects)

I still get queries on my website for my animation groups which is kind of cool - i actually ended up uploading the files again after several email requests.

Map editor? What's that?

Dirt wrote:Map editor? What's that?

BOO! GET OFF THE ROAD!

I used to be able to pull off some pretty wild shit in Quake 3 using GTKRadient. In fact, while I'm one of the few who thought it was a half-way decent game, I always enjoyed the simplicity of the editor the most. Very time consuming, though.

I once built two small rooms joined by a short straight corridor for Doom 2.

that's all folks. move along please. nothing to see here!

That's better than I ever got, Andrew.

Eel Snave wrote:That's better than I ever got, Andrew.

Werd. I never got beyond making the corridor.

I did a few scenarios for the old Great Battles series. One of them was good, I guess; it was used as a tournament scenario.

Starcraft maps ... and lots of 'em ... with storylines ... and triggers ... and lots and lots of fun.

And they're all gone.

The farthest I ever got was creating in embarrassing detail my workplace at the time as a Duke Nukem 3D level. Basically so I could bow it up with rockets whenever I chose.

I made a few levels for Rune back when it was newer. I started out really really amateur and was starting to get not too bad before I stopped. A couple of my later levels made it as the "map of the day" on Rune sites and what not.

They were mostly arena levels and featured bridges as a heavy theme. One was AR-GoblinTowers, two towers stretching high above the clouds connected by a bridge. Spectators could wait and watch from the tops of the tower while the combatants found down on the narrow bridge. Next was AR-RiverRage, which was a large wooden bridge in a forested area, near a temple. The bridge was over a cliff with rapids. There was also a trap door on the bridge that spectators could spring. Finally, my last map was AR-BrokenFury, which was a series of rickety wooden bridges at different elevations with jump pads to move between them. There were planks missing and stuff like that, with a pit of lava below. Players watch from a temple embedded into the cliff with a little head ball game to keep them entertained.

I made one level called "Joust" where people stood on platforms on opposite ends of a long rail, over a lava pit. Each guy had the giant swords. Then one of them could pull a lever to start the platforms speeding toward each other. The object, of course, was to knock the other guy off the other platform or simply kill him. There was also a normal fighting arena on another level if people didn't want to joust.

These maps sound better than they were, though. The architecture was always very simple and I could never quite get lighting down right. But I was getting better with each and every map. I can't help but think that if I had stuck with it, I might be making maps today for something like UT2004, and they might actually be on par with some of the higher quality maps that are out there. Oh well.

My best map moments were with the Jagged Alliance map editor. I worked with a bunch of guys from the Bear Pit JA site and made a game addon with about 65 maps, I believe. About 20 of those maps were mine - lots of work though

Seekre

That's so cool.

I've got a friend who is making a campaign for Warcraft 3 with in-game cinematics and triggers and the like. Pretty cool stuff.

My first and only experience with a map editor was when "Duke Nukem 3D" shipped with the "Build" editor.

I WENT NUTS!

I spent literally hundreds of hours with that thing. Up until 3:00 am on work nights letting my imagination run wild. I actually completed only 3 levels, but EACH of those took in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 hours to complete, and I was so damn proud of them. I used every square inch of the grid on each of those. The levels were huge. One of them I went through co-op with a buddy over the phone line. After 5 hours, we were only halfway through it and had to quit. It played like a massive Doom level.

That level was "A Journey Into Hell" (Filename 'Descent3'--this was before there was an actual Descent 3 game). You started aboveground, and worked your way underground, deeper and deeper, into caverns, across underground rivers, deeper and deeper, darker and darker, until you finally emerged into...HELL! Hell was all red, I mean ALL RED, just varying shades of red. It turned out really beautiful only you never noticed because you were fighting for your life. The few people that played it really liked it.

My second attempt (final version Filename 'Area51e') took place in the desert night, with dry lightning flashing all around. You start in a helicopter, jump out onto the desert floor, watch the helicopter fly away over the cliffs, then proceed through a ghost town, further through the desert until you arrive at AREA 51! Groom Lake is an actual lake in this level. Across from the lake is a cliff you must climb way up until you reach the secret military base. Everything's locked so you get in through a vent hidden behind a bush then go through the sewer system. Go through a couple buildings and come out into a courtyard. The dry lightning has now given way to a drenching thunderstorm--that part turned out awesome, gradually you can hear the rain get louder until you come out into it. Go through a high security building and then come out into a secret canyon where the government is storing a captured UFO. Really diabolical traps to keep you from getting to the UFO, but once you get there, you jump up under the exact center of the elevated flying saucer and are teleported inside. More surprises there, culminating in great fun within the cockpit involving firing the UFOs weapons and watching the results. I put in well over 100 hours creating that one.

My final completed started you off abandoned on an asteroid. I'll be merciful and spare you the details on that one, though I will say you travel from there to an interstellar space liner terminal. This may be my favorite one.

Ahh! 1996...What a great year!

My proudest moments with a map editor was using FreeSpace's editor (FRED), mainly because the logic-based event system was so intuitive and powerful:

1. There was a fairly decent fan outcry when my FreeSpace 1 mission "Ryleh Rising" didn't make the final cut in an Interplay mission competition. The fans loved that the mission involved pretty hairy dogfighting sequences WITHOUT shields, all in the name of stopping some alien terrorists from a suicide bomb attack on a Terran space station (which was the only technology available during the timeline in the game when I set the mission). The outcry led to "hardcore" multiplayer missions in FreeSpace 2 based on unshielded ships, which was cool.

2. Another was with a mission I created at a LAN party to show how important beam weaon arc facings were to capital ship combat in FreeSpace 2. The idea was to show a destroyer in a hit-and-run operation on a convoy of much stronger capital ships. By placing the attacker in an optimal position, it took advantage of some blind spots in the defenders and did substantial damage before losing the battle. When a bunch of players wanted to jump in fighters to tip the balance in favor of the attacker, I had the FreeSpace 2 mission "The Queen" -- which made the cut in the FreeSpace 2 fan mission competition and onto the FreeSpace 2: Space Sim of the Year Edition.

3. At another LAN party, I had a request to create a Terran/Shivan mission. Using the player-flyable Shivan fighter, I created a furrball over a capital ship construction yard called "Shivan Incursion." The reaction was extremely favorable, and people were dying for my next tweak to the multiplayer mission. The extensive play-testing also payed off when the mission was accepted into the final group of the FreeSpace 2 fan competition and onto the FreeSpace 2: Space Sim of the Year edition.

The only problem was that we tested the mission extensively only at the medium-hard difficulty level, and the mission was self-completing either at very hard or easy difficulty levels -- which led to some cheating on PXO, unfortunately. The bright side was that the community started calling the Shivan attacks the "Shivan Incursion." So the mission at least contributed to the lore surrounding the game.

None of the other mission editors I have used (or attempted to use) have been as satisfying or rewarding as FRED.

I recreated my house, barn, garage, and front/back yard in worldcraft. I even had it compiled for play with Counter-Strike. But it took me ages, and I finished it just before that PC's hard-drive crapped out on me.

Well, for those of you with Rome Total War, you'll get to try mine real soon. Over 50 hours of work to create 2 campaigns. Much better than the original included in the game...

I made a map for an all time favorite game of mine: The Ancient Art of War. If anybody remembers that game, the maps were pretty simplistic, but I was very young at the time and quite proud of myself.