Station 15 Final Release 1

[Supertanker]

Station15

Edit Jul 31, 2011:


A long four years. A modest 7932 brushes. 13.8 megabytes. This is the map that I have been working on since my earliest days in Tremulous. And it's finally "done." (Leaving the possibility open to further tweaks, of course.)

Thanks to everyone who has helped and supported me. Station15 has come a long, long way since beta1.

Changelog:

* Widened Lower Storage Hallway, added boxes
* Added a tiny box just outside of the human base
* Improved lighting (again)
* Improved texturing in unfinished areas (see airduct screenshot below)




Download: http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/map-station15-r1.pk3
Or:       http://downloads.mercenariesguild.net/maps/map-station15-r1.pk3

MD5SUM: 595c3d9500e5f9b3c6191a3216fb88e6


Votabele on US1.

Now I can rest.



Edit Jul 25, 2011:


Beta 7 is out. Changelog:

* Improved lighting throughout the map
* Quieter iris doors
* Modified Meaningless Pipe Room to give humans a little more of an edge there
* Fixed info_alien_intermission and info_human_intermission cameras
* Improved performance mapwide
* Human base looks better and has a slightly lower polycount
* Garden performs better with the fountain psystem removed
* Smaller pk3 (13MB)

I'm almost ready to give up and kick out the -final.

Download: http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/map-station15-beta7.pk3

Edit Jul 3, 2011:



Yep. Station15 BETA6. Mostly a gameplay tweak release. We're getting near a -final, folks.

Changes include:
All new sounds (Every sound is now CC Sampling Plus licensed)
Iris door between cargobay and hallway
Faster cargobay elevator (hopefully this and the above will provide a more viable alt human base there)
A second route to the upper level of the meaningless pipe room (boxes to jump on)
Slightly changed waterfall (still tweaking, accidentally killed the reflection) that saves 2MB in the pk3 size.
Speaking of the above...4MB smaller. The pk3 is 14.7MB.

Download beta 6!


Edit Jun 29, 2011:




Station 15 Beta 5 has been released









The map should play a lot better than beta3. Performance has been increased in most areas. Map is less dark. Map is smaller, and now there are signs for guiding people around. More alternative base locations and more alien-friendly corridors. I did my best to balance it better. What do you guys think?

This is a release that can safely be put on servers and such. Spread it around! Put it on your servers, have matches. Tell me how they go. I can't tweak gameplay in a vacuum. Any and all suggestions and complaints are welcome.

Station15 is votable on US1 and the other official servers. Give the map a try! I was not able to test it with more than six players, so testing with a large number of players would be excellent feedback!

Download it here: http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/map-station15-beta5.pk3
md5sum: 068e6d518222112975b4cde970e0b371

Thanks to the betatesters: firstinaction, kasm279, tehpaper, philh, StalKermit, A_Spork, your_face, superpie, nux, odin, menace13, and all the other ones who joined the server to see the new map in action.


Edit Jun 26, 2011:



Station15 beta4 beta5 is under development.

Just to make it clear: there is no beta4. After all, I swore you'd never see it. So you won't.

I need playtesters. I have a server and will be hosting several private games in the upcoming weeks to see what people think of the new layout. After that, I'll stick beta5 in a .pk3 and throw it in the wild for everyone to look at. Actually, depending on how the first few games go, I may do that sooner than later.

Minor changelog (I have forgotten what I changed since b3, so there might be more):

* The lower floor is gone. Completely.
* Elevator room is gone.
* Service tunnels are gone.
* Blast door is permanently shut.
* The area behind the blast door is now a sort of cargo bay area (unfinished) that would make a good alien base. Hmmmm.
* Alien base redesigned.
* One of the hallways beyond the human base is completely redesigned and made easier for aliens to get in there.
* Garden has a waterfall. Which is cool. All gardens should have waterfalls.
* An airduct leads from the alien base to the garden.
* Lots and lots of nice detail added.
* There is an entire freaking space station floating outside one of the windows. Just for eye-candy. Rule of Cool, go go.
* Doors look cooler. Again, rule of cool.
* Iris doors open faster.

I have decided that performance is "good enough." The garden area is annoying no matter how you look at it, but even on an FX 5500 the lowest framerate I've seen is about 50FPS. I can even play it on an ATI Rage 128 PRO at 20FPS. So there.

Keep your eyes pealed!

Edit Mar 24 2009:


Station15-beta4 is under development again.
After a long break, I've started reworking the map with two goals in mind.

1. Making it playable on older hardware, and
2. Finalizing the layout, because I have received some concerns that the map is too large/confusing.

To work towards these ends, I am actually going through the map and redesigning each room, cleaning up the brushes and optimizing it. Some rooms will appear very different, others will look much the same, but each and every room in the map will have been gone over by hand. (Funny, now that I think about it. This is the third time I've gone through this map completely. The first was to retexture the map. The second was to go through and re-set all the brushes that should have been 'detail' back to 'detail'.)

Any comments or ideas would be greatly appreciated.
One comment by Cadynum suggested removing the entire lower section of the map, or at least making it far smaller, and either making the service tunnels far larger or smaller, more air-duct size (And shorter too). I find myself liking the idea of cutting down the map. What do you think?

Screenshots:

http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/station15_beta4.jpg
http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/hbase_hall2.jpg
http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/garden3.jpg
http://supertanker.mercenariesguild.net/cargobay_new.jpg

EDIT (old)

Station15 beta 3 is released as a second gameplay test, for I added a feature that will most likely change the gameflow somewhat. In addition to some optimizations (which hopefully will lower r_speeds a bit), I added an elevator core to allow players to move easilly from the upper to the lower level of the facility.

The Current Release (Beta3) can be found at: http://downloads.mercenariesguild.net/maps/map-station15-beta3.pk3



OLD NEWS:


Station15 beta 2 is now finished and released!

Station 15 is a largish space station that I have been working on for the past few months. It was originally made to be entered into the mapping competition, and beta1 did in fact make it into the compo and win best gameplay. However, beta2 has grown beyond all my expectations. The map is much larger than beta1 and somewhat more detailed.
Just to clear up a point: this is a seperate map from station15-beta1, and so this release has no bearing on mapping competition.

Screenshots:

Garden (Map center)
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newgarden1.jpg

Alien base:
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newalienbase1.jpg

Human base
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newhumanbase1.jpg

Slightly Revamped Cargo Bay
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newcargobay1.jpg

"Furnace" room
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newfurnaceroom.jpg

Hallway with a view of my new skybox
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/newhallway1.jpg

Service tunnel area
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/servicetunnel1.jpg

One of three 'vent rooms'
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15_beta2/ventroom1.jpg


Downloads:
The (Beta2) download is at: http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/map-station15-beta2.pk3

The download for beta1 (OLD) is at: http://imn2rc.com/base/map-station15-beta1.pk3


Known bugs:
There are a few misaligned textures and a crack in the map geometry.

Todo:
Fix the garden to make it less FPS whoring
Clip the entire map
Add detail

Thanks to n.o.s.brain for re-packing beta1 for me, the original upload was BROKEN.
Thanks to Speedy ( http://planetquake.com/speedy/ ) for allowing the textures to be used under the CC license, as well as some help from laspace with textures.
Thanks to everyone on the IRC channel for tips, support, free beer, and my daily ration of humor.
And finally, thanks to MercenariesGuild for putting up with me, and all the players that showed up for the beta testing.
Enjoy!

[Knowitall66]

Dont use atcs textures/that space skybox (Both are over used). Also bases seem a bit too open.
Can we see a overview picture (From gtk or nocliped)?
Other then that, Looks cool.

[gareth]

eww atcs textures

you could redeem yourself if you add some more contrasty lighting and a load more of those glowing green (and maybe some other colors) lights like in this shot:

http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/3doorroom1.jpg

also needs more blood! and some stars flying past the outside windows!

[zybork]

Am I the only one getting reminded to QuakeII?

[Supertanker]

This is most definitely not completed, which is why it looks so quakeII/boxish like. Especially that rather large, blank hallway.


overview: http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/ov1.jpg

@gareth, this map actually has very contrasty lighting and is fairly dark, but I lightened the screenshots so you can actually see them. For some reason, in game, even at gamma 1, is brighter than the screenshots!

I dunno about the stars flying past the window, unless I tried (ugh) another portal skybox. From what I remember in Star Trek though, starbases generally stayed in one place...

[Supertanker]

I sort of finalized the alien base layout. What do you think, good, bad, crappy, really bad, or sucks?

http://www.mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/alienbase4a.jpg

http://www.mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/alienbase4b.jpg

Also, hopefully this partially redeems my horrid architexture:

http://www.mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/newskybox.jpg

Just a little something I made in Blender3D....I'll release a seperate texture pack after I finish the map.

[Knowitall66]

Still seems a wee bit too open to me. Skybox looks cool though .

[snb]

AWSOME! man i wish i had more time for maps

[Lava Croft]

Nice map, but I would change the texture set. You are getting better and better, supertanker.

[Supertanker]

I'll try changing the textures, but it's going to be a royal pain in the ass. I kind of designed most of the brushwork to fit with those textures.

Rest assured, I'm not touching the ATCS set again

[Lava Croft]

I'll say it here once more so that everybody can read it;

Most good texture sets all use images in sizes like 16x16 32x32 64x64 128x128 and so. This allows you to build your map without having to create weirdass sizes brushes just so it fits to the textures. See the mapping wiki for some texture sets that adhere to these mandatory rules.

[Supertanker]

Whoohoo, I spent 2 hours working and retextured about....1/10th of the map.

Oh well, at least this set has some cooler textures. Thanks for the tip lava!

http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/ad_cargobay.jpg
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/ad_cargobay_hall.jpg
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/ad_cargobay_hall2.jpg
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/ad_hall3.jpg

[Lava Croft]

Now, is that looking better and more 'fresh' or what? I would suggest to add a lot more details though, with proper VIS management, you can easily push around 20k-25k 'r_speeds' all around. I'm looking forward to a nicely detailed map in this texture set. Go girl!

[techhead]

Beautiful, just add some detail, like edging on that hexagonal window.

[TRaK]

Andromeda FTW 

[Kaleo]

Soooooooo...

When are you gonna give me a copy?

[Johnpp]

Soo, when it's done. You don't know how many times I have to say this on the FileFront Gaming Forums. When it's done, he will (hopefully) upload it and share it. If not, that's his choice.

[your face]

awesome skybox

[Supertanker]

It'll be done WID.

Depending on the amount of work I have to do over the holiday season, between December 31st and Feb. 2 is a likely release time, although it could take much longer if I get hit by a giant load of work again. For example, I have shopping to do, decorations to put up, a house to clean, people to socialize (ugh) with...

I don't go on the FileFront Gaming Forums, so I have no idea what Johnpp is talking about.

About 30% of the map is decently textured, one short hallway needs to be re-designed, and then I have to detail it. So it might take awhile.

[Supertanker]

Just some random arachnid-style hallway, sans 80% of the pipes.

http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/coolhall1.jpg

75% of the map is re-textured. Two rooms and two halls left.

[your face]

that skybox PWNZ...

[Supertanker]

Almost done re-texturing.

http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/randomhall4.jpg
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/randomhall3.jpg

Detailing to come in the next weeks.

[Supertanker]

Some subtle lighting effects.

http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/hl1.jpg
http://mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/hl2.jpg

Also tbr when the map is done.

Someone remind me if I forget when I release the map to release the skybox and misc_light_flare shaders as a seperate pack for people that want to use it.

[jr2]

Hmm... I'll have to find a server playing this map when it's done.

[Supertanker]

The map is almost ready for a beta playtest. I'm just busy Hinting up the map right now.

Let's get the campers with helmets and sensors out of the base by putting hints right through the hall outside.

[Johnpp]

The map is almost ready for a beta playtest. I'm just busy Hinting up the map right now.

Let's get the campers with helmets and sensors out of the base by putting hints right through the hall outside.

If you need a beta tester, you know who you could ask...

[Supertanker]

Beta 1 is released! WHoooo!

Link is at the top of the page, as well as new screenshots.
For those of you that are lazy: http://www.mercenariesguild.net/supertanker/station15/map-station15-beta1.pk3

[your face]

ah thx!

btw, i r laezeh

[Taiyo.uk]

The pk3 is broken.

[Supertanker]

Damnit, you're kidding me.

I spent an hour uploading that.
Great. Unfortunately, you're going to have to wait until tomorrow, when I get more un-interrutped time to upload.

Sorry