 |
 |
|
|
| |
|
It would seem that I have the privilege of dissecting levels by some of the most renowned mappers in the Unreal Community. A gross generalisation, perhaps, but warranted in no small way by my recent review of Ezkeel’s map, and now, loading up UT2k3 I find I have one by Angelheart. The younguns of the Unreal community may never have heard of him, or perhaps they remember a Bladerunner inspired piece that was widely hailed as a visual masterpiece but lacking real game play that was released not too long after UT2k3 itself. I’m here to tell you that Angelheart has been around for a long time and has made many maps for UT in particular. Visit NaliCity and do a search for him and you’ll find 20 maps in his name. Sadly, many of his maps previously have suffered from the “too much eye candy and not enough game play” syndrome, in many people’s opinion. Viewing the readme, Angelheart states quite clearly that this map is really intended more as a work of 3d art rather than a level to play on, so now it would seem that even Angelheart himself believes the press. Perhaps some of you might think Angelheart a trifle egotistical to describe the level as a “work of art”, and perhaps he is either ahead of his time or existing in a parallel dimension where such releases are commonplace. Personally, I’m thinking neither of the above, but there is the question of art…
Seeing as I have noticed a penchant I have for covering the good stuff first, I’m making a conscious decision to cover the weak points of the map first, and this is not merely a whim but intentional and with purpose. The first thing I noticed about the map in a bad way was the distance fog. The end point (the point at which the fog completely obscures all polygons) has been set too close resulting in several points of popin where geometry and terrain suddenly appear. This could have been fixed by pushing the endpoint a little further out. It only happens in the extremities of the map, but it does happen. A nice distraction is the use of a custom mesh for health, in the form of a rotating golden Buddha. When I was walking around the level these things seemed to have no purpose, but I noticed the bots go for a couple during play and finally realised that they were health. I would have liked to have seen bases for these health icons to better identify them as pickups. I’m presuming Angelheart avoided this in order to maintain the theme, however as he went to the trouble of creating a custom mesh for the health, it would have taken little effort to create a custom mesh for the base as well and still maintain theme. The same could also be said of the weapon bases. Most of them are scaled down to 25% of their normal size, with two at 75%. Firstly, I don’t understand the inconsistency in scaling, but that’s minor although several of them aren't well positioned on the terrain. I found the tiny bases looking patently ridiculous, and again my money is on the author’s attempt to minimise intrusion of technology aspects and again a custom mesh for the weapons bases could have achieved this far better than just making them smaller.
The author states that because this map is intended primarily as an artwork and not a playable level, he didn’t see fit to optimise it. [bump] What’s this? Why, it’s a soapbox! *grin* Angelheart is not the only author guilty of this kind of attitude, but as he’s been around long enough to know better, I feel it necessary to touch on an aspect of mapping that seems to have gone out of the window as of late. It would appear that as people get themselves a big rig to play UT2k3 on at max setting throughout, the art of optimisation is slipping away. I’ve read lots of readmes by authors who state that the map runs fine on their 2Ghz plus machine with a 128Mb video card, but people with lower systems might experience frame rate issues. What a copout! “It runs fine on my system, stuff the rest of you!” That’s what they’re saying. When UT came out there was maybe 100 – 200 Mhz difference between top end processors and bottom end processors. UT2k3 is designed to run on a 733Mhz CPU and a 16Mb video card. No optimisations means people with a system at this end of the spectrum may have difficulty playing a map. Take the time to optimise or don’t release until you have! End of sermon. Still, the fact remains that some people will have problems getting this map to run silky smooth for three reasons. Firstly there are numerous pockets of high visual complexity, this is a combination of texture use and visible polygons, and so you can expect peaks and troughs in your frame rates even on high-end systems, although they will be less noticeable in the high-end. Secondly, the map contains almost 900 static meshes (I think nearly all custom, part of the reason for the large download), and with no antiportals whatsoever, the game engine is drawing all of the ones in the direction your screen is facing, regardless of whether you can see them or not, resulting in an unnecessary load. Finally, and perhaps most shamefully, there is the use of the fluid surface. I have never seen a map that so wantonly wastes processing time on unseen fluid surface as much as this one does. One fluid surface almost the size of the map sits underneath the terrain, to appear here and there as small canals. I would estimate approximately 75-80% of this fluid surface is under terrain. This represents copious quantities of triangles that cannot be seen, do absolutely nothing for the visuals of the map and take up huge chunks of processing time. Simple little breaks in the canals would have enabled massive reductions in draw time by breaking up the fluid surface into several smaller and completely visible fluid surfaces.
On lesser notes, I noticed several misaligned or badly aligned textures on some of the static meshes. Some of these were under bridges, and no doubt the author considered that it was less likely that players would see them, but it’s quite possible to fall into the canals and it’s just one more thing that makes the map feel rushed or produced with a certain amount of apathy. A sunlight actor has been used to produce the outside lighting, however this clearly resulted in unwanted shadows and so the map has been dotted with normal lights colour matched to the sunlight actor to provide ambient light. A simpler method I have found useful is the addition of a second sunlight actor at much lower brightness facing the opposite direction to the first, or at the very least judicious use of ambient light in the zone lighting. Overall the soundscape is ok. There is a lovely custom music track featuring traditional Chinese flutes which notches up the atmosphere. There are only about twelve ambient sounds, about four of them are the same sloshing water sound for the canals. There’s one for the waterfall and one for a wind sound which doesn’t seen to carry throughout the map, and I would have liked to have seen several different wind sounds placed throughout the alleyways to provide possible audio clues as to your location and some real variety and complexity to the sound scape. The rest of the ambient sounds are chime sounds. Yes, about six chime sounds, same pitch, same radius and same sound. They are dotted throughout the map; suitably next to custom wind chime static meshes. My only gripes here are firstly that I would have like to have seen the author take the time to vary the pitch on each chime sound for a little variety and some semblance of attention to detail. My other complaint is that it wouldn’t have taken much to make the wind chimes movers swaying in the breeze, because it looks strange that there are these chime sounds coming from totally static wind chimes. Why not even go the extra mile and make them Karma actors? Little things like that can make a difference. I have mentioned all of these negative points because, putting aside game play issues and focussing on the visuals, presenting the map as a visual work rather than a playable work is fine by me, but to use that as an excuse for sloppy mapping is simply indefensible.
Finally, we’ll have a look at game play. The map features two flak cannons, a rocket launcher, a lightning gun, the redeemer and three miniguns. Yes… three. My feeling here is that the author wanted to avoid technology aspects and thus avoided using the shock rifle and bio rifle. If this was the case then weapons such as the lightning gun and redeemer should also have been removed. At the end of the day, though, all of the weapons represent technology that is well outside the map’s setting, so this decision wasn’t necessarily the right one. Or was it the close confines of the many alleyways that lead the author to remove weapons that can take advantage of narrow spaces? Why leave in the flak, minigun and rocket launcher? All weapons are lethal in narrow alleys. No matter how you look at it, the choice of weapons doesn’t seem reasonable. Another point is that the author seems to have neglected the fact that players can and most probably will climb onto the roofs. There is nothing up here to reward adventurous players and the coolness factor of rooftop fighting cannot be denied, particularly in this setting. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, anyone? My final issue is another one of sloppy work. Ok, so the map isn’t designed as a hardcore death match, but there are numerous player starts that face into walls and dead ends. This is such a simple thing to fix that I could not believe it had been neglected and there is one player start right next to the redeemer. Excuse me? This means that every match starts with a bang and you are guaranteed of a redeemer explosion within the first ten seconds of a match, every time!
I know I have been rather harsh on the author, but for good reason, and this map could have scored more highly had there been more care taken with so many aspects. Where’s the love? The truth is, that all the love has gone into the visuals, and in this respect this is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most beautiful maps I have ever had the pleasure to view. I simply cannot rate the visuals of this map highly enough. Furthermore, whilst the map may not have been designed for game play, I had a fun time bolting down alleys, diving into canals, sprinting towards golden, floating buddas praying for some health and generally running around killing people. The game play, with all of the issues above taken into consideration, isn’t so very bad. Unfortunately this map’s score has been dragged down by the multitude of slipshod construction issues resulting in uneccessary performance hits. At the end of the day, this map goes into a special folder of mine where I keep those maps that may or may not play well, may or may not have been built well, but are just delightful to take a walk around for some peace and quiet and a massive change of pace.
As a special treat all large screenshots are 1024x768. Trust me, it's worth those extra few seconds for the visuals!
Bottom Line: Visually breathtaking, technically also, but for the wrong reasons.
Score: 6.5
Average User Score: 7.5 (13 scores)
(marking schema)
|
|
|
 |
|
|
smeerkat
Score: 8.0
Amazing piece of work. Please continue making maps for us. Do you have a website, btw?
2004-02-22 11:48:32
|
|
Morpheus
Score: 8.0
It's... bliss...
2004-02-22 06:52:27
|
|
Crafty
Score: 9.5
I would like to say that this map is beyond ''artwork''. I think alot of people take for granted at how hard some of this stuff is to create. I can sympathize with people that have low grade systems but I think he did a great job on it and I am converting it for the Face off mod.
2003-08-05 00:16:05
|
|
MoxNix
"there is more to mapping than making a map look beautiful - that's the easy part - making it playable - that's where the true art begins"
So true... gfx!=gameplay and that's something a lot of mappers need to learn.
2003-08-02 18:38:30
|
|
- {Re(@)peR} -
This map ownz for the Face Off mod but for regular ut2003...to small
2003-08-02 14:35:13
|
|
Deathbliss
Score: 8.5
Like DM-Angkor I'm not going too much in-depth here. This is a beautiful map that seems roughly half again too small for the player size. The music fits the level nicely, and I agree with the reveiwer about the fog. About lag though I have a soapbox (getting up onto it...)
OK, I'm running Windows XP SP2 with an AMD 1 gig processor, 512 megs of RAM, and a GeForce 2 MX video card. Altogether except for the amount of RAM a recipe for disaster in need of an upgrade. BUT I HAD NO SLOWDOWN ON THIS MAP! Furthermore I have all the settings at their very highest level except for character and physics! So whoever is experiencing slowdown either has a worse system than mine, is running programs in the background, or has no idea on how to propelry maintain their computer. You must defrag your drives at least every month for starters, use a regsitry cleaner to remove all unecassary leftover remainders of uninstalled programs, have stuff like Norton Antivirus turned off when playing UT 2003, and you should make sure you don't have programs that start with your OS running in the background. There is no lag issue with this map if I can run it just fine - the problem is the user's computer on which they are experiencing lag. The only UT 2003 map I've had lag on from this authoer was DM-2019 - and that was only in one spot. Generally my computer only experiences extreme slowdown and lag in UT 2003 where particles are used - LARGE amounts of them - and I have no idea as to why. VERY large terrain or extremely dense deco layers can also cause slowdown and lag - but not as badly as particles. Anyhow - maps should not be reveiwed based on framerate because this limits authors to what they can make - and no limit should be put on creativity. Furthermore there is no guarentee that it is not the reveiwer's machine at fault - rather than a fault in the map.
OK, off my soapbox now, just one final thing to mention - I found a hole! Yup I can run right off the edge of the map and die after falling for a while! Try Translocating from the bride by the temple structure over the high building over the water, and then follow that path. Yes, this should be fixed - this and the scaling are the only reasons I've given an 8 instead of a 9.
- Deathbliss
2003-07-19 03:37:38
|
|
QuinnBlackwood
(Even later note: Not "I". I mean "it".)
2003-07-12 11:00:04
|
|
QuinnBlackwood
Later note: After trying out the newly released Jungle Warfare TC together with this map (removed weapons and health) I'm even more pleased with it. But I still think I could have been bigger and have a central point. o_O
2003-07-12 10:42:25
|
|
QuinnBlackwood
Score: 7.5
As always, you always wish that AngelHeart's maps would grow even bigger and bigger (despite the fact that the computer probably would blow up while loading) so that you can keep walking around inside this beautiful stuff until you die.. ^^, (Joke, of course.) ..and that Infiltration would somehow be done with UT and move over to UT2003/2004 so that you wouldn't run over the roofs and miss the smaller rooms because you're out there playing roof-jumpin'-ninja. All maps done by AngelHeart for UT2003 really needs Infiltration to be playable, I might add. The only thing I started to think about was that you really could make the village a bit bigger and add a central place with some kind of tower and a more open market place so that you see the middle of it from a distance and also feels that it's just not a bunch of houses by houses by more houses that makes it more like a maze than a town. But still, there's only love for this map.. *hugs the fps-killer and sends it to the private map-archive*
2003-07-10 04:54:04
|
|
Agent_Smith
Score: 9.5
I think this map kicks some serious ass. And yes you may need a pretty chunky computer but if oyu do it REALLY KICKS ASS. But one thing i dont know what you all are talking about lacking gameplay. Its completely SWEET AS HELL with the new MonkeyMatrix mod. run on the roofs alot and youll get into it. Again the only draw back is the distance fogi have to agree. But overall this is one of my favortie maps ever. Have fun. Thanks for the reveiw ThunderStrike.
2003-07-09 14:38:05
|
|
Anon
Score: 4.5
Since this eccentric author cares so little about gameplay, maybe they should just leave out the weapons/ammo/pickups altogether. Doesn't all that stuff just detract from the beauty of your scenery?
Either make art, or make playable maps that look really good. One or the other, make a choice. Making gameplay secondary = a game level that fails. We are gamers, not art critics, and from our standpoint a map like this can NOT rank high.
2003-07-09 10:46:23
|
|
Nanikore
Score: 7.0
Great AVA but... the gameplay needs some serious help. It sort of annoyed me that I couldn't jump off the balconies (apparently the characters were too big) I think the map would have worked a lot better as a gameplaying level if it were done with a larger scale, like a Chinese palace or something where there's room to move around and run. The game characters feel like they're squeezed into this little movie set that was too small for them.
I have to give the author credit for doing the proper research to make the level Chinese instead of Japanese or just simply throwing some random "oriental stuff" together and call it a "Chinese/Japanese map".
2003-06-26 00:16:07
|
|
AngelHeart
Ulukai, Thankyou
Lruce Bee, how wrong can you bee :( If what you say is true then there would be thousands of beautiful maps and sadly I see almost none. But I guess that depends on your definition of beauty. For me excessive coloured lights, recycled meshes and gargantuan architecture maketh not a beautiful map IMHO. But I fully understand thats just my very blinkered vision so no big thing.
2003-06-23 00:24:22
|
|
Ulukai
It's a fantastic looking piece of work, reminded me of an old game called Magic Carpet in places =)
Didn't have any problems with framerates on my machine, either. I doubt anti-portals would have helped the framrate-challenged folks much given the open nature of the layout tho'
2003-06-22 15:33:14
|
|
Lruce Bee
Score: 6.0
Good review - very thorough but ultimately pointing out that there is more to mapping than making a map look beautiful - that's the easy part - making it playable - that's where the true art begins
Lruce
2003-06-22 14:42:54
|
|
Eyegore
Looks good, plays like crap.
I love the way this map looks, real sweet, but I get like 15 FPS!!! Unplayable!!
I'm really pleased that Thunderstrike pointed this aspect out about maps coming out lately! I pointed out to a new reviewer who will remain anonymous that he gave a map a score of 8.5 and said 'there may be framerate issues with lower end PCs' The rest of his review was fine, but in reply he told me *I* must be doing something wrong. Well, you know what?!? It's the mappers!! I have 1.7GHz AMD, GF4Ti4600 with 128MB, 512MB ram... yet for an average user-made map, I get around 28 FPS!!!
"Thy framerate shallt not suck" commandment is obviously out the window now...!
I think that if there are any framerate issues with any map, that it should lose at least 1/3 of its points from the start.
If you want to create a work of visual art, make a fly-by in Max.
Don't get me wrong though, the map looks beautiful, but needs serious optimazation. I want to PLAY!!!
Thanks
2003-06-22 07:59:01
|
|
AngelHeart
Thats one hell of a thoughtfull review. Thankyou Thunderstrike. Thanks for making me think.
2003-06-21 12:19:19
|
|
Yggdrazil
Angelheart has created an astonishing map with love for the details (although a second tree would have been nice). It looks more like a map for some sort of rpg. After flying around a bit I decided not to actually play AChina because I didn't want to disturb the atmosphere. Download it - take a look - be amazed!
2003-06-19 12:26:05
|
|
SkaarjMaster
Score: 7.0
Gameplay was a little rough in this one, but great AVA!
2003-06-19 06:34:54
|
|
lophead
Score: 6.5
It does seem like a map for some sort of mod. I'd like to see this author do some mod work!
2003-06-19 06:17:55
|
|
anonymous
Nice review Thunderstike.
I hope u will be in the future the reviewer of the map "RebirthII" by D4ms because if Gui reviews it, it will be pure flaming and not a smart review as yours.
btw wtf with NC ;-)
2003-06-19 02:02:34
|
|
Michele
Score: 9.5
China Like
May I make a suggestion?
Map of GreatWall,or
http://www.gxbcts.com/ReadArt.asp?Art_ID=54
http://www.guilin.com.cn/china/photo/%E6%91%84%E5%BD%B1%E5%B1%95/%E5%B0%81%E9%9D%A2.htm
I from Beijing
sciart.yeah.net
2003-06-18 20:39:18
|
|
ExiT
Score: 6.5
Why hello map that feels like it's made for a mod that doesn't exist :) A little rough, but fun...and weird.
2003-06-18 20:35:19
| |
To add a comment, you need to login.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
