The Well Of Youth - Official BETA

(Rought) #1

Hi there! :wink:

I’ve finished the first official BETA of my map “The Well Of Youth” :banana:
I’m so happy that I got it work…

But it is stil a BETA…so if you find errors please post them here…

If you like to see some pics…watch them here
http://www.splashdamage.com/index.php?name=pnPHPbb2&file=viewtopic&t=5647&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Here is the dl-link :wink:

http://www.beowulv.ch/dl/maps/twoy_beta.zip

We’ll test the map BETA this or next week to find gameplay-errors (or maybe other stuff :smiley: ) …so I hope the Final will be done in 1 or 2 weeks!

At least I want to thank ratty redemption for his great work but you’ll see all details in the readme file! :slight_smile:

Many thanks to Beowulf for the webspace!

:moo: :drink:

Rought

(Java.Lang) #2

Nicely done Rought… out of curiosity, what did you have your lightmapscale set to?

(The Wanderer) #3

122 lightmaps…that’s gotta be some kind of record

Maps looks great, exelent job. Only a couple of things I noticed.
First you should include everything in one pk3, also most of the textures in your second pk3 seem to be editor or compile time textures only which you don’t have to include at all because they’re not used by the game and they’re just taking up space.
Also the water at the bottom of the waterfalls is a bit too bright even with my modest gamma settings.
More on gameplay when I’ve had a chance to play it. For now here’s a banana :banana:

(au.Hiroshima>) #4

very very nice, looks fantastic! :slight_smile:
I can’t wait to play this, hopefully it may be suitable for use in competition.

the only problem I have is the drop in fps near ratty_textures, everywhere else is fine.
http://clanoxygen.com/hiroshima/newmaps/twoy-badfps.jpg

(Rought) #5

@Java: I didn’t use the lightmapscale on the whole map, just on some brushes and I used 0.1 there :wink:

@The Wanderer:
I didn’t put all files in one pk3 cause ratty wanted the files in an own pk3, so you can see that it is his work :wink:
I never opened the ratty_textures-pk3 so I don’t know what files are in it…
The brightness of the water is set by ratty too…:smiley: But I like it the way it is! :wink:

I’ll try to fix that fps-problem with ratty, thanks!

(NightKiller) #6

I have added your map to RtCWFiles.com (http://returntocastlewolfenstein.filefront.com/file/The_Well_Of_Youth;30268), when you fix the FPS problem could you please notify me at nightkiller@rtcwfiles.com so i can update the file.

(Rought) #7

Thanks for the upload :wink:

I hope I’ll fix those bugs soon, but I still wait for more feedback and more reported bugs…so that there is no bug left in the FINAL :slight_smile:

Greetz

Rought

(ratty redemption) #8

the large waterfall room was tested on its own and ran very well, fps wise on my system, but I wondered how it would run when added to the rest of roughts map… how well is the vis working in that room?

admittedly, I did use hundreds of autosprites for the mist at the bottom of the waterfall… rought could probably reduce those by half and still get quite a good effect there, so if several of you guys find the fps drops too much in that room and vis blocking cant fix it, then I recommend reducing the amount of autosprite brushes, Im sure rought could do this his end, and it would be easier to test the results with the rest of his map.

also any mappers are welcome to use my water textures and the shaders using them, this is why the editor images were left in the pk3… if you use them in your maps, just credit me and don`t modify the textures or use them as a base for your own textures.

(Ifurita) #9

The FPS drop is a killer for me. Here are 5 screenies

2 corners away from the large middle room. The FPS here is just a baseline for the remaining measurements. I have a decent machine, not top of the line, not crappy. All of these shots were taken in my test config, with most of the graphics settings at near default

1 corner away from looking into middle room

Looking into the middle room

One of the reasons for the 60 FPS drop is that I’m now drawing >170,000 tris. Additionally, this is a primary engagement area so 1) FPS drop is magnified by the flame throwers and moving bodies 2) the impact of the FPS drop is intensified because this is when you need smooth framerates the most.

As you can see, at the foot of the waterfall, I’m not drawing that many tris ~16,000, but my FPS is now at 14.

(G0-Gerbil) #10

Had a run around and have to say the FPS needs a major overhaul.
The README says rought didn’t want to spend more time on this - I hope he just meant ‘for this version’ and not ‘at all’ because as Iffy points out it’s unplayable with those framerates in the main area (not to mention when the bridge is built you get even more tris there!).

My advice would be:

  1. Sort out FPS - this is the most important issue
  2. Sort out a better command map
  3. Actually have some command map icons that are of use in it!
  4. Fix yer floating ‘bridge crates’ problem :slight_smile:
  5. Do something different with the destroyable wall - just make it dynoable and be done with it - keeping it like it is (requiring lots of destruction of about 5 or so ‘strength’ bars) is confusing and not going to win you any fans
  6. Double check your objectives work as you mean. Are you sure that only the jug carrier can activate the well’s ‘full’ effect, and that only a full jug can be delivered? The second step is easy enough (only setstate default the final drop point once the jug is full) but how are you doing the ‘full jug’ check? Something seems a bit fishy to me about that, but until I can test it on a server with more than myself playing I can’t double check it works properly.
(ratty redemption) #11

the work I did in the main room was the rocks and water and although they do have several layers of shaders and polys I did use vertex lighting for the rocks and pool beds.

and rebuilt roughts original patch mesh rocks, with trisouped brush work as it cut the tris down a lot, and I used as low poly ‘models’ as I could get away with… iow, I don`t know if I could improve the fps much from my work there, other then perhaps turn those rocks into .ase models if that would help the fps?

but it sounds like in the large waterfall room, that my autosprites are killing the fps, which with roughts permission I will try to fix, and gerbil just pointed out to me that I could of used more phase variance on the autosprites, so although not a fps boost, would help reduce the pulsing in unison effect of the mist.

after reading the posts by you guys, I`m prepared to do what needs be to fixed in the work I did for rought.

but hell have to fix his own work or get someone else to help him with it, as Im now working on several other et maps with gerbil and wolfwings, as well as learning to use the very powerful ja (jedi academy) particle system for another project of mine, and as a result don`t have much free time left.

(Chruker) #12

I have played this map on the Shit-Storm server (Chaos or Extreme I forgot). I didn’t notice any drop in the performance, even at intensive fighting in the main hall. I must say that the overall look of the map is awesome. The lighting effects are extremely nice. I especially like it in the tunnels below, with the flickering lights… I’ll have to dig into it and see how that is made.

One thing though, beside the floating construction crates, is that when the objective is dropped on the ground the game just displays that missing model thing with the red, blue and green axis.

(G0-Gerbil) #13

One of the things I’ve found on maps with low framerates, is often players and their actions don’t affect framerates as much as you’d think.
From a purely hypothetical point of view - say drawing all the players, bullets, particles etc takes up 1000 gerbil-seconds.
If drawing your level also takes 1000 gerbil-seconds, then you can see that playing on a full server will give you roughly half the frame-rate (because now your CPU is doing twice the work).
However, if you are on a map which already has slow framerates, eg it now takes 3000 gerbil-seconds to draw the map, the overhead of the map drawing is so much greater than that of the players that you’ll now only get a drop of 1/3 of the framerate on a full server.
So if you go to extremes, and a map takes 10000 gerbil-seconds, you’ll hardly notice the difference between a full and empty server.

While the above uses a theoretical measure of time (since I can’t be arse to deal with milli/micro seconds since I’ve no idea of real-world values for time taken for map drawing / player drawing and it’d change from one computer to the next anyway), it should explain the idea that a slow map won’t slow down that much more with players, BUT you only get this ‘benefit’ if the map was quite slow to begin with.

@Chruker - what’s your computer setup? Also you don’t say if framerates are acceptable in the first place in the areas in question. If you have a beefy setup then maybe it’ll be fine, but both Iffy and I don’t have monster systems, and performance is noticable.

@Rought - don’t get me wrong, I do like the map a lot - just think it needs that extra bit of loving to make it really playable.

(Chruker) #14

I’m getting 108 in the first of Ifurita’s shots. When moving forward I get 95, looking at the main hall from Ifurita’s location I get 48 and diving into the waterspray result in 12 FPS :slight_smile:

And running across the wooden bridge above the waterfall I get 72 FPS.

One strange thing though: When I have r_speeds 1 displayed like in Ifuritas screenshot, it only says 37000 tris.

I have set the highest graphic settings and are running in 1280x1024.

The machine is a AMD XP1700+, 512 MB with a Geforce3 TI500 graphics card.

However I didn’t think it was awfull playing in those area, even with more players. However thats probably due to the ‘gerbil-seconds’ argument.

Down in the tunnels there are a texture for the flickering lamps thats missing. I suspect the same texture is used in one of the adjoining tunnels, since the lamp texture is missing there too. The console logs these warnings at map load:


WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0051.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0039.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0046.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0040.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0047.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0008.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0009.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0011.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0010.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0005.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0010.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0009.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0027.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0049.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0079.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0066.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0107.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0044.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0047.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0067.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0062.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
WARNING: reused image maps/well_d/lm_0047.tga with mixed glWrapClampMode parm
^3WARNING: R_FindImageFile could not find 'textures/lights/light_m20.tga' in shader 'textures/lights/light_m21_fb'
^3Shader textures/lights/light_m21_fb has a stage with no image

Also, if:

  • Allies steal the jug
  • Allies fill the jug
  • Allies looses it
  • Axis returns it or it times out
  • Allies steal the jug again
  • They don’t need to fill it again.

Why doesn’t the axis just throw out the water?

(Ifurita) #15

I’m running a P4 2.5 Ghz, 1 Gb RAM, and a GF4 ti4600. I run most stock maps at a pretty steady 76

(Chruker) #16

I wonder why I’m seeing less tris than you in the mainhall, it is r_speeds 1 you have on in that shot, right?

(blushing_bride) #17

Great looking map, we could all do with a ratty me thinks. im getting very similar FPS that i get on the officail maps. At the lowest point it goes down to around 105fps in the waterfall which is about the same as the worse places on the officials.

(G0-Gerbil) #18

Hmmm this framerate thing seems strange, am going to have another run around it and make a note of fps and r_speeds…
BTW anyone tried the combo I was concerned about for the objective (as opposed to Chruker’s concern (which I agree with)):

  1. Get the jug
  2. someone else jumps in the water
  3. deliver the jug

What happens? Can only the jug carrier jump in the water to fill it up, and if so, how are you doing this? As far as I’m aware you can’t react to a carriable objective without actually having it be ‘delivered’. Unless you are using the good old Q3 key thing somehow?

(G0-Gerbil) #19

we could all do with a ratty me thinks.
Paws off, he’s mine :wink:

(Chruker) #20

I haven’t tested it but the entity in the water is a trigger_flagonly, so I’m guessing that only the guy with the big jugs can fill it :wink:

BTW this map has the smallest script I have seen in many map. But much more isn’t really needed.