Upcoming map: Coral Sea

(mazdaplz) #1

Battle of the Coral sea, fought on a chain of islands near new guinea;
was an epic historical battle and the first time two different carriers engaged each other in an all out battle.

the original idea was to come up with a remake of the Bf1942 map: coral sea.
but due to several engine limitations the idea of the map was completely rethought - each side still has their own carrier but the planes you can’t fly.
The planes will fly themselves though and will engage in battle with planes of the opposite team. the goal is to secure the island below the dogfights, in the middle of the carriers and build the powerups for your planes.

the team that loses all of it’s planes loses the battle.

now, this map has been in the making for longer than a whole year.
it’s probably the longest developing time for an et map but it is also one of the biggest and most complex scriptwise.

the people working on the map are myself (mazdaplz aka led_zeppelin on bunker1 server) and gkcito.

anyway the map will be done soon but i want to show some upcoming images in hopes of people dropping quake wars and going back to old school et :stuck_out_tongue:

this is a hallway inside the carrier, made for cov ops to infiltrate

carrier was modelled after a real german carrier called graf zeppelin

carrier as seen from shore

hangar and lift inside american carrier

models by mazdaplz (me)

machine room in carrier

way out to the ship’s stern

radio machinery inside carrier

uncapturable spawn inside carrier

this is a room for the ship’s officers

the shore of one carrier (there’s 2 shores)

a modular prefabricated building of bulletproof glass, can you say camper?

the gunboat from saberpeak, but highly modified. give it’s author credit

a balcony showing the brutalist architecture style used on the island base

this kind of intersection is common in the warehouse

what you’d see from the ship’s stern, notice the planes bomb the island

this is a pier that can be found at one of the shores, bigger than it looks

corsairs were probably not used in the actual real life battle, but i chose to model the coolest ww2 american plane

the cp is lit by a d light near the tunnels

fishermen’s houses are used as refuge for snipers on shore

this is one entrance to the base, warehouse is visible

near the industrial sector of the map, an objective is found nearby

this is a custom fuelpump modelled by me as well.

a scaffolding made to seal up the crack you see, it can be blown with explosives though.

the floor is cracked on this very brutalist style bunker.

i tried to make original shapes where i could

excellent interior decorations by gkcito, most details on the pics are his work

the entrance to the tunnels, elevator by gkcito

this is the allied version of the glass building

the glass building, get to the last floor!

(mazdaplz) #2

most decoration and lighting is missing from the mainland base as you can see, but im trying to be careful with the light stage since compile times are thru the roof in that respect.

lot of optimization to do, some pics will look very different in the release im sure, texturing also needs work i admit; and i have to finish up the script.

please tell me what you think and ask me a tech question :smiley:
i’d be happy to reply

(S14Y3R) #3

Right on, looks good :slight_smile: What kind of objectives were you thinking of? Like dyno the fuelpump, or something “more” :stuck_out_tongue:

(mazdaplz) #4

glad you ask! :stuck_out_tongue:
lol

this is how the objectives work and what they are:

cp: optional, increase charge bar of all classes and possibly will be used for spawning purposes as well.

radiolink: building this big antenna in the communications sector of the mainland base will provide your planes with better part supply to the carriers improving the conditions of your planes (increase the plane’s health 300 points) and repair time (the planes no longer need 60 seconds to be fixed after being destroyed and can be on their way out in 30 seconds, bombing the coast more often)

fuelpump: this will provide the planes with higher octane fuel that will give the planes of one side more horsepower, in turn increasing it’s capability to carry payloads (building this will make your planes shoot 5 panzers to the oposite planes instead of just 3)

proximity fuse assembly: this is a big machine attached to the chimney in the industrial sector of the map, building this means proximity fuses will be adapted to the rockets that your planes fire; making them highly accurate (the randomness of the panzer shots of the planes is decreased 200%)

those are the objectives already done; they merely affect how quickly the planes destroy each other, none can win the game by itself.
any combination of objectives can be built by a single team; eg.
the corsairs could fire 5 high accuracy rockets at the zeroes and also have superior armor and repairing times. while the zeroes could have inferior armor and fire 3 erratic panzers

the plane count would drop rapidly

the final objective i am planning to build is the carrier hangar, the cov ops will infiltrate it and satchel each plane on it’s fueltank, making the enemy plane count drop FAST

so the task of the team is not simply build the objective but think what each objective does and which objectives to attack and camp.
the team that controls the most effective objectives for the longest time will surely win, now i wont say which one is the most effective cause honestly i dont really know. i put the thing together and it’s pretty surprising, sometimes 2 planes will destroy each other and there will be nothing in the air lol, i had to script that eventuality too

conversely, you COULD win the map by shooting at the planes with your luger (they WILL get destroyed eventually), but doing the objectives will give you a big advantage

note: the screenshot with 60ish fps doesnt normally run like that, my map is dependant on open programs, as soon as i close msn and mspaint it increases by at least 10, also that pic was recording demo :slight_smile:

(Avoc) #5

This sounds awesome! So how long is the map playtime? 60 minutes? :smiley:

Though, as awesome as it sounds, I am afraid that the average ET player is going to be scared by the complexity.

(Diego) #6

We should compare scripts sometime. :slight_smile:
I seem to get off on making my scripting life a living nightmare. Probably doesn’t help that I only know just enough to be dangerous. I love to see some ballsy scripting in ET. Dynamiting water pumps and radios gets old after a while.

But I’ve definitely got you beat on development time. My map Praetoria got so big that I couldn’t compile it at all. So I had to break it into two maps and then come up with all new objectives to end the first half, and start the second half. The first map took 3 years from start to finish. Almost 4 years now for the second half. :shock:

Keep up the good work. I look forward to trying this one out.

(mazdaplz) #7

thankyou :slight_smile:

that’s what i suspect lol! that’s why i was trying to appeal to quake wars players, :wink:

but really; it’s not more complicated than qw, your team mates dont even need to know what the objectives do, just that they have to split in order to try to capture at least 2/3, protect them for a while and hope for the best.

The middle one is a good candidate since it’s a central position, the trek is long but there’s no fear of snipers, also; it is the most agressive upgrade (note that this doesnt necesarily mean anything since planes will, in rare occasions miss every rocket they shoot, even with accuracy upgrade! [luck plays a bit of a role-but the upgrades minimize it]).

//////////////

for the noob/tard (call 'em noobtards) who can’t even do that you can tell them to point up and shoot. Me and my friends have been able to hit the planes with panzer and blow them up in 1 hit, no lie; but it takes some luck, time, skill and patience, the planes move WAY faster than even the spectator!, all of this asuming you can find the time to aim under fire.
also mg42 is good if you can find the angle to hit it but it’s not that effective, you have to wait for the planes to come back and return to hit them right, also i didnt include any intentional high angles you could use-sorry. you could also try to use your favorite smg- or colorful pistol but be careful because the plane could laugh it’s ass off.
finally if you hit it with a mortar you’re obviously hacking

the only way would be to have a bunch of players hitting the planes sistematically or just have 2 planted mg42 concentrate fire, i will probably add one ramp facing upwards to hit planes with the mg, or something like that

When it comes down to it i think you are completely right. I mean, most players dont even know what’s going on the first time they play a given map (me included), but given enough time they can develop strategies and whatnot. i think what we’ll be seeing on the long run is the least defficient teams winning, with some complete bloopers every now and then, but hey; the times are a changin- i think the complexity i have given my map is just what was going to happen sooner or later, i think we have to step to the plate with bigger, newer games and while my script is busy running stuff every milisecond i have still a lot of space on my .script, i could easily add 2 extra planes, if it werent because there’s no space for them to cover :lol: . cheers.

============================

@diego: lol! yes i remember we crossed a few words about a year ago when i was doing my research still, i made the script way back then, it’s just taken this long to add stuff to the emptyness that fell below the dogfight. hearing about the time it took you to make your map makes me feel kind of better lol!, i never played your map praetoria but i heard it was damn impressive, also that it took like 45 minutes to play haha, i’m aiming for a solid 35 minutes worth of plane.

it’s kinda sad that we have to go through all of this with no help, i mean i got some great tutoring from the peepz at splash damage, namely the creator of UJE, C. but when contacted people who were working on similar things they never wanted to team up. i convinced gkcito to help me since his map is still a long way to be done and he’s my childhood friend
he’s good with detail brushes where as i make the models/caulk/script

with help the development time can be cut in more than half but now that i realise i couldn’t just expect that people drop their projects to make something on a team; specially when they put in so much time like you have.

(kael) #8

I like large outdoor-style maps, like this.

just waiting for upcoming Coral sea… I’m looking forward to playing the map. :slight_smile:

(S14Y3R) #9

Sounds wild, holy hell! :shock: Can we “Ride” the planes at all? That’d be some quick transportation 8)

(Avoc) #10

Riding planes is SICK! Especially if you are able to hold on while their in air :smiley:

I often get crushed though, chariot had a waterplane.

(Diego) #11

You heard right. :slight_smile:

But it isn’t 45 minutes, only 30. It would have been 60 if I had been able to fit the second half in there. But since that one has more interior space, I’m already having trouble fitting it into a light compile by itself. Combined with mission 1, It was over 45 mb of lightmap data. Trying to keep mission 2 under 20 mb.

(mazdaplz) #12

lol, i feel like santa handing out charcoal when i say this but, there will be no plane riding :lol:

it was originally part of the plan, but there’s several drawbacks, the most important one being that there’s already 6 planes doing fixed routes on most of the sky, if the passenger plane is going to go through it would have to go even Higher, above it all, the player would see that most faces pointing upwards are caulked, also his/her fps would drop at least 70 frames

on the upside there is a dhingy you can ride :roll:

if the map makes it to final release then i will seriously consider a rideable plane but not anytime soon

if i ever start a new map though; it will definitely have a rideable sea plane, and i will call it the battle of britain :stuck_out_tongue:

(mazdaplz) #13

ok, you may have wondered what happened with my map.
(then again you may have not)

there were a couple of problems.
first of all, gkcito turned out to have the work ethics of a 3 year old; scratch that. he has the ETHICS of a 3 year old. i did not only scratch his name off the project but stopped talking to him altogether (ending a many years long relationship). anyway i am willing to credit him a good and generous 29% credit of the whole map (theres no way he exceeded 28% anyway, so he should be happy).

i managed to work on the map relentlessly by my own until almost the finishing point (it needs a lot of detailing to do tbh, gkcito WAS the guy who had like that queer eye for the straight guy in terms of decoration and detailing)

then i had some other problems:

i need to precisely aim the guns into the flying planes so that they both have the same possibility of death, making it an even match. the problem is i can try to point them in the right direction but the compile is sooo long i can’t really try several times; im bound by my avaiable time, and the processing speed of this 2001 rig (to be fair it was monstrous at 2001, it was still good pc in 2004-2005 but now…)

the other problem that i have is that i was permanently banned from all punkbuster enabled servers;
because i dared to use a graphics card emulator called 3danalyze on wolfenstein; to see if my friends with ancient rigs could probably play the game (it boosted the performance of MY machine to the point i could play most wanted on high detail and marvel ultimate alliance perfectly); i should have imagined that punkbuster didnt know the difference between 3danalyze (which isnt a questionable app) with (and i quote)“HACKED VIDEO DRIVERS”.

i was blown away; the very next day i posted a trouble ticket at evenbalance so they can lift my ban. i got a promising response from a punkbuster staff but ban hasnt been lifted yet. more a month later!

anyway, long rant short- what i am asking for is someone that has experience and he can aim the shooter rockets to release the map. he would also have to have a good computer and some ammount of time to spare at least. credit will be given of course!

thanks for reading
-maz

(th0rn3) #14

Map looks AWESOME

(stealth6) #15

well, I am not very good, so I dont know if this is possible, but why dont you select and save the pieces u need to test, and then just have the guns and the planes in 1 giant room to test it?
would save on compile tiems I think and does the trick no? then when it is done put them back on the same places…

(mazdaplz) #16

well it’s a bit more complicated than that. getting the planes to hit each other is not the hard part.

the hard part is aiming them to get the same proportion of hits/misses. what is needed is
to point the guns
to keep track of how many planes have been destroyed (for about 15 to 30 minutes-several times) on each side to make sure that the game(of this map) is balanced. i did not think the balancing would have been this tough when i made the map, the randomness of the shooter rocket is high even on setting 0.
also (some) compensation has to be done for the bending on the splines that drive the planes

it takes patience and more time than i have avaiable with college at this time

(Ziggy) #17

This map looks awesome! I’m attempting to do something similar myself, what method are you using for getting the planes to move, are you using splines?

(mazdaplz) #18

no one that knows how to balance this sort of thing can help me out?
for the sake of a new map being released before wolfenstein gets into it’s third age
it’s almost done. also you have complete creativity for the parts of the map that look wrong or something, no prob; just can’t mess the hinting because i get good fps

(Ziggy) #19

any updates…? hope this project hasn’t died:confused: