|
Lezing's DN3D Resource»Released projects»The Last Pissed Time (Chapter I)
Once, when I was exploring the list of Duke player structure variables and found this one, I wished to name my new map in honor of it. Afterwards, Duke limits prevented me from doing my conception in a single map, so I decided to make several maps conjoining the single plot.
This is the first map of the Last Pissed Time series. I began working on it in 2006, when I was also developing LEBuild. Last Pissed Time is my first playable map fully made in this map editor.
The first revision of Last Pissed Time was released on 02/19/2009, shortly after the "0th revision" release, when I spotted a nasty bug in it. Some months later, on 09/16/2009 the second revision was ready.
Map overview
This chapter is called "Driston Infiltration". Driston is a fictional subterranean research station occupied by aliens. It's January 11, 1996 in the map. Duke has been freed from captivity and now he has to shut down the energy supply engine to complete the map.
This release has no user art, sounds, or CON scripts. But it has vastly higher quality than my previous releases, the existing capabilities were used very effectively, resulting in lots of advanced doors, switches and other things. The map itself measures 1.25 Mb, the first revision was even larger.
I preferred puzzle-oriented gameplay for this map. Then I decided that every LPT chapter should have a similar style of game. The next chapter will start from where this one has ended.
The Last Pissed Time (Chapter I) screenshots
A couple of external renders from LEBuild:
Unique tricks
Although the map has over 9000 various complex things, here I listed its most notable tricky elements.
|
| There are some boxes spread on the map. Their top sides are covered with floor-aligned sprites because Build doesn't support the required scale for the box textures. Since sprites have a wide range of sizing, they can be used for covering such a box unless it can move. The second revision of LPT introduced a moveable box, but the sliding door effect used to make the box moving off doesn't move any sprites inside its sector. Fortunately, I found a way to make floor textures smaller than their usual scale levels. When a sector has a very long first wall, a relative texture may shrink dramatically. The first wall can be hidden into a non-adjacent loop of the box sector. |
|
| This elevator fully consists of sprites and moves up and down under the high-detailed ceiling. The main difficulty here is making the sector floor static when sprites above it are moving. Since the floor is required to move simultaneously with the sprites when using common Duke elevators, I decided to make two unit wide sectors around the elevator, join them together, place an elevator tag there and then set the sectnums of all the elevator sprites to an 'incorrect' value of that elevator sector what LEBuild allows to do. Despite most of the sprites outside their sector, this trick works good, although can show minor disappearing bugs from certain viewing positions. By the way, I also used similar sectnum manipulations when modeling the Christmas tree in the bar to brighten its baubles. |
|
| Twin window ceiling door. There are a couple of similar-looking sliding doors in the map, but this one opens upward, making what is much more difficult in this case. This door is assisted by a hidden teleporter moving Duke into an auxiliary (duplicated) room containing just an opened door, perhaps this is the only way to make Duke able to go through such door when it's open. The door's bottom side and the doorstep are made of sprites; the rest is just walls and masks. |
|
| The pool full of transparent water. Both water surface and the bottom of the pool are made of floor-aligned sprites. Unusual sector arrangement makes possible seeing everything above and under the surface. Both water and underwater sectors have a special outer edging running along the room walls which makes the sprites being rendered from everywhere. This is one more benefit of joining of non-adjacent sectors, albeit the effect is somewhat buggy: Duke can see himself when swimming backwards, moreover, the underwater area disappears when looking down because the sector edging required for sprite displaying gets out of the field of view. |
|
| An animated 3D-switch. There are many three-dimensional switches in different map locations, but this one has the most complex design. When activated, some parts of it diverge against each other, some rotate. To simulate this, I made individual sprite groups for each frame to be 'scrolled' by a floor raising effect. Similar techniques were used for the advertisement in the main hall, the digital clock and the LEBuild promo panel. Making separate sprites for each frame means that any effects can be applied, including smooth accelerating and changing of shades. The main drawback is, of course, huge sprite consumption: the button on the screenshot requires almost 500 sprites to be animated. |
Requirements
You must have a copy of Duke Nukem 3D Atomic and EDuke32 to run the map.
This map won't run under DOS versions of Duke3D due to low sector/wall/sprite limits.
In Software rendering mode, Last Pissed Time should play fine on a Core 2 (Core i5) processor or better. I do not recommend using the OpenGL mode due to its shading distortion (and because I'm a fan of 8-bit graphics :P).
External reviews
Download
Here you can download the latest (second) revision of LPT, released on September 16, 2009. It has a couple of minor improvements and optimizations compared to the previous revision which was released on the sites above. I don't post previous revisions here to avoid confusion.
If you wanna take a look to the early (developing) map snapshots, here are some of them.
The sizes are for the uncompressed files.
Forum threads
YouTube videos
See also
Mapping template data
======================================================================
Title : The LAST PISSED TIME (Chapter I: Driston
Infiltration) rev. 2
Release date : September 16, 2009
Filename : LPT.MAP
Author : Maxim Chinyakin aka Lezing
E-mail : slike1990[at]mail.ru
Misc. Author Info : I'm a 19-year-old Russian Duke fan.
Web Page : http://lezsite.narod.ru
Other Levels : The CROSSROADS Series (Russian localized)
Russian Community Build Project (among other authors)
Other Stuff : LEBuild, a powerful Duke3D level editor for
Windows. It's available here (the site is in Russian):
http://lezsite.narod.ru/dn3dprog.htm
Description : My first map release that was fully made in
LEBuild. It features lots of spritework, tricky doors,
real complex design and, of course, advanced (but mostly
linear) gameplay. Unlike another BUILD maps, LPT is fully
laid out in a continuous Euclidean space, with many
overlapped areas. Besides, there's no visibility haze
(visibilities of all sectors are set to 240). The map
exceeds the original Duke limits and must be played with
EDuke32. Look forward to the sequels!
The second revision features some minor improvements and
optimizations.
======================================================================
* Play Information *
Episode and Level # : USER MAP
Single Player : Sure
DukeMatch 2-8 Player : May be (needs revision)
Cooperative 2-8 Player : Nope
Difficulty Settings : Yes
Plutonium Pak Required : Yes
New Art : No
New Music : No
New Sound Effects : No
New .CON Files : No
Demos Replaced : No
Duke3D Enhancement : EDuke32
=====================================================================
* Construction *
Base : New level from scratch
Level Editor(s) Used : LEBuild 1.0.3 and older versions
Other programs used : None
Construction Time : Very long (more than two years, but with
great breaks)
Known Bugs/Problems : Some sprite & mask disorder may be observed
due to engine issues. The game may (rarely) occasionally
crash, so save often. EDuke32 behaves very unstable when
viewing textured 2D-map, so avoid using it. You may also
encounter clipping glitches, e.g. getting squished by an
opened swing door. However, the map itself plays pretty
well.
* Where to get this MAP file *
Original file URL : http://lezsite.narod.ru/files/lpt10.rar
=====================================================================
*Important Information*
PLAY THIS MAP IN CLASSIC (SOFTWARE) MODE and use the latest
version of EDuke32. Recommended screen resolution is 640x480.
This map has some framerate demanding stuff, therefore you'll
need a good Core 2 processor or better to play LPT smoothly. It's
also recommended to switch off ingame music due to rich sound
ambience. Gameplay mods should not be used in this map. You
should use the original (unaltered) Duke3D Atomic tilesets.
ORIGINAL MAP FILE STATISTICS
Sectors : 2395
Walls : 16384
Sprites : 15845
Loops total : 3149
Isolated sector groups total : 57
Vertices total : 7767
Tiles used : 740
Summary wall length : 23636 m
Summary sector area : 10108 sq. m
Secret places : 9
Effectors : 1908
Monsters (skill 1) : 18
Monsters (skill 2) : 37
Monsters (skill 3) : 62
Monsters (overall) : 62
Monsters (respawn) : 63
Pick-ups : 90
Map size : 1317294 bytes
Minimal unused switch lo-tag : 182
* Derivative relations:
Average walls per sector : 6.841
Average walls per loop : 5.203
Average walls per vertex : 2.109
Average sprites per sector : 6.616
|
|
