Jade Earth - [Oct 13th: Now on idgames]

Story so far (scroll down for tl;dr):

UAC.

The God damned motherfucking UAC.

I couldn't have cared less about whatever fuck-ups they do out there in the space. That's none of my business - it's their business.

But when they bring that fucking Hell on Earth? That's my business.

It feels like ages, like we have been going on fighting for years. A losing battle. Not a single victory. They only keep coming. To my Earth, no less.

That's when our recon team found out about a secret UAC facility deep inside the mountains, right on our backyard. No one had known about it, no one knew that those fuckers had been doing their god forsaken shit right under our noses.

And that's when they they told us, that this facility was one of the few connected to the UAC stations out there, on the moons of Mars, by those teleportation things.

That, was the first good news we had heard in a long, long time. The enemy was right there. Their supply lines were right there. We could strike them. We could destroy the teleportation system, get the Hell out, clean up the mess outside and be victorious.

We were so going to do it.

...

It was a good plan too. It would have been a damn good plan too. Gather our best men, form up a small team to sneak in to the base and give them Hell.

We had everything planned. Absolutely everything...except the part where they laid waiting to ambush us before we even got inside.

None of us died though, I think. Maybe that would have been better, lose one or two men but move on as a group. But no, we didn't die, I can still hear them through the radio, somewhat.

We didn't die. The bastards separated us.

The voices are starting to die down.

...

Did they die?

No, they couldn't die. They're just deep enough that the radio won't work.

...I hope. Because if they're dead, it's all up to me.

Again.

tl;dr: There's monsters around. Kill everything.



Jade Earth is a huge tech base map (it takes me about 80 minutes to beat when I'm playing fast) that I've been working on for over a year now, and it's finally finished. I haven't uploaded to idgames yet, but will in a few days in case there's any huge bugs that the thorough testing somehow missed, BUT, you can download the map here:

http://www.akinomori.com/stuff/jadearth.zip

idgames: http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/index.php?id=16217

Enjoy!

Screens:

Nice screens. Even though the theme is predominantly green, the texture usage is nicely varied.

I'm always up for playtesting.

Looks nice, though I don't like the liteblu structure in the first shot. All the 8x8 columns in a row look rather garish to me.

Sign me up.

esselfortium said:

Looks nice, though I don't like the liteblu structure in the first shot. All the 8x8 columns in a row look rather garish to me.

Hey Jodwin(soz! *L*), I think Essel is onto something. I reckon you could keep the style if the column was round, not square. This will change the view of each liteblu section slightly.

oh and then make it glow. reactors are always round are they not? ;)

-travers

traversd said:

Hey Printz, I think Essel is onto something. I reckon you could keep the style if the column was round, not square. This will change the view of each liteblu section slightly.

oh and then make it glow. reactors are always round are they not? ;)

-travers

Who's Printz? :P

Anyway, the lights are glowing and the computer part of the pillar is slightly rounded. I like it the way it is :( I might play around with the light sectors' heights though and make the ones on sides shorter.

Looking at that first screen, I can totally see what people are saying. But ingame, that first screen is actually much darker than it appears in that screen, to the point that the blue is not really very noticeable.

Also, having already playtested this b4 this first playtest-release, allow me to say what an awesome awesome level this is. Good to see it actually seeing daylight here. :D

Well I love green, so this is all good.

Green is the best. (Followed by orange, and then red.)

Also, this looks very pretty :) Keep it up.

This looks really really cool :D. I like all of the green and you've got some interesting texture and theme combinations going on here.

I'd love to give it a test spin, though I'm not sure how it'd run on this old machine.

I'd be happy to test it.

I'm assuming this is vanilla and/or boom compatible? If so, please include me as a tester also.

Looks satisfying.

To be honest, I currently wouldn't have the patience and skill to do something like this.

It looks pretty amazing.

Looks pretty good!!! I think the E4 sky would go down very well with this. :)

Bumpabumpbump!

Jade Earth is finally released! See the OP for a download link. :D

This is murderously good stuff! I've yet to play through the lot, but from what I've already seen I think the pacing and mood is fantastically executed. I'm pretty skint on armor at the moment, but that's probably because I'm a lousy search-monger. Suppose I'll have to look a bit harder.

Two things; both of which are fairly menial. You can get stuck between the wall and the sewage vats/valves - the structures the individual zombies are standing on - prior to entering the tunnels near the start of the map, forcing one to noclip out. The lightning is also generally a bit too dank for my tastes, but that might have something to do with my playing it in sunny Spain and at the wrong time of day. I'm splitting hairs, of course: It's all top notch material.

Going to wind it up now. Nice work.

st.alfonzo said:

Two things; both of which are fairly menial. You can get stuck between the wall and the sewage vats/valves - the structures the individual zombies are standing on - prior to entering the tunnels near the start of the map, forcing one to noclip out.

Took me a while to realize what you meant, but yeah, good find. D: I'll have that fixed before uploading to idgames. :)

Brilliant work, Jodwin. Kept me entertained for almost two hours.
Couldn't find any secret though. I'll take a better look at this one for sure. :)

Great to fianlly see a release.

This map is simply awesome, one of the best standalone maps I have played.

I'll have to play it again.

Yea I really enjoyed this map as well. I love how massive it is. I had so much fun exploring all the nooks and crannies and there's so much to look at. Also it's really green, and green is awesome. Oh yea, and it plays pretty well too! Ammo and health felt pretty balanced to me and there were only a few times where I was overwhelmed. I don't consider that to be much of a problem though because I'm a sucky player.

Good stuff Jodwin :D

Very nice, man. I died somewhere in it, I still got a long way to go apparently because I have yet to see any of the areas you posted screenshots of.

Just finished this one. Good stuff!

I didn't find any bugs or anything, and while I didn't find it terribly challenging, I still died a number of times.

In fact, the only criticism I have, is that while I like the texture theme you used for this incredibly long map, I felt it could have done with a little more contrast in areas.

Maybe an area that contrasted very, very sharply with what you had?

Still, that's a minor complaint. This was a great map, and I wish I saw more maps that showed this much dedication from the author :)

Just finished it :)

A very nice map indeed! I didn't mind the lack of contrast but one or two areas felt slightly too dark. Also, I got lost after obtaining all keys and coming back to the already visited part of the base. That was annoying. Would have wished for a more straight-forward way to the next chapter at that point. But otherwise: thumbs up! I personally wouldn't build such a large map myself. The flow of the map could easily be devided into 2-3 smaller maps but I guess you had a good time building it. :)

Thanks for the kind comments! <3 I'm glad that at least so far no one's hating it. :)

I just uploaded the map to /idgames after fixing the getting stuck issue st.alfonzo mentioned. I'll update the thread with a link to the archives once it's there...


@Insane_Gazebo: To tell the truth, the difficulty of this map isn't necessarily something I'd normally do, I most like doing (much?) harder maps. However this time I wanted to do something that's more accessible to everyone out there. Also...

@Deathmatcher: I can see some of the areas feeling tad too dark, but at the same time I wanted to have dark areas. :) Balancing light levels in dark areas is particularly hard once you count in all the different monitors people use, gamma and brightness settings, the different ways different source ports render things, etc. etc... Point being, if I make something that looks just right for me, it can be "too bright" for someone else and too dark for an other guy. :(

About getting lost when coming back to the base...yeah, I hate when that happens. At least the red key door is in the exact same room from which you can get back to the base so if you check the room first you'll see it. :) Also, if you check the automap you'll see where the door is. I did want to make it so that you can go back to the already visited areas just in case you'd want to search for secrets, go looking around or something like that.

Yeah, I had thought about dividing the map into parts, but that would have only created more problems (for me): Like I said, I wanted to make it so that you can re-visit areas if you want to, and then cutting a map this size into pieces isn't easy. It would also take more effort for balancing since the pieces would have to make sense when played as one whole AND from pistol starts. At one point I calculated how many pieces there would have to be and I got something like six or seven pieces when cutting the map into parts that would actually make sense. So would I leave out all the unused parts of the map from the pieces? Or copy/paste the entire 7mb map six times? :D Not to mention that updating the map would have become a pain in the ass.

Maybe if it was for ZDoom only I could have used hubs, but don't know if that would have really solved anything. :P

I hate to be a party pooper, but this map didn't do too much for me. at first i was digging it, but the huge size and uniform theme lead to boredom before too long. the nice little clever texture uses that at first i thought were very original - the wrapping of STARG and LITE*, the very nicely done large green doors - were repeated and milked pretty hard, which caused me to lose my fondness for them. speaking of doors, there were too many of them for good level flow, and some opening by using them while others required opening some other way, which can become an annoyance. perhaps making the doors that are opened by using them brown or something similar would help the player out a bit. too many switches too. half the time i wasn't sure what they did. doors and switches can really cause the flow of a level to chunk pretty quick.

monster and weapon progression were standard and uninspiring, without any surprises. the level is too big to get through in one sitting, and since everything looks the same and so many decorations are copy/pasted, leaving the level and coming back to a save left me horribly lost. i eventually cheated my way through, but didn't see much difference in the later parts.

this level looks way better then anything i could ever make, but i feel like 75% of it could have been left out and what would have been left would have been a solid, enjoyable level.

NaturalTvventy said:

stuff

That's cool; I knew from the point when I decided to make this a long map in a uniform style that not everyone is going to like it. :) In fact, from that point of view I'm mildly surprised that no one else has shared that sentiment so far. I'd just like to say that some of the "detail" like the 192-unit long doors weren't made for the purpose of having detail: The purpose was to make a level which, while not realistic, could be considered believable, and having bigger doors that machinery which was supposedly used in the base before shit hit the fan could fit through was one part of that. With the exception of the red key door the big doors are actually accompanied with "roads" that, hopefully, give off the impression that they are mainly intended for large machinery.

So to make a base that, hopefully, would give off the impression that it has a purpose, etc, some of the visual elements had to be repeated. I realize that not everyone necessarily agrees with this design sentiment, and they're free to do so. I just wanted to throw out my reason for doing some of the stuff the way it was done.

Jodwin said:

I just uploaded the map to /idgames after fixing the getting stuck issue st.alfonzo mentioned. I'll update the thread with a link to the archives once it's there...

Will the updated version of the map have the same link on akinomori as the original link? I only ask coz this level has been cacoward nominated and obviously you want the links in the cacoward thread to point to the latest version.

Kyka said:

Will the updated version of the map have the same link on akinomori as the original link? I only ask coz this level has been cacoward nominated and obviously you want the links in the cacoward thread to point to the latest version.

Point. I uploaded the latest one so that it's available from the same link as in the OP. If it's needed for some reason (such as demos :P), the original release is at http://www.akinomori.com/stuff/jadearthorig.zip