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esselfortium

[Eternity] Vaporware preview map released!

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A single-map demo of Vaporware has been released today, containing the first map "Cargo Transfer" along with an updated Eternity Engine (which of course has its own share of nice things)!

Get the Eternity update and the Vaporware demo in one nifty package here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/eternity/55219-announcing-the-blue-box-ee-3-40-10-and-vaporware-demo/

Alternately, download the Vaporware demo by itself, or see the textfile. Eternity 3.40.10 or newer is required to run it.


(click for fullsize screens)

Have fun!

Update: The savegame crash has been fixed as of Eternity r1510. An official 3.40.11 update will be available tonight, but in the meantime, you can get a fixed EXE here: http://svn.drdteam.org/eternity/Eternity-r1510.zip
Newer update: The main links in the EE release thread have been updated to point to the bugfixed 3.40.11. Go get that :)

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THE CURSE HAS BEEN BROKEN!

Damn fine map, I must say! And yes, unfortunately I wasn't able to find a single misalignment to complain about. Damn you, Essel. :(

Whelp. Now I can't not be excited about this now.

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I like that you used several types of new monsters. In some parts, it reminds me of some ZPack or KDiZD maps, though it's for Eternity.

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I may have to re-check this out at some point, as I was very impressed by what I saw before.

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Very thorough effort there Esselfortium. I particularly liked the rock formations. I haven't used Eternity before so I thought it to be a great show case for the features of the port (that I've seen so far). I loved how portals are drawn on the auto-map (grey'd out until active) Will it be long before hitscan weapons work between portals? or perhaps I've missed something?

-t

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printz said:

I like that you used several types of new monsters. In some parts, it reminds me of some ZPack or KDiZD maps, though it's for Eternity.

Yeah, I was amused by the ZDoominess of it at first sight: Simplicity-looking palette, polyobject doors, Nashgore-like effects, scripted events, custom monsters including shadows and catharsis, orange keycard needed... Then I got killed near the blue key door and EE froze when trying to load the save I made after getting the orange key. :(

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Gez said:

EE froze when trying to load the save I made after getting the orange key. :(

Where is your bug report?

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From what I've seen, it's a very well made map. :)

And seconded about the freezing upon loading (from what I've seen on my friend's lappy).

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Awesome. It's one of the best things I've played for quite some time. I've spent a lot of time just looking at the level like a moron!

PS: I also had that freezing after load game problem.

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tempun said:

Where is your bug report?

I intend to wait for six years before whining about it in some unrelated thread.

Or more seriously, it's coming as soon as I gather all the data I can gather on this.

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Actually, now that I think of it, the texturing is like in Thunderpeak, and the layout like in Suspended in Dusk, but without the Doom 1 syndrome (mancubi, chaingunners appear liberally here).

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Guest

Beautiful architecture and gameplay was pretty damn solid too. Great stuff.

I too got the freezing upon reloading thing.

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The freeze-on-reload issue has been identified and fixed by Quasar just now; hopefully there should be an updated Eternity build online soon. Savegames made with the current build should load properly in it with no hangups or corruption.

edit: Bugfixed EE 3.40.11 is online :)

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Just got around to playing this.

I enjoyed the gameplay. It felt like a good opening map, difficulty seemed about right. The layout and flow made good sense. My only complaint is that I did run out of ammo while fighting 2 Mancubus after I got the blue key, died, and had to restart.

The real treat for me, though, was the visuals and attention to detail. Several scenes REALLY stood out (seriously, I was tempted at these points to take a screenshot and put it as my desktop wallpaper):

1. The train. How many layers of portals is that? 3? And my big question: How does your polyobject door have a window in it? In either case, that door BLEW MY MIND.

2. The outdoor, bridge area. Totally felt like something out of Unreal. I'm just a little disappointed that I wasn't able to get to the base entrance in the distance, overlooking the bridge. Maybe in the next installment?

3. The cargo room with 3 levels. The soft glow from the lights really looks great. I did have frame rate issues here though.

The texturing in general is as good as I've ever seen. I liked all the little touches, the custom made signs over doors and logos/numbers painted onto the floor.

I also liked your dynamic use of sector lighting - the glowing floodlights on the spiral stairs in particular. The effect of lights flickering after opening the 3 story cargo bay was pretty cool as well (I'm going to look and see how you did that btw. also that sliding door).

Things I didn't like:

I mentioned above that I ran out of ammo.

Every time I saw a smoke trail on the imp fireballs I thought it was a spectre flanking me. Not a big deal, would just take getting used to.

Frame rate in general seemed kind of choppy. Might be my 4 year old PC though.

Anyways, this map is great and really piqued my interest in Eternity - once the hitscan issues are resolved and UDMF is implemented I'm definitely going to play with EE mapping.

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Thanks Skillsaw!

As far as framerate issues go, while the map is pretty heavily intensive at points due to all the complex portal layers being rendered, on some computers enabling d_fastrefresh 1 in the console gives noticeably better performance. It used to use the fastrefresh behavior all the time, but it was changed to limit CPU usage. My PC is about as old as yours, but Vapor runs smoothly for me, so maybe that setting will help. Perhaps fastrefresh should be enabled by default again in the future...

The train area uses 4 portal layers, technically. There's the one you actually stand in, plus one above the train that's visible from outside and from the ceiling windows, one below the train visible outside it, and one inside the traincars to make the reflection effects on the floor.

The glass polyobject doors on the train were built using a careful arrangement of 2-sided lines with custom textures and the "block all" line flag.

The upper portion of the outdoor area will indeed be accessible in a later map in the full release. Very, very early on, this was going to be all one big map, but I got kiiiind of carried away with the scale and decided it'd make more sense as a small episode.

The flickering lights when you trigger the mancubus/catharsi fight were a total pain in the ass to script and set up, and involved something like 40 or 50 tagged sectors I think. Maybe more, I can't remember. The ACS for it is just tons and tons of lines of setting sector lights. Either way, it was a pain in the ass and afterwards I wasn't even sure how much I liked the effect, but I put enough time into it that I sure wasn't going to take it out :P

I was sort of throwing around the idea of making the effects optional somehow, but didn't feel like it. Sorry if the imp fireball smoke was distracting. I stole it from KDiZD :P

Anyway, glad you (mostly) enjoyed it, and EE maps from you would be killer to see someday! I look forward to that :D

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