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September 6th 2010 - ValhallaReborn Released

 

VCTF-ValhallaReborn.

My remake of a classic Halo 3 level. This is not an exact copy of the map just created in Unreal Tournament 3, but my vision of how it would have been made if it were an orginal Unreal Tournament level. For anyone that has never played Halo 3 (is that possible?), this is a typical 2-fort level played withen a large gully that spills into the ocean.

The map went through about 2 major revision changes. The first iteration of the map was about 33% larger overall. The distance between the 2 bases were about 32,000 Unreal units. This was changed to it being about 20,000 units between bases and ended up playing much better. Keep in mind, this map is much larger than the Halo 3 version of the map, but this is because of the difference in movement speed and overall pace of the game in Unreal Tournament.

Below are some screenshots with some information on different areas of the map.

TopDown view. Red base on the left, Blue base on the right. Bridge in the middle is the highest point in the map and serves as an overpass to the river flowing through the level. The bridge serves not only as an alternate route through the level, but also as an advantageous sniper position that can view a large part of the playing field.

Side view. Red base on left, Blue base on the right. Showing abit more of the z-axis changes throughout the level. The river flows through the entire level, but can be traversed on foot with ease. The water is never at the depth where the player must swim except where it emties into the ocean. This also means that the hoverboard has no slowdowns while passing over the water.

Base Front. A view of the front of one of the bases. It has 2 entrances into the bottom area that leads to the rear of the base. It also has a jump pad that goes directly to the flag area (Halo 3 version did not have this). Near the flag base there are 3 jump pads that shoot the player out into the midfield. This is just like the Halo 3 version of the map. It is good for offensive strikes and also to use as a defensive ability.

Base Rear. In the middle, there is the entrance that the 2 front entrances lead to. On the 2 sides are ramps up to the flag area. Overall the bases are very similiar to the bases in the Halo 3 version of the map. They are slightly bigger as the action and movement in Unreal Tournament are quite abit faster.

Base Interior. Some shots of the base interiors. Once again, very similiar to the Halo 3 version of the map, just abit bigger to compensate for the difference in movement speed of Unreal Tournament.

All of the assets used were from the shipping version of Unreal Tournament 3 except the outer cliffs. I modeled those using 3dsMax. I wanted to give the sense of being in a vast gully, but save polies over using the typical method of using the Unreal assets cliffs. Knowing i would be using those assets in the playable area, I knew that it would become a poly issue if I also had to use them to bound the playable area in. So I decided to make the cliffs myself. Below is a shot showing the cliffs in 3dsMax. They total ~ 15,000 triangles total for the whole mesh. Might seem like alot but considering a single Unreal cliff is around 1100 triangles, it was quite a savings overall.

They were vertex painted and then I created a material to combine the textures. I also created an extra node to blend 2 textures together to try to keep it from being so monotonous.

Screenshots of the level.

 

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Copyright 2010 Josh Tyrell