April 20, 2002 (re-release... see below for notes on changes)

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Title:           T I T A N S
Map name:        ump1ctf4
Game:            Quake 3 Arena CTF, Threewave CTF (all modes), and Team Arena
                 SEE REQUIREMENTS SECTION FOR VERSION INFO
                 8-14 players
Author:          Joel Baxter (aka Johnny Law)
Other work:      jlctf1 "Grazer Station"
                 clan arena "Lost Colossus" for m3amap1
                 q3wcp15 "Industrial Revolution"
Email:           jbaxter@neogeographica.com
URL:             http://www.neogeographica.com/

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* Description *

A long-abandoned temple complex spanning two lofty plateaus, in a
mist-wreathed mountain range.  Undiscovered by modern man... until now.

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* Requirements *

NOTE: this map requires Quake 3 version 1.29f or later.

Titans is for CTF styles of play that do well with larger maps.  It was
originally designed for public server play, large-team Team Arena games,
botplay, and as an experiment for Challenge ProMode CTF.  It was not intended
for 4-on-4 competitive Q3CTF league play; I would think that Titans would be
unusual at best for that.

You can play Titans using the CTF mode of Quake 3, or with the official Team
Arena mission pack.  You can also play it using one of the mods Threewave
(www.threewave.com), OSP (www.orangesmoothie.org), or CPMA (www.promode.org).
Other mods that preserve the basic Quake 3 CTF style of play should also work
fine too.

Grapple mods may be problematic though; see the "gameplay notes" section
below.

Also see the "known issues" section for a couple of things related to botplay.

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* Changes from the originals *

Titans was originally released a little over a year ago as separate maps for
Team Arena and non-Team Arena play, since Quake 3 did not yet have the
capability to store different item sets for those play modes in the same map.

For its re-release as part of Unofficial Map Pack 1, I've basically merged the
two maps into one, using the new entity features provided by Quake 3 patches
and by the Threewave mod.  I generally resisted the temptation to use this
opportunity to revisit the item layout, but I did make the following changes:

- In the original titans_ctf, one of the weapon spots had a nailgun in CCTF
and nothing in normal CTF.  I would have liked to have put a plasmagun there
for normal CTF if Q3 had supported that sort of item distinction.  Now it
does, so now there's a plasmagun there for normal CTF.

- For similar reasons, the in-base yellow armor (one for red team, one for
blue team) is now replaced by a green armor in CCTF.

- Since the release of titans_ta, id has increased the power of the nailgun
in patches.  I don't like having the new-style nailgun available in the
fairly enclosed base area right next to the flag and an ammo regen powerup,
so for TA play that weapon spot now holds a lightning gun (same as in the
other modes of play) rather than a nailgun.

- The originals had bad entity properties on the throne doors that caused
those doors to open too far; when a throne door was open, its top edge would
protrude out of the lap of the statue.  Fixed that.

I haven't changed anything else about the map.

If you have one or both of the original maps, I would recommend deleting them
and using this map instead.

FYI for Team Arena players:

If you already have the Team Arena "menu video" for titans_ta (in
roq-titans_ta.pk3), you can use it with this map if you use WinZip to extract
titans_ta.RoQ from the pk3 file, rename it to ump1ctf4.RoQ, and then put it
back into that pk3 file (or create another pk3 file to hold it).  Be careful
to store it so that the "video/" filepath is preserved.

If you don't have that Team Arena menu video but would like to (or if the
above process sounds like too much work), then check the Titans page of
neogeographica.com.  It currently has a download link for the titans_ta menu
video, and I'll also make available a version renamed for use with ump1ctf4.

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* Gameplay notes *

* At the "ladders", you can drop down to the ground at the foot of the ladder
without taking damage or making noise... just think of it as "climbing down
the ladder really really fast".

* When played using a mod that has a grapple, there are surfaces in Titans
that should be "ungrappleable" to prevent the most extremely lame forms of
hiding: the mountain face, the interiors of the center chimneys, and the
exterior walls that face onto the deathfog.  For these surfaces to be
"ungrappleable", the mod must support that particular feature.  At the time
of the original release of Titans, it seemed reasonable to expect sufficient
mod support for that feature.  However, the current state of things...

CPMA supports ungrappleable surfaces (yay arQon).  I was under the impression
that OSP did too, or had planned to do so, but when I checked the most recent
version the feature wasn't there; I've pinged them about that just to see
what's up, and I suppose there's a chance that OSP might still get on board
(especially since it tends to share features with CPMA), but no guarantee of
course.  CCTF is the biggest disappointment in this regard, as it is the main
"grapple mod" and it had the feature already in place in a patch that was
about ready for release, but then they went through some problems and were
absorbed by Threewave, and now Threewave CCTF doesn't have this feature.

So... at this point, a year after the original release of Titans, you can
imagine that I have little interest in re-convincing mod coders to have this
feature, or in substantially reworking the map to accomodate a certain set of
players who will almost certainly never adopt the map for regular play.  So
just consider this a heads-up.  If you want to play with a grapple on Titans,
you'll be fine in friendly games where you can have whatever house rules you
wish about flag carriers hiding outside the playing area.  Any sort of
organized competition could also make and enforce such rules.  But a public-
server game on Titans with a grappling hook could turn silly.

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* Credits and appreciation *

All media from other authors used and/or modified with permission.

Media credits:   - Teleporter model: Todd "Mr.CleaN" Rose.  Skin replaced by
                   me... doesn't look nearly as good, but fits in with the
                   map's theme now.
                 - Colossus model and skin: Bjornar "Ewooz" Johansen;
                   starting from the original "judge" model, I tinted the
                   skin, removed the throne, and "supersized" the model.
                 - Fountain model and skin: Ranjeet "Rungy" Singhal; I've
                   added surfaceparm trans to the skin and reshaped the model.
                 - Pool brick texture (cosmo_brick48_mod4.jpg): a hacked-up,
                   resized, tinted version of a texture from CosmoGraph
                   (http://www.saturn-online.de/~cosmo/nav_main_native.htm).
                 - Brick and stone textures: based on Mr.CleaN's Egyptian
                   textureset; variations by me are indicated with the _mod
                   suffix.  The mrclean_based_combo_tiles texture is a
                   composite of multiple textures.
                 - ctf_unified logo textures and shaders from Threewave
                   (marked with the ctfu_ prefix).
                 - door_layer.tga was extracted from an id Q3 texture.
                 - The envmapmach_ textures are variants on an id Q3 texture.
                 - Skybox: made by me using TerraGen
                   (http://www.planetside.co.uk/).
                 - The glyphs are letters from the synthetic language
                   Denden, of which I know very little other than it looks
                   cool and its font was free for any use.  If you're curious
                   I'm sure a Google search will turn up more.
                 - Shaders in titans_ump.shader are created by me or based on
                   existing shaders as credited.
                 - Wind sounds: Free sounds from around the Web, don't
                   remember where.
                 - Teleporter sound: this is drone_starship from Death2Uall's
                   Industrial Pack 1 (http://factory.thebackburner.com/).

Other thanks:    - David/phooka for putting together the UMP and asking that
                   Titans be included; also, the various folks who recommended
                   Titans to him (BlaZeD, nitin, anyone else).
                 - Jan "MrElusive" Paul for much help with the bot support.
                 - The denizens of the Quake3World level editing forum, for
                   advice and entertainment.
                 - bushboy, nakedape, some guy i know, Maj, and Drunken Boxer
                   for comments and suggestions.  The entire M3A team for help
                   with the previous incarnation of parts of this map as an
                   RA3 clan arena.
                 - Clan Plaid for being my "gaming support group".
                 - Of course, Robert Duffy, Paul Jaquays, and the rest of id
                   software; and Timothee Besset and the Q3Radiant ninjas.

Tools:           - GtkRadiant 1.1-TA (http://www.gtkradiant.com/)
                 - q3map 1.0r and bspc 2.1e
                 - The GIMP 1.2.0 (http://www.gimp.org/)
                 - Milkshape 3D 1.4.3 (http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/ms3d/)

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* Map specs *

Base:                 media and some architecture from my clan arena
                      "Lost Colossus", in m3amap1
New sounds:           Yes; see the credits above
New graphics:         Yes, almost completely; see the credits above
Build time:           Dec 2000 to Mar 2001; TA/CTF versions merged April 2002
Brush count:          8047
Entity count:         1255
Max polygons in view: approx. 9000 *
Imagelist size:       approx. 3.1 Mtexels **

* This is the max r_speeds value with gun display enabled, 3D icons, 3D
items, and high detail geometry, as viewed from the normal playing field.
It is possible to see higher values when spectating/noclipping/grappling to
the highest points in the map.
** This is the imagelist size at r_picmip 1 (2nd-highest texture quality) in
unmodified Q3; original Q3 standard is 3 Mtexels.

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* Known issues *

This map was designed to the system specs for Team Arena.  It should perform
as well as the large Team Arena maps (hopefully better), but it will be more
taxing to your system than older Q3CTF maps.

There are a couple of interesting jumps that can only be successfully made if
pmove_fixed is enabled and pmove_msec set to a good value (like 8).  Or if
pmove_fixed is disabled and you have a really high framerate.

I am fairly happy with the bot play on this map.  There's one little quirk,
and here it is: bots are extraordinarily hesitant about going after the yellow
armors in the middle.  They pause and run in place for a bit before jumping
over.  Because of this I haven't given any extra weight to those armors, and I
don't think that bots will ever go to get them unless you tell them to.

Because of the large open areas of this map, bots have a lot to think about.
There are no pathologically bad areas for the bots, but there's no getting
around the basic structure of the map that eats more AI cycles than a map
with small contained spaces would.  So, systems with slower CPUs will
experience some framerate drop when loading up large bot teams on this map.

If you play in 16-bit color, your graphics card loses some precision in
determining how far away polygons are from you; this can lead to distant
polygons getting mixed in with each other and looking odd.  You can see this
effect on the large statue; nothing I can do about that.  It also affects the
special effect of the colored runes "bleeding in" at the tops of the obelisks.
Other than that, I think I've gotten rid of any other bad visual effects that
can happen to the map in 16-bit color.  (At the cost of increasing the texel
count a bit.)

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* Copyright / Permissions *

All media used in this creation remain property of their respective owners;
they are used here with permission.

The author reserves all rights concerning this creation not superceded by
prior claims and not waived in this document.

You may of course install this map on a Q3 game server, and you may install
it for a Q3 client to play the map alone or on a game server.

You may not use this map as a base for creating other works without 
permission from the author.

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