Journal #5596

I originally posted this on LiveJournal, so it's a little light on technical talk, and a little heavy on explanation to non-Hammer-savvy civilians, but it's relevant here too!

January is half-gone already, and it's been an interesting month so far, full of ups and downs. I'm not here to talk about those, though; I'm here to talk about my next HLDM mapping project. I'm actually slipping this in front of the ongoing work on Lab11: Erupt, and I'm basically treating it as a "quicky" project -- which, for me, means less than a month. Hopefully. Needless to say, there's a back-story...

Many moons ago (mid 2004) my buddy Ben built an HLDM level of his own. I'd already built a couple, and was working on another - off-hand I don't remember which one - and he wanted to get in on the act and express a few ideas of his own. It was his first -- and so far, his only; with a wife (and now a child) Ben does not have as much free time on his hands as I do -- and he'll be the first to admit that it is not as, uh, visually polished as it could be. That level was (and is) called Canyon.

The original design idea behind Canyon was the same original idea that drove the creation of my first level, LavaLab: quite simply, "glass walkways". In fact, one of my false starts before I settled on the LavaLab setting was a canyon. I didn't know enough back then (and was working under an artificially imposed constraint which I have since ignored) to do the idea justice, and finally set about to remedy the situation with my most recent level, Lab11: LavaLab... Of course, the remake has no glass walkways at all, and the original had them pared back to squeeze the level into that constraint I mentioned, so I haven't yet managed to produce a level making proper use of the idea. I'm sure it will manifest itself at some future point in my map-building career...

(Edit: Ben tells me that the original design idea behind Canyon was actually one of the extremely vertical, vertigo-inducing levels of one of the Jedi Knight shooters, combined with some other canyon-like level we'd seen. Live 'n learn, huh?!)

Canyon, meanwhile, ended up with a grand total of one glass walkway, and absolutely no "canyon"-like features apart from its being a long deep hole. The story that we developed to explain the purpose of this facility was that it is a garbage disposal thing, but there was little in the design to back up that explanation. A couple of years ago, with Ben's permission, I set out to "reimagine" the idea, making the place a rocky hole on an asteroid somewhere, with a garbage compactor at the bottom. I was using a set of grungy tech textures from the same guy who made the Egyptian texture set I'd used in my Necropolis: Mausoleum level, and I was excited. The attempt stalled, however - I'll get back to it sometime - and I then decided to work on the remake of LavaLab instead.

At around that time we discovered that Ben had mislaid the source files - the MAP and RMF - from which the playable BSP file is compiled. Without those, he was unable to make any changes to his level, and over the years that we've been playing it, he had numerous things he wanted to fix, or change, or add. At the time I hunted out a decompiler, which takes a BSP file and generates a MAP. The process is far from perfect, and the resulting MAP file would have required a lot of work just to get it back to its current state, so he (and I) gave up on the attempt.

Then, in the lead up to my release of Lab11: LavaLab - something we both highly anticipated (Ben with delight; myself with more than a hint of trepidation) - we stopped playing whichever of my levels we had been playing and switched back to Canyon. After we started playing my level, of course, we had Ben's on our minds. One thing led to another and, on a whim, I went looking for another decompiler. Of the few I found, one gave us a MAP file which was almost useable. I rubbed my chin thoughtfully, and then I told Ben I had a working canyon.map file. I offered him first dibs on jumping into it and fixing up all the things he wanted to fix.

When he declined, I made my counter-proposal: I would take it and work on it. He agreed.

For a time I simply sat and stared at it, in the editor. (Interesting typo there; I originally typed "deitor"!) Where to begin? It didn't take me long to decide that I would use his work to arrive at a hole of the same dimensions, and with the same doors and walkways and layouts -- but that I would rebuild the level from scratch, within those constraints, with my own design sensibilities. It was the only way I could get fully enthusiastic about the project! The original transformation of the layout from untextured blockwork to final design went fairly quickly: after all, I did not have to think (much) about layout and could focus all my energy on detail and texture. And since I already knew I'd be going back to the same texture set I'd wanted to use the first time I reimagined the level, that texture set began to drive detail design much as its sister set had guided the design of Mausoleum...

I very quickly arrived at something which had both Ben and myself really excited about what I am now calling Canyon: Redux... I also very quickly pushed the compile time up from minutes to hours.

So far, Canyon: Redux has no glass walkways at all... Additionally, because 18 months of work on Lab11 had cured me of any wish to do rocky walls (to do them realistically, they rapidly consume the available resources) I have opted for the same full-tech approach of the original Canyon. I always like to try new things when building a level -- I'm more than happy with how my garbage disintegration field is shaping up, and the round doors have me quite excited, although I haven't yet proved I can get them to work. Revisiting complexities that I've already proved (to myself) that I can make work ... there's just no fun in that!

Which brings me to last night. After Ben and I finished firing it up -- 30 minutes in Lab11: HeatHaze (which is merely Lab11: LavaLab with gorgeous orange fog, and surprisingly the level works quite well for its size, even with only the two of us) -- we were talking about Canyon and Redux as we packed up our stuff in preparation for our respective trips home. (We play after work most nights...) Ben referred to it as "this thing we call Canyon", and the phrase lodged in my head. I decided we needed something to explain the actual "Canyon" name, given its complete un-canyon-ness, and the idea of having graffiti tagging the facility with its "common nickname" (given, no doubt, by those who worked there) occurred to me. (I'd already been thinking of using some generalised graffiti art somewhere, but that thought now crystallised into something very specific.)

Of course, while I'm fully confident in my mastery of Valve Hammer Editor when it comes to building levels, I have a dim view of my digital art abilities. So making a suitable piece of graffiti art for inclusion into Redux was something of a challenge.

I do like a challenge! I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the end result; it's certainly better than any of the textures I'd made up till now. Of course, it is applied over one of the wall textures I was already using so it would fit seamlessly into the level -- making a texture from scratch is still beyond my abilities...

Also last night, apart from putting the finishing touches to my disintegration field, I solved another problem which threatened to stall my progress. I had all my wonderfully circular doorways -- they existed in the original Canyon, I merely found a texture to suit them -- which had to open into much smaller (than the exterior space, anyway) square rooms. My solution was to construct a square-to-round transition piece. I'm still compiling last night's efforts so I don't know exactly how it will look in-game, but I'm pretty happy with it...

So there you have it. New project, coming soon...