Finally done! An actual playable rendition of the Riverpool theme!
A lot of work went into this one, so I hope you enjoy it.
HOW TO PLAY:
Ride the ducky to earn points.
Kills don't give points.
There are 3 secrets. Looks for things that are out of the ordinary.
NOTES:
GOOD GOD THE FUCKING DUCKY!
Here's how it works. Brace yourself.
The duck itself is a model. The lighting is baked into it, rendered out from Blender. The model is flagged with the settings 'No Shade Light' tick on, and 'Force Skylight' also ticked on. So what that does is it'll make the ducky fullbright to the intensity of the light_env present.
The duck is the first train and uses the zhlt_usemodel trick to replace the brush train with the model.
The collision is a second train that is invisible that follows the ducky along.
The track is in 2 parts. There is a first part that the collision train follows, and as is passes closely placed together path_tracks, a total of 78 of them, they each fire their own game_player_zone that then covers the ducky and detects if a player is on the ducky. To prevent the points from doubling, there is a second set of paths (another 78) that doesn't fire any zones. This is for the ducky model. So that's 234 entities to make the ducky point system work in succession around the riverpool.
Its a beast of a setup, and frankly I've been mulling over the concept for an actual while. It had its bugs but I worked them out. I spared no detail or effort.
The map itself reaches a cool 3500 world polies, but a mind rending 40,000 epolies. >_<
The map had to be compiled on -fast vis, otherwise too many of the models would disappear as parts of the map unload. Sometimes they still do but when it needs to matter and you're up close. Each tree has a rudimentary collision box though, just a rectangular brush that goes a bit above head height. The tops of the trees have no collision and can easily be jumped through. I kept it this way for gameplay reasons.
Because it is a small map, I gave the players 100 Armor starting out. It would suck to immediately die being spawned right before someone. This makes each player more hardy.
The RPG, longjump, and Tau Cannon are present... somewhere. >_>
I did notice a minor issue in that the render mode for the forcefield around the rpg seems to be set to texture rather than additive
Also, has anyone found any secrets yet?
Even with fastvis, the ocassional tree model will disappear due to visleaf disconnections. You could mitigate this a lot by editing the models and put the origin point higher up. This will solve most of the issues.
Another point of improvement would be sound. The map is dead silent. Some splashing water around the fountain or a sound for the jumppads would go a long way.
The only secret I found till now is the HL logo but I'm not sure what that does?