--Planet AvP | Articles | Red_Riot: In His Own Words

Red_Riot: In His Own Words Edited and annotated by Windebieste. This article is edited together from correspondence between Red_Riot and myself at the end of July and the beginning of August, 2002. Red_Riot had notified me that his latest map for Aliens vs Predator 2 had been released and was now available for download. That map is Jungle and it features numerous unique and creative gameplay elements for Multi-Player sessions. Innovations are what we have come to expect from Red_Riot. His earlier maps, like Friendly Welcome, featured gameplay involving shooting endless swarms of Aliens from the back of a moving truck; and the unique arcade Bug blasting experience of XENOCOMMAND. His expansive outdoor Multi-Player map, Hangers 2, can be considered a precursor to the recently released Jungle. I asked him what his personal motivations for making these maps was and his response came as a series of lengthy 2 a.m. rambling E-mails about game design philosophy. Compiled together and tidied up for community appreciation, here it is, Red_Riot: In His Own Words: "Personal motivation? That's a good question. No map will ever get done unless there's some sort of personal motivation behind it, and it had better be a darn good motivator because map design and creation is a hair pulling event. People message me with great - Hell - brilliant ideas every day, unfortunately a lot of these maps wouldn't be 100% in my interest to do. Why? Because proper motivation isn't there. "What's my motivation? To do stuff that's never been done before in an engine. Plain and Simple. If I can do something truly unique in a map, there's a good chance it'll get done. This has sort of been a pattern with me and the maps I've released (The junk map and prefab piles sitting on my harddrive are simply amazing). "If you consider Friendly Welcome, a game where you sit on the back of two moving trucks, this is something that, to my knowledge, has never been done in a FPS shooter. It made for one hell of a learning curve as my first DEdit map ever. Monolith was going to do a moving tram sub level, but it never got done due to time constraints. "Hangers/Storm almost didnt make it out of the doors after that, because it was too mundane for me, thus the lazy errors in the initial Hangers2 release. "Next up was XENOCOMMAND, a truly refreshing and easy map for me to do. Talon has no If/Then/Else/Int structure to speak of, so finding a way to do squad selection and everything else in the map was a true challenge, with some very interesting results, thus you get a decent finished project (and falling cows). "Lastly, we have DM_Jungle. I have *never* seen a decent Jungle map in any FPS that made me completely happy. Usually you get the straight up pillar trees - that I'm sure everyone is familiar with. That, and your map is always in a straight line. The motivation here was 10 fold because this was a truly unique challenge. Here's my motivator list that (in my opinion) made Jungle such a great map: A) Never been done before. B) Open line of sight with no visibility blockers. C) A decent jungle with non crap trees that at least does a half way decent impression of a jungle. "While I'll admit, that Jungle still doesn't look like a 100% pure jungle (which has led me to want to take another crack at it, and fix my mistakes with all I've learned). It's as close as I could come giving the limitations of the engine and the map design. I can say that I'm satisfied with the end result, which is a good thing to say about any map that you've designed. "As for the game modes, CTF and evac_jungle_password, these came up when I found out that people were having fun with Jungle, and were having a great time. In a few of the beta runs, players who found a bug that allowed you to go underground made up a game called 'grabboids', (Aliens under ground pouncing up at Marines on the ground). This got me thinking about what other type of games I could come up and make work with the engine. I'm not big into modding the attrib files, and I didn't want Jungle to make players incompatible with normal games so I had to keep all my mods in-game. "Another great challenge, of which the end result in the initial release was ctf_Jungle, buildable bunkers, and a bumpy Evac jungle_password. CTF_Jungle seemed to be very popular in the test runs with my friends, so I took a lot of care to provide everything to make it a very stable game. Once I got a few good ideas rolling, I didn't want to stop. I have over 100 different ideas that I'd like to implement into the Jungle map, including SP squad play, however I'm not sure if any of them will ever see the light. I want to do a SP_Jungle pack with you as a Pred hunting respawning (a'la Skirmish) Marine squads, and also as a Marine squad leader fending off tree jumping Aliens. "Anyways, As I mentioned above, challenging and inovative changes to games, incorporating stuff never done before is a big draw for me. The bunkers in the Jungle map were a pure NIGHTMARE (N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E) to implement! Especially when I decided to have them toggle their aiming from Corps to Marines. There is no magical command in Talon to switch a turret's targeting properties. Did I mention that debugging and working with the turrets was a Nightmare? CTF was also fun (and quite easy believe it or not, I think I'll implement this mode into all of my future maps). "My microphone broke at a very inconvienient time, however, Sgt_Stew was kind enough to do the announcer voices for me. I think that in the end he did us all a favor. Maybe this was an act of God? The Jungle Password was also tricky, like I stated earlier, Talon has no if/then/else/integer/boolean structure, so it was a challenge to figure out how to compare passwords, or to randomly generate passwords. In the end however, everything worked out just fine and dandy, except for a 6 second unlock delay on the switch which I forgot to take off in the initial release. "Speaking of releases, it could hardly have gone unnoticed that I released Jungle version 1_1 about 16 hours after version 1_0 went public. A lot of errors that I had hoped would go overlooked came up and bit me (I love the public). So, crunch time began at about 10:00 PM and stopped at 3:00 AM until all the bugs were taken care of. I have to admit, that there was a great deal of satisfaction in squashing these bugs as well. I'm sort of kicking myself in the butt for releasing version 1_0 since it had such a rocket boosting start off, but I'm even more glad that I released version 1_1 before the news sites published the map. "Up until recently, one of the core ideas behind making maps was to limit how many polygons can be on screen. To do this, you needed a wall. The engine calculates what you can see and what you can't see. It doesn't draw what you can't see, which limits how many polygons will be on screen at the same time. This is the reason hallways in levels always have kinks in them, or limited line of sight, there are visibility blockers there that keep the game from drawing too many polygons. "With the Jupiter engine, there is no longer any visibility blockers, or a visibility tree for that matter. The engine can push 20,000 polies on screen at one time (more than the poly limit for an entire Talon Engine AvP2 level). So the visibility tree can be cut, as well as anything having to do with blocking visibility. It just draws it all (and with amazing detail). "You gain a tremendous amount of power here because the engine no longer has to worry about a visibility tree, or testing to see which polygons it has to draw, and which ones it can leave on screen. This frees a tremendous amount of space, and it's even more important if you consider the current trends: Games these days are pushing thousands of polies per screen at high refresh rates. The more polies you put on screen, the more checks and tests you have to run for each polygon to decide if it gets drawn. Start having to check for a couple thousand polygons and you're wasting a *LOT* of time calculating which areas can be seen and which polygons to draw or not. It's gotten to the point where it's more effecient to forgo the checks and tests and use that power just to draw what's there. Overdraw (polygons the engine draws, and then draws over with closer polies) will soon be a thing of the past, and the old engine rendering techniques shunned. (If you're familiar with Talon, it's like making a whole level out of detail 1's) "So down to the nitty gritty, Jungle has no line of sight blockers, the map is a big detail 1 mesh with a detail 0 box around it, like what you'll see with the Jupiter engine. It draws everything up to the fog, no further. It doesn't waste much time checking a visibility tree, it just draws to the horizon. This is also why Jungle.ed (which I'll put up soon) takes under 3 minutes to do a full process: it doesn't have to do much for visibility trees, which are a *huge* part of practically every map ever made. "One of the biggest rewards, however, is seeing your map on the public AVP2 server list, and people actually playing it. makes your time and work feel worth it. I'm happy to have seen all versions of Jungle being played at some point or another, and many happy gamers fragging one another. "That's what it's all really about though, isn't it? Fun and Fragging." By Red_Riot So, there you have it. A very interesting insight into some of the thoughts and philosophies of one man's game design principles. It sure makes me look forward to Red_Riot's next release. Whatever that will be. When I first read these E-mails, it was a real surprise to me to find out that Friendly Welcome was Red_Riot's first DEdit map. I was always under the impression that he was a No One Lives Forever mapping veteran. Nonetheless, his work has provided us all with some truly inventive maps for the AvP2 community. Obviously, he has had some modding experience elsewhere. XENOCOMMAND is a personal favourite map of mine. It's got all the essential ingredients for a great time to be had. Yeah, blanket bombing a valley full of Aliens with a barrage of falling, exploding cows is definitely a unique experience. Can't ask for much more than that in the innovative stakes. When my die-hard Quake 3 and Counterstrike friends asked me why I liked AvP2 so Much, I showed 'em this map by Red_Riot. Advertisement "Here." I told 'em, "Watch this...". They sat down with eyes transfixed on the monitor, watching in semi-disbelief as wave after wave of Kamikaze Aliens, helicopter gunships and exploding cows cascade across the monitor... "Wipe them out.. all of them." Comes the voice of Darth Sidious, accompanied by the warning sirens of the impending Nuke. Then the big end of map boss Queen trots out across the landscape, and the bitch is holding multiple Rocket Launchers... Oh, "Happy, happy, joy, joy!"... it always floors 'em. Ahem, anyway. You just have to love the idea of a squad-based Single Player version of Jungle. That really has got some appeal. If Red_riot were to decide to follow it through, I am sure it would be well received. It makes me wonder about some of the "junk map and prefab piles" he has residing on his harddrive. Well, maybe we will discover when he finishes his major project, Evacuation Earth, some time in the unspecified future. Whatever happens, it looks like we will get to enjoy some more fine releases from Red_Riot. It's just a matter of time. All of Red_Riot's currently released maps that he discusses above have all been reviewed in Planet AvP's Map of the Week section. You can find them all here with Download links. Thanks Red_Riot for agreeing to have this posted. By Windebieste Comments? Flames? Praise? Mail feedback!