Saturday, April 10, 1999
================================================================
Title                   : The Elder God Ruins
Filename                : EGodRuin.bsp
Author                  : David M. Pochron
Email Address           : newshole@mindspring.com
Web Site		: http://www.mindspring.com/~dpoch
Additional Credits to   : id Software for Quake 1 & 2

Other Maps By Author	Quake 1:  rktarena
			Unreal:   DMLightsOut

================================================================

* Play Information *

Single Player           : No
Cooperative             : No
Deathmatch              : Yes (3-10 players)
Botmatch                : Yes (Eraser bot route is included)
Difficulty Settings     : No
New Sounds              : No
New Graphics            : No
New Music               : No
Demos Replaced          : None
CD Track		: 11

==================================================================

* Construction *

Base                    : None, other than the original dimensions of Q1 e4m3
Editor(s) used          : BSP, Quark
Known Bugs              : The wall in one hallway disappears because of the limited
                          size of the Q2 sky environment cube.  Not much can be done
                          about this without rewriting Q2 engine or making 
                          *significant* changes to the original Q1 layout of that hall.
                          Also, bots sometimes get stuck in the water in the red armor
                          room because they don't understand that they can't climb
                          the steep side of the ramp.  That is for the bot authors
                          to fix, however.
Build Time              : Approx. 9 months of off and on work, it takes about
                          35 minutes to do a full build of the level on my
                          400Mhz PII system with 128MB of RAM.

==================================================================
Installation:

Unpack the EGodRuin.bsp into your Quake2\baseq2\maps folder (create the maps folder
if you don't have one.)  If you have the Eraser bot, unpack the egodruin.rtz file
into the routes folder.


==================================================================
Backstory:

After the fall of Shub-Niggurath, the world which was the home of
the Elder God Shrine was forgotten and fell into disrepair.
Several hundred years later, as man expanded out into the deepest
reaches of space, several mining expeditions came across this world
and found the ruins of the former shrine.  All layed claim to the
artifacts at this site, and now battle amongst themselves to see
who will get to uncover the secrets of the Elder God Ruins.


==================================================================
Author's Notes:

If you haven't figured it out by now, "Elder God Ruins" is a remake of my
favorite Q1 map, "Elder God Shrine" (E4M3).  The former map is now in ruins,
but despite these significant changes I have gone to a great many lengths
to make this map play like the original on Q2.  Dimensionally, the map is
*exactly* like the original map - all the rooms are the same size, everything
is in the original positions of the Q1 version.  Note that this map does
not use any decompiled Q1 map material.  (This map was started long before
WinBSPC existed.)  I used Quark to jot down the basic room sizes of the
original on a piece of paper, then I blocked out the map with large brushes.
I then used the hollow tool to simply turn each block into a room or hall,
deleted the overlapping end sections, and resized them so they all connected
and didn't leak.  I then studied the original map in quake to see how all
the room and hall details were layed out, and simply added them in.  (The
original E4M3 is really a simple map - most of the details like the ceilings
are duplicated everywhere in the level and are symmetrical, so once I knew
how a detail worked it could be repeated again and again.)  In fact, getting
the original map with all its details only took about a week's worth of work
in the entire project.  Making the map look ruinous is what took most of the
time afterwards!

The first changes you'll notice is the fallen ceilings and crumbling walls.
The reason I decided to restrict some of the halls with these objects was it
became possible during playtesting for someone with excellent railgun skill
to dominate the map because of the long straight nature of the hallways.
These fallen objects will give players some places to duck behind if they are
being chased by someone with that weapon.  Also helpful is the ability to
duck into the old light fixtures/windows that were in the old map.  The glass
has been shattered, and you can duck into these to wait for your pursuer to
pass you by and you can turn the tables on him and shoot him from behind.

The biggest changes are the graveyard and the exit room.  The exit room's
exit has collapsed into a large chasm that formed after the destruction
of Shub-Niggurath.  It's very impressive to look at, but this doesn't really
affect the play of the map as there is no useful items in the chasm.  (The
chasm was really designed for the "Weapons of Destruction" mod so players could
have air to air jetpack battles.  There's lots of room in the chasm for that,
and the lava at the bottom makes things *very* interesting as players will have
to keep an eye on their jetpack fuel! :-)

The graveyard is the other big change in the map, and it does change a bit how
the map is played.  In the original, the only way to the graveyard was through
an underwater passage.  I noticed however, that this didn't make any sense,
as the graveyard butted right up against the hump where one of the rocket
launchers was located.  So, I opened it all up, and now that hallway overlooks
the graveyard.  In order to make sure the underwater passage was still
an important feature of the level, I place a backpack in it.

The other layout change is the addition of the "dig" area where the miners
originally uncovered the entrance to the Elder God Shrine.  Some items
are located here, but the biggest asset is it give players the ability to
cross over from one side of the map to the other quickly without
having to use a rocket jump in room below.  It also allowed me to open up one
of the hallways and get some sunlight into there.

Weapons placement is matched as closely as possible to the original map.
The rocket launcher, grenade launcher, super shotgun, machine gun, and
chaingun are direct replacements for the original Q1 weapons.  The
hyperblaster is used to replace the two places the lightning gun was located.
To round out all the Q2 weapons, a railgun (as previously mentioned) was
added to the dig area and a BFG was added in a hard to reach spot in the new
and improved graveyard area.  (This map has so many places to duck and hide,
however, that only beginners should be   Ammo placement is mostly the same as the
original map.  I had to add grenades separately since rockets don't work
with the grenade launcher as they did in Q1.  Additional power cells were added
because of the extra power requirements of the power shield items.

Speaking of which, the ring of invisibility was a bit of a problem.  I solved
it by substituting two items for it - in two of its locations I used the
power shield, and in the other two I used the silencer.  (Both very useful,
IMO.)  Health is pretty much the same as Q1, as is the two instanced of
megahealth.  An adrenaline was added to help combat the effects of accumulative
quad damage in Q2.  (See below.)

The quad presented an interesting problem.  Early playtesting showed it was
possible to acquire "infinite quad" because the original map has so many quads
(5 of them!).  Because Q2's quad's are accumulative, a good player could simply
get into a pattern and keep building up quad damage time until they had several
minutes of constant quad damage on.  This was unacceptable, so I removed two of
the quads.  One of the quads (in the graveyard) was turned into an
invulnerability (which the original Q1 map had none of) in order to combat quad
hogs.  The other quad (in the red armor room) was turned into a bandolier to
give players some extra ammo to combat anyone trying to hog the backpack.  If all
this sounds complicated, it really isn't.  This is just the result of 9 months
of playtesting while I've been working bit by bit on the map.  In any case,
server operators can turn off all the powerups if they like, though my feeling
is the abundance of powerups in the original map added to the overall
enjoyability of that level.

If you've ever played the original, you know that the rocket launcher is king
(as is the case in most Q1 maps.)  In the ruins, firing the RL down long
hallways isn't going to be very effective (unless the server is running a Q1
rocket mod).  There really isn't a "top" weapon in this map, as I've modified
the map enough that anyone should be able to effectively use the weapon
they are most comfortable with.  (Aside from the blaster and regular shotgun,
of course. :-)

There are no weapons secrets in this map, only one easter egg that refers
to another Q1 map.  (You'll know it if you find it. ;-)  Since everyone knows
the secrets of the original map by now, I took them out.  (It didn't make sense
for "ruins" to have working secrets, anyhow.)  All the raising floors have been
replaced with ladders, and the teleporters have been replaced by Company(tm)
teleportation equipment. :-)  The lava hall moving floor fell apart years ago,
but the expedition crews bridged the gap with difficult to navigate metal beams.

The lightning is mostly the same as the original.  However, since the original
light fixtures/windows shattered long ago, the expedition crews installed
mine lights everywhere.  I wanted to use ArghRad to light the outside, but
it didn't create the harsh interior lighting effect I got with id's QRAD3
program (which I wanted for the ruins), so the outside is lit with several
small lights to give the appearance of sunlight.

Because this is a modified Q1 map, players should get good performance on
just about any system.  (Most of the work was done on this map while I still
had a Voodoo1 accelerator.)

In closing, although this map is visually different from the original, after
working and playtesting it for so long, I still think I've managed to capture
the feel of the original without simply duplicating it verbatim.  If you want
to make an exact duplicate of the original E4M3 map, I am releasing the .map
file at the point which I was finished reconstructing the original.  You
can then recompile it into a version that looks just like E4M3.  Note, however,
that this .map doesn't have any entities and doesn't have any textures other
than the brick, so you'll still have a lot of work ahead of you if you want to
make an exact copy the original.  The .map file is located at my web page.
(See top of this document.)  Eventually, I'll probably release the .map file
for the ruins as well, after I see how well the "Elder God Ruins" goes over
with gamers.  Feel free to comment to me on it after you've played it!



==================================================================
* Legal Stuff *

You may distribute this level and include it in any deathmatch compilation
as long as you include this text file as it appears here.
