Kasteel - May 1998
================================================================
Title                   : Kasteel, aka "Sir FragALot's Village"
Filename                : kasteel.txt    (this readme file)
                          kasteel.bsp    (the level itself)
Author                  : Aardappel      (Wouter van Oortmerssen)
Email Address           : wvo96r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Web Page		: http://www.dsse.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~wvo96r/quake/
Description             : DM for 6-12 players ideally, structure very unlike
			  most maps, looks like a little village.

Additional Credits to   : Don (Brick) and Charlie (MoonGlum) for helping out,
			  advice & playtesting, the Qoole people for such a
			  good map editor, our sysadmins for letting me hog
			  their servers for weeks, and, um, id :)

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

* Play Information *

Single Player           : Well there are no monsters :)
Cooperative             : Eh?
Deathmatch              : 11 respawn points
Difficulty Settings     : No
New Sounds              : No
New Graphics            : non-quake textures from here and there
New Music               : No
Demos Supplied          : No

* Construction *

Base                    : New level from scratch
Editor(s) used          : Qoole
Known Bugs              : Can get stuck in places
Build Time              : Extremely long. VIS time about 5 weeks. read below.
Texture Wad used        : Original quake, + various from doom/hexen.

Compile machine         : sun ultrasparc 300mhz, 256Mb Ram
QBSP Time               : About 45 minutes?
Light (-extra) Time     : About 30 minutes?
VIS (-level 2) Time     : About 5 weeks. read below.


Summary of the level
====================
The map is supposed to look like a little village originally. It consists
of various interconnected buildings (towers, a church), bridges with lava pits,
a little harbour, and various other outside areas with trees, canals etc.

The level is quite big and nicely interconnected (once you'll get to know
it you'll notice that there are quite a few non-obvious ways to get from
A to B). Not every connection is straightforward though, and quite a few
paths require skilful moving and jumping to negotiate them.

The level used to be completely open, but Quake and it's tools VIS and co
couldn't cope with that so now it is split into 4 compartments, confined
by sky brushes. This will look weird at first, but you'll understand the
structure as you walk through it.

The level contains:

1 rocket launcher, 2 grenade launchers, 3 thunderbolts
4 super nailguns, 4 nailguns, 4 super shotguns
1 red, 4 yellow and 6 green armours, 4 mega health
1 quad, 1 ring

There is lots of everything, but the level is quite big and some of the
items above are in non-obvious places.

due to the structure of the level it is not as fast as most id levels,
but seems ok on most machines (it runs smooth on my p166), but if you're
using GLQuake (depending on your config) it can slow dowm in deathmatch
much like, say, dm7. Tweaking your GL settings (particles, dynamic
lights, gl_subdivide_size set to 1024 for lots of sky etc.) might help.
In normal Quake it is quite fast, though gives grey bits depending on
your settings. I have r_maxsurfs 2000 and r_maxedges 5000 and that seems
to work fine (shouldn't slow other maps down).

Bad points about the level: It is full of camper spots :)
It has bits where you can get stuck, most noticable of the back
of the highest tower (it is not real easy to fall down there).

history:
I set about making this level in december '97 with the idea of
a little village/castle on an island. I did this all without
bothering to vis it, and when it was about finished I noticed
it was impossible to vis, due to it's extreme interconnectivity
of portals. I had no option but to split the level up, which gave
rise to the current structure of 4 segments separated by sky
brushes. Even then vis -level 4 bombed out, and best I could
do was a vis -level 2 (the default level), which ran a total
of 5 weeks on our ultrasparc server here (I never guessed it
would take that long still, but I just let it finish).
Changing anything but the entities about the level would
require another 5 weeks of vis, so I'm not doing that.

So crap level design? yes and no. If I'd say crap engine design
I'd get the whole quake community laughing at me, but let me have
a bit of a VIS rant: vis takes time basically exponential to the
most complex room in your level. The problem is, is that as soon
as two rooms can "see" eachother potentially (i.e. sometimes even
when they can't really see eachother), vis takes the amount of
time as if they were one big room. The only way to get around
this is have all rooms of moderate complexity, and have them
all interconnected by bendy hallways, to block the view, much like
almost all quake levels out there. This forces quake levels to
be a particular style only. My level of course was (and to some
extend still is) one huge and very complex room as far as vis
is concerned.

If you think it is difficult to have extreme vis times like this,
it is not. Do the following exercise: create a huge room. create
a column, make sure it is slightly detailed (some holes, bits
and pieces sticking out, let your creative juices flow), then
copy this column, say, in a 10 by 10 grid throughout the room, free
floating, maybe even slightly randomly. now run vis. I'd be very
surprised if you ever get it to finish. Such a level design would
give, say, the doom engine hardly any trouble.

My newest map is more traditional in structure, and the current
version still takes less than 15 mins vis time. Yes I learn,
albeit slowly.


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* Copyright / Permissions *

You now the drill: don't tamper with the archive or anything in it. Cheers.
Distribution in any way is ok. Hey, you could even ask me :)


Wouter van Oortmerssen (aka Aardappel)
