Estatica by Cardigan

'The rain in Spain falls mainly in freeze-frame'

FFA map for Quake 3 Arena

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Title: Estatica

File: map-estatica-cardigan.pk3
BSPs: estatica.bsp

Author: Cardigan (Dan Evans)
Email address: cardigan@planetquake.com
Website: http://www.planetquake.com/cardigan

Description: Surreal, spanish-colonial-flavoured FFA map for 4 - 8 players. Makes use of many of the new visual effects made possible by ydnar's fantastic q3map2 compiler - hi-res shadows, lightmapped terrain and models etc...

Recommended specs: Beauty unfortunately comes at a price - something I can attest to after undergoing 12 years of cosmetic surgery to make me look like David Hasselhoff. In the case of this map the price is a GeForce2 or equivalent graphics card with processor to match and I would imagine 64MB of video RAM for full texture detail. Anything less will probably result in unplayable frame rates, although reducing geometric and texture detail and switching to 16-bit colour will make the map less system-hungry.  

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How to play
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Unzip the .pk3 file into your baseq3 directory and off you go!

Type "\map estatica" into the console or choose the map through the skirmish menu.

Assets:
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New textures: yes, all textures made in Photoshop 7.0 by me. Some textures contain photographic elements taken from the following rather groovy public photo collections: 

Travis Price's Texture Bin 342: http://www.digitalcraftsman.com/textureBin/textureBin.htm

Jeremy A. Engleman's Public Textures: http://www.art.net/~jeremy/photo/public_texture/index.html

Animax
http://www.animax.it

Ornate tile designs taken from 2 textures on the TextureWorld European Tile texture CD.

Some of the textures in this map will shortly be available to use as part of the Map-Center Mediterranean Texture Challenge Pack. See www.map-center.com for more details.

new shaders: yes.

new models: yes - the palm is by Todd Gantzler and the rest are by me.

new sounds: yes, a rustle cobbled together in Sound Forge from various sounds from Todd's multiplant model pack. 

new music: yes, a moody atmospheric piece commissioned from my good friend The Tudor Intruder.

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FUQ
(Frequently Unanswered Questions)

1. Why doesn't the rain move?

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Answers to Spot the Deliberate Mistake Competition (aka Known Issues)

1. z-fighting around the smaller pools and in a few other places in 16-bit mode.
2. a few hard edges on the lightmaps.
3. portals wobble in out-of-the-box q3 and in many mods. They're static as they should be in regular Q3 patched up to the latest version.
4. The weapons and items rotate and bob as normal, something I tried to override using a cunning idea from Sonke Richter (thanks!) but unfortuantely all the global shader switching required to keep the items still and make them invisible when they were not available was causing horrible framerate drop-outs.


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Thanks to....

ydnar for writing q3map2, without which many of the fancy effects in this map (high res shadows etc) would not have been possible.

Everyone at the Q3W Level Editing forums for their support, especially quint for being such a good pal, wviperw for his comprehensive feedback and djbob for helping me out with some techy stuff.

The ICE and CPMA mod teams for writing ICE and CPMA which allowed me to test new item layouts at decent framerates without having to sit through another enormous VIS compile.

My mexican connection Lionel Steamer for the title and feedback.

The Tudor Intruder for the music.

Todd Gantzler for the palm model which can be found at: http://i.am/professorQ3

id software for making Q3.

My partner Megan, son Fred and baby Lola for putting up with me, contributing lots of good ideas and generally being splendid. 
 

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Distribution / Copyright / Permissions

Level design, map models and texture art copyright Dan 'Cardigan' Evans, 2003 (subject to exceptions stated above)

Quake III Arena is a registered trademark of 
id Software, Inc.

This level may be electronically distributed only at 
NO CHARGE to the recipient in its current state, MUST 
include this .txt file, and may NOT be modified IN 
ANY WAY. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES IS THIS LEVEL TO BE 
DISTRIBUTED ON CD-ROM WITHOUT PRIOR WRITTEN PERMISSION.

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