Working with BSP-made meshes in UT2004, I've been relying on a perl script to automatically remove unneeded polygons from brushes before converting them into meshes (this fixes many lighting issues, which are caused by overlapping vertices, incidentally) by matching a specific texture. This was a tedious process as it involved saving the brush(es) in a separate file and manually setting the texture to look for (or sticking to a specific texture forever) each time. In order to do away with most of the process, I have scripted my own tool. A simple copy/paste of the brush in the text field will spit a list of all textures used. Select one and it will process the brush, removing any polygon with the corresponding texture reference.

I have tried to proofread most of Hellkeeper.net with only a few old updates to go through. I will not waste my time going over the whole list of tutorials as I plan to rework the entire section. I need to rewrite and re-illustrate almost everything, removing duplicates (as some tutorials written for Unreal-Design had quasi-clones written for Projet-3D) and ordering tutorials in a logical progression with clear categories.

This is a long-term project to make this place slightly more useful and useable. I already reworked a lot of backend stuff and I'm now trying to enhance and increase actual content in an effort to fight the current state of the Internet. Simplicius' small essay mirrors not only my impression but that of many: there are fewer and fewer interesting websites each day, time is spent browsing a handful of social networks and news articles, with very little content and a lot of technology dedicated to being as outright hostile as possible to the user. As I was lucky enough to build Hellkeeper.net with the help of forums and websites aimed at curious teenagers, I realize I have been an unknowing disciple of the Small Internet: in my ideal world, I browse pages which are mostly text, load instantly and focus on content made by actual people interested in the topic they're writing about. I feel a personal responsibility to make Hellkeeper.net this kind of place you only stumble randomly upon by clicking on a link at the bottom of a forum post dated 2008: the type of intimate web space where everything looks janky, outdated and a little off, but with interesting links, articles and pieces of information about things you've never heard or thought about. Things like Amisa's antique site or someone's personal interpretation of Plato's dialogues. I miss those days.

Because I had a lot of time on my hand, I also wrote this funny Victoria 1 guide on how to make Uruguay a major player. This is based on an old strategy one could find on the Victoria wiki which no longer exists.

Finally, shortly after reworking the PHP behind Hellkeeper.net, I wrote a little snippet to automatically convert distances from Unreal units to the metric system and vice versa and inserted it at the bottom on my tutorial on measures (in French).

Update (03/03/26): The new tutorial has been removed as OldUnreal now produces a new UT2004 patch with Epic's blessing. These bugs are now fixed after plaguing map editing for years.

After being static and dormant for 7 years, Hellkeeper.net is finally back to its old self. Whoever is still reading may have noticed the return of the Archives page on the right-side menu. That's because I finally found the time and motivation to hone my 15 years old hobbyist level programming skills and fumble my way into getting all the dead php working again, doing away with the defunct database of old times, like an ant clumsily wielding the powers of God. The last thing I had written before the event was the release of BR-Riveting, quickly followed by the site's collapse and its revival in 2018 (for DM-Hightitude's release, which remained the first news on the frontpage until now in 2024) as a hardcoded empty shell. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I was able to recover most of the frontpage articles I had written and sort through them (not every immature scribble deserved to be salvaged).

But wait, there's more.

This also brings back RSS syndication, as the feed was also dynamically generated. Does anyone still use RSS anyway? Seems pretty dead to me. But then again, I never used it myself anyway.

What does that mean from the reader's perspective? On a surface level, not much, but a lot of text has been exhumed, notably several map's post-mortems and notes taken during the making of DmRiot, as well as reports of map releases. To me, these are interesting reads nowadays, bringing back memories. The oldest note I've recovered is from February 2008, a small lifetime ago.

Working on the website made me realize how old everything is. I might take the time to revamp a few things here and there now that I've delved into it.

Update (13/05/24): Everything is now working as intended.

Download Heir (11,067 Ko)

The smell of diesel exhaust fills your head and the pounding metallic sound of engines and weapons invades your mind. Far above, the flying fighters manoeuvre tediously, like caged birds. Long-time companions scramble through crowded corridors to load up on guns. The fight is about to begin. An heir will soon be found for a long dynasty of champions.

Can there be more to life?

The last long-time project I had for UT2004: indoor Onslaught with Raptors flying in gigantic halls, Scorpions hurling themselves from platforms and full on tank-on-tank battles in concrete corridors and behind pillars.

Download Acid (541 Ko)

After a long night drinking crack and smoking battery acid, an unnamed Liandri overseer bet he could get a major game of the professional league to take place absolutely anywhere in the galaxy. His companion, a robot-mutant-alien hybrid housed in the body of mechanical dog, challenged him to organise the game in a literal cartoon. Three days later, he had spent 160,000,000,000.99 credits on a start-up promising to do just that and his sudden death (slaughtered with the help of 7 different types of weapons and covered with fingerprints of known Liandri security personnel) was ruled a suicide. The executive board of the Liandri corporation decided to test the new technology it had unwillingly acquired in the process and it turned out to be a major technical success. Viewers were disappointed by the visual experience, however. The whole thing was shelved after 5 months of broadcast.

This is an old layout I had laying around since the days of Hightitude at least. With no idea how to modify it or what theme to use, I caved in and lazily made it a bunch of solid colours. It plays nice for a spammy and brutal match and it would be a nice addition to a rotation of maps like DM-DE-Osiris2, simple straightforward maps made to accommodate a reasonable amount of players.

Download Corten (20,914 Ko)

Despite polls showing most audiences would rather watch matches taking place in real-life locations, ratings show people actually prefer games played in arenas built from the ground up to fit the requirements of their favourite bloody sport. With the blessing of corrosion-resistant materials, new areas are built to look like recognizable places, but with the added benefit of amazing sights.

Greetings. It's nice to see you here, I was feeling a bit lonely in this UT2004. 2020 has been a wild ride and though I know it's been a difficult year for many, I can't bring myself to care as it's been great for me and everything is going smoothly. Too bad for most of the world.
This map was built in a very short time and wasn't worked on too much, but I'm satisfied with the end result. It was made with my brain off and the usual attention to detail completely forgotten. Most ideas were shamelessly lifted from DM-AquaMortis from Unreal Championship, except I made sure it didn't suck like the original. I hope you enjoy it, I know I do.

Update (02/06/21) - version 1.1: Faulty zoning has been fixed, disassociating the main rocket launcher area from the upper floor.

Download Empire (19,031 Ko)

Conquerors, emperors and dictators spare no extremity in building a new world modeled after their grand designs. Soldiers, warriors and militants renounce their lives so the great destiny of nations becomes manifest. And so the bones of men serve as foundation for the marble-clad monuments which tower over the graves of all.

Update (17/09/21) - version 1.1: Missing sound package AmbOutside has been added to the file.

A little more than a year ago, I faced critical server problems. My site has been down since then. I have been able to recover most of it but the database is still under work. Nonetheless, the site works and everything stored is still available: maps, tutorials, links, etc.
I'm not abandoning the site, it is very much alive. It will take time to recover though.

Now, some news about mapping:
After the release of Riveting, I spent almost a year away from the editor. As time passed, however, I experience the need for some 3D doodling while listening to music or watching long debates on Youtube. A small project started on UT2004 soon found itself ported to UT99 and here it is.

Download Hightitude (888 Ko)

Built to ward off flying fortresses, these concrete towers failed to prevent invasions when planetary landers became large and robust enough to use ramming manoeuvres against their weapon platforms. All but one were dismantled.

This is a rather uninspired project, an arena map with no clear theme and a symmetrical layout but it was enough to keep me busy.

Update (20/10/18) - version 1.3: Fixed a number of issues found by the first players: missing killzones, unintended ways to reach the rooftop, crashes with some renderers.

Update (16/04/19) - version 1.4: Portals moved to fix a hole.

Stay tuned, the site should be fully recovered at some point.

Download Riveting (16,752 Ko)

Implanted on the surface of an entirely frozen planet, this drilling complex never saw use as new environmental regulations prevented the exploitation of natural ressources on virgin worlds at the last minute. As the only loophole concerns cultural journeys, the Liandri Mining Corporation found a way to cash in on its assets by organizing pitched battles in these riveting landscapes. Remember, you're all officially registered as tourists.

Download Watched (13,739 Ko)

A fresh gust of wind blows away the warmth of the afternoon. Your footprints on the hard tiles disappear as nature carelessly moves the dust about. How long have you been fighting this now aimless battle? Does anyone in this arena still desire a fleeting victory or a tenuous speck of glory? But your mind is clear, you know the fight needs no reward. Even without spectators; even with no cheering crowd.

The gods of war watch over, a champion shall be named.

Download Valor (12,345 Ko)

The competing powers of Set and Horus have been poured into your soul. The burning eye of Ra has risen high in the sky to watch the coming duels. Jump in and battle the champions of distant lands in the name of Pharaoh.

Download Qesh (374 Ko)

Now that UT99.org 512k mapping contest has ended, I feel free to release my entry. Here is DOM-512K-Qesh.

The contest revolved around making a UT99 map in 512 kb or less, including full pathing, screenshot and the provided logo to be included: the map had to be a full map, yet remain small enough to fit in a tight size limitation.

Out of 31 maps by 15 participants, my own map achieved 3rd position (tied) in the main vote, and was 4th in the gamer's choice vote. I am very satisfied by these results, have received very good comments for this map, both its gameplay, ambiance and build quality, and I applaud the winners for their great maps, especially sinnical's Aquarius and TomcaT112's Sonder, which were my two favourites and earned well-deserved 2nd and 1st place respectively. I will not go over each map of the contest in detail, as I already did so while casting my votes, but there were only a handful of maps which were objectively bad or half-made. Most of them were of great quality, and I am happy to see so much creativity still lavished on this dear old game.

About Qesh: this is a Domination map, a gametype I always enjoyed but which has less maps and seems to be less popular. It is striking in this case, as only 2 DOM maps were made in this contest against 16 CTF and 13 DM. As a result I didn't expect to win as the two DOM maps were obviously lost in a sea of DM and CTF, and it always proves hard to compare maps which are so different.

Qesh is my first Domination map. First of all it is notable that I started from nothing, instead of reusing parts of old projects (this will seem to be contradicted by what I say in the readme of the map; bear with me): I entered the contest with no clear idea of what I would do and thought I would attempt some CTF but after Senate I felt like attempting something new. Assault would have been interesting but I am not familiar enough with this gametype to try and make a map for it, especially under such tight constraits in size and time (we only had a month to submit our entries). DM was not an option as I felt quite bored of mapping for it after all those years. So Domination it was. I first envisioned a very vertical layout which didn't felt right and was replaced with symmetric one, which was boring and felt like Domination played like CTF, a bad variation on UT2003/2004's Double Domination. In the end I decided to go for three control points. One room turned out to be very similar to a part of P17 which had been scrapped, so I scavenged a few brush from the abandoned layout, and another room of another ill-fated unreleased project was used for the main "lift" room, providing the basic proportions but no actual structure.

Now, mapping for Domination is not entirely different from mapping for Deathmatch: both gametypes are, as Amisa puts it, cyclical: instead of a linear progression from A to B as in CTF, players need to always have access to all parts to reach any control point at any given time. With 3 control points, 3 rooms was not enough as the layout would have ended completely circular or would have had at least one critical chokepoint, which hampers fluidity. The final design has 4 rooms, one serving as the main spawning location and giving access to all rooms at once. Next was the placement of my three control points. As I wanted a lot of Flak Cannon action, there are many small corridors and even the main rooms are small enough to make a volley of burning hot metal chunks a real threat.

Because of the limited decorations I could fit in 512 kb I have chosen an ancient temple theme which looks nice enough with big rough geometrical shapes, straight lines and limited colours in the lighting. The two fancy effects I added were a low level of water at the lower level and a fog effect on the ceilings of open-roofed rooms. This, coupled with limited noise and a basic grey skybox, gives a nice wet and cold atmosphere which has been appreciated a lot by other participants. Each control point has been placed so that they can never be fully controlled as there is always the possibility of an attack from behind a defender, no matter where he is standing, so points quickly change hands. With enough players, the game is frenetic and tensed, just as Domination should be.

Because each actor had to be perfectly placed to limit their number (and thus the total size of the file), it has been necessary to "cheat" somewhat. In many cases, several functions are piled in a single actor. In many cases, for instance, PathNodes also emit light and sound to replace Light actors and AmbientSound keypoints. I'll take this opportunity to remark that very few map in the pack used sound effects; mine was the first one to include them and only a minority of the contestants made maps that were not totally silent. Finally, like all contestants, I had to distribute a map without any brush included to remain under 512 kb: the maps are thus not rebuildable as it would destroy any BSP. However, most of us also included a secondary .unr file that contains the map with the brushes included, so that fellow mappers may take a look at the CSG.

All in all, this has been a very satisfying and exciting challenge, and I have been forced to learn a bit about Domination. I also had to map in a completely different way from my usual method. Maps like P17 or even Exar show that I like to trim and build everything out of sunk brushes with only limited parts of the main structural brushes visible. This time, there is exactly 0 trimming and sunk brushes, so the entirety of the map is actually made of structural brushes with two movers and a single zone portal which is the water zone surface. No optimization was done at all as it didn't fit. Bare texturing and a couple of sheets with masks are the only form of decoration I could get. Gameplay is very fluid because there just isn't anything to get stuck on. Bots only have problems in one area, around the "Bridge" control point, where they may have trouble getting up on the bridge from the inundated level due to the very narrow access to the ramps and the scarcity of PathNodes.

Update (19/04/15): The pack containing all finished maps is now (finally) available on the Maps page, or directly from this link.

Download Senate (6,424 Ko)

Mortals are not told what purpose serve the Premakan giants, the angry gods of the automatons, in their mechanical senate, as they work in deathly silence inside the empty halls to accomplish the emperor's will. Only those who are destined not to come back are allowed to venture near the cores of the reactors, to fight for two glorious rags, battered relics of a glorious age, an age of blood and gold.

Update (13/02/14) - version 1.3: Fixed a collision bug. More importantly, extensive bot-testing has forced me to correct several key assault strategies. Bots now take all the routes, including the upper one, and will pick up the Flak Cannon, which they used to avoid, on the way. They will also escape with the flag using the upper road, this time avoiding the Flak, as this makes their escape too long and predictable.

Update (27/02/14) - version 1.4: Added some team-coloured arrows to help players navigate, after several comments about the map being slightly confusing; modified a number of JumpSpots to help bots translocate; fixed a lighting bug caused by invalid geometry.

Download Piraeus (1,545 Ko)

Welcome to the Nali port-city of Piraeus. The harbour is closed at night. But don't worry, there are enough opponents and weapons to make nightly tourism exciting.

Update (01/01/14) - version 1.1: Fixed a geometry bug. Should not be visible.
Also added three lacking fire effects in sconces. The duplicate function tends to "miss" some actors. The blue crystal now rotates correctly.

The lighting bug which affects the upper level of P17 remains present. It is absent in Unreal but permanent in Unreal Tournament, even when the map is rebuilt in UnrealEd 2.0 for UT. I believe the problem come from the different ways in which Unreal and Unreal Tournament handle light building.

I have also started (about a month ago) a medium-sized map for Unreal, taking a step away from the usual science-fiction-space-ship-techno-abstract theme I usually revel in, to venture into a medieval port city. The result is coming along nicely, but I estimate the map to be only about 45% done at the moment. It should be less heavily decorated than P17 or even Exar, but it is very geometry-heavy right now, due to its size, structure and the general layout: buildings can be entered, have windows, and various other structural choices making the map very intensive in some angles. It should be able to fit 4/5 players in Deathmatch, making it my largest map since Megatan and the fourth map I make which is not purely sci-fi after Honored, Riot and HKDA1(I am not counting You Are the Demons for obvious reasons).

Since I feel compelled to show a screenshot but do not actually want anything to be seen, eat my wireframe viewport.

After releasing DmRiot, I was pretty much done with UnrealEd and I knew I wouldn't have the will to come back to it for a while. I still wanted to release something in 2012 and avoid another two-years gap in my schedule. I was soon asked to make a single-player map in the SkyCity style (think Na Pali Haven) for a single-player adventure under Delacroix's supervision. The map was finished in the first few months of 2012 after a long time in the making, it was a small project and not very good. The single-player campaign it is supposed to be part of has still not been released and seems to be stuck in developpment hell. I may release the map separately if the project eventually dies out. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to detail P17's evolution, which might be easier to follow if you download this compilation of all successive versions of the map.

Soon after the completion of this yet-unrealeased SP map, I started planning a new Unreal Deathmatch map. I first needed to come up with a nice layout. I explored many of my abandonned projects (my first stop when I need to start something new is always this bottomless pit of failed projects) and extracted a few interesting parts. One was from an aborted project parallel to Riot, another one came from a Deathmatch stub, another taken from DM-Quaker and the last bit was borrowed from Lruce Bee's, DM-TensileSteel. I like this map's compact layout and the way each room seems to be carved in the little space available behind every wall, an effect I attempted to recreat in DmRiot. The idea of a narrow lower level directly underneath the upper one drove the map's concept entirely. To link all the different height levels, I started my work from the corner of the map, which constrained the main structured much more tightly than if I had started with a central atrium. This stage is seen in test6.unr, demonstrating the first way the collection of ideas started to coalesce.

I put together a basic layout of four main rooms at three height levels, with a lower central corridor. I had settled on the Starship.utx package, a spaceship theme, which would be the human version of what DmExar was to Skaarj.utx. I also liked the idea of having the central lower corridor partially open towards the upper areas, on the northern side of the map. The room I started with, (let's call it Room One), was my main working area at this stage. From IsvKran32, one of the main Unreal maps using the theme I had chosen, I copied the corridor shape and stuck it to the top of Room One, lit with contrasting yellow, red, and some dashes of blue on the screens. This is the stage p1-2012 illustrates. I had also started working on the corridor between Room One, and Room Two, directly east of it.

In p2-2012, I focused on the junction between the four main rooms and the acces to Room One's upper level, as shown in p3-2012. At this point, I started saving different versions of the map with a number system so I could go back to former stages of the map and experiment without the hassle of deleting or moving away large parts of the map to make room. I then linked Room One to Room Three. In p4-2012, I copied the ramp to the other side of the map to provide another access to the third floor.

After a month-long break I reverted to p1, discarding everything except the passage between Room One and Three. I reworked the links between Rooms One and Two. The lower route received its final form (except for a few textures) and the upper one was mostly done too. In Room Four, I changed the platform to a walkway. There were still obvious problems I would have to tackle latter. I began to focus on the ramp.

The p6-2012/p7-2012-stage (for some reason, they are identical as I must have reverted to p6 at some point) was a massive change. I finished the lower corridor between Room Two and Room One and started working from the bottom up on Room one. I finished the ramp and duplicated it elsewhere. I began shaping the lower central corridor and the walls of Room One, but structural problems in Room Three and Four bothered me. I tackled them in p8-2012, and gave the map its quasi-final layout, removing part of the planned third level in Room One. I revamped the doorway between Room One and Room Three, moved the passage between the lower corridor and Room Two at the junction between the corridor and Room Three, but I found I had problems connecting a third level. I had also started working on the lighting.

By p9-2012, the layout was definitive. I had removed all connection between the lower levels of Room Three and Room Four, moving it to the lower central tunnel. I added a third floor and saved some space for a lift in Room Two. This allowed me, in p10-2012, to finish almost all connections. By now, I was lighting each part as soon as the main architecture was done, starting with Room Four. By p11, Room Four was finished and the colour scheme for lights was more or less settled: yellow on the upper levels, blue at the bottom, with red accents. I made a special effort on ceilings, as they're usually the largest flat surfaces in a map. At the stage p13-2012 illustrates, a fourth of the map was done.

From p14-2012 tp p15-2012, I focused on the third level on Room Two and Room One. Most of the later was built of rearranged parts of Room Four. I cobbled together a lift which caused a lot of trouble with lights at first. With Room Two and Room Four finished, things sped up.

At the p16-2012 stage, I had completed Room One effortlessly and could now marvel at the long way this part had come from its humble beginning in test6.unr. I started working on Room Three, working from the bottom up to the ceiling.

There is no p17-2012 because p17-2012 is DmP17 (that's where the name came from). I managed to make Room Three's ceiling looks almost symmetrical, despite one side being vastly larger than the other. I quickly finished the last details, then added PathNodes and sounds. I added a base effect for weapons to highlight their position in the dark, then zoned the map. I had been consistently monitoring the geometry stats and from p9 to p12, my node count had been decreasing constantly. The final map has an honorable 1.68:1 ratio, with 6339 polys and 10627 nodes for a grand total of 2493 brushes, more than any of my previous projects. The BSP tree seems more balanced than in Exar, even though the map looks hellish in UnrealEd. Neither sound nor weapon placement were thoroughly thought out, as I could not get anyone to beta-test the map before its release.

Download P17 (1,485 Ko)

Welcome to section P17 of our new particle accelerator. It was shut down because of a serious leak of cooling fluid. There's not much we can do with it now, except kill each other inside.

Late 2006-early 2007, after almost a full year with no finished project, I was desperate to make something. Anything. Karalen was almost a year old already and had not been a learning experience. I had released Cockpit, which was not a playable map and was limited to a single room anyway. I had considered several things, from a grand CTF map that I had already begun (the ill-fated CTF-Hellkeeper), to an indoor assault map based on the design of DOM-Core. But also BR and DM projects with Arborea or medieval themes. I had thought about everything and anything. What I had done, however, was nothing. In mid-2006, it occurred to me that CTF-Hellkeeper, after two years of work and a lot of experimenting, was doomed: it sucked. Despite all my efforts, its layout was simply not good enough.

I did nothing for months until, in a sudden burst of indignation, I decided to force muself into some project just to keep myself working on something. I took the overused Shiptech theme I had already abused in Megatan and Premaka (and, in a way, Cockpit) because I knew it perfectly. At that point, I was not aiming for originality. I was only falling back on this package because I knew I wouldn't achieve anything with unfamiliar assets given my lack of ideas. Using a greyish-green texture, I started subtracting cubes in the last few months of 2006. It was only the beginning of a long disaster.

In January 2007, I showed everyone what I had done. I could only sum it up as being done under self-imposed "moral constraint". It was what I would later call "beam-fest".

For someone who had abandoned many projects because they were unplayable I was making a remarkably poor job of improving the situation. The map was symmetrical, although in a complex way, as the two levels were mirrored along different axes. There was only one way to access each level on each side, which meant the map would suffer from its very structure. It was narrow, which hindered movement. In terms of BSP, it was a complete mess. Almost no static-meshes were used and all brushes were solid as using semi-solids gave me huge BSP holes. And when I tried to convert some of my twisted brushes into meshes, I got lighting issues which proved to big of a challenge for my patience. The initial release of the alpha version was met with initial enthusiasm, but this was mostly because friends were eager to see what I would come up with after Karalen. When things began to cool down and real critical feedback started to arrive, reception became exceptionally lukewarm. The map was ugly, it was crippled (several flickering polygons were spotted), it had terrible flow. Adding insult to injury, I was not fond of it. It was hard to edit because of its complex structure and messy geometry.

I had to rework it entirely. It was still an early alphan so nothing was settled. Someone suggested I should mirror everything and link both parts with corridors in a DM-Compressed sort of way. I suggested several ways to improve connectivity, but each of my attempts was met with doubtful comments: testers and fellow mappers could not see a way to improve on it. To be honest, I couldn't either. Moreover, the map had no interesting concept behind it, it was just a contrived beam-fest.

Mid-2007: I had not made any progress. I would launch UnrealEd, open the map, stare at it for a moment and then focus on something else. I couldn't, for the life of me, decide what to do with it. I was angry at it and at me. Life was not helping me either. In the last third of 2007, things worsened suddenly on a personal level. DM-Atomnium was dumped. Parts of my computer died and I lost the file anyway. I was low. I had appended DM-Atomnium's name to my list of aborded projects.

2007 ended. With the release of Unreal Tournament 3, I was overwhelmed with the impression that UT2004 was now dead and mapping for it was foolish. I began studying Unreal 2's particle system, dialog manager and triggers. It led nowhere, because Unreal 2 was indeed even more obsolete than UT2004. I gave up and considered myself more or less done with mapping at the time. I spent most of my time experimenting with minor UT99 and UT2004 stuff (I updated CTF-Axlik's visuals during this period) using triggers and emitters. After a while, I stopped launching UnrealEd out of mere habit.

In March 2008, I suddenly realized I was forgetting how to use UnrealEd after finding myself unable to answer a basic question on a forum. This was an outraging epiphany: not only was I unproductive, I was also becoming unhelpful. "Well, I thought, it's time to do something if you don't want to forget everything". The last modification of Atomnium was back in February 2007, just like the last post in the topic about it on Unreal-Design. That was more than a year before. I dug this topic out of its grave, asking if someone still had an early version of the map stored away. It turns out someone (Alea) did. Incredibly, the guy had kept it somewhere for a full year and was able to send it back to me.

When I opened it, it was as chaotic and disastrous as I remembered, but I had leveled down. I had to re-learn UnrealEd, but also reeducate myself on how this mess of a map worked.

I toyed with the idea of rebuilding it from scratch, using the original map as a blueprint, as I had done with Premaka and Megatan, but I ended up just rolling with the first alpha. Seeing how uncluttering the viewports was almost impossible, I decided to just go with the flow and build upon this rotten base. I converted my custom static-meshes back into brushes and added lifts to finally fix my connectivity problem, enhance the flow and add the opportunity to lift-jump to the upper floor. Looking back on how the level came out, it could have been a few week's job had I made these lifts from the beginning instead of waiting a full year to do so.

I finished decorating by just piling beams ad nauseam. When all the walls and ceilings were covered with shiptech-textured beams, I covered parts of the floor too! When I had sufficiently abused the brushwork, I used blue and yellow/orange lights to lit the whole map, with touches of red (a very, very, very (very) traditional lighting scheme) I would use almost the same colours in DmExar, a year later almost to the day. To add a feature to the map, I added a semi-random event with a "bang" sound, smoke falling down from the ceiling and camera effects in order to simulate explosions. To further enhance my walls, I added lights between some beams and increased the lightmap factor to get complex shadows out of the mess of beams and supports around the lighting fixtures.

And there you go, I released Atomnium in June 2008. Lo and behold, I had done something! It had taken nearly 18 months, but I had succeeded. Compared to Premaka and Karalen, it was slightly more complex, as it had 3 levels and its symmetry was much more complex. It was of course smaller than Megatan but much more interesting to play. As far as visuals are concerned, it had its own personality, if only because it was beam-land and a style I can only describe as being "messy". A final version a few days later fixed a handful of bugs, even though you can still find a couple HOMs today in fringe situations.
There also remains, to this day, a huge zoning bug which causes the upper room to be part of one of the two main zones. If the map wasn't so old, I would fix it, but I noticed it months after it was finished, so the Lighting Gun Room and the Bio Rifle Side will remain fused.

It's also my map with the most brushes to this day, exactly 1800, 65 more than DmExar.

I have been mapping an Unreal 1 single-player map for someone and had to trick the game with warpzones in order to keep the nodes-to-polygon ratio at a manageable level while still preserving a huge church I was asked to make and which is now completely overdone. I have not been making much progress for the last few weeks though. I don't plan on showing screenshots since it's supposed to be a surprise in a single-player adventure.

I have played many games and spent hours on Victoria. The game unfolds a bit more each game and features strange bugs. After turning the small and sparsely populated (127,000 inhabitants) Uruguay into a gigantic superpower (200,000,000 inhabitants, 150 divisions, hundreds of warships, main producer of all manufactured goods on the planet) and using it to crush the Royal Navy and the US Navy, I conquered most of Germany with Denmark by the means of a huge war with Russia by my side, triggered by a contrived plot to threaten the stability of the world. Meanwhile, France jumped aboard and took its share of the Reich too. Fun times.

I later played as Sweden. After a complicated set of events and bugs, I managed to get a transport boat in the land army. Things started to get quite metaphysical when I loaded the army into transport ships. The bug having persisted, I found myself loading a transport ship inside a transport ship, but when I tried to disembark my army and its land-boat on the coast of Burma, the game crashed.

Two years were necessary to build this map, yet it's nothing impressive. The reason is that these two years were mostly spent thinking about it and failing to build anything, with only the last months actually spent mapping anything out of the pile of ideas and failed designs I had accumulated over time.

On 15th June 2009 at 19:57, I rebuilt and saved the final build of DmExar, with a new music and a collision bug fixed. The few weeks afterwards were spent looking at it with a fresh new look... And finding two more problems: a misplaced corona and an almost invisible texture problem caused by wrong brush order; these were never corrected as I did not feel like releasing a third version when those were barely noticeable issues. After that, I wanted to do another U227 map but had no idea what to make.

I was quite busy at the time, yet managed to plan a medium-size layout which, at the time, seemed quite nice and original. Many parts of it were hastily drawn in the margin of whatever piece of paper I could find. For personal reasons, I was not able to start working on it immediately, and it's only in January 2010 that I decided to start actual mapping. I had decided to use a classic yet twisted theme based on brutalism and totalitarian architecture, which, now that I think about it, is not entirely unrelated to the landscapes of ruined London in the 1984 film 1984 I had just watched. I wanted massive concrete structures with little decoration and simple flat surfaces, the opposite of Exar. I also started thinking about style and fixtures, and that's when I designed the concrete eagle in BSP.

It took a few months of fiddling to get the size of things right, before I started the map itself in April. It immediately became clear that though the layout looked good on paper, it didn't actually work in 3D. There were only two real "rooms", with many corridors on the sides, but since every zone was both small and open, they usually felt unnecessary. Several locations were completely pointless, the main fighting area itself was a large flat zone on only two levels. I was enthusiastic at first, as I believed whatever looked bad on paper would turn out better in-game, but since the plan was more or less devoid of straight lines, places which looked close on turned out to be impossible to link together propertly in the game. I spent two weeks trying to salvage the floorplan until I finally dropped the idea completely, foolishly thinking that I would have better ideas in the near future.

After months of idleness as far as mapping was concerned, I came back to it and tried to see if I could save parts of it, including the room with the eagle. I liked this area more than any other part of the map and it was the only room I had already started to embellish. I deleted the northern section and the upper levels for which I had no hope. Meanwhile, beta versions of the 227g patch were delivered to testers by Smirftsch, who gave me access to them. I finally abandoned the layout in its entirety in May, when I was given the task of writing a basic help file for UnrealEd. Seeing how DmRiot seemed doomed, I agreed to help to keep myself busy. By now, 2010 was about to end and I felt quite anxious, as it would be a full year without a map in sight and it would be the second year since I discovered Unreal I would not release a map (the first one being 2007).

Starting from the eagle room, I tried to design new layouts, but only one was completed. Even before it was finished, it was clear to me it suffered severe issues, making it even worse than the first draft. I looked at ancient aborted projects from 2007 but it didn't spark better ideas. My attempts at integrating these elements into outdoor terrains lead nowhere either. In the end, I abandoned Riot completely. After more thinking, I started a small DM project which quickly died out, as it was plagued by bugs. It was followed by project VIL, an industrial-themed realistic DM map with static-meshes, custom textures and detailed geometry, but it didn't go beyond a single room. Though I keep it somewhere on my hard drive, it's clear that nothing will ever come out of it without a complete overhaul and actual planning. 2011 was now upon us, and 227g was released in April 2011, more or less a full year after I had started working on Riot, which was now in my Aborted Projects list.

Being quite depressed and badly wanting to map something, I came back to the eagle room. Unlike before, I took only the room itself and nothing of the surrounding areas. It had previously been the inside of a small building surrounded by large volumes and great spaces. I now considered the entire idea flawed and I kept only the room itself (the inside, none of the brushes that made the outside). I started building the north-west room, improvising. After that, the east room was built with difficulty and the project ground to a halt when I had to build the southern part of the level. It took days and days of thinking, trying things and talking with Jival to complete the painful delivery of the southernmost room. After that, I was more than fed up with this and the last room was hastily slapped together with minimal planning, reusing the stairs from the main room of DmExar. I had decided earlier in the process I would make it a rainy map with muddy terrain on the lower level, and I was still using the brutalist totalitarian design I had adopted in 2009. After cutting out the window part of a texture from UT, I created most of the few decorative panels with Tarquin's extrude brush. The ground itself was made with static-meshes. As 227h had been released in the meantime (being the second version released during my work on this map, which says a lot about my workflow), static-meshes enjoyed a solid support. I used the BSP based terrain tool to create them. In 227h and subsequent versions, surfaces with the FakeBackdrop flag are deleted when a brush is turned into a static-mesh, a feature I used to delete all the surfaces of the terrain brush except the tessellated floor whose normals I flipped in the mesh browser. Once converted back into a CSG brush, the result was a tessellated sheet, vertex-edited into a muddy terrain. A custom ground texture was applied, aligned to floor, and the whole thing was converted back into a static-mesh. Each room has one sheet. The eastern stairs were also converted to static-meshes and the BSP underneath it set to FakeBackdrop as a BSP hole appeared there which would not go away despite all my efforts. I also decreased BSP cuts with the building sliders, as the entire structure is very inefficient and prone to BSP problems.

After that, only cosmetics were applied: a couple of projectors with loosely fascist-looking images to mimic posters, a shield-and-sword panel made of BSP. They were scatttered around generously, along with a couple other eagles and a panel of concrete flags (more soviet than fascist-looking). For the rain, I used one of the new actors from patch 227. As it can only create rain in a whole zone or in a cubic volume around it, I used many of them in each room to cover the many odd angles. Lighting and item placement were both made in 10 minutes, without devoting too much effort or time to the process. For sounds, I used the rainfall sound of NyLeve as a rain sound, a few wind and fountain sounds on the ground level to mimic the impact of raindrops on concrete and mud. The custom mud texture was given "flitch-flotch" footsteps sounds and its hitsound replaced with a grass footstep sound, so that players jumping into the mud from the upper levels would not make a big "blomp" as if landing on stone.

The baby was released to a candid world on the 21st of June 2011, more than two years after DmExar. The next day, version 1.1 was released with a few changes: the outdoor lighting was slightly changed to a pale orange. It makes the inside lighting, which is completely white, look much harsher by comparison. A possible collision bug was corrected on the stairs of the eastern room and the walls of the lower level were covered with a new texture. A lighting bug was fixed on the lift.

And thus DmRiot finally ended. It's not great, but it's not that bad either. There are ideas I always wanted to use there, but they are not fully developed. Many aspects of it were rushed. Yet I like it as it is. I guess the best way to see what a mess it really is it to take a look at it in UnrealEd. Go ahead.

Things were not as over as I thought however: in 2012, Smirftsch decided to include both DmRiot and DmExar in the next releases of patch 227 for Unreal, and some of his comments on both maps convinced me to tweak a few things. The emitter actors were modified by the 227 team specifically to allow the use of particles from another emitter on impact so that I could create impact effect where particles collided with geometry.

Download Riot (1,145 Ko)

The foundations of the great concrete cities are full of small recesses and loops created by a complete disregard for urban planification. There is no complete list of the many riots which have been crushed by the Riot Police in the muddy holes between the poorer buildings.

(The end result is so different from the original sketches that I should have changed the title. But in the end, the atmosphere is close enough.)

Update (22/06/11) - version 1.1: Fixed a collision bug, a lighting problem, modified some things, corrected errors in the readme. I'll do a post-mortem of this map someday.

As I said earlier, the general design of the map has definitely turned into a very compact and narrow setting, the opposite of the great open spaces of the first version of Riot. It is much more compact than Exar. It should accommodate up to three players in the end, but more would likely devolve into a chaos.

I went for a three-level map as I wanted something that felt very vertical, but it is hard to pile up so many levels in such small rooms.

I kept most of the structure, got rid of any temporary decoration and deleted huge lumps of the layout. The basic idea is rooted in a few doodlings I had aimlessly scratched on a random piece of paper about a year ago. A good half of the sketch turned out to be an interesting starting point. I decided to come back to it and I am now considering several possibilities for the other half, so that the whole map does not boil down to an excuse to get the good part out, as was the case with the original project. I have been looking at a few other aborted projects, mainly DM-Quaker, which had a grand total of one good idea, but I don't see how I could blend parts of these different projects together in a way that would seem harmonious and natural. Another aborted project which had kept me busy for a few weeks in January may end up providing a couple of interesting things too.

Right now my problem is getting back into the mood. So much time has passed since I've last been productive that I have actually lost some of my habits and I don't know where to start. The basic structure is not even half finished and half of what has been accomplished is not even guaranteed to stay in place for more than a few days or weeks, so I cannot even plan deadlines to activate the whole process. This is something I did with Honored and Exar, since the layouts were given from the start.

I thought I would start a huge project with many polygons and attempt to do something UT2004-ish in Unreal to promote U227, only to have my ass handed to me (in a seriously kicked state) when the 11 years old engine saw what I was up to:

Though the whole map consists only of this staircase, the Versailles-styled handrails were enough to completely kill performances (on a computer which does run Crysis on "very high" at full speed), for very a simple reason: each column being 256 polygons and one handrail being made of several brushes and 43 columns, the scenes adds up to a respectable amount of polygons. Miltiply this by 2 (there is a second handrail on the other side), you get 86 columns, 22,016 polygons (only for the meshes, not counting the BSP polygons) and that's, of course, way too much for an engine that slows down on Exar on lower rigs. And this was achieved with only this small incomplete scene, there's no map around it. It's just stairs in a big empty cube.

So now, I have two things I want to do: make an Unreal map in some way or another (probably a DmExar-style map with ISV-Kran textures), and maybe try this style of Versailles map in UT2004, where polygons wouldn't be so scarce.

Except for a few units, all the armies of the western front are sent east. The Second Regular Army is sent straight to Manassas while the NG and the IInd and IIIrd Conscript armies are sent to Cleveland in order to shorten the frontline and divert forces from Maryland.

On March 8th 1863, the last two divisions we were ever able to recruit are deployed in Fredericksburg and sent to Manassas. Lee's extraordinary performance at containing the overwhelming Maryland Army is decisive for the later course of the war.

Dauterive arrives from the west on March 16th and joins the bloodbath in Cleveland. Jackson is still fighting rebels in Missouri, along with a handful of depleted Union units. On April 2nd 1863, one year after the Conscription Act was passed, the US Army, though completely disorganized still manages to put up a fight.

The battle of Cleveland is of course a success, our forces being largely superior. As the Norfolk farrison establishes control over the area, Dauterive takes all the available units on a chase to Pittsburgh, leaving only the Norfolk garrison behind him to secure Cleveland

On April 18th 1863, The battle of Manassas is still going on. Despite the destruction of many US divisions, the US seems willing to throw everything it has in this battle, as if it had infinite manpower. Lee's incredible resistance proves very costly. Divisions have been pulled back from as far as Missouri, and several units have already vanished in the fires of war.

On April 24th, The bloodshed in Manassas comes to an end with the retreat of the remaining Confederate troops to Staunton and Fredericksburg. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the entire Army of Virginia have ceased to exist, and the remains of the IInd Regular Army and of the fresh troops of March amount to only a few hundred shellshocked, wounded men. Though the western front has come to a close, the eastern front is falling appart, leaving the gate to Richmond wide open.

As the collapse of the Eastern front sucks US divisions from the northern border, Lee, now without a command, is sent to assist Dauterive's Army of the West in taking Buffalo. US troops starts pouring into Norfolk, threatening Richmond and the CS capitol. The more or less valid IInd Regular Army, replenished with new men, marches towards them, while the Volunteer Regiment of Kentucky and a couple of disorganized units are sent to Manassas, in a desperate effort to isolate more US troops and stop the decomposition of the Confederate Army in Virginia.

Lee marches into Buffalo, looking grim. Though he has six divisions and Billings only four, his army consists mainly of exhausted veterans from the Lake campaign and not one division has its ranks complete.

On the other side of the front, the Norfolk battle is a victory, but new US forces gathered in Manassas refuse to leave Confederate ground. Both the retreating US troops and the victorious IInd Regular Army also arrive and join the second battle of Manassas, where the disorganised US troops are finally overwhelmed.

On August 7th 1863, the CSA seems to have the upper hand.

However, riots just behind the frontline prevent any offensive from the Confederacy. On August 5th, a large offensive lead by US general Meade threatens to isolate Lee and Dauterive's Army of the West.

They immediately retreat to save their supply lines and support the Norfolk garrison. In Manassas, the routed US forces are retreating to Washington, chased by the IInd Regular Army, while the second half of the army stands in Manassas to reestablish Confederate control. Sudden reinforcements in Washington, and the fear of an early counter-attack cutting back the Second Regular army, lead to the cancellation of the assault.

In Pittsburgh, the battle has turned into a ludicrous slaughter. As Lee calls for more and more units from the central front and from the west, Meade's battalion starts to plummet and fall appart. On September 7th, Jackson abandons Buffalo and joins the battle. Two days later, Missouri officially joins the Confederacy.

The Battle of Pittsburgh continues, under general supervision of Twigs on the Confederate side and Meade on the Union's. Most of the US forces being pinned down there, the US having neglected the defense of Frederick in Maryland, an attack is immediately planned.

After the destruction of most of their forces, including Meade's own division, the survivors of Pittsburgh retreat. The victorious forces of the Confederacy launch a huge assault on the heavily fortified province of Wheeling, hoping to conquer the second half of West Virginia and its mountains.

The battle ends with a costly victory, but Pittsburgh being defenceless, the US army jumps on this opportunity to take back control over one of its industrial centers. While the IInd Conscript Army occupies Wheeling, all the armies of the western front move back. In the west, Jackson still kills rebels and tries to prevent the remaining US western forces from regaining ground. These tiny remains of an army are still without orders from their government since October 23rd, 1862.

Despite our efforts, Pittsburgh falls into the hands of the Union. We make a hasty retreat to Cleveland, both to heal our wounds and to prevent any further advance. However, the 1864 elections in the United States saw McClellan elected as President of the United States. The new president made a peace offer to the Confederate Military Command.

The US ambassador met General Lee, general Dauterive and general Johnson in Cleveland, where he proposed what was presented as an "honorable peace", basically a return to the 1861 borders with Missouri and Kentucky under Confederate control. The CSA government demanded all border states and, unsurprisingly, the United States would not submit. The war went on.

The US uses the momentum of its success to attack the army in Wheeling. This is a stupid decision because this province is heavily defended, easily defendable, and because it forces the Union army to leave Pittsburgh wide open. We jump on this opportunity to take it back. Seing this, US invaders make a hasty retreat to Pittsburgh, where they overwhelm the small Confederate attacking force but are soon joined by the vast Army of the West.

More divisions from the east attack us in Pittsburgh, and we are forced to retreat to the secure province of Wheeling. There, the eastern theater as a whole comes to a stop. What follows is a long and pointless series of ambushes and skirmishes, but the real battle now takes place in the west, where Jackson is still gaining provinces, crushing revolts and containing the shreds of the US Army.

The theocracy of Deseret, under Confederate control, decided to officially join the Confederacy on May 25th.

Finally, on September 12th 1864, on the brink of disintegration, the United States recognizes its defeat and the legitimity of the CS claims on the western territories.

It was now time for the Confederacy to acknowledge its bankrupcy, start healing its wounds and prepare its administration for its glorious destiny. After the European intervention in Mexico, the Confederate Army liberates Mexico and includes it in the CS sphere of influence, but the United States, to counter this, also agrees to a military alliance with thos nation.

At the end of 1869, after the expiration of the peace treaty, the Union foolishly calls for another war against the Confederacy, with mexican support. Though Mexico never did as much as moving troops into Texas, the United States found its army crushed and almost its entire territory occupied by Confederate troops. The whole country being occupied, save for a bessieged New England, the new peace treaty was much harsher: West Virginia, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and most of Mishigan were annexed to the Confederacy, definitely splitting the US territory, the Confederate Army dwarfing its ennemy.

A long period of peace was now to follow in North America. After the purchase of Cuba, Jamaica and other islands in the Caribbean from the United Kingdom and Spain, the Confederacy, now rapidly extending its industry, invaded and annexed Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and, in the end, every country in Central America between Mexico and Columbia. We then decided to build the Panama channel, bought Belize from the UK and increased the size of our army. We set up a great and efficient public health service and implemented strong safety measures at work. We thus managed to regain our status as one of the most important powers on Earth.

The final situation is 1936.

A third conscript army is deployed and sent to Charleston, under the name of IInd Conscript Army (the previous IInd having been incorporated into the Army of the West). Meanwhile, the horrible assault on Louisville turns into a complete slaughter, as hopeless waves of Union soldiers are dropped into the firestorm. Part of the army of Paducah is sent there in order to support the exhausted troops under general Dauterive from the Army of the West, who took control of the battle, Jackson having been wounded.

On February 19th, the Norfolk garrison from Lexington and the IInd Conscript Army are ordered to take Cincinnati. In Kentucky, incompetent Union leaders, refusing to retreat, lead to the complete annihilation of the Army of Louisville and its support. Dauterive takes the city.

On March 11th, the three broken divisions in Lousville are routed and the Army of the West remains in Lousville, establishing Confederate rule over the ruins of the city. The bloody battle of Louisville, despite a short interruption in Winter 1861, lasted for seven months.

On April 1st 1862, the government passed the Conscription Act. Ten new divisions were drafted, causing unrest in the entire nation. New soldiers are sent to all armies in order to strengthen the frontline and two expeditionary corps are sent to take control of Oklahoma and Missouri.

Spring saw the Split Operation being resumed, now executed with all available forces. We would try and conquer Evansville and Cincinnati and proceed northward from here, without diluting our army or overstretching our supply lines.

The battle of Cincinnati ends. Once again, we stand victorious, as the Army of the West and the IInd Reserve Army, under Jackson, attack Evansville. The Norfolk garrison, now in Cincinnati, marches to Indianapolis, as we hope to encircle the US army of the western front there or in Cairo. The NG is intercepted and has to fight its way into the city. The encirclement plan vanishes and the Ist Conscript Army, in Paducah, is sent to Cairo to delay Yankee reinforcements in Indianapolis.

On May 9th, Kentucky officially secedes from the United States and joins the Confederacy. 10,000 enthusiastic soldiers join the Volunteer Regiment of Kentucky and the battle of Evansville.

To my dismay, the counter-attack comes from the east, as armies marching through Colombus or descending through Fort Wayne make their way to the Norfolk garrison, now fighting 1vs2. On May 18th, they are called back to the secure area of Cincinnati, while Jackson secures Evansville.

The Ist Conscript Army reaches Cairo. Dauterive and the Army of the West join them. Fleeing units find their way to Evansville and are sent back to Cairo. West of this, the two reserve divisions deployed south of Missouri are finalizing the occupation of Springfield and Rolla

In June, the 2CA and NG are sent to Colombus, where only a small northern army stands. However, massive reinforcements after the outbreak of the battle prompt us to abandon the fight and come back to Cincinnati. June also sees our victory in Cairo. Our expeditionary corps in Oklahoma, its task completed, is sent to nearby Union States to disorganise the administration and disrupt any drafting attempt in the area. The Missouri occupation plan is thwarted by a counter-attack in Saint-Louis. The reserve division there retreats as Dauterive, marching from Cairo, replaces it on the battlefield.

Colombus is taken. All remaining troops in Evansville and Cincinnati are ordered to take Indianapolis to extend the front line north and separate the two fronts. Thus starts Jackson's "Lake campaign". However, we notice a large concentration of US forces in Maryland and we fear a massive counter-attack in Virginia which would endanger our whole strategy.

The battle of Indianapolis is short-lived, as Confederate forces, five times greater than lieutenant York's army, brush resistance aside. The division routed from Saint-Louis is sent to Jefferson City where it joins forces from Springfield. Meanwhile, the Ist Conscript Army, in Cairo is under heavy attack. Our goal is to take Kansas City and Jefferson City, thus encircling the three US divisions in Saint-Louis where Dauterive's Army of the West would destroy them entirely.

Four new regiments are created, forming the Second Regular Army, the first regular army implictly being the Army of Northern Virginia. They are ordered to attack Cleveland, as this would complete our grand plan by dividing the Union. The eastern front shows no sign of evolution right now. After slightly more than a year, the war has seen the Confederacy expanding greatly and the Union being threatened, as more and more divisions are unable to get clear orders from Washington.

In mid-August, the US sends large reinforcements to Cleveland, leading us to direct the IIRA on Toledo instead. The western front sees Jackson's IInd Reserve Army called back from Indianapolis to break US resistance in Cairo. He then chases them to Kansas City, hoping to complete the encirclement of Saint-Louis, where Dauterive is pinning all the remaining armies of Missouri down.

Both operations are complete successes. The Confederate forces of Missouri are sent to Saint-Louis while Jackson prevents any breakthrough. Toledo falls quickly, but has to be swiftly reinforced as a medium-size counter-attack is organized by the United States.

On September 28th, the encirclement of Saint-Louis is complete. The US Missouri army is annihilated and the few survivors are taken prisonner.

The Norfolk garrison is sent to Detroit to complete the splitting of the US while the 2ndRA protects their back.

After the successful breakthrough of the Confederate army in Missouri, Jackson organizes the second phase of the Lake campaign: Dauterive is to occupy Davenport while he himself takes control of Des Moines, then proceeds to take Chicago. At the same time, the Norfolk garrison is to take Lansing. This would create a huge pocket, Isolating what remains of the western front.

While Dauterive's Army of the West marches to Chicago, cutting off the enemy's retreat, Jackson's IInd Reserve Army, in Des Moines and the Ist Conscript Army in Cairo launch a great assault on Spingfield. Feeling the trap, the army in Fort Wayne tries to break through Dauterive's lines. Their assault is a failure and they retreat inside the pocket. On January 29th, 1863, Chicago falls under Confederate control. The Norfolk garrison in Lansing effectively preventing any retreat through the lakes, the US armies in Springfield and Fort Wayne are doomed. All the armies of the western front are sent in Springfield while the six divisions in Indianapolis march towards Fort Wayne, soon joined by the Norfolk garrison (now very, very far away from Norfolk).

In the west, the two expeditionary corps are still expanding the Confederate territories and smashing occasional loyalists. However, supporters of the Union also take arms against the right to possess human beings in the occupied territories of the north. The Confederacy is actually on the brink of self-destruction, its economy, army and civilian population exhausted. Feeling this, the US government decides to launch a huge attack in Northern Virginia, 12 divisions from Maryland attacking Lee's 4. Despite brilliant command, support from the fleet, entrenchments and use of heavy artillery, the ANV is suffering terrifying losses and fighting 1vs3. The various armies in Staunton are amalgamated in a single Staunton army and sent to Manassas to help.

The war starts on day 1, July 4th, 1861. Some POPs are converted to soldiers, all the armies are reinforced, a new division is set up and four volunteer divisions are created and immediately mobilized. I will need all the forces I can gather and I won't even try to save the economy, as the imports of clothes, weapons and food will be enormous. The treasure is basically doomed.

Because the Union always starts with a massive assault on Manassas, the Army of Northern Virginia and all armies in the east are gathered in Staunton, save for the Army of the Shenandoah which is sent to Charleston, as its mountains and forests make it an easily defendable position. If the Union reaches this province before we do, it will be almost impossible to dislodge its troops, and the Confederacy does not have enough men to suffer the heavy casualties a regular assault would surely cost.

All the armies of the west are gathered in Bowling Green and amalgamated as the "Army of the West". Our great plan is to push through Kentucky to the canadian border or the great lakes, breaking the communication lines of the enemy, divide his territory and isolate the western part.

Two problems however: pushing north will stretch our supply lines to almost unsustainable level and open a new front on each side. The United States having three times as much population as the Confederacy and a larger army from the beginning, it will have plenty of time to crush our attack and prevent us from advancing. At least three phases of the Confederate plan are based on major incompetence in the US military HQ.

Lee is intercepted by major Baker's troops but quickly retreats to Staunton. The Army of the Shenandoah arrives in Charleston exactly one day before a Union army does and benefits from the topology. After a small skirmish, the enemy retreats with heavy casualties.

Meanwhile, the Army of the West is split in three and each division is ordered to attack one of the remaining provinces of Kentucky. No enemy division is visible west of us, but we fear it's only a matter of time before they arrive.

In yellow, the limits of the State of Kentucky, which I want to rally to the CSA.

Union forces spotted in Cairo, just north-west of us, attack colonel Watts' division in Louisville. More soldiers from the east are threatening to attack us in Lexington and we are outnumbered in both provinces. The Norfolk garrison is detached from the army in Staunton and sent to Charleston where another attack takes time to be repelled. We need them to cross the mountains, support the Lexington garrison from the incoming attack and then help in Louisville.

Meanwhile, we receive a communication from general Lee. Troops from Maryland have been shifting west continuously to try and stop our advance in Kentucky and West Virginia, leaving only a tiny garrison in Manassas. He has decided to use his overwhelming superiority to take it back, leaving only the Army of Virginia behind.

On September 13th, the 4 conscript divisions recruited in the summer are deployed, divided between the First Conscript Army in Bowling Green and the Second Conscript Army in Lynchburg. Both are immediately sent to the front to assist in the battles of Louisville and Lexington.

Lee's army crashes into the Manassas Defense Force on September 22nd and routes them in 8 days. In the West, the siege of Louisville turns into a bloodbath, as the Ist Conscript Army arrives to support Watts' division. The Paducah army establishes control over Paducah and plans an attack on Cairo, hoping to cut the armies in Louisville from their supplies, but new US troops, pulled back from the west, are menacing our flank and any movement is canceled.

Lee chases the Manassas garrison up to Washington, hoping to seize the capital in a matter of days, as the Army of Virginia is ordered to take position in Manassas, covering his only supply line. Seing this, the US command starts gathering troops in Maryland.

In Kentucky, things look grim. The Paducah army is ordered to reach Louisville in order both to assist in the liberation of the city and to avoid the assault, coming from Cairo, of a northern corps twice as large. They will never make it however, as the US detachment attacks them a week after they left their entrenchments.

As the battles in Lexington and Louisville are draining our men and energy, we detach commander Chilton and his Texas cavalry from the Army of the Shenandoah and send them to Louisville through Lexington, leaving Charleston defended by only one division. However, hysterical gathering of all union forces in Washington to counter Lee's assault have weakened the army of Cincinnati, which is now retreating through Colombus. Lee's audacious chase of the routed army of Manassas is a complete success for now.

In Louisville, stubborn US resistance seems to be paying off. A constant stream of fresh troops from the west pours into Kentucky and Watts' losses now amount to half his initial strength, while the battle of Lexington still delays our eastern reinforcements. Help planned for Paducah won't be ready until November 4th, and without a victory in Lexington, there is no way for us to hold on that long.

Finally, good news: the hopeless Union resistance has been crushed in Lexington and the various corps are divided into four groups: one to Louisville, one to Cincinnati, chasing the demoralized US forces, two in Lexington to secure the province.

A new infantry division is deployed in Memphis and ordered to join the Army of Paducah. On November 7th, the continuously reinforced Union army starts overpowering the Army of Northern Virginia. Despite his resistance, Lee has to retreat.

The battle in Paducah is hopeless. Whatever is left of our troops there has to fall back to Bowling Green and the new division is ordered to hold its position in the fortress near Memphis, denying any further push in Confederate territory. A few miles away, the siege of Louisville proves a disaster and the divisions there are also ordered back to Bowling Green.

The end of the Washington battle sees troops from the east walking back towards Kentucky. Partly because of this and partly because of bad weather conditions in the end of November, the assault of Cincinnati is canceled. However, newly promoted commander Jackson, at the head of the newly deployed IInd Reserve Army, decides to use this moment of relative calm to attack the exhausted Louisville garrison.

On the eastern coast, the Confederate navy launches its three commerce raiders and our new secret weapon, the CSS Virginia, hoping to damage the US navy and prevent it from supporting ground forces from the coast. An old-fashion sailing fleet under admiral Farragut is this found in Chesapeake bay and the battle begins.

New armies are deployed in Memphis and an assault planned to get the Yankees out of Kentucky. While they cross the border, Jackson falls upon the Louisville garrison by surprise. The reorganized armies in Bowling Green are gathered and sent to Paducah too.

Paducah secured, the reformed Army of the West, composed of the four divisions from Bowling Green (including the IInd Conscript Army), are ordered to take the Louisville army from behind and thus force them to leave Kentucky under Confederate control. This is a complete success.

Download Exar (2,884 Ko)

This is a little project to mess around with Unreal227's new features (I used one jumper, a new weapon and some particle emitters). It's not a hardcore state-of-art map but the layout is quite good. It used to serve as blueprint for a hypothetical map Jival and I were going to make together, but that was two years ago and it didn't go anywhere. Fortunately, he still had an old bare-bones copy I could use as a base.

You can't play this one without Unreal 227. No previous version of Unreal and no Unreal Tournament setup can handle it.

Update (12/06/09, 23:00): Corrected a minor glitch.

Update (15/06/09, 20:00): Added a music track.

Download NotRealistic (783 Ko)

Download .map file (93 Ko)

QuArK users can also download the .qrk file which shows every step of the map's creation:

.qrk file (for QuArK users) (2,753 Ko)

Update (20/01/09, 10:59): A few bug have been fixed. The .qrk is fixed and updated too. The .map file can be downloaded. Item placement is still under consideration.

Update (21/01/09, 23:32): Armor, health and weapon placement revised.

What you won't find:

The Advanced AI script tutorial had links to more topics... Which were never written. I got rid of these dead end links. I have also not translated the terrain tutorial in French, replacing it with a link to my own since I based it on Worch's article. It's more exhaustive (among other things, I explained how to import an heightmap from UT2004). The original tutorial in English is available though.
You also won't find a tutorial for pet seagots, as it was left unfinished. Otherwise, everything is here. I hope you appreciate my pointless effort.

Eveything can be read from the tutorials page. Thanks to Worch for allowing me to publish and translate them (and also for writing tutorials for U2; he and Scott Dalton were the only ones to do so).

Small 1vs1 Deathmatch.

Download Honored (627 Ko)

Thanks again to pigfreezer for the "Folded" Music.

What does it feels like to fight in a bombed bunker? Probably not good. You may be able to tell me if you can win this fight. If you hear some big noise, don't be afraid: it's just a shell exploding on the shielding. Ahah.

Download Atomnium (4,104 Ko)

Download Axlik (775 Ko)