Tharsia KO, a purpose-built knockout final map

[JRandomNoob]

Copy of the release thread on the official UrT forum.

tharsia_ko_a3-1.jpg

Tharsia KO supports bots and pretty much every gamemode known to man; it has 8 FFA spawns and 6 + 6 spawns for team modes.

The map (along with the alpha versions) can be downloaded from CMM. Trivia: the working name for the full-sized map was Gernsback, that’s why the first alphas are called Hugo.

ut4_tharsia_ko_b1 (current)
ut4_tharsia_ko_a3
ut4_hugo_a2
ut4_hugo_a1 (SpeedyShare link; since this site has confused several people, I’d better point out that the download link is at the very top of the page)

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Tharsia KO was created for the Urban Zone Knockout event as a final map that would only need to acommodate three people. (The way things turned out, it was first played in the Asia Pacific knockout a week before it was used in UZ.) It’s a fun-sized version of a map that doesn’t actually exist yet.

The story behind Tharsia is a bit convoluted. Back in April when I first started learning Radiant, I needed something to work on. The old Streets was still in rotation on DSWP TDM and I had begun to rather like the early morning rounds where the half a dozen people on the server would rush for the corner building and attempt to camp on the top balcony. I decided to decompile and rebuild this.

Trying to figure out a way to explain why do the streets end against the skybox I came up with a theme of artificial environment mimicking a real city — a (retrofuturist) space station or a Moon base or a post-apocalyptic shelter, basically something that would have a fairly large and stable population willing to spend effort on building a “normal” living space.

Now, Streets is a horrible map in many aspects, and actually turning this layout into something good is effectively impossible, even though I did try to mess with the buildings and actually changed the center completely. Scrapping all the work didn’t bother me much since I had started this project mainly for the learning experience; I resolved to shelve this map (called Straßen) and maybe build something new based around the same theme sometime later.

Tharsia, of which only a basic layout exists at the moment, is the new incarnation of this theme, and Tharsia KO is a variation of one of its areas. I was actually able to reuse a few bits of Straßen when building this.

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Thanks to JohnnyEnglish for allowing me to modify the texture of his water heater model. Johnny, Swiiit (aka JustMe…) and xandaxs played an alpha version of the map with me.

The BSP, the raw MAP file (included in the PK3) and all my scratch-built textures are released as CC-BY (Creative Commons Attribution); see the readme in the PK3 for details. All the textures that I created or significantly modified for this map as well as the ASE models can be downloaded as a compressed archive from my DeviantArt account. The assets pack includes the same credits files as the PK3, containing full credits, sources and license information for each asset.