Nightwatch Textures

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It came to my attention recently that the download link for the Nightwatch textures on FileFront randomly disappeared. I’ve updated the original post with two new download options, a public Dropbox link and a ModDB mirror. If you don’t feel like clicking through, here’s direct links for you:

To see some of these in action, the guys over at the Sven Co-op forums have been doing the most with the textures so far; if you poke around there you can find quite a few maps with their own take on the NW set.

We also ran a Nightwatch-themed challenge over at MapCore back in July; you can view the winners as well as the rest of the entries over there. If you’ve made anything with these textures, I’d love to see it.

Identity Crisis

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“Hell yes,” I said aloud as my character stepped onto the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. I was so ready for this. Through its first three missions, Battlefield 3‘s campaign had been a shaky ride – literally, too, as the entirety of “Uprising” can be legitimately blamed on the earthquake that closed “Operation Swordbreaker” – and the game was teetering back toward the shelf. For all the hype, for all the amazing trailers closing with the Terminator Salvation-esque take on the familiar “da-dun dun da dun-dun” Battlefield theme, this was a game that seemed to be in the midst of a major identity crisis.

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Starhawk

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After a couple years of being possibly the worst-kept secret in games (let’s be honest – just the rumored name piqued my interest in employment at LightBox), the cat is officially out of the bag. We’re working on a little thing called Starhawk.

Official Site | Twitter | Facebook

There is an absolute mountain of coverage out there on your favorite gaming site(s), but I’ll just draw your attention to these two videos. The first is a behind-the-scenes look at the excellent team at LightBox, and the second is an introduction to Starhawk with LightBox President Dylan Jobe:

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The Cube Challenge: Results

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The Cube Challenge results are in over at MapCore – Bender (pictured above) came in second to Minotauro’s HL2DM level, “Zest,” and ahead of Robert Yang’s HL2: Episode 2 level, “Tintern” (both pictured below) It was a close vote at the top between Bender and Zest, but I’m pleased to have such a strong showing having built a map for a game relatively few people own.

The voting this time around allowed members to vote for up to three levels, which I think aided some of the issues we had with voting during the previous challenge. I gave my three votes to Zest, Tintern, and vfig’s level, “Escherish.” The third vote was a tough call with some very closely matched entries, but I had to give the nod to some of the crazy tricks vfig pulled off in his level – many of them similar to the portal tricks I used in Bender.

I definitely recommend checking out as many of the entries as you can within the scope of your game collection.

FINAL: “Bender” (Prey)

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We just wrapped up another challenge at MapCore: the Cube Challenge. The goal of this challenge was to build a level completely contained within a 1024x1024x1024 cube (based on id Tech scales and adjusted proportionally for other engines). We ran a similar contest back in 2007, but I never finished my entry and was itching to release something this time.

One thing that bugs me about these dimensions, though, is that horizontal and vertical spaces aren’t created equal. Unless you fall back on ladders, elevators, or teleporters, covering a 128 unit vertical shift requires somewhere in the realm of 256 units – 25% of the horizontal bounds allowed in this challenge! As a result, many levels tend to fill every possible inch of X/Y space, but often can’t utilize the full 1024 units on the Z axis.

I decided I wanted to take a crack at this in Prey. I’ve long held that Prey is the best of the Doom III engine games; it remains one of my favorites this generation, and I’ve always wanted to experiment with some of the crazy level design possibilities opened up by variable gravity and seamless portals. The result is “Bender,” which is now available for download.

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