7 April 07 · 4.0 & Turnpike

As you all know by now the fourth major incarnation of urban terror has been released. The release went smoothly and turned out bug free for the most part. When I say for the most part, yes, there were some issues with performance on some of the maps. One of them being turnpike. I'll get to that in a moment. First of I want to finish off my turnpike diary.

Lighting and the rest

After finishing off the garden area there wasn't a whole lot of time left. I would have liked to have done more with the outside buildings, but it wasn't to be.

The version that I had been given was missing all outdoor lights around the map. So with the time I had I placed all the lights around the outside of the map, and made sure the lighting was ok. Because of the lighting changes in 4.0 I needed to brighten up a lot of the outside textures, or it wouldn't be bright enough. After that it was just a matter of fixing small bugs.

I gave the map to Maureen a few days before release and she fixed up some other minor issues. And that's the map you get to play today.

Performance Issues

Turnpike has an issue with low frames per second. Not for everyone, but quite a few have experienced it. You can read more about it on this forum thread, but basically the the map isn't optimised as well as it should be. You could blame it on the fact that the map is a decompile, or that four mappers have worked on it over the last year, or that qa never reported it as an issue, but ultimately I should have have checked it more thoroughly before handing it off. At any rate turnpike will be fixed for the next patch.