Goldeneye 007 was a first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, released now over ten years ago. Though it lacked technical capability being as old as it was, it pioneered locational damage, featured varied mission objectives, and included stealth as a game mechanic for the first time.
Next to competitors like Quake and Doom, it was a revolution in the FPS genre.The multiplayer levels were well-designed, but this was a time before console online play and the now somewhat archaic N64 has fallen into disuse. Consequently, the multiplayer mode is played little nowadays, and the maps have become neglected. It's been an ambition of mine since then to bring the classics to a new format and a new audience, and since I began playing Tremulous I began to think about the possibility of bringing my favourite of the old Goldeneye maps, Bunker, to the new engine.
Tremulous' gameplay, however, is delicately balanced, and the two opposing teams have very different requirements in terms of layout. Bunker's long corridors and many single-door rooms would provide virtually unbreakable bases and present the basic riflemen with a very easy target indeed. Tremulous, in its creativity, requires maps be designed and built with it in mind for the most part, as the port of Hamunaptra so aptly demonstrated.
Furthermore, the Quake mapping tools are difficult to set up and understand, and the ratio of work input to map output is not great. Becoming frustrated with my test map, whose textures would not load or render properly, I eventually abandoned the project and decided that, for Tremulous at least, I would stick to coding it.
In time, I heard about another interesting OSS FPS, based entirely on its own engine. Sauerbraten featured pretty lighting effects, fast and simple gameplay, and most importantly, a set of mapping tools both intuitive and powerful. Although the gaming community itself wasn't half the size of Tremulous', and the gameplay not half as rich or complex, the map creation was entertaining in itself and it wasn't long before my old ambition started to resurface again.
I completed the basic structure and layout of the map fairly quickly, and moved on to texturing, lighting, and detail. The recent acquisition of the hardware necessary to connect the N64's output to the computer I'm working on accelerated and improved my work a great deal, but there is still a lot to be done, and indeed a lot to be learnt about the engine as I use it.
You can read about some algorithms I used to draw the textures on the textures page.
