Alden Bates' Weblog

Since no Vehicle CTF maps came with the game, and I'd never played one before, I downloaded a pile of them last weekend. This one is the best of the bunch.

...and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immesurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly but surely, they drew their plans against us.

It's probably not surprising that someone based am UT level on the War of the Worlds. In this case, the 1978 musical version by Jeff Wayne. All elements bar one appear to have been based on the designs in the note which came with the album, from the tripods and the cylinder, to the wrecked houses and the red weed. The tripods, while accurate to the designs in the book, don't appear to have much in the way of texture to them, unfortunately... The one feature not from the album, is (are?) the overflying Martian flying wings, which appear to be from the 50s WOTW movie (and also look sadly unskinned).

There are actually two versions of this level on the site linked above - this one (VCTF-WGS- HorsellCommon), and VCTF-Horsellcommon2k4, which doesn't have the overflying wings, and has a lot less vehicles. It also doesn't have a music file with it, so the download's smaller.

I found one bug in the bot-pathing - both bases have a spawn location in a house containing a rocket launcher which isn't linked to the rest of the level, meaning a bot will often get stuck there. I fixed this in my copy using UnrealEd by adding in another path node...

Each flag is situated in a ruined town, at the foot of a tripod. There's liberal use of vehicles - each side gets two scorpions, a hellbender (which the bots don't seem to like), a manta, a paladin, a tank, and an SPMA, as well as two stationary chaingun emplacements, so there's no shortage of vehicles to get you from one base to another.

The central area (which could be fair bit wider, IMHO!) is a depression in which a crashed alien cylinder lies and it's in this exposed area most of the clashes take place. The tripod at one end of this area has an ion painter on top, though there's no safe way back down once you've got it...

Quite a fun wee level!