Description

Coma Moonlight is an experimental gothic-style map created as part of the Refracted Reality project. Quite difficult development passed through couple of reworks, lasted about 4 months and ended in August 2020. Map was expected to be released as part of RC2, but went to free floating.

Preview
Infraworld - Coma Moonlight
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KP_SapphireMK2
KP_SapphireMK2 - - 154 comments

What is this music from? (I know its moonlight.xm found in WinRAR) Also i like it ^.^

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StormCatcher.77 Author
StormCatcher.77 - - 17 comments

This is Moonlight by Darkhalo. And yes, its a great track. Leodoom85 advised it to me and it fits map atmosphere perfectly.

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Hereticnic
Hereticnic - - 229 comments

Aw man, it breaks my heart a bit, I keep seeing these incredible intricate maps and most of them would be much more fitting if done directly in the Quake engine (instead of all the manual labor involved in the process of "simulating" fake-3D inside gzdoom engine)
It's bad because not only it takes MORE LABOR from the map maker, but it also impacts performance to such extent that lots of people can't even enjoy your map (lag, slowdowns)

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Hereticnic
Hereticnic - - 229 comments

Divide this map into sections and you would get a BANGER Hexen hub to explore.
Hexen Hub format is also nice because it auto-saves the game for the player, no risk of dying forgetting about saving after a while, the Hub teleports do it for you. So it's objectively better from a purely consumer standpoint as well.

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Hereticnic
Hereticnic - - 229 comments

Wow just finished actually playing the map, it plays really nice, very good flow overall.

- white dynamic lights (quake software renderer vibes, highlights the natural colors of the textures, instead of mushing the colors in a blob of Coloured Lighting everywhere... coloured lighting has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while, it just mushes all the texture work, can't notice individual textures as much... so well done!)

- brilliant use of small enemies (too many Doom mappers fall for the mistake of using big enemies from Doom 2 everywhere, ends up making their maps feel like a chore to play... no one likes Circle Strafing Barons of Hell in tiny corridors until you're out of ammo, ******* snoozefest Zzzzzzzzzzzz.....)

I made footage of how the game runs in my 8-core CPU. It's able to keep no less than 12 FPS which it's just fine to keep playing, nothing game-breaking really (people with older computers will be ****** however) This with a brand new 2021 hardware have in mind, not optimal. But it's more on fault of gzdoom engine which barely uses GPU at all and mostly relies on a single-core for rendering, instead of splitting the load across cores, they're lagging behind in this regard.
I should have recorded footage of the game running with a GPU overlay in the corner to demonstrate how gzdoom never uses beyond 20% GPU and never more than 20% CPU, despite lagging hardcore. It claims to be "hardware accelerated", not really. It's more than a decade that people complain about this.

Maybe if you designed this map in a way where each floor is a different area of the map (just keeping the illusion that it's all a single piece) and making use of teleports to travel across floors, then maybe it would run a bit smoother. How does it run in your machine?

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StormCatcher.77 Author
StormCatcher.77 - - 17 comments

I apologize for such a late reply. For some reason I don't get notifications, and I'm here very rarely. However, thank you for your attention to my work! Everything is really debatable here with performance, but it was originally a big experiment.

I just didn't know at the time that sector portals put so mach strain on performance. An additional factor of the "failure" was that all the initial stages of development map were covered by temporary textures without dynamic lighting. FPS did not drop below 17-20 in the most "heavy" places. But with finalization and full lightning, it turned out that it was impossible to play. A redevelopment and cutback followed (initially it was ~30 min longer). At that time, I had a PC with an AMD Athlon II X2 CPU and a Gigabyte HD 7770 GPU (about 10 fps in place from video).

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Hereticnic
Hereticnic - - 229 comments

Why was this map not used in Refracted Reality?
Did you quit the project voluntarily or did they find an "excuse" to get you off of it?
This map is brilliant, and I find impressive that it is just below 5 Megabytes, I've seen maps in Refracted that take 20 Megs just for the map itself, not even talking about textures etc.
I will upload my modified version of Refracted soon, I was able to reduce the file size from 150MB to 75MB... 20 Megs shelved off merely by compressing the skyboxes, another 20 Megs or so in the music, some more in the textures (uncompressed PNG)

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StormCatcher.77 Author
StormCatcher.77 - - 17 comments

The RR team didn't try to get me off. Guys made a great contribution to map development by testing and supporting me despite all these fps problems. Activity for the last half year before the release was very low due to lack of time for the team members. I think it was decided to simply not wait any longer and release a last build, into which my map was not added initially. I was not against this arrangement.

I hope that you have coordinated your plans with members of the RR team?

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