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					  >  Techniques Used In This Map  <
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:: What This Is About ::
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I thought sharing a number of techniques used while creating ut4_superman  might be of interest
to some people, so here's explanations on some of the more or less known design decisions that
went into building the map.

-wily duck



==================
Aesthetic Features
==================

- Reglow			: An effect I designed with the help of Null. Two sided water texture, with a different
				  texture/shader on the bottom. The underside projects light to give underwater brushes
				  a different color. This allows the mapper to simply apply a water texture, and let
				  the underlighting reglow shader color the underwater brushes.
- Fur for Grass			: Used in the grass at hotel for a raised 3-d appearance, rather than the normal flat texture.
				  Significant work went into giving the grass to look as natural as possible with almost no
				  artifacting. You'll also notice hues change in grass that's further away.
- Fake Mirror			: Originally seen in ut_nimrod, this is a carefully designed under-floor area that is built to
				  look like a mirror image of the room above. Seen in military lobby. Main advantage is the low
				  FPS hit due to not rendering two scenes like a standard mirror portal.
- Water Texturing		: Several layers using carefully designed shaders and custom textures give water
				  a more natural appearance.
- Curve Surfaces		: Vertical support pillars, beveled edges, waterfalls, light fixtures, curbs, etc.
				  A lot of work was put into the tower arches at the base of military building to
				  handle the gameplay required, and to compensate for texture stretching.
- Smooth Environment Mapping	: The "water glass" section in the middle of the hotel lobby sports
  On Curves			  a smooth reflective appearance all the way around. This took many
				  iterations to get right, combining brush surfaces with patch endcaps.
- No Lightmapping Over Certain	: The wall of Immortality uses textures that are pre-colored to fit
  Complex Curves		  it's location in the sun, removing the additional layer of lightmap
				  polys that it would otherwise require, to cut its rendering expense
				  in half. The polycount on this object is rather high.
- Outdoor and Indoor Lighting	: Skybox/sun lighting using sun_ext, skylight, and lightmapFilterRadius to get the best
				  quality outdoor light. Flourescent and halogen lighting from Realword light for
				  indoor light.
- Variable Texture Resolution	: Stretching and strinking textures to produce new appearances, reducing texture memory.
- Variable Lightmap Scaling	: Grouping objects and scaling shadow resolution to create detailed shadows
				  or large blanketing gradients.
- Auxillary Vertex Lighting	: To save on lightmap data, vertex lighting is applied to certain large surfaces that
				  have no change in shading, or are in distant, non-gameplay areas.
- Breakable Objects		: Not only are windows breakable, but a one-time breakable soft landing brush covers
				  most vehicles to create an effect of busting out the glass when they're first landed
				  on. There's are a few object around the map that require grenades to break, a couple
				  that require the grenade launcher.
- High Quality Blackrayne	: A feature in itself - BlackRayne's models stand out in creating a lush
  Models			  environment full of detail.
- Scaled Tcgen Environment	: Using scaling on environment mapped surfaces allows for new types of shiny
  Textures			  behavior. For instance, the doom towers use this effect to cast a distant
				  shiny reflection of the sky, and water doesn't appear oily.
- func_group Brush Groups	: Grouping brushes together properly creates correct lightmaps without blotching
				  shadows at the edges.
- Ambient Sounds		: A number of environmental sounds around the map to give the extra natural dimension.
				  Some wind sounds I custom filtered to apply the right amount of deep lows and hiss
				  without becoming a disturbance.
- Camera Portal			: Used in executive floor security room. Multiple shader layers cover a portal, to appear
				  like a security camera looking down the outside hallway.
- No Mmipmaps On Textures	: Signs, the newspaper, and other objects that require maximum fidelity without blurring
  Requiring Total Clarity	  are not mipmapped. the streets are also stripped of mipmapping to give the intended clear,
				  sparkly appearance of a city street.
- Alpha Blending		: Fences, decals, etc. The structure grid between the shiny doom tower windows
				  are projected over the shiny surface with alpha blending.
- Color Blending		: Busstop blue glass, smoke colored glass, water glass, etc.
- Simulated Water Motion	: To add additional surface motion to the environment mapping shine
				  on water, func_bobbing is subtly used.
- Waterfall With A Volumetric	: The twin waterfalls at the base of Pond Publishing. Patches using independent func_bobbing
  Appearance			  on the Y axis, differing sort values for rendering priority over the two patch flows,
				  lighting control, and integrated brushes. built to appear realistic in the physical properties
				  of water pressure and surface tension.
- Point Light Area Coloring	: A few areas have additional color influences using point lights.




=================
Gameplay Features
=================

- Flypoints - Jumppads that float above a player, marked by scrolling green arrows. By
  putting these above the player, they must use their jump key to begin flying to the
  arrows' precalculated destination. Flypoint behavior makes it easy to move around this
  very large map in seconds, changing battlegrounds and strategies quickly.
- Cushion clipped landing zones for safe landing when falling from distant heights.
- Numerous free-form nonlinear routes.
- Timed ledge grabbing.
- Ground-level boosting:
   + power sliding
   + ultra-fast surface sliding
- Evolutionary jumping and sliding to create new routes even after years
  of playing the map.
- Velocity redirection by falling/impacting/jumping from angled cushion surfaces:
   + Military support arches, rebound bounces on green arrows, redirect bounce off
     sides of vehicles, etc.
- Penalty-less chained jumps to get to common areas.
- Combinations of jumps to maintain speed as a defense, or transport to a remote
  area.
- Arc jumping. Advanced technique to move through the air in unintended ways.
- Super strafe jumping using angled surfaces to get massive forward velocity.
   + Used on doom roof to make the military roof jump.
- Water as a cushion/safe landing zone.
- True 3d gameplay environment. Unlike nearly all FPS games, this map focuses
  on vertical gameplay as well as standard ground-based FPS movement.
- Versatility of 1vs1 up to 16vs16. Gameplay naturally modifies itself to handle
  variable sized teams.
- trigger_push Help Assist - A number of areas have water pools or containers that
  are sometimes difficult to get out of. Adding a small trigger_push helps force the
  person out when the engine physics fail to work.
- Unheard of mid-air spawns and other amused mapper shananagans. ;)



===============================
Development and Design Features
===============================

- Nodrop clips anywhere where a new to average player would not be able to
  practically reach. Some veterans can hide flags in difficult to reach places,
  but this is not fair to those who don't know the tricks to reach those areas.
- Nodrop and kill brushes outside of map/gameplay zones. Just in case.
- Highly cleaned up skybox. Compression artifacts, aliasing, and color anomolies
  have been cleared.
- Structural vis blocking, hints.
- Much better FPS performance than previous versions:
  + q3map2 optimizations in -vis do most calculations automatically now.
  + significantly reduced excessive polys from previous version
- close attention paid to cracks and texture misalignments. You may find this file
  useful for aligning textures: dev/ut4_superman/128x128_editor-overlay.tga
- Added easter eggs!
- CTF gameplay oriented, and supports all game modes (except FTL).
- Radio locations across entire map.
- Specially designed alignment texture, included in pk3.
- Best use of compressed tga and jpg files. Recompressed or converted image file
  types when quality could be maintained while shrinking the file sizes.
- Wrote scripts to purge as much unused content as absolutely possible, keeping
  the pk3 file size down.
- Manual edits to the .map source file.
- NonPlanar Lightmap - when one room would continue to leak light, the solution
  was to create a shader containing only q3map_nonplanar, then assigning the _shader
  key to the func_group which grouped the rooms' brushes. Light was then contained
  correctly.
- Shaders Utilizing Sort to control the rendering method and timing of various
  translucent textures.
- Pk3 compression set to fastest. If set to best, the map would only decrease about
  1.5MB in size. By using fastest, players will be able to load the map much faster.
