These maps were made for the Old Skool Rulz mapping contest held at Unreal Playground. This contest originated as an idea which Superchaz brought to me (King Mango) in IRC one night. We discussed rules, and before Chazzy even knew what was going on, I had totally taken control of things. It's a bad habit of mine I'm told. Sorry Chazzy!
With the rules set or at least percolating it was time to start a hype thread to get everyone fired up about mapping for a new contest. I have to admit I had a LOT of fun teasing everyone that whole week. :D :D :D

I initially proposed a prize fund of fifty USD and moments later received a PM from the mighty Spiffness generously offering to match what funds I was willing to put up and we each agreed to contribute fifty USD to be divided among the top three finalists.

The contest rules were fairly restrictive:
1.) With the exception of movers and game related actors such as power cores, nodes, turrets etc... there were no static meshes allowed. The objective here was to concentrate on gameplay issues and also (maybe more importantly in the long run) to force mappers to come up with original ideas to trim out their maps.
2.) No fancy materials. I won't get into the full definition of this as laid out in the contest rules, but since the maps were going to be BSP, textures were limited to those which simulated the original UT look.
3.) The file size could not exceed 5 MB zipped. There were no external custom packages allowed. Everything custom had to be stored in myLevel to keep things simple. I think it's safe to say some of the contestants reading that last statement are saying to themselves, "wtf?"
4.) Mappers had just over two weeks to submit their entries.
5.) Discussion of maps during the contest was forbidden. Each map was to be a complete surprise. I didn't want anyone to NOT do a particular theme or idea just because they saw that someone else was doing it too. With the help of UP's venerable Kingster a special ftp location was set up specifically for the contest entries where users were given only write permissions in order that they not be able to see any of the other contest map names and thus get some idea of the map's theme from the name or gametype.
6. Maps must have OSR- as the prefix following the gametype.
7.) Porting over of an author's previous UT classic work was allowed permitted the mapper had not made any previous discussion nor had run any 2k4 beta cycles of the map he/she intended to convert for the contest.
8. Mappers were not allowed to make use of distance fog to aid in level optimization as this would detract from the old school feel of the map.
9.) Playable areas in the map were limited to a BSP triangle count of 5000 maximum. This rule started off at 1000 but it quickly became clear that due to the way the new engine handles BSP rendering, 1000 was too low. I personally felt it was possible, but many mappers voiced concern and in the spirit of the season I changed the limit to 5000. What a guy eh? :D
10.) In order to be considered as one of the three top maps, contestants must send tithing to me in the form of cash or pizza in order to secure- oh wait that's not a rule. Just a suggestion. ;)

Mappers in this contest were allowed to submit as many entries as they could complete before the deadline. Some mappers took advantage of this option. *cough Blito cough* while some who vowed to participate wound up dropping out at the last minute due to personal or technical problems. As a result there are some notable mappers missing from this comp.

Mappers were competing for a 100 USD prize pool to be divided among the top three entries in a 50/30/20 split. As of this writing the contest has just closed and results will not be available but if you are curious to see how the voting went you can visit http://www.unrealplayground.com/ and have a look in the 2k3/2k4 Level design forum to view the results. http://forums.unrealplayground.com/forumdisplay.php?f=129

23 maps made it into the final pool of qualified entries with some sneaking in barely under the wire with literally seconds to spare.



There was good fun had by everyone, some bruised egos, sore bottoms and the best part of all, much was learned on all accounts during this endeavor.

May I give one final congratulations and thank you to those who participated, and even to those who almost participated.

Regards,
King Mango
1-16-06

To install the files, unzip this archive directly to your UT2004 dir. This is C:\UT2004 by default