ReadMe for Age of Enlightenment for Unreal Tournament 2k4
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               Title: Age of Enlightenment
            Filename: CTF-UCMP2-Enlightenment.ut2
              Author: Aaron McCoy
       eMail Address: aaron601@yahoo.co.uk
         Website URL: http://www.ucmappack.org
        Release Date: 30/09/2005
         Last Update: 27/09/2005
             Version: 1.0

Credits:
Thanks to all of the UCMP team for providing feedback, testing maps, providing motivation, and for just being an awesome bunch of people in general. There is no way I would have finished this map (or any other !) if it wasn't for you guys !

Thanks to Taleweaver and Selerox for providing some comments on the map. They had some good suggestions, but unfortunately no time for me to implement them. Maybe for the next volume guys ;)

Other levels by author:
DOM-UCMP-Cerebral (UT2004)
ONS-Resilience    (UT2004)

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Play Information
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                Game: Unreal Tournament 2k4
          Level Name: Age of Enlightenment
           Game Type: Capture the Flag
            Botmatch: Yes
       Single Player: No
            Teamplay: Yes
        New Textures: Yes
          New Sounds: No
           New Music: Yes
        New Mutators: No
                Mods: 

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Construction
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                Base: Built from the ground up !
          Build Time: Long time .... too long probably .... started this shortly after the first volume was released, so probably around 6 months altogether (on and off)
   Ideal Playercount: 16-24
      Editor(s) Used: UnrealEd 3.0, Photoshop 7, Paint Shop Pro 8, Maya Unlimited 6.0.1
          Known Bugs: None (as far as I am aware)

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Installation
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Unzip CTF-UCMP2-Enlightenment.ut2.
Store the *.unr or *.ut2 file in your Maps\ directory along with the others 
(see guide below), then either doubleclick on it, or type open CTF-UCMP2-Enlightenment in 
the console, or select the Map in a Botmatch or an Internet game.

Guide:
*.unr and *.ut2 files go in Maps\
*.utx files go in Textures\
*.umx and *.ogg files go in Music\
*.uax files go in Sounds\
*.u, *.int, and *.ini files go in System\
*.usx files go in staticmeshes\
*.ukx files go in animations\
*.ka  files go in karma\
*.upx files go in prefabs\

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Extended Description
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The Age of Enlightenment:

- One solitary island. Two abandoned castles. An endless supply of death. Go forth my brothers and bring your righteous fury to bear on any heretics who would attempt to proclaim themselves kings. For this is the Age of Enlightenment, and there can be only ONE !

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Author's Notes
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I've often heard people say that no-one reads readme's, but I can say without hesitation that I myself typically do, so I'm sure that there is someone out there who is currently reading this. If so, thank you for downloading my map and I hope you enjoy it ! If not, well, you'll never please everyone I guess (where would the fun be in that anyway !).

I'll try to provide some notes regarding the map itself, construction wise (in case anyone is actually interested):

All of the custom textures contained within the AMc-UCMP-Enlightenment-Tex.utx package are copyright (c) Aaron McCoy 2005. All of the textures were photosourced using digital images taken by myself using a Canon Powershot G5 digital camera. I went around my college campus one (very !) cold day last December before Christmas and grabbed me a load of material. Thankfully it worked out quite well, considering it was my first attempt at creating proper textures ! I used both Photoshop 7 and Paint Shop Pro 8 for creating and touching up the textures. A large majority of them contain alpha channels (all of the DXT3 and DXT5 compressed textures), though they have typically not been used for specularity effects. I included them in-case anyone else wished to use them.

All of the custom static meshes contained within the AMc-UCMP-Enlightenment-SM.usx are copyright (c) Aaron McCoy 2005. All of the meshes were created using Maya Unlimited 6.0.1, a great (if a little buggy and temperamental !) program. The flag castles themselves are loosely based on the real-life Bunratty Castle, located in Co. Clare in Ireland (not too far from where I live, though I unfortunately I have never had the pleasure of visiting the castle in person yet, but I plan to very soon !). Initially, I had intended to create a realistic replica of the castle, including inner chambers, but the scale issue associated with UT2K4 meant that in order to create a playable map with sufficient movement space, the castle would have to have been HUGE ! So in the end, I settled for a much simpler, less directly-inspired version, but hopefully you can see a reasonable resemblance. Do some Google searches for the caslte if you're interested in finding out more.

The music in this map is actually a track taken from Unreal 2 : The Awakening, developed by the now defunct Legend Entertainment. The track was originally entitled 'M03_fite_loop2.ogg'. I thought the music fit the theme of my map so well I just had to include it ! I have renamed the file to 'UCMP2-MercFight.ogg' - but it is exactly the same as the original file, just with a name change.

I decided early on during construction that I wanted to try to make the entire map out of static meshes, and generate lightmaps for them to provide enhanced illumination (similar to CTF-Magma, such an impressive map construction wise IMO). It took a good few days (and very late nights !) to finally import, rearrange and set-up the meshes and appropriate lighting inside of Maya in order to generate the lightmaps. In order to get sufficient quality, I had to generate high resolution lightmap sources. Uncompressed they totalled around 80MBs (including mipmaps), so they have all been compressed to DXT3 textures inside of the editor, reducing the filesize considerably. As a result of the compression, you may notice some colour banding when up close to the meshes - this was unavoidable I'm afraid, but it's not a particularly big issue. As with the custom texture creation, this was my first attempt at using lightmaps - I think I did a pretty decent job !

Finally, I would just like to add that I'm pleased with how the map turned out. I am confident that it satisfies the initial vision I had for it, and it's pretty much exactly as I intended it to turn out. I tried to keep gameplay in mind when designing, as with anything there's an element of luck as to whether people enjoy playing it. Even if one person out there gets a kick from playing it, it was all worth it !

And FINALLY, if anyone would like (for whatever reason) to use any of the custom content included within this map, you are completely free to do so. All I ask (as does any mapper) is that you credit me with their creation, and that you contact me to let me know that you are using them.

My email address is kind of a temporary one, I use it regularly but I do intend changing it for something more permanent (and more importantly Unreal / mapping related !). You can contact me anytime on that address. If you have concerns regarding the map in any way, shape or form, feel free to also post some feedback on the UCMP forums - that's what they're there for.

p.s. I can't believe I have rambled on for this long !! Ah well, sometimes it's good to get your thoughts down on (digital) paper :)

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Copyright / Permissions
-----------------------
This level is copyright 2005, by Aaron McCoy.

Authors may NOT use this level as a base to build additional levels without explicit
permission from the Original Author.

You are NOT allowed to commercially exploit this level, i.e. put it on a CD or any 
other electronic medium that is sold for money without my explicit permission!

You MAY distribute this level through any electronic network (internet (web/ftp), 
FIDO, local BBS etc.), provided you include this file and leave the archive intact.

UnrealŪ Tournament 2004 (c)2004 Epic Megagames, Inc.  All Rights Reserved. Unreal 
and the Unreal logo are registered trademarks of Epic Megagames, Inc.  All other 
trademarks and trade names are properties of their respective owners.

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