Big Boo's Haunt in GoldenEye

This haunted house is waiting for you.

Download de patch here

After releasing Kakariko Village as my first map I thought about other iconic Nintendo 64 levels that would fit as other multiplayer maps and the Forest Temple (released in 2013) and Big Boo's Haunt popped into my head.

This haunted mansion was probably the Super Mario 64 level that I liked the best because. At first you could only get to a small amount of areas, but as you collected stars and explored meticulously you unraveled the mysteries one by one: accesing the second floor, the secret door behind the bookshelf, getting to the roof...

This level had fixed cameras that followed Mario's movement inside the house, so you would miss some details. Thanks to this conversion, now you can roam freely and spot every corner.

The merry go round in the basemente is still there but it's isolated from the rest of the house. It's up to players to use it or not. There's a reward awaiting there for those who walk the path.

I started working on the map on March 2013 y and was really easy to extract the geometry and textures with the same procedure of my previous works. As my priority back then was the Goldfinger 64 project, I could only work on this map at a slow pace and it took about a year to merge all the parts that I extrated, inject them to the rom and test it. I shared two images on April 2014 (1) (2) at the same time I showed Blue Resort's progress.

As you could see there was a lot of work to do with textures, clipping, weapom location and pregenerated lighting. I didn't come back to this project until March 2015 (we had holidays in my hometown but it was raining all the time) and left the map in a ready to release state. But I wanted to add a couple of details which I'd need help with and the map was on hold until recently.

The first thing I wanted to add were the rising cofins as in the original game. I needed to convert the object as a special door that only works in one angle and the map had the wrong orientation, so I had to rotate the full thing 90º. Rotating the map took longer than thought because with the unnapropiated tools some of the vertex shading that creates the ilusion of pregenerated lighting was missing. With the help of SubDrag and the GEEditor v3 I finally succeded. But it turned out that the cofins would only raise in a certain way and not the symmetric, so only one of the three cofins that rise made it in the end.

The second addition was the moving bookself that unravels a secret door. It seemed like something trivial to add, but I had a lot of trouble as well.

Since it was very big, if you tried to open it the way it does in the original game it would go through the wall and be seen at the other end, so I had to make it open the opposite direction. But the door opened to fast and it went too far, taking a very long time to close by itself. I kind off fix that problem, although it's still opening too fast. Then I noticed it was invisible on console. SubDrag reminded me that doors need to be modeled with two sided triangles if you are going to have double doors, which was the case. The only thing that I couldn't fix was that you can activate the door from the other side of the wall. Well, maybe that can be used tactically altough it's not very fair. I'll try to fix it in the future.

This map took a lot of time since its conception but I think it came out beautifully. It has the perfect size so players will meet constantly and works very smoothly on console. Not to mention the atmosphere is superb.

The utilities I used were:

-'1964 v1.1' emulator and 'Nemu 64 graphics (combine debug)' graphic plugin in order to rip the geometry as VRML and textures as BMPs

-'3D Studio MAX R8' to merge the VRMLs and convert them to FBX.

-Autodesk FBX converter 2012 to convert the FBX to DXF (Autocad) and OBJ (for Deled)

-'AutoCAD 2007' to model clipping and add some parts to the map.

-'DeleD CE' to chop the level and export as OBJ.

-'Irfan View' to edit some textures.
-Autodesk Softimmage 2013' to rotate the map.

-'GE Setup Editor' to edit the GoldenEye rom: adding textures to the rom, injecting the level, fix and colour textures, adding shadows and lights, edit the colision (clipping) and portals, put guns and spawn points, modify the skies settings, change the image and name of the map... and creating the patch.