Rainforest multi for GoldenEye

Finally a true jungle map to battle your friends!

Download the patch here

Back when I played with the Nintendo64 I wondered how there wasn't any credible forest levels. I mean big extensions with lots of polygonal trees that made it hard to walk and hide the sky. Forest levels where small boxes with plain textures like the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time, or narrow corridors with a few trees like Jungle in GoldenEye.

My idea was spliting the level in small pieces and load only the ones needed, so it was possible even for a N64 to perform a map like that. To makes things easier I thought of the level taking place on a foggy night.

When I understood how the GE engine worked it suited perfectly mi idea. So last year I made a test to check how it would perform. And it was really good.

People liked the map and some of them asked me for a multi version. Because I didn't understand how memory allocations worked for multi I wasn't able to make it multi.

But a lot of time after that I learned a few things and I tried again with the multi verison. It worked, but very poorly even for 2 players. So a few tweaks were needed to make it playable.

I lowered drawing distance and that helped a lot, but not enough. I also tried editing the object rendering distance but it didn't do anything. I replaced some of the palms with less poly plant models, but didn't help either. So in the end I had to remove around 20% of the palms.

I lost some visibility, density and smoothness, but enough to keep the level playable. It  was worth it.

I remember there were like 420 palms to begin with. Because they were all in the same position I had to rotate all of them in one of the 8 different positions (I did it with the help of a dice XD). Also, in order to keep good framerate for 3 and 4 players I had to hide more palms for those cases, and it wasn't easy to homogeneously place the remaining palms. Lastly, I improved the background look thanks to the new lighting feature that SubDrag coded to the editor. It gave the level a more realistic feel.

Thanks to SubDrag for the Editor and the new features. Also thanks to Acceptable67, EternallyAries, MultiplayerX, Rey and SATURN_81 for their feedback and suggestions.

The utilities I used were:

-3D Studio MAX 6 for modeling the map.

-AutoCAD 2004 for creating colisons, portals... and exporting the files to 3DS format.

-'DeleD CE' to import the 3DS files, texturing, grouping geometry and export it all to OBJ format.

-'GE Setup Editor' for editing 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.