Adopting ATCSHD and Arachnid2 as stock maps?

[illwieckz]

After having done the tremulous legacy map pack, I did a huge revamp of Arachnid2:

• almost complete retexturing with similar textures
• almost complete redo of the lighting using light-emitting shaders

About that light revamp, the first iteration wasn't that good (light intensities were a bit too-much different) but it greatly imptoved in latest version as I then re-tweaked again the light intensities of the light emitting shaders.

If I'm right, map-arachnid2 still relies on res-tremulous for a couple of textures, some may be replaced (like the orange grunge texture with holes), some may be imported in our stock res-ambient like the monitor textures (like we already did with soda machine and blood textures used by various legacy and new maps).

On ATCSHD side, this map itself was already a complete re-texturing planned for Tremulous 1.2. Though, this retexturing is not on par with Unvanquished requirements for stock maps: it brought higher resolution textures (good), but no normal/specular multitexturing (bad). But @RedSkyByte is working on a revamp of those textures, adding extra components like height maps.

If I'm right the ATCSHD map is fully standalone and doesn't depend on res-tremulous already.

It means, at some point we may provide with the game:

• map-arachnid2
• map-atcshd
• tex-atcshd

Actually the ATCSHD textures already are a revamp of the eQ2 textures by evillair, so if we do a tex packages for them, we may name it tex-eq2hd or something like that instead of tex-atcshd.

Arachnid2 is a greatly appreciated map, ATCSHD has a kind of love & hate relation with players, mainly because of overplaying it, not really from his intrinsic quality, and also because many map cloned its layout (which is not really its fault, except for the layout to be playable). ATCS being to Tremulous what de_dust is to Counter Strike, some may hate it from this being overplayed, but on the other hand it's something that is so deeply tied to the game it's like it should be there.

[slipher]

Arachnid2 was my favorite in Tremulous.

It's kind of annoying to have 2 ATCS clones among official maps

[sweet235]

I have a preview of the @RedSkyByte ATCSHD on my server. It already looks quite good, I think.

ATCS is a special case. There are some open source maps that use (almost) only original ATCS textures. Remastering them to use the ATCSHD textures is not difficult. For example:

• https://github.com/InterstellarOasis/map-new-hope_src.dpkdir
• https://github.com/InterstellarOasis/map-tds_src.dpkdir
• https://github.com/InterstellarOasis/map-ptcs1_src.dpkdir

There are more.

[illwieckz]

It's kind of annoying to have 2 ATCS clones among official maps

Touché! 😄️

Maybe this would be less of a problem if we have more official maps? 🤔️

ATCS ist a special case. There are some open source maps that use (almost) only original ATCS textures. Remastering them to use the ATCSHD textures is not difficult.

That's part of why I believe it's a good idea to make a separate stock texture set for them (even if the atcshd map is not stock). Also those revamped textures do not look bad.

[sweet235]

Here is a preview of @RedSkyByte's revamp:

This is map-ptcs1, all I had to do was changing to atcshd textures and recompiling the map.