SinkPack2004

Name: SinkPack2004 

Version: 1.0
Compatibility: UT2004, updated to 3323 with ECE bonus pack
Description: A collection of Giant-sized maps placing inches-tall players in various places around a kitchen, ranging from the entire countertop, to the basin of the sink, even hopping outside into a windowsill flowerbox.
Comments: It's been an intense couple of months working on the SinkPack, and I hope it's received well in the community. I've learned a great bit and done a lot of things I never thought about doing before. I wound up skipping out on the Assault board due to time constraints, unfortunately - but I will probably finish it later, giving it the time and care that an Assault map needs.
Screenshot: 

Credits: Dan "Winky Boy" Overlander. The cupboards, chair, faucet, pot, and pan come from mr-cad.com. BootsofJumping are credited to Mr.Evil! Almost every other static mesh you see was hand-modeled by myself after that, and I also manually created all of the textures myself, too.
Downloads:

• from NaliCity
• from GameFront
• from Winkyboy

Previous and new discussions begin below. For nostaligic/planning reasons, I'm attaching the first layout that I had thought up while designing the first Sink Pack board, Countertop. You can see that the final product turned out a lot like the original plan.

[Previous Discussion]

Gusher		Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 3:55:08 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member, Winkies Joined: 7/6/2004 Posts: 19 Location: United States		Oh wow., this is insane! Just downloaded and am gonna give it a go.......will be back for some feedback.......
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Gusher		Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 4:50:41 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member, Winkies Joined: 7/6/2004 Posts: 19 Location: United States		I played it a bit and visually it's impressive! Only thing that is low quality are the textures........they look blurred and washed out.......texture use and variety is very well done...si0mply there many things to explore...also, many of that dark areas prolly would look better with some low lighting.......If the contest is your intention for this map then you need to redo the labels of the products.............. The bots really do their job and the fun factor is there. .......as of now I haven't found any major bugs or errors..........I'll keep you posted once I do find any......
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winkyboy		Posted: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 8:24:20 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Hey there Gusher! Okay, this is good feedback! I wasn't expecting anyone to say the textures were blurry, however I would much prefer to have them clearer myself. What do you think, though -- if I enlarged the textures to 1024x1024, that'd make things look really nice, but I think the texture pack might wind up being about 80meg alone! Now, I think people probably know that I do intend to release several maps that use these textures - I'm calling it the Sink Pack BOB - but I wonder how many objections there are going to be if I would enlarge the textures. What do you think? I'm gonna post some updates on the ataricommunity thread.
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winkyboy		Posted: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 10:03:36 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		I've been overhauling the textures on EVERYTHING, increasing their resolution and removing all copyright issues. This is a major pain in the butt! However it's looking really nice. Oh - some other things that I didn't note in the changelog in the first post -- I increased the "play area" by creating teleport paths leading from the two counter-top "center" nodes to the bottom shelf of the cart. I did this because the bots NEED a ground-based path to reach every single node, apparently. If they don't have this, you'll wind up with the jump-in, jump-out garbage that's so poor. I still find them abandoning their vehicles once in a while, which is disturbing, but even with that it's fun playing against them. Gotta gits ta sleep. Two more days and this thing is finished! Guarantee.
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, September 13, 2004 8:29:52 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		I put some serious hours into the map over the last couple of weeks and have it sitting in the hands of a few players as a release candidate version. Until last Friday when I missed the MSU deadline, I was actually thinking about releasing the map as a standalone, with the rest of the map pack to be added later. Since I did miss the cutoff, I'm holding back again until I can release several maps all using the same texture and staticmeshes packs. There has been a whole lot added and fixed since the beta release. The most notable items which I mentioned in the last post are that there are now teleporter/land-based paths leading from the middle countertop nodes to the central cart node. Also, I manually recreated all the product packaging textures to remove any copyright issues. This took a LOT of time, but I'm even MORE pleased with the results. I think players will be, too. Other fixed issues can be found in the (edited) list in the first post of this thread. Finally, in regards to the status of the overall Sink Pack, I also have a DM arena/CTF version of the sink board probably at a good 55% finished. (I decided to restart the VCTF board that had been working on because it was based on the version of the map with the copyrighted materials.)It's very easy to create new boards based on these, since the hardest work (modelling, texturing, etc) has already been completed.
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, September 13, 2004 8:35:56 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Oh yeah - links to most recent screenshots http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00064.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00065.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00066.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00067.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00068.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00069.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00070.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00071.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00072.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v371/winkyboy/Shot00073.jpg
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winkyboy		Posted: Tuesday, September 28, 2004 8:28:30 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		I know it's been a little quiet with the Sink news - although I don't know if you're a regular or not (feel free to shout out so I know someone's reading this) - but progress has been continuing! I have the first three boards (ONS, DM, VCTF) pretty much completed, which feels great. I've been working on the Assault map and I guesstimate that it's now about 15% done. I've got an overall plan 90% complete, a portion of the layout actually built, and the first objective almost finished. I'm hoping that it will be a very easy-to-understand Assault level, because while I absolutely adore the gametype, I have to admit there are a lot of assault maps out there that are confusing. Nevertheless, there will be a lot of fun objectives to accomplish On a side note, if anyone reads this who might seriously be interested in adding a map or other useful content to the sink pack, please contact me. It'd be great to get a bunch of quality giant maps out there in the community!
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, October 25, 2004 2:54:14 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		As one may have noticed on the SinkPack Atari thread, I've put up some pictures from the new Bombing Run board, FlowerBox. It is turning out BEE-YOU-tifully with kickin' bots and awesome framerates. This past weekend, I added decorations to make the goals right-pretty-like, with a vine curling up and around it, all decked out with ivy leaves of various sorts. It's such a breeze to create these things - I'm a bit addicted, I admit BIGSMILE You can see it pictured here along with the Plastic Flamingo I added! The other up-and-coming bit of awesome progress is that I've successfully completed the modeling phase of the decoration that's going to appear opposite the flamingo -- my garden gnome! There are no screenshots yet that I can give you, but I'm suprised at how much work has to go into something like that. Keep an eye open and I'll have some really great news to share, soooooon BOB
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, November 01, 2004 9:32:23 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		I had some frustrating experiences while editing the SinkPack this weekend, too (see the News section for other frustrations). I was really excited that I had modeled, skinned, and rigged my gnome character so I could import it as a new player character. But I got to the point where I needed to import that animations for the character into UnrealEd, and I hit a wall. The only thing I could think of doing to continue would be to actually create all the animations manually - and I'd really been hoping that, since I was using a default human skeleton named exactly as the UTmale is, that I could just piggy-back on their animations. SO, the gnome is, at the moment, just serving as a statue in the Flowerbox board. It looks pretty cool, though.
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meatpopsicle		Posted: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 1:21:36 PM
Rank: Newbie Groups: Member Joined: 10/25/2004 Posts: 2 Location: United States		Hi WinkyDad! BR-SPAC-FlowerBox-beta, CTF-SPAC-FlowerBox-beta and ONS-SPAC-Countertop-beta crashed on my Mac! In the basin I noticed the bots swam through the water in the middle, making themselves really nice targets! I had a bit of fps stutter in the CTF-Basin. I am running on a 2Ghz Dual G5. Thanks for working on the sinkpack, despite your new charge! meatpopsicle ------------------------ - Are you classified as human? - Negative, I am a meatpopsicle.
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ShAdY2882		Posted: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 2:57:40 PM
Rank: Newbie Groups: Member, Winkies Joined: 6/14/2004 Posts: 4 Location: United States		Awsome Maps Winky!!!!!!!! Honestly the months, weeks, and hours of work really show. As I've tested these they have run flawlessly and really been evenly balanced maps and solid bot pathing. Anyways this is preaching to the choir, but I do think these are some of the best maps out there and the detail is unmatched. Hope everyone enjoys these as much as us LAN party boyz.
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winkyboy		Posted: Tuesday, November 09, 2004 6:33:14 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		meatpopsicle wrote: Hi WinkyDad! BR-SPAC-FlowerBox-beta, CTF-SPAC-FlowerBox-beta and ONS-SPAC-Countertop-beta crashed on my Mac! Hi meatpopsicle!! Great to see you around here! I'm alarmed to hear that those three maps crashed for you... I know very little of the workings of a Mac, but I'll first check with you on this: Have you patched to version 3323 and installed the ECE bonus pack? I've had Countertop crash on me when I tried to bring it up on a non-patched/updated computer... I'm trying to think what those maps have in common... It sucks especially because I think they're the three prettiest... sigh. Of all of them, those three maps have the most ambient sounds, but I doubt if that could really crash you. I'll wait back to hear if you're up-to-date. If you are, would you be up to testing a few versions of maps I send to you? (I can't test on a Mac since I don't have one) And hey there ShAdY - again, thanks for all the ideas and comments and shizazz this whole while. It's really looking good for the Giant map community. (I hope ) I'm hoping to find some server running the maps, now...
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Guest		Posted: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:17:56 PM
Rank: Guest Groups: Guest Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 104		Yeah, my Mac is up-to-date with patches and ECE. Very few maps crash me... the only other one I can think of is AS-Frigate- all versions from the get-go. And I would love to be your Mac-Guineypig! I can't wait to see those three maps! Especially my all-time-favorite: Countertop! (AKA Kitchen Counter). I'll check back tomorrow morning!
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meatpopsicle		Posted: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:19:54 PM
Rank: Newbie Groups: Member Joined: 10/25/2004 Posts: 2 Location: United States		That was me above- forgot to log-in. ------------------------ - Are you classified as human? - Negative, I am a meatpopsicle.
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winkyboy		Posted: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 8:34:43 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Well, next we've got to figure out what's wrong. Can you find your log file & send me a copy of it right after it crashes? Or, you could try opening the map in the editor, too; sometimes that tells you what's going wrong. edit: If you have one of the messengers running, click on one of these icons below my message. I prefer to use MS Messenger, and can usually be reached best with that one, but I run Trillian during work hours, and have the others running there. 2nd edit: Hmm. I'm NOT sure if that works... email me instead at winkyboy@winkyboy.com and if I'm on I'll hook up with you
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Molodiets		Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004 8:15:09 AM
Rank: Member Groups: Member Joined: 11/29/2004 Posts: 14 Location: France		Great job, winkyboy. Find one of your "sink" map on Wicked Sick Game server and i'm very impressed Micromaps are fun? i'm going to upload this one on another gaming site. BIGSMILE
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004 11:26:32 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Sweet! Thanks, Molodiets! (do you speak Russian by any chance? ) What gaming site are you uploading it to? Can I link to it?
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Guest		Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004 5:07:02 PM
Rank: Guest Groups: Guest Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 104		winkyboy wrote: Sweet! Thanks, Molodiets! (do you speak Russian by any chance? ) What gaming site are you uploading it to? Can I link to it? Hi Winkyboy - Elric here - one site you can find this pack on is[url]http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com/[/url] Direct link to your pack and posted comments is[url]http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com/map_hub.php?mid=7969[/url] Can't wait for more Giant Maps from you. Your work is incredible. BTW I run a Mac as well - G4 Dual 1.42 GHz machine all decked out with a nVidia Card and 2GB of Ram. Ran this whole pack on a small private listen server, (iMac) with a friend - he is located in Florida in the United States and I am located in Ontaro Canada - many miles from me. We had low grav turned on for the most part but not in all the maps though, We had a real fun time for about 2.5 hours or so, We will play these again and again. Keep up the great work.
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, November 29, 2004 8:02:31 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Thanks, Elric! I had submitted that to NaliCity but I guess either I didn't receive an accepted notice, or I just forgot. I'm pretty good at forgetting things... DROOL Sounds like you've got one of the best Macs I've ever heard anyone having - it's very nice to know that it's working well for you. I had help from another player out there, Meatpopsicle, in optimizing the Countertop board - it's really important to be able to know how other operating systems/computers run the maps... I'm glad you enjoyed the boards! It means a lot to me!

Molodiets		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 4:46:01 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member Joined: 11/29/2004 Posts: 14 Location: France		winkyboy wrote: Sweet! Thanks, Molodiets! (do you speak Russian by any chance? ) Interresting that book about ukrainian cooking in your kitchen but what a dreadful shambles. It needs to be tidied up. winkyboy wrote: What gaming site are you uploading it to? Can I link to it? http://www.levels4you.com/ and i did it for you.(feel free to resume. It's not mine anyway )
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winkyboy		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 5:02:37 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		e, yeah, that's actually inspired by a cookbook sitting on my shelf. My wife brought it over with her when we got married and I wanted to stick SOMEthing "Russian" into the kitchen Yeah, thanks for the L4Y post -- I had initially tried uploading there but something happened and I couldn't connect via FTP.. then I forgot. I've got an account there, so I'll just go post a reply to the thread. Thanks again! [edit] hm.. I can't reply there without giving it a rating - and I don't like to vote for my own things, throws off whatever curve there is... Oh well! No worries - I'm glad it's there. [/edit]
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Molodiets		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 5:14:59 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member Joined: 11/29/2004 Posts: 14 Location: France		winkyboy wrote: e, yeah, that's actually inspired by a cookbook sitting on my shelf. My wife brought it over with her when we got married and I wanted to stick SOMEthing "Russian" into the kitchen Yeah, thanks for the L4Y post -- I had initially tried uploading there but something happened and I couldn't connect via FTP.. then I forgot. I've got an account there, so I'll just go post a reply to the thread. Thanks again! [edit] hm.. I can't reply there without giving it a rating - and I don't like to vote for my own things, throws off whatever curve there is... Oh well! No worries - I'm glad it's there. [/edit] Oops i blundered. I uploaded the map pack on the site then i saw you among online users and spy you to discover the map pack was already there. Ouch the admins are going to bitch at me. DUHUH Nevermind. i just rated it. Don't try to rate it by yourself. They usually don't like people reviewing their own maps.HRRM
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winkyboy		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 5:19:17 PM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		Quote: I uploaded the map pack on the site then i saw you among online users and spy you to discover the map pack was already there. Ah! That brings me right back to the subject of my forgetfulness! :OOH: [edit]Weird - I can't find my own file, then. I only see the one you uploaded...[/edit]
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Molodiets		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 5:33:30 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member Joined: 11/29/2004 Posts: 14 Location: France		winkyboy wrote: [edit]Weird - I can't find my own file, then. I only see the one you uploaded...[/edit] http://www.levels4you.com/search.l4y?searchid=196141 Here but i wonder why it's signed Dan. Wizard probably made a mistake too.
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Molodiets		Posted: Thursday, December 02, 2004 5:35:26 PM
Rank: Member Groups: Member Joined: 11/29/2004 Posts: 14 Location: France		I said wizard HRRM i meant gandalf. Hey, no way to edit your post here. Well, i'd better go to sleep.ASHAMED
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winkyboy		Posted: Monday, December 06, 2004 9:27:53 AM
Rank: Administration Groups: Administration Joined: 5/10/2004 Posts: 242 Location: United States		You should be able to edit your posts... I can edit mine, but then I've got administrator settings. I double-checked the members settings and editing is enabled there... but if it truly isn't working, hopefully that will be fixed when I upgrade the forum. It's beta software right now, anyway :AWW: Looks like I have to fix that emoticon, too!