Topic: Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold (PC)

[DarkWolf]

The projection is probably a little weird, but I like the results enough to continue with these maps.

[JonLeung]

I really liked Wolfenstein 3-D back in the day.  I think I disturbed my teachers with doodles of Nazi symbols on my notes, since I probably wasn't as aware of what the Nazis stood for as much as I should've about the time I really liked the game...  >_>  Anyway, didn't these two games use the same engine?



I had an idea about how to map out Wolfenstein 3-D, but it pretty much just involved using an editor (I'd have to find that again), resizing the whole map to the size where each plain-looking square was the same size as the tiles' textures, and then using Revned's Tile Slicer/Splicer, if it could handle 32 x 32 tiles (instead of the usual 16 x 16) or whatever size they were.



However, that would've looked really flat, even if the game really was.  I like this angled perspective much better.  Would you consider doing Wolfenstein 3-D and in the same fashion as well?

[DarkWolf]

It probably depends on how long it takes to do Blake Stone.  These old games have tons of levels and although it's all assembled by a script, I still have to match the textures and sprites with their respective #s.



Here's another peek.  I had to make the south and east walls transparent so you could see what's on the other side.

[TerraEsperZ]

I so love what both DarkWolf and Maxim are accomplishing right now. This looks a lot like those Doom maps that Ian Albert did, but games using the Wolfenstein 3D engine look a lot better in this format.



What else can I say? Keep up this amazing work



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[DarkWolf]

Mission 1 is done, 11 maps total.  I ran the first floor through PNGGauntlet and it took more than 4 hours for one map!  So I just ran PNGout over them with the Intense strategy rather than the Xtreme strategy and it only took about 40 minutes to an hour for each map.

[JonLeung]

Those 66 maps are huge.  At 132 MB, that works out to 2 MB on average.



Did you know that 16% of the volume that all the maps take up is taken up by Blake Stone: Aliens Of Gold alone?  o_0



By volume, today was probably the largest update I've ever done.

[DarkWolf]

Just think of how big they'd be without PNG compression.



Wolfenstein 3D won't be as bad, only 60 maps, and they seem to be a bit smaller on average.  Wolf and Blake are probably the only ones I'll do.  I never played Spear of Destiny, and Blake Stone Planet Strike sucks, as well as the other Wolf3d knock-offs.

[Maxim]

The first map crunches to a total weight of 702KB if you use my modified slicer to make HTML+PNGs and then use PNGOut, based on 64px tiles. I didn't try 32px yet. If it was intelligent enough to find duplicate tiles across multiple maps it'd save even more. Having the original images for download is still important, though.

[Maxim]

I cropped these maps the same away I did Wolf 3D, and now they weigh in at a svelte 97MB.



http://rapidshare.com/files/73998404/blakestone.zip.html

[DarkWolf]

I'm sure these are fine, but I can't look at them now because I lost connection with the server before the file finished.  I'll try again tomorrow.

[Juliettte]

I love the maps on this site for Blake Stone, but they freeze up my IE, is there any way of viewing them in a smaller format? I made my way thru all of the secret rooms on floor 1, and some on 2, but would like to find them all, or at least get a good feel for things.



Thanks!

[Maxim]

You may need more memory on your computer, else try Firefox or a regular image viewer like Irfanview or even Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Just save the files to disk instead of opening them directly.

[marioman]

Get <url>http://www.irfanview.com/(Irfanview)</url>.  It is the only program that I can open those huge GBA Castlevania maps with.

[TerraEsperZ]

I offer another recommendation for Irfanview, though I'd better warn you if you want to use it for mapping and image editing. All versions from 4.00 forward have nasty bugs when selecting a specific area of an image, where said selection changes in size and area when scrolling or pressing random keys; I went back to 3.99 until it gets fixed because it made mapping impossible to me.



---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard



B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

[JonLeung]

DarkWolf, please confirm if Maxim's cropping is fine and that this is a resubmission and I will put them up.