PH - A new missing level! (from Tresgame; pic-heavy)
Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2010 8:14 pm
Original 4-page thread can be found here: http://www.tresgame.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7
tatu wrote:I was looking through the texture of the beta IJ and came across this!
All levels in Trespasser got an object called "TrnPlacement". Some of the level does use the PV map and the texture name is most of the time "T**Baset2" and ** is the levelname, like BE, JR etc..
But in the beta IJ the texture name is "TPHBaset2"!
I leave it to Draco to tell you more about the name...
DracoAlphaX wrote:Right, then! I was quite impressed when Tatu first found this. Obviously PH likely means "Plantation House". I thought it was an old version of JR (very old), but upon closer examination, I found that it couldn't fit JR at all!! I brought it into photoshop and discovered its true location:
I couldn't believe my eyes! Also threw in the PV terrain to help in the comparison, which happens to fit at the exact same size on the map, as further evidence that the PH map is in fact a full-size rendition of a level and not just a part of the full 1024-WTD. The level expands all the way to the bottom (west) of the island! Terrain that is completely undeveloped in the retail and build96 versions of the game! It's just unreal! I then did a comparison with Hammond's map and traced the path of the monorail.
I believe this means that BE extended some ways out into the monorail path, and then this new PH level begins in the upper-right corner of its map, essentially, where the red line intersects the big grey thing. Seems that the monorail would have been the upper (eastern) boarder of the level, where the bottom would extend all the way to the West beach. This also then would show that the upper-left corner of the level is the gate to IT!
There are quite a few interesting things in this terrain map. For some of it, it's hard to know if we'll ever find out exactly what was meant to go there. Some stuff even looks like it could be swampland. One thing seems most evident - the level looks entirely non-linear. I'm in love Oh and, the giant light-grass hexagons are much, much larger than the ones found in PV. I'll be doing some special analysis to see if I can figure out exactly what size they were meant to be. Oh and, the green base of this terrain (if you ingor the odd brown surrounding everything with a gradient.. perhaps it's important) is much darker than any green we've seen in Trespasser images before. I can't explain it, but I love it! It leaves open the very real question of if I want to try recreating it or not. Oh but that's part of a larger discussion...
So here is the map when facing "game description" North, and blown up:
Let's try to make sense of this, now, in terms of the new PH beta voiceovers.
VH81: A failed coffee plantation of the 1860s. Fields were marked out by stone walls, and to the west, the ruins of the plantation house still stand.
VH82: We took a shortcut south to reach the site, west along the stream, until a tall tree shows itself with a cluster of boulders at its base.
VH83: Then walked northward, until the path appears.
Is that giant grey thing the remnants of a stream? Pretty large (more like river-sized) and.. bright, to be a Tres-type river or something. But idk. Then there is a path a bit north of that.. And I guess, the PH itself could be near the shore, being "to the west"?
Alternatively, that streambed-looking thing in about the middle could be the stream, instead of the path, but then to fit the description, the PH would have to be REALLY far into the North, in about the far northwestern corner.
Honestly, I don't see any obvious place for the house itself to go. I'd like to hear as many opinions as possible on that.
That's all the analysis I have here for the moment!
EDIT: This just in. I bet some of these voiceovers may go in this level:
VH53: October 1996. The InGen Corporation is taken out of my hands by a vote of the board of directors. My nephew dispatches his team.
VH54: The hunters landed on May 13, 1997 deep in the island's south west. Most of them had worked at my African parks for years... they never stood a chance.
VH55: The InGen hunting party carried the pass codes for our perimeter fenses.
VH56: The hunters scattered, their pre-arranged hunting routes forgotten. Only a third of their number appeared at the rendezvous.
VH57: In May the rains came. The smell of the jungle was everywhere.
VH58: As I journeyed south along the coast, the air grew moist and heavy. Metal and concrete lay rotting in the sun and the rain.
The hunters carried the passcodes for the perimeter fences. This could totally explain how you'd find the gate to the town, but not be able to get in! You'd have to search for something with the fence passcode in the level until you found a hunters site which had something with it written down on. So we have a pretty clear initial picture of the level goals now, I think!
Also, there are only two places to journey south along a coast. PV and now PH. Somehow I don't think it went in PV - we have enough about that already. And yet, I did not picture construction stuff along the West coast of the island, this far south. Ideas?
EDIT2: So I was just looking at the map and thinking how there's supposed to be a major construction site/facility, and it's supposed to be in JR or something, you know. So then I thought about how, there's this entire level where you should really only need to follow the monorail, but instead a search for the needed thing(s) to progress takes you far West. So perhaps there WAS a level between BE and PH, which contained this site, having only a small section of monorail and going way off to the South, where those voiceovers about the construction site may be found in JR? And maybe this level was called (and more fittingly so) Industrial Jungle... Or, maybe it's "JU" (Jungle?), that name from the ambient sounds? (Tatu has just made some more discoveries which he's about to post xP) So the main thing, here, is that BE need not lead directly into PH. There might have been a WHOLE area of things to do, between them...
tatu wrote:Really interesting reading Draco. As I told on msn.
In the AmbientNames file, there is a few PH sounds.
AMB-PH-A01
AMB-PH-A02
AMB-PH-A03
AMB-PH-A04
AMB-PH-A05
AMB-PH-A07
AMB-PH-A08
AMB-PH-A09
AMB-PH-A10
AMB-PH-A11
AMB-PH-B L&R DOPL
AMB-PH-BTRAP02
AMB-PH-BBIRD02
I found some thats not in the file but in the beta tpa:
AMB-PH-BTRAP01
AMB-PH-BBIRD01
AMB-PH-BBIRD03
AMB-PH-BBIRD04
AMB-PH-B01
AMB-PH-B02
AMB-PH-B03
AMB-PH-BBIRD01
AMB-PH-BBIRD02
AMB-PH-BBIRD03
AMB-PH-BBIRD04
So this must mean that PH was cut not long before the Build 96
Oh! I just found this in the Beta BE level texutre, named "TrnObj_PHstreambed00t2" See the PH??
Thats all for now!
DracoAlphaX wrote:Yeah, it's pretty interesting that some are in build96 but not in retail, while some are still in retail. But anyway, it's pretty easy to say "not long before build96", as I see said a lot, but in all truth there's no way to know. They could easily just stop working on a certain thing and "get back to it" later, in which case we'll have no idea how recent or not it is, so there's not an incredible amount of relevance in the fact of it or not. What can be potentially important is the order in which things were done/cut.tatu wrote:So this must mean that PH was cut not long before the Build 96
Indeed, that is the build96's beach cliff boarder texture, seen even in the first youtube video. I've noticed it and didn't even take a second look at its name (then again, it was many days ago). Awesome find! I am quite confident this "stream" is the one referenced by the voiceovers, which means that thing I pointed out at first as the "path" is probably in fact a stream. Anyway, if you compare it to the PV base, it's pretty thick, at least as thick as a road (the "path" streambed in JR, for example, is much more narrow), so it makes sense.
hppav wrote:Oh.... My.... Shit... :X
DracoAlphaX wrote:Crap, I've been called in to pick up a shift today, and I already work the other shift, and tomorrow morning, so I'll be gone for a while XD But I wanted to post up a bit of research I've just done on plantation houses. Well it's really just some images I found, to get some ideas about what original concepts for the level might have been (and also simply as inspiration since we don't have much to go by):
http://msnbcmedia2.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Sect ... das.h2.jpg
http://jessieboylan.files.wordpress.com ... use_03.jpg
http://www.uvm.edu/histpres/cuba/coffee4.JPG
http://images.adventure-life.com/2008/0 ... q576km.jpg
http://www.heritage-history.com/books/m ... age256.gif
http://www.indianawaterways.com/Lock%20Ruins.JPG
http://sinfrijoles.dk/mexico/person/ken ... on%202.jpg
http://img2.photographersdirect.com/img ... 197049.jpg
http://img2.photographersdirect.com/img ... 197047.jpg
http://www.penick.net/digging/images/Af ... 0rooms.JPG
http://itech.dickinson.edu/chemistry/wp ... a_rica.jpg
http://www.authentichistory.com/diversi ... ee_Bag.jpg
http://www.treefrogcoffees.com/images/daterratrees.jpg
http://www.dawnazon.com/wall_close.jpg
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/1675700.jpg
http://www.webewebbiers.com/vietnam/ima ... %20Loi.jpg
http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/ ... -house.jpg
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/fearn/fearn14.jpg
http://missgraciousliving.southernaccen ... 970c-500pi
http://south-carolina-plantations.com/o ... iginal.jpg
http://south-carolina-plantations.com/j ... tation.jpg
http://pics4.city-data.com/cpicc/cfiles4977.jpg
http://media.photobucket.com/image/%252 ... haddon.jpg
Rexhunter99 wrote:Oh yesh, btw, Tyler and I were discussing his latest map editor for Carnivores and i asked him why his 'colored' versions of the terrain map had textures much darker than the game... and he told me that by basic nature, these kinds of overhead renders of entire levels into a single square texture must have the colors from the corners of the terrain texture, averaged before they are used to draw a pixel on the entire map texture.
If this is unclear, catch me on MSN and get me to draw up a proper explanation
Anyways back on track, the averaged color will usually be darker or lighter than the texture, so the dark green you are seeing might just be a funky output from the Dev's tools btw... have we ever considered they wrote an application or a plugin or something that outputs these maps? They'd be very complex... needing to take the data from not just textures but also instances, etc... pretty impressive, that and not even TresEd is capable of taking a full overhead screenshot, computers even now wouldn't be capable of handling that much detail :O
But very interesting finds all the same, does any of this affected Tres: R?
EDIT1:
I spy with my demented eyes... something green and kinda mossy on the ground
DracoAlphaX wrote:Yeah well we've been talking about this in messenger now. Nice to hear that you agree PH is mindblowing X_X
What you say could be pretty important. Might not be, also but could be. I know that for example, when I took that "beta pv terrain" texture in JPDS as a base texture in some area, then also had a "cover" object which was the same texture but with an opacity, in TresEd from any distance except in-your-face, the version of the texture with an opacity map appeared to be much more RED than the pure one. Totally freaky but I understand how color-averaging results in this (and sucks).
Still, I am liking the theory we discussed about a pure form of that moss texture. Your screenshot there (despite probably being from JR like we've thought) is also quite helpful. Seems they did have a grass texture in use, of that color, at some point that they were releasing images. Pretty handy... I'll be making a more extensive analysis of pre-release images & of things currently in IJ/JR, compared to PH. I think some of IJ3 might even go in PH, but I have to look into it.
hppav wrote:The devs said in one interview something about playing "level candidates" PH could have been one such "level candidate" that didn't make the cut.
Nick3069 wrote:I think there might be other missing levels: JI and JI2. If you look at the loading screen you see that there are these 2 loading screens, which are almost identical.
Very interesting stuff!