[CONTEST] The Emperors Throne Room

Description
[b]Jan-Feb 2007 Contest Finalist - Intermediate Skill Level - To see the winners, check our [url="/info/ContestArchives"]Contest Archives[/url].[/b]

Well, here we have another contest map from the recent JKFiles Duel Map contest, this one being the winner of the Intermediate skill group.

As is obvious from the name of the map, this is perhaps one of the most famous locations out of Return of the Jedi; the Emperors Throne Room that sits atop the second Death Star. And a good recreation it is too! ;)

First of all lets start off with the size. The map is a pretty decent size for a duel map, it is quite large, but it’s not too large. You could have a good duel in here, as there’s plenty of obstacles to jump over, duck behind and such as well as a couple of different levels to fight your way around. And of course, a couple of staircases as seen in the movie, I dunno why…but dueling up a staircase seems to be quite a popular feature of those old swashbuckling movies, I guess that kinda carried over to Starwars!

Now, let’s move onto the architecture and detailing, always important parts of a nice looking and practical map! Firstly the architecture, obviously being a movie location based map, you cant really be as creative as you might an original themed map when it comes to the architecture, because of course its meant to look like the location in the movie!

That’s also where the challenge lies, because it’s not easy to make a faithful recreation of a movie location. However Duke has done an excellent job with that here, and I would say…it appears as though he’s been looking through the ‘Inside the Worlds of Starwars’ books (kinda like the cross-section books, but for the locations in the movies rather than the vehicles). I noticed a few parts in this map like the holo-projector which don’t appear in the film, but are shown in a lot of detail in the book, so good job to the author on managing to fit those in!

As for the detailing, I would also say that it is well done. Like I mentioned above, the author has managed to fit in even the areas that are not actually see in the movie, but that are in other books and stuff, which is always good. The windows are well made, and I believe they use a texture from JK2 that was used quite a bit on the old Stardestroyer FFA map, which looks good. The author also made the outside look pretty good too, so what you see when you look out of the windows is a pretty accurate representation of what the Throne Room tower actually looked like on the outside. One other thing is the nice rotating elevator doors, good scripting there. ;)

Now, as always there are some areas of this map that I feel could be improved upon. The most major thing is the framerate, which was a little low in this map, at least for me anyway. High framerate is always essential to a practical duel map, though I’m sure people with more powerful systems (mines getting a little old, its getting an upgrade soon!) shouldn’t have much problem with that. There were one or two other areas in the map which maybe could have been more detailed, or textures that didn’t quite fit, but apart from that an excellent map here!

So lets round up some pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s:

[*]Good recreation of the movie location.
[*]Good brushwork.
[*]Good use of lighting and textures, especially for the windows.

Con’s:

[*]Slightly low framerate for a duel map.
[*]Textures in a few places seem a bit out of place.
[*]It could do with a little extra detail here and there.

Bot Support: Yes
New Textures: Yes
New Sounds: No
New Music: Yes
Game Types: Duel, Power Duel

~Nozyspy~