20/07/2024 - "Orbit + Landing + Outpost Pheonix" by Will "Mr. Prophet" Drekker

[Sat42]

Map Titles:

• Orbit
  Landing
  Outpost Pheonix

Author: Will "Mr. Prophet" Drekker
From: Xidia Gold - The Xidia Incident
Filenames:

• XidiaGold-Map1-Orbit.unr
  XidiaGold-Map2-Landing.unr
  XidiaGold-Map3-OutpostPheonix.unr

Video Playthroughs:
Orbit + Landing:
Outpost Pheonix:

Orbit + Landing + Outpost Pheonix (text commentary):


Synopsis: 22 years ago, the Liandri mining corporation discovered a remote world in the outer rim sector: Xidia-287. What attracted Liandri's interest was what lay under the surface: purified tarydium deposits... of unnatural quality and in irresistible quantities. Liandri immediately set up a mining facility: "Outpost Pheonix".
Years later, the only human presence on Xidia-287 besides Outpost Pheonix is a military defense compound located in the higher mountains. The large mining facility thrived throughout this time, but now a strange problem has reared it's ugly head. Reports indicate that a deep space radio feed bounced off a satellite displaying an S.O.S. call from Outpost Pheonix. All other attempts to communicate with the base have failed.
Xidia, being a prime center for tarydium supply, was considered a CODE RED zone, so the Rim system has been sealed off and a single capital ship sent in: the USM-IceRaven.
You are Jones, a USM marine serving as a field scout, and your job is to turn on a backup power transformer in the darkened Outpost Pheonix ahead of the rest of your team...

Discuss!

[Semfry]

Putting the text from the Xidia making of commentary for these maps here first:

-MAP 1- " Orbit"-

Mr.Prophet-

" I wanted the first map to be a quick overview type thing. You get your mission, grab your gear and then you go. I did not want there to be fighting, were you are thrust into battle right away. I wanted the first map to seem quiet, casual. I knew the player knew there would be fighting, but I wanted them to enjoy a the priveledge of an overview begining without being in action from the moment they spawn. The map is very very very short, only a few rooms to enter and exit. I tried very hard to give the feel of a ship, something I've NEVER mapped till that moment. The map uses elements from Vortex Rikers and the RTNP map ''Prometheus''. I wanted the ship to feel the same as the old unreal ship maps, otherwise the player may not reconize it as a ship. In the map you take a lift to a prep bay, read your mission, grab your items, and enter the hangar door where you see a brief cutscene showing your ship fly off. In between doing that, you can check lockers, see little robot guys fixing broken vents, people looking down at you from overhead observation booths, and even look out the window for a glance outside your ship. I chose Gala for the exit music since that track sounds good for a space theme, very ''vast'' feeling to it."


-MAP 2-" Landing"

Mr.Prophet-

" I had alot of fun making this map. It is probably my most ''complete'' map for the pack. I say this simply because of the feel it has, it's eerie. Alots going on yet everything seems dead. You see ''things'' lash out from you in the shadows and vanish just as quick. I like how abandoned the map looks, there is sun outside, but inside it is still dark and foreboding. There was a opening showing the start of a new change of theme, there was a sense of place and presence and you were on your guard every second you played, simply because you don't know whats going to happen, you have to use your brain to get past certain obstacles since most people take easy routes for granted, you see a plot unfold before your very eyes, you are reminded of the begining of the original game and that keeps you guessing about what happens next, and you end the map with a thrill as the enemy reveals itself in a familiar setup that shows the skaarj in a fresh, creepier, light. That and this map really is the start of Xidia, this is where the player enters the world of Outpost Pheonix and our game unfolds. I took fractions from some of my DM release, DM-Chimeara, and used certain rooms from that map and placed them in Outpost Pheonix. I did this several more times in the game, I never thought my UT maps ever had a real sense of theme that seemed to work for them, and I later added segments from all three of my best UT maps into the 3rd map. Good thing my maps aren't that popular, nobody except for a few seemed to realize it."
" I used alot of tricks in this map, such as my mesh swap technique. I hated how in sp maps you could shoot a dead body apart or kick a book and it rolls away yet u still get a message from the where the message was placed. To fix this, I make all translator books immobile and all dead bodies by placing a nonmovable mesh, like a knife or boulder or sumthing, and changing it's mesh and anime frame to a person's body or sumthing else. This way they would always stay there and u just couldnt blow away their body and take away the identity of a person being there. I also used modulated textures alot, for decal effects. I've seen it done often but never employed the concept till this map, and for good reasons."
" The skaarj duel at the map's end was directly inspired from the first skaarj encounter from Unreal. I sorta ''borrowed'' the idea and put in my own world. I originally had all the lights go out and you fight it in complete darkness aside from the aid of your flashlight, but Hourences insisted I add red alarm lights. In all, the sequence was adequet to kick off the game. "


Hourences-
"I liked this map and the next one 'cause it is like "Aliens" but then a la Unreal. Scary, no life anymore, and at the same time life everywhere. There were some nice little ideas and details in it wich made it more alive, wich make you feel like things happended there, and that it once was a real living base, interaction.


-MAP 3-"Outpost Pheonix''-

Mr. Prophet-

" The biggest map in Xidia, and probably the hardest. I consider the 3rd map my first real single player map, and I don't know if thats a good or bad thing. Before I began this map, I had numerous visions in mind on how I wanted it to look. I didn't want just another ''Mining facility'', which has been burnt out long ago. The way I figured it, Outpost Pheonix was like the "corporation's'' institution, while all the grimy, dirty, coarse mine detail went underground in the 4rth map. Outpost Pheonix was more of an operations facility, several areas devoted to certain functions, such as a pump room, transformer station, power room, research lab, storage depot, ect. I wanted to give the distinct impression of a colony and an industrial complex. I wanted the player to walk around and know that they were only in the surface compound, and that the real mining realm lurked undetneath them. I don't know if I succeded with that theme, but nevertheless, the map contains all the functioning departments that regulate the entire Mining colony on Xidia."
" As far as general contruction, people who are familiar with my UT work ( and there are not as much as I would prefer) will feel right at home in here, alot of this map comes from recyled sectors of my Deathmatch maps that have been edited and incorporated into the Outpost and work properly to the game. Among the areas I used were several segments from my DM-Chimeara, the large outdoor area from DM-TimeCrash, and I even fit the entire DM-Imago map into the unr as well. I included Imagp as a last minute thing, originally that section ( Area C) was going to be a large crate room kinda deal ( sort if in the style of the Dasa crate room from Unreal, I later reinterpreted this idea into the 4rth map of the mission pack). But I changed my mind, the whole map before Area C is ambush upon ambush as you fight through hordes of Skaarj who are alerted to your presence. After the walk through the sniper field connecting Area B to C, I felt the ambush approach had been overdone. I didn't want to depress the player by making the ENTIRE map a series of ambush tactics. Also, at the time I was still sort of sore at how my Imago deathmatch map was recieved by the community. Even before Imago my DM maps were never really interesting maps as far as 99% of the community was concerned ( or so it seemed to me). My map Chimeara seemed to be my most popular of my releases, ironically that map being the one I worked least on ( If I were David Fincher, Chimeara would have been my " Panic Room", overall a well produced map but only a taste of what the author has up his sleeve). Imago was my first real release of anything I mapped that I truly was happy with, and I felt it was rejected. I don't know if was meant to be, but I knew I did not want the map to be forgotten after all the time I put into it, so I reinvented it and put it in Xidia's 3rd map. Sort of my own personal " Eat Me" to everyone who asks me, " Who and what is an Imago?".
" I utilized various texture packs, Mine mixed with Richrig, SG-tech, Playershp, and our own new custom stuff. I have to admit I was worried about using Rich rig and SG-tech ( and even more so when nearly all our Human stuff had a touch of rich rig in them somewhere). Richrig I felt was good, but overused way to much, so I sought to mix it with Mine and anything else that looked good with it. SG-tech worried me because it is such a difficult pack to work with, lighting wise. I think I managed as good as anyone I guess, or maybe just enough not to get flamed, which I didn't thankfully. I chose the skybox to be from the Indus skybox set, the sunset setup. Hourie was against it from the first moment he saw my sky. I dunno, I have a sunset fetish."
" I used my dead body techniques from Landing, which served me alot better in this map when I need alot of bodies and bodies to remain untouched by the testements of a savage firefight, so nomatter what state the room was in afterwards, the shell of the former miners would be there to haunt you. That and I hate how the Unreal bodies gib. I also began to broaden my use of modulated decals to the bloodpool mesh. I took the average knife decoration, made it's mesh ''bspot'' and made drawscale 22 or so, and modulated it with a botpack or Indus blood decal, and badda bing I had a easy to use blood decal which was easy to place, position, resize, and store. They also taste alot like grapefruit, which surprised me most, let me tell you."
" This map took me longer to make then anything I've ever made on the editor. No, that's a lie, TimeCrash took 3 months, Outpost Pheonix was shy a few weeks, but that was only cus I borrowed from my older stuff. I added alot of ideas that people keep telling me are original, such as my experimental "sniper encounter" ( which really is experimental, I am so fucking happy it was regarded with such praise, I thought it was such ghey shit when I set the process up). I always liked the idea of Skaarj snipers, and you never saw them with rifles in Unreal. So I set them up exactly as I always pictured them, I am just pleased others like what I did with that picture. I also needed a new skin for the Troopers, I admit that I really HATE HATE HATE the Unreal trooper skins for the skaarj. They weren't menacing looking at all, they looked rather....erm, flamboyant. I always pictured the Skaarj as stone cold and Iron tough warriors, which the warrior pawns are, the troopers never lived up. So I made them a new skin, all black and very dark gray, all metallic looking. Nomatter what anyone tells me, that skin rox my nuts."
" The ending of the map, I wanted to shift pace from the turbulent rush of being stranded with alerted enemies coming from every which way, back to the dark silence of the Landing map. In the story, the Red Nemesis, which is the first time we showed off our new Skaarj Praetorian, kills off the last of the defending miners in Area C and challenges the miner's Outpost leader, Deckard, to a warrior's duel in the belly of the plant's soil processor. The whole entry to the Red Nemesis's lair was inspired by the end of the RTNP Toxic map, where you go through a flashing red corridor and duel a powerful Skaarj in a small, filthy room. My Red Nemesis duel was similiar, the music dies as you travel through a corridor with red alarm lights everywhere, then as you take the lift down, it breaks and you fall into the dirt processor to see Deckard dead, his killer nowhere in sight, until he appears and your fight starts. I used the Guardian UMX track for the duel music, I wanted the fight to feel godly in a way, to give the praetorian the illusion of being a brand new opponent despite the fact he looks, moves, and behaves like any Skaarj Warrior, only pumped. He used my new red skin for a semi new look, in all I like this duel simply because it has a sense of " Ok, now what else am I gonna see coming my way".
" Map is big, very challenging, and contains just about every trick in the sp manuel I know of."

Hourences-
"This map was just like the previous one cool due to the atmosfere. IT really feels like a base where once people lived, but there is no one there anymore. Some of the events really scare you

[Mister_Prophet]

I have to say that I was surprised by the trifecta. Unusual for our normally 1 map focus discussions (not counting intro/extro combinations, as they have come in the past). Two playable prologues + a full level might be bending the rules...but if we're gonna bend them then I am pleased that the bending was made for one of mine

I was a teenager when I made these. More time has passed since for me than what came before, so I'll tell you what I remember.

I was working on four singleplayer mods for Unreal Tournament between 1999 and 2001. Two were cancelled and one released after I was fired from the team. The fourth was my own fledgling attempt to do something for Unreal singleplayer, which I desperately wanted to do since playing Unreal in 1998.

It's kind of perfect that Sat chose to focus on three maps-in-one for this MOTW because this was really one of those things that Americans refer to as a "Hail Mary." I put all my frustration pent up due to these other SP failures into making what was essentially a "please mod with me" demo. That's why map 3 is so bloated. I wanted to make something cool for the community and since my DM stuff wasn't really so good I thought I could do this better. If I never made friends with Sjoerd De Jong randomly one day jumping severs and meeting him for a 1on1 in some map he was testing (this was prerelease DM-Sion) I simply wouldn't have made any lasting friends in this community nor joined (or be invited to, rather) Team Phalanx. I would likely have released this set of 3 .unrs as is and moved on.

I want to thank Semfry for the two video runs he made for this MOTW and I want to say how impressed I always am to see his attention to memory of all these many mappacks in real time every time he uploads something. He always knows where all the enemies are and when all the events trigger, and if he doesn't recall exactly you can see the moment of pause when he thinks something is supposed to happen. As winner of that Seven Bullets contest I ran years ago he also has lifelong first dibs on any public testing of any SP thing I make, ever. He had first chance playthrough of the Savage Land Demo before we gave it to private testers, and this will continue. Watching the vids here helped make me remember my own pack.

I'll post more when I have some time to play it myself.

[ebd]

I know I played Xidia because in the day, but found I remembered surprisingly little about it. I know in 2003 I would have found the difficulty very off-putting.

Visually the three maps hold up excellently even today, if a little dark. In hindsight it's easy to spot things like the one-tile-missing trick and little red lights all over the map, but I can say with total confidence that back then Mister Prophet was absolutely revered as one of the 'l33t' UT mappers we all wanted to emulate, along with DavidM, Hourences, and many others.

Gameplay-wise... there are a lot of 2002-isms and weird leftovers from ONP, and as a result I had to give up trying to record the third map in one unbroken take. Increasing the health on pretty much every enemy was not a great choice in my opinion, but it is a very period-appropriate choice and I would guess that any who played it two decades ago, myself included, would have held different opinions about it at the time. The third map has some easy to miss but very important weapon and ammo pickups right at the start that weren't present in the earlier map, and those turrets right around corners with the oversized ONP translator popping up over the entire screen, holy shit! Overall very brutal difficulty, especially with the enemy placement and spawns often either behind the player or in areas the player has already been through.

The sniper encounter was the highlight of the map easily I like the build up in tension with the squid too, even if it doesn't work out the best because the ONP weapons inexplicably either can't be used while swimming or instagib the player...

Video will be pretty late I think. It's over an hour and a half of raw footage and will need a lot of cuts. I'll have to choose how much of the failed playthroughs I want to keep in the final cut.

[Semfry]

Since Outpost Pheonix is very long I split the playthrough into two videos. I wasn't sure about having three maps for MOTW, but I guess the flipside of that is that Orbit and Landing are very short.

Orbit is a small intro map but it does some scene setting and has some nice details (I like the repair robot thing at the start), since Xidia was back when UT as an SP platform was still a little exotic, it also has the trait of all the worldbuilding working as a bit of a tutorial for people who haven't played SP Unreal before.

Landing continues that well as a creepy intro map with some small puzzle elements, and shows off Xidia's high build quality in the process. Then it ends with the first Skaarj encounter that's a nice callback to the one in the original game while still having some flavour of it's own. The ending did used to have an annoying bug where the exit didn't trigger a lot of the time and you just got stuck on a black screen, but I couldn't replicate it, so I forgot if that was fixed in the final version or if the 227 port I used (as mentioned on discord, the Xidia hud is almost unplayably massive in UT at higher resolutions) edited it.

While Hourences stuff probably had more influence on future map design, Outpost Pheonix is still THE Xidia map for me, even if it's somewhat infamous historic tech issues like no saving played into that a bit. It just throws the mission statement of the whole set at you with it's unforgiving ambush setups and close-combat encounters that have you on the backfoot the whole time if you don't know where everything is. While brutal there are consistent ways to handle most rooms though, and, at least in the final version, there's enough supplies to recover from some bad fights (and in the playthrough I somehow got ambushed by the Skaarj in the turret room lol). The layout also makes good use of the space with that central corridor area you go down several times (not even counting the last map or later revisits) that manages to stay interesting despite that, along with the messages doing a good job building up various characters and scene-setting. I know the design is partially some DM maps and I guess the four console area shows that with it's more abstract theming and semi-open layout, but it still fits and is used for some more open-ended combat.

The only part I find a bit too awkward is the mounted turret set-piece, which is a nice idea, but both the turret and the Skaarj AI/spawns are a bit buggy, and since the enemies are designed around the turret being insanely strong it gets near unwinnable if one or two do get through. In the corridor leading to the four consoles area there's also another fuse box thing that the ASMD secondary should break, but it doesn't seem to despite there clearly being some mover details on it; maybe it's used in a later map or was removed in a patch for some reason but it's an odd inconsistency either way. Also that message saying there's five snipers when there's actually four is a nice touch that makes sense realistically, although I think on higher settings there are one or two more that technically make it right then?

I want to thank Semfry for the two video runs he made for this MOTW and I want to say how impressed I always am to see his attention to memory of all these many mappacks in real time every time he uploads something. He always knows where all the enemies are and when all the events trigger, and if he doesn't recall exactly you can see the moment of pause when he thinks something is supposed to happen.

Note that this is also because I do a playthrough beforehand to make sure there's no major flow-stoppers I forgot and need to mitigate, as well as remember where the hardest stuff is and any secrets and other extra stuff.

Increasing the health on pretty much every enemy was not a great choice in my opinion, but it is a very period-appropriate choice and I would guess that any who played it two decades ago, myself included, would have held different opinions about it at the time.

A thing about Xidia is that headshots are enabled on most normal enemies even with the Automag and CAR. If you're used to how things normally work it can be easy to miss (and I guess it's only mentioned in the readme files) but it makes them take down normal Skaarj faster than normal.

[Sat42]

Classic 1337 material!

I really like it when a campaign actually feels like it cares about its fictional setting, and so unlike the vast majority I'm sure, I actually read all of the readme text file material lovingly prepared by Will for Xidia and its sequels... and since I love space, Orbit is right up my alley! We don't get a complex intro cinematic like ONP, but this is still a really cool way to start an adventure - also because it still did some of that "modern" stuff (by Unreal standards), like actual live humans around the place (and with the Unreal Tournament models, better looking humans than we ever get in Unreal).

Once you quit dicking around, you embark for Xidia-287 proper, and Landing literally leads to "first contact", and it's all professionally executed with a proper build-up in tension. And hell yeah, better graphics than the mother game! As intro maps go, this one is fairly unique for being technically a subset of the next map.
@Semfry: never experienced the bug at the end of this map, so it must have been sorted out for Xidia Gold. As always, thank you for the video playthrough - we sure get a sense of how epic that final boss fight is, first time I see you almost die in a fight in one of these videos! Also thanks for posting the "making of" commentary for these maps

Also @ebd: technically, The Xidia Incident was released shortly before Operation Na Pali, and Xidia: The Escape was released shortly after ONP (all within the year 2002 IIRC). Looking forward to your playthrough as well!

As for Outpost Pheonix... Naturally it's a great map, must have been one of the best at the time of its release, but for more details I think I will leave it to my younger self, who left an enthusiastic account of a first time experience some 10 years ago! (And Proph had let me know he enjoyed the read as well I only made some minor edits for clarity)


--- Original Sat42 transcript on Outpost Pheonix (UnrealSP MOTW, September 2014) ---

[1st post]

Originally, I was thinking of starting my text with a triumphant
OH FUCK THIS MAP
but it seems a bit ill-timed now! Anyway, what can I really say about this one? A lot of things...

OK, brace yourselves. Naturally, by the time you get to this map, the shit has already started with that excellent playable intro provided by the pack's first two maps. Tension is there right from the start, and I was quick to notice the superior skills of enemies compared to stock pawns. Gee, it was so tense... first I had to backtrack some way through the rooms and corridors of the previous map and in fact I went right back to the landing point, only to see the bodies of fellow soldiers littering the floor... that confirmed what command said. I also needed the ammo badly. I had given a glance at that bridge I was meant to cross and got a salvo of rockets in return. What with the tough Skaarj I had already been fighting (including a close quarter encounter with those damned pupae during a creepy passage through an air duct), I knew I was in for something rough. Ha! if only I really knew... OK, so I make my way across the bridge, dispatching the Brutes on top of the cliffs save for one who fell back a bit, out of range. Whatever. Let's keep moving as fast as possi... WOW!! steady now! fuck haha imagine if I hadn't paid attention to that translator message and had dashed ahead through that valley! OK sniper time: scanning area... one, two, three down... oh there are more of them... and in fact, funnily enough, that really cool section is an easy section of the map - the only easy section, actually. I wasn't headshot once. Well, now I can continue. In order to open the door at the end of the valley, I have to reactivate some mechanism and in the process I find myself going in a flooded part of the facility - and oh shit there goes a big and freakin' fast moving Squid! shoot the motherfu- BAM!!! 'Splodes. Me, that is. What the f... AH that was because I used my weapon underwater! The Shock Rifle, I mean! Yeah the readme did mention that, yeah that's really cool man! OK, reload, this time we will do it right! OK so I make it and now I can go through that door into the next part of the outpost... Oh damn, this part was a nightmare. So many reloads, and not necessarily because I always got killed but also sometimes because it was just best to reload rather then risk continuing with low health - and we all know how it feels to be low on health with the Xidia gametype, don't we? Right so I was headed towards what I imagined would be the final battle in that really cool looking area seen in the bottom right (or 4th) screenshot. The tension builds to a new high here... and I completely freaked out! Holy moley, that's when I really realised that Outpost Pheonix is a scary map! And during that fight I got my ass kicked many times. Eventually I made it, but I was almost dead, thank goodness I soon found some medkits or my head could have kept on spinning for a long time! Ah so now I can activate that mechanism and go back to the main part of the outpost and proceed towards the mines... uh-oh, not so fast apparently. There are some clues as to what still lies ahead. This doesn't bode well... of course, I just have to continue, right? Take that lift a-a-and crash down into that soil depository. OK now I know I'm fucked. Any second now and that boss is gonna make its appearance. Ah yes, there you are, Red Nemesis! let's get this party sta- aaaand I'm already dead. Reload. Die. Reload. Die, etc. Inflict some damage while taking minimal damage, SAVE, and die. Reload in the middle of the fight. Inflict some more damage, save, die, reload the last save, etc. And thus I eventually made it, I was so RELIEVED when I finally defeated the Red Nemesis, you have no idea! Honestly, this map is very hard, but with that very hard boss fight, the level is close to being extremely hard IMHO. And there was no way I was gonna miss a very valuable item as I was taking the lift down towards the mines!

Do I even have to talk about the build? It's excellent, kinda realistic, details everywhere, use of sound and music is professional, man it's all perfect in a way. I know Hourences' Derelict maps have a more aesthetic side to them but Outpost Pheonix is the best human facility I have seen in Unreal and Unreal Tournament as of yet [future self edit: Project Xenome: First Day surpassed it in this particular regard]. And I loved the way Mister Prophet revisited the location in Xidia: The Escape!
Definitely one of the best maps of The Xidia Incident. And the longest one for me: on my first playthrough, it took 2h45min to complete! Mister Prophet did an incredible job. By the way, that mappack is the most consistent large campaign I have played so far (the other large campaigns I have already played are Legacy, Nali Chronicles, Deja Vu v2 and Operation Na Pali) [future self edit: have played way more since incl. 7 Bullets].
The only pseudo "negative" thing I'll say is, because it's often very hard for me, Xidia Gold isn't always exactly as fun as Operation Na Pali. Now I'll say that again: the former is the most consistent of the two, but the latter is, to me, slightly "better" overall because slightly more fun. In essence, it goes down to personal taste: I am not a very good FPS player, and very high difficulty doesn't maximise fun for me... unless the story is really compelling (i.e., really justifies the difficulty/motivates me). That last remark is important when considering my favourite individual SP map of all, which is a very hard map, but nonetheless my favourite so far. I'll tell you about it when it comes up in Map Of The Week [future self edit: was talking about Na Pali Haven Redux, since then 3 other maps have joined the "favourite" ranking ]
That said, I like the story in Xidia Gold, but the main plot in The Xidia Incident is just good, and it's really the action that is awesome. Xidia: The Escape improves the storytelling a bit, and since it's just as good as the first part in every other way, well, it constitutes my favourite half of the overall mappack.
Oh yeah, regarding the fact that Outpost Pheonix was made from fragments of a few DM levels: I would not have been able to guess that. However, come to think of it, I can see how that area in the fourth screenshot could do well in a DM map! It is an excellent arena to fight in.

[2nd post]

I can't believe I forgot to mention the passage with the Machine Gun Turret (MGT) and the Skaarj Hunters; that was super cool, and quite hard for me the first time round (I died a couple of times, indeed you have to have good accuracy and reflexes). Probably the most memorable MGT sequence of the whole of Xidia (and none of the bugginess witnessed in Na Pali Haven Redux, where only one out of two MGT sequences worked alright). You see, this map is just so full of various set pieces, it would easily be enough for several maps, and yet the whole map is incredibly coherent, as is the whole of The Xidia Incident. Actually, I have an explanation as to why I forgot this particular highlight of the map when giving my detailed impressions: the thing is, I only ever did one complete playthrough of this level [future self edit: have done a second playthrough since!], and my last memories of this facility are from Xidia: The Escape, which managed to bring again a lot of new memorable sequences to the map, including by adding new sections to it. Outpost Pheonix is the most complete version of the facility, though Beacon comes a close second.

--------- End of transcript ---------

[Mister_Prophet]

Some Trivia and personal cons:

-Main influence would be the first level of Super Metroid. I always loved how you go through this whole spooky zone until a security light detects you, and when you backtrack the level is suddenly alive.

-Also a lot of influence from AVP 1998 and Red Faction.

-For homework, look up three UT levels made by myself called DM-Timecrash, DM-Chimaera, and DM-Imago. These three levels were cannibalized heavily to make the bones of Landing and Outpost.

-Original Xidia was released before ONP, with Xidia Gold released after with UsAaRr33 helping to backport some ONP code for us. Seems to be most people remember XG as the full release, or even a post ONP thing.

-I remember at the time being somewhat surprised how the first level of Unreal 2 seemed very similar to Landing and Outpost. They even had bloody water around a floating corpse.

-Reading the supplementary logs Semfry/MMAN posted earlier really reflect the poorly worded translator logs that plague Xidia. One of my big cons about this. I had a very "write and don't reread" way about a lot of these and figured the bigger window meant people did not care so much about wall of text spam. Outpost has a lot of this and it bugs me. EBD notes somethings that also really irks me about this level is that I dislike the message placement in nearly most of the map. Too many message flashes amidst combat and it's not good at all.

-The USM thing. There were two misconceptions about Xidia concerning spelling errors and this was one of them. People used to think we just misspelled UMS. Truth? I had forgotten that the marines in RTNP had an acronym when Xidia was being developed, or simply did not think about it and picked a generic military ID that was more reminiscent of what AVP '98 did (which was a major influence on me at the time). We had released before it was pointed out to me so I chose to keep it thinking nobody would care. I made an effort to explain this better in later releases. To be clear, one is United Space Marines and the RTNP group is Unified Military Services.

-The other was the obvious misspelling of 'Pheonix' in Outpost Phoenix. This was going to be explained fully in Xidia 2 (later turned into 7B) and in Residual Decay, but to clarify there was to be an old defunct mining town left derelict near the facility that I never got to map for The Escape. My original idea was a wild west kind of prospect town that had poorly worded shop names by the blue collar work force that staked the original claim on Xidia. The fact that Xidia has lots of general errors in log material didn't help much in either this or the USM issue, so I just kind of accepted that people thought we were idiots

-These first three maps used a lot of assets made in meshmaker. This would continue in Sjoerd's Skaarj levels with the use of 3dmax made cables and hoses. While many of these were custom meshes that either were imported from outside modelling programs or converted from BSP I made myself, there were a few that were meshed from prefabs taken from popular DM maps made by other people. I think I took a few from Angelheart. In the years after I remembered seeing these reused all over the place, which told me that a lot of people played Xidia.

Gameplay-wise... there are a lot of 2002-isms and weird leftovers from ONP, and as a result I had to give up trying to record the third map in one unbroken take. Increasing the health on pretty much every enemy was not a great choice in my opinion, but it is a very period-appropriate choice and I would guess that any who played it two decades ago, myself included, would have held different opinions about it at the time. The third map has some easy to miss but very important weapon and ammo pickups right at the start that weren't present in the earlier map, and those turrets right around corners with the oversized ONP translator popping up over the entire screen, holy shit! Overall very brutal difficulty, especially with the enemy placement and spawns often either behind the player or in areas the player has already been through.

Much like Unreal's oft unused dodge mechanic, I remember a lot of people simply would not read about (or use) the new weapon functions we had featured with the guns. Semfry stated it already, but we had more headshot functions available for the player's weapons. As a reaction to players being made stronger, pawns typically get new buffs to compensate in my SP outings. In any case, I notice that people have a harder time when they go for the body instead of the head.

As for the style of gameplay in Outpost, the whole map basically has spawns and attacking enemies in every room and then typically there is a reset on the backtrack. Again, this is reminiscent of my Super Metroid influence as stated earlier. The Landing was about giving the player a free floorplan to see and the following level is a test of the player's memory of the environment. It actually was hard to do for me at the time because I had to make every ambush feel different. Little things, like a vent cover falling open and then the pupae come out of a different hole nearby when the player presumably moves to the wrong position. You can see Semfry figuring it pretty correct most of the time, but there he also makes those quick miscalculations that need readjustment. I wanted to make it random enough feeling that I myself could not remember each ambush exactly.

As mentioned previously, I do regret some things. The Trans message spam being the most paramount. Other things that are mentioned here would be the INF Turret. It truthfully doesn't work so well, especially of the player moves away from it and then tries to reuse it. At the time the INF Turrets were brand new and people loved them in the community, in Infiltration and outside of it. But in retrospect they could have been used better possibly or perhaps not at all.

In the corridor leading to the four consoles area there's also another fuse box thing that the ASMD secondary should break, but it doesn't seem to despite there clearly being some mover details on it; maybe it's used in a later map or was removed in a patch for some reason but it's an odd inconsistency either way. Also that message saying there's five snipers when there's actually four is a nice touch that makes sense realistically, although I think on higher settings there are one or two more that technically make it right then?

Some stuff is older from the original Xidia release that was left over in the Gold update. However, I don't recall if this powerbox ever worked originally. I seem to have a faint memory of the powerbox being able to be shot in order to deactivate the turrets in the hallway. It is possible that it is a leftover asset. It could also be that I am remembering from the prerelease of the original Xidia...or it was something changed for Xidia Gold.

As for the number of snipers...I do not remember if the log book was originally clueing the player for the exact number of targets. Difficulty filtering could be examined, but it also could be another change from Xidia Gold.

[Aspide]

Finally I have the time to talk about this maps , Xidia is truly a milestone in Unreal SP history, it introduced a more realistic and grittier look into Unreal that we've never seen before and its focus on story also became something that inspired many people that made SP projects in the future. The only drawback that Xidia has is that difficulty isn't well balanced because the game throws at you enemies with enhanced properties even in lower difficulties and health and armor pickups are rare (also there are only two secret armor pickups in the whole campaign, big mistake), and the whole "you are slow and the camera starts moving when in low health" stuff should burn in hell, now that's what I call harmful realism. I think Xidia is well balanced in Unreal difficulty but not in lower ones, no matter what difficulty you choose Xidia is always hard. The weapons in Xidia have been upgraded to deal with the new enemies (however I really dislike the change of the numbers of the weapons, Dispersion Pistol in weapon slot 2 is soo cursed), however I wished they upgraded the Ripper to make it more powerful, I would love to have blades that go through pawns, no wonder The Escape replaces the Ripper with the Pulse Gun. Also hate that some weapons don't work underwater, another example of harmful realism, also try using the ASMD underwater, you will make John Romero proud .

Mr. Prophet and Hourences have proven to be a deadly combo when it comes to making levels, both have different approaches but one thing they have in common is their attention to detail, there's always something interesting in every corner. Mr. Prophet mentioned that he was involved in four SP mods for UT during that time and that he was fired from one of them, I have the feeling that he was talking about ONP , well look at the bright side Xidia and the rest of the franchise would have never existed if it wasn't for that and considering how Mr. Prophet has evolved as a mapper it's safe to say that he has proven that he's one of the best mappers around.

Now to the maps:

Orbit : pretty cool intro map with lots of attention of detail, I like that the campaign that is remembered mostly because of its relentless difficulty starts like this, a calm before the storm type of level. Also this map has a reference to Ortican a map that Hourences made before Xidia and possible is part of the franchise but I'm not sure. FUN FACT: you can kill both humans in this map without cheating, all you have to do is grab the flares and look for the human standing still next to a window and activate all flares right next to him, this will completely decimate him (and if you recognize that human then you will agree that he deserves such fate ), then you can grab his weapon and take care of the other human, this will give you grenades for the CAR which you aren't suppose to have until later in the campaign.

Issues I've found:
-The first translator message is kind of bugged because sometimes it doesn't play when I touch the trigger.
-The final cutscene cannot be accessed in the latest version of Xidia because there's a teleporter before the cutscene starts, I wonder why this was done since the cutscene works without issues except that I would have changed it a little bit so you can listen to the music to the end. Bonus points for using UT99's hidden Raw Steel face skin

Landing : this map is still technically part of the intro but now in unknown territory, you explore the outpost and witness the carnage that took place there, I can see a lot of inspiration from Aliens when the marines explore Hadley's Hope for the first time. This map is pure atmosphere and build up which culminates in the first fight of the campaign (unless you count kicking Cray's ass in the previous map ), and that first fight should give you a teste of what's to come. Also what's up with campaigns recreating CliffyB's introduction of the Skaarj ?, even Unreal 2 did that. I will give some bonus points for removing the collision of those Skaarj that you see all over the map (except for the one you fight). One interesting thing I noticed about Xidia is that it uses Blank.umx in moments of silence, I think this is a left-over when Xidia didn't use OldSkool Amp to prevent UT99's menu music when no music is playing. Another thing I noticed is that this might be one of the very rare instances where you get to see Xidia/ONP's yellow crosshair when aiming at the explosive barrels.

Issues I've found:
-There's a small continuity error in the bridge where the brutes ambush you in the next level. The translator becomes a red book in the next map. Also the Special Events at the bottom to kill you aren't perfect, they deal damage (when they should kill you instead) and those triggers ONLY affect players. This glitch is in the next map as well.
-If you are using old Audio drivers (like Galaxy) you might encounter a funny glitch where the screams when you enter the first fight corridor get interrupted because of the music change.
-A COLOSSAL glitch this map has is the final teleporter, it's very easy to push the final button and then run away, this will soft-block the game because you will not touch the final teleporter and the next map will never start. I can't believe that even Xidia Gold didn't fixed that.

Outpost Pheonix : now this is the real first map of Xidia, long, full of action and surprises. There are soo many memorable encounters like the brutes in the bridge, the Skaarj that falls down when you get the ASMD, the whole ambush where you use the machine gun from Infiltration, the small pupae, the sniper section, the Squid fight and of course the Red Nemesis himself (the beginning of many nightmares for Unreal players), this map is the peak of action in Xidia and it seems that Mr. Prophet has grown fond of this map because it's reused many times in the rest of the campaign. This map is like a Frankenstein monster of many maps made by Mr. Prophet and I didn't notice that until I started playing custom DM maps and found Imago, Chimaera and TimeCrash, I was vey surprised when I realized I was playing a Mr. Prophet map before Xidia was made (however I have to admit Chimaera looks and feels very different from Xidia), I wished something was used from DM-AbsoluteZero, I love the music of that level. This map has plenty of attention to detail, probably my favorite is the red fog effect used underwater, shame that it doesn't appear if you have fog turn off. Messages really adds to the immersion, makes you fell that you are in a real place, something that Mr. Prophet really excels at. The difficulty of this map is legendary, but for me it isn't that big of a deal, I recently played the map in Unreal difficulty and I beat it in less than 10 minutes without using saves (I used every weapon as well ), however I have to admit the final boss is very difficult if you don't know the trick to beat him (getting close and dodging out of the way when he does the melee attack), also giving brutes UT rockets and giving Skaarj Troopers the Flak Cannon is pure evil. Also this map used to have a nasty glitch that prevented you from saving the game, I'm curious to what was causing that. Bonus points for using UT99 unused death scream .

Also what's a Ripper Blade doing out of bounds??? , maybe that's something I did since I modified the map.

Issues I've found:
-You spawn with two Automags, why didn't you had them form the beginning or get the second one in this map?
-The machine gun from Infiltration is infamous for its glitchy weapon swapping system and considering that in this campaign every second counts this glitch can easily get you kill.
-The falling damage you take before the final boss depends on how you jump off the elevator, considering that Unreal difficulty increases the damage that you take this could severely hurt you leaving you with a great handicap before the final fight begins.
-The collision of the final elevator is really weird, you can stand in places where you shouldn't be able to which makes grabbing the secret in the small cave more difficult than it should.

[Semfry]

-Reading the supplementary logs Semfry/MMAN posted earlier really reflect the poorly worded translator logs that plague Xidia. One of my big cons about this. I had a very "write and don't reread" way about a lot of these and figured the bigger window meant people did not care so much about wall of text spam. Outpost has a lot of this and it bugs me. EBD notes somethings that also really irks me about this level is that I dislike the message placement in nearly most of the map. Too many message flashes amidst combat and it's not good at all.

This reminds me that I was surprised how many typos there were while replaying this. Almost every message has at least one error (including some consistent ones like the spelling of cavern) even it's all still fully understandable. In retrospect I guess that could have been looked over in a later patch.

-The final cutscene cannot be accessed in the latest version of Xidia because there's a teleporter before the cutscene starts, I wonder why this was done since the cutscene works without issues except that I would have changed it a little bit so you can listen to the music to the end. Bonus points for using UT99's hidden Raw Steel face skin

I thought I remembered there being some sort of cutscene and it not just cutting to Landing, so this confirms I wasn't imagining it...

[fashahhh]

Wow it's been such a long time since I played these so I couldn't remember all the enemy placements and ambushes. I did play on medium difficultly as I remember hard and unreal being ball crushingly hard! Even on medium I got my arse tanned!

Xidia is among those campaigns which got me into playing Unreal custom maps. I have to admit that when I had the original Unreal I didn't play a single custom map until UT Oldskool came about. I remember playing Xidia and being amazed at what level of detail could be achieved. One of the main reasons why I map like I do, I aspired to create maps as detailed and engrossing as these, not just on a mapping level, but story and atmosphere. This map really tested my old Pentium 2 back in the day, there were significant slowdowns in some of the high poly areas (though not as much as in the Xidia: Escape episode).

What I loved is that it feels completely different to Na Pali. It 'feels' like another planet, quite barren looking despite the massive lake. The backtracking felt organic too, I never felt hopelessly lost even though the 3rd map is massive. Even the gameplay is different to how Unreal plays, I felt like I was having to be more reserved and taking cover rather than just running in all guns blazing.

I forgot how big the hud is and the translator messages. I honestly don't remember them being that big on my old monitor. Also that low health effect does actually make me feel nauseous!

Parts which I particularly liked.
- The flooded area, really clever use of fog effects for the blood (I always love it when stock effects can be used to create something entirely different) and the build up to the squid.
- Sniper alley, I forgot that they one shot you if you don't take them out.
- Deckards story arc. It provided a great build up to the Praetorian Skaarj where he's toying with him.
- The creepiness of the 2nd map, I initially expected something to just jump out at you.
- The amount of scripted events which added to the atmosphere and story.

Overall awesome maps and great build up to one of the greatest campaigns for Unreal which still looks amazing all these years later! It's a trailblazer for modern Unreal mappage.

[ebd]

As promised, here is a video of my playthrough. There is an editing mistake in the middle of it with one clip repeated.

[AlCapowned]

It’s a rock solid set of maps that gets the pack off to a great start.

As promised, here is a video of my playthrough. There is an editing mistake in the middle of it with one clip repeated.

I’m at the part with the snipers and am enjoying how much of your experience has been similar to mine.

[Kajgue]

Wow what a blast from the past, haven't played Xidia in many many years. Alot to enjoy about this series. Iirc my favourite was the campaign featuring Spencer as he felt a bit more human than Jones, not to say Jones was a bad protagonist at all though.

Also wish there was more to explore of the intro spaceship. Perhaps i should finally replay this after such a long time.

[Sat42]

As promised, here is a video of my playthrough.

Haha thanks ebd, some great moments in there like the sped up footage in the middle of the video and then finally you resort to saving your progress, and all the bits of text commentary, we really get to feel for you and your struggles