Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 5 2017, 6:08 pm by Pr0nogo.

Did play, have impressions:

- atmosphere is cool and makes me feel there's more to the universe than the map, so that's good, music is also good

- got a message at some point that shield batteries recharge your shields if you move next to them, thought that was a mod feature but they just worked like in normal BW i.e you have to rightclick them

- killed the early sunken by the gateway which was quite difficult with just Drakkar, but the gateway didn't do anything and the sunken was mostly avoidable, big waste for no pay off

- was weirdly surprised by no custom music or ambiance during the main game, though the rhynadon sounds were nice, i turned the default music back on there

- the fighting is really fierce, but goes on for a lot, I can tell the idea is to have a lot of technical fighting without sc2 ability spamming, but you can have various mechanics even in those confines, something I put in my map is some neutral destructible objects, you usually want to kill them but on occasion there's some that are actually keeping melee enemies like zerglings further away trapped, like in a shooting gallery, and you leave the objects alone until you've taken care of the zerglings

- the main templar can die and just re-appears out of nowhere when you reach the shuttles since he has dialogue there, i think the easiest way to handle this is detecting his death and creating a transmission like "I'll hang back, Prelate......the fighting is too much........." like he didn't really die and is still with you in the background

- overall it works as a self-contained map, even though I can tell it cuts off in a way that suggests a following map, it's possible to make something like a scifi short story that leaves things open-ended after all

I remember thinking that atmosphere was always a strong aspect of this map back in the day, glad to see it's aged decently.

The message actually says that the shield batteries restore Drakkar's health (it's colored green in the transmission text, too). This is to make it possible for you to continue without too much backtracking to the first shield battery, especially if you miss the protoss base and go north instead of south.

That's a more recent addition, since before there were almost no zerg structures between the first and second shield batteries. I probably should have made it a cybernetics core or something instead of a gateway to reduce confusion, but generally any structure that's invincible and neutral is just there for ambiance.

I wasn't really thrilled with the thought of creating a music system for this map so I kept the default music going. What are you talking about when you reference rhynadon sounds? You can leave music enabled as the menu song (self-made) and the briefing song (by Cris Velasco) are the only custom music, and the protoss ready room music was disabled manually via modding (a blank .wav imported over the song so nothing plays).

One of the biggest limitations of this iteration is that there's really no transition between commanding just Drakkar to commanding Drakkar and an entire force of allies. If I had remade this map from scratch, I probably would have had Drakkar search for some escape pods with his crew still in them, and make terrain exploration more important (i.e. some areas are locked off because Drakkar is too bulky to fit in them, but if you get zealots/high templar, they can reach those areas for you to unlock puzzles or retrieve resource pickups or whatever). The map would also probably wind up being longer, regardless of whether or not the map size was increased.

This is a good idea, one that I would have included if I had thought of it during the refurbishing period. Protoss are all warped into their nexus when they die (unless you're a dragoon) so it makes sense.

I think it's regrettable that I didn't carry over the second map from my old, dead hard drive, as I'd probably refurbish that along with this one. Not doing that now, though. If I ever get to the point where the newer iteration of Chronicle of the Beast sees a release, it'll be fun to contrast this standalone one-off to the new version. It was cool to get in a test run of voice acting for Drakkar, though, since he's a character I've messed around with for so long but never gave proper voice acting to.

Thanks for playing! Hopefully I was able to shed some light on the logic behind some of the questions you had.