FallHaven Screen Capture Galleries

Fall Haven began life as a role-playing campaign story I wrote and ran for my role playing ensemble in Seattle while studying at University of Washington. The original campaign was a gritty science fiction work that we told using a proprietary talent driven system I developed alongside my friends and players. The campaign was meant to be terrifying and very challenging, with dangerous adversaries, overpowered and dangerous exotic weapons, and consequences to mishaps that often meant the best solution was to find reasons not to fight. 

 
In that story our heroes and an entire community of under-dwellers found themselves suddenly walled-in deep below the surface of a sprawling industrial world. Racing against time and fighting to survive an attrition of dwindling supplies and resources, the players grappled with the moral dilemma of saving the community or just themselves as an opportunistic governor-like crime boss thwarted them at seemingly every turn. 

 
As we concluded the campaign, I was eager to breathe more life into the world and give my community of players a chance to experience some of their adventures and mishaps again. Fall Haven for Quake II CTF was borne of this. 

• Levels had to feature the same sense of atmosphere from the campaign.
• The concept art had to faithfully fit within the world but also within the Quake II engine, geometric limitations, and texture libraries. 
• The lighting needed to capture the cinematic feel that I had seen in my mind's eye and been revealing in my concept art for the campaign. It also needed to make full use of the GL rendering technologies that were emerging at the time. 
• Blind walls were a new innovation at the time. When employed properly, they restrict rendering to regions beyond them and modularly limit rendering to specific regions of the map. These provided a huge optimization that resulted in higher frame rates and enabled much more expansive multiplayer levels. 
• Ambient atmospheric lighting was baked into the level using non-visible emission geometry. 
• Finally, the entire package was assembled into .wad package files to make it seamlessly installable and transmittable for LAN and online gaming using the limited internet distribution methods of the time. 
• For those who remember GURPS Traveler, they may notice some of the models and textures I created for my illustration work in the Traveler source books was repurposed into the 3D environment maps. These were the first 3D models made for illustrations within the GURPS Traveler franchise and a good example of state of the art game asset rendering in 3D Studio Max 1.0.

The same technical choices and soundly considered level design methods employed in making this package over two decades ago have allowed it to be fully compatible with Quake II RTX and look breathtaking with the addition of modern 3D rendering techniques.

• For those who may own a copy of Quake II and want to explore it interactively, I have included a downloadable link for the Falhavn2.zip file.
• I have also included two screen capture galleries of in-game renders (links below) including both the updated Quake II RTX engine original Quake II GL engine.

As with the original release in 1998, my only rule is that if you include any part of it, post it. or utilize it any way or anywhere, that you give me credit and copyright citation. I hope you enjoy!

- Lance S. Winkel

www.lancewinkel.com

lance@lancewinkel.com