This map is an attempt at totally new style of play for HL2DM. Everybody starts in a central spawn area with no guns. The area has, among some other things, sixteen different booths each which leads to a smallish arena. Players pair up at a booth, step into opposing sides at the same time, and are teleported to the corresponding arena and given weapons for a one-on-one duel. When finished, the winner is returned to the spawn area. Of the sixteen arenas eight of them are remakes of old custom Quake maps which had been made specifically for a one-on-one fighting mod (Rocket Arena), and the other eight are of my own design. Each arena also has an spectator area so people not participating in a duel can still watch.
build_plaza_v2.zip & build_plaza_L2.zip
There's a genre of "sandbox" or "build" maps for HL2DM. They generally feature a big open space and several buttons, each which spawns a certain type of prop. The intent is that you spawn props and freeze them in various configurations to make a fort or a building or house or some such, for no reason other than the sake of building something. Unfortunately there's no "freeze" command in HL2DM, so to run a build map normally you need to run either a custom mod with a freeze command or you need to leave cheats on (which usually leads to frequent server crashes). This is my attempt at making a build map that doesn't require either. It allows players to freeze and unfreeze props by pressing the same key they use for opening doors and activating switches. It's also got several devices to assist the building process such as paintbrushes and scaffolding fields and object deleters and whatnot. There are also some toys hidden in the sky as an incentive for people to build pathways to reach them.
Unfortunately, Valve's dedicated hl2dm servers are poorly-designed. A lot of really great maps out there work great in Windows but crash Linux servers and vice-versa. So until they fix this (which is likely never) I have an alternate version of the map for people who want to run it in Linux. The only difference is unfreezing props is done by picking them up with the gravity gun instead of pressing the 'use' key, though freezing still works the same.
dm_deathwands_v2.zip
Several of my maps have wands you can pick up with the gravity gun and use to kill other players by touching them, not to mention some other weird mostly-lethal toys and devices. This map is a modestly-sized area centered around fighting with these devices instead of with guns. The custom tree model isn't mine, but it's very pretty and HL2's native tree models are ugly and dead so I thought this one would add a nice touch. I am happy with how the ruined temple turned out since I tried to make it historically accurate and it ended up pretty.
dm_vdeth6_v3.zip
The sixth and final vdeth is the smallest. It's tiny even by Doom 2 deathmatch standards. The level is also very flat, having little change in elevation. However, it's convoluted and has several teleporters to make it feel bigger than it is. If players hit all the relay switches, techno music will start up and a huge killer force field will slowly sweep through the map in two passes. It's not hard to avoid unless you're careless or not paying attention.
dm_vdeth5_v5.zip
The fifth vdeth is the largest of the vdeths. Like the fourth there's a series of relay switches which change the layout of the level slightly when activated. There's a "duel booth" where you try to hit a button before someone else does in order to blow them up, a floaty rocks room, a trap which will only drop you if you look down, a barrel cloning trap, and several other gimmicks and whatnot.
dm_vdeth4_v3.zip
vdeth4 is perhaps the most complicated of the vdeths. I worked on the final three remakes simultaneously to save time, since they share many of the same features and similar-looking design. Vdeth4 has various new kinds of killsticks in addition to the usual toys. It also has two mounted lasers, a mounted machine gun, and a portable lightning/laser/beam turret. Additionally, throughout the level is a series of relay switches. Hit them all and the level changes its layout slightly through the use of rising pillars.
dm_ccelerator_v4.zip
The ccelerator is my weirdest map and so far the most popular. It's a huge maximum length (for the Source engine) corridor with a base at either end. Combine spawn at one end and rebels at the other. The corridor is divided into two lanes, one for each direction, and objects in the lanes get pushed at fantastic speeds down the corridor. Defend your base! There's toggle-ramps and a bridge at the midpoint, a few teleporters lining the sides, and each base has a kill-field that can be turned on for brief periods of time, freezing incoming objects temporarily and killing incoming players. Colored indicator lights on the arches over the corridor tell you whether a travelling object is a Combine player, a Rebel player, or an inanimate object.
For reasons that escape me, somebody (no idea who) took an earlier version of this map and renamed it "dm_star_wars". In this renamed form it's currently enjoying immense popularity on a server that runs only this map. Any publicity is good publicity I suppose. :)
dm_vdeth3_v5.zip
Vdeth3 is the most open of my remade vdeth maps. There's three mounted weapons in this one: rocket, laser, and suppression mortar. Like the original map there's some mininum-size watery corridors underground with a tasty super health charger inside a wall. It's surprising how many people never find it.
dm_houseofcthon_v4
This is a remake of Quake's E1M7, the boss level from the shareware version of the game. It's rather symmetrical so I put some barriers up to divide the space into a Rebels-vs-Combine layout plus some neutral ground in the middle. The barriers are team-specific if teamplay is on. The electrodes (which were used in the single-player game but functionless in deathmatch) are now traps designed to suck everybody on the side opposite from them into the slime pit in the middle. There was a Stargate-shaped teleporter in the original so for this one I put an actual Stargate in, a custom model made by dav0r and used with his permission.
dm_vdeth2_v6
The second of my vdeth remakes has both a mounted laser and a mounted rocket launcher. There's also a "jail" in the center which you can teleport people to by using gravity-gun-held teleportation wands. People teleported to jail are removed of their weapons but given stunsticks and crowbars to fight other "inmates" with. The map also has a gas trap, and an trap door iris leading to an underground arena.
dm_menger_v2
I made this map while in an experimental mood. I wanted to see if I could turn a 3-iteration Menger's sponge fractal into a deathmatch map. It's fully playable, but the gameplay is a little slow because the fractal nature and sheer size of the space makes it difficult to find opponents. In the "hollow" in the middle of the map there's a lit diagram that tells you the locations of cubes within the sponge which have players occupying them, and what team affiliation they are if team-deathmatch is on. Despite this and a number of teleporters and lifts to tie the space more closely together it's still slow on gameplay, so I made it so players can get points by breaking the glass floors along the walkways. Not my most entertaining map, though maybe it would be better in an engine with far more players playing at once. I might update this if I get some sudden satori regarding how to make it vastly more entertaining.
UPDATE: The lifts in this map are now non-functional since Valve's ass-backwards engine update in June 2006. I don't know why this is but I suspect it's just that the newer engine can't handle the size and complexity of the map though the older one could. The lifts are identical to the ones used in my killsphere map, and those still function fine, so this is likely an engine issue and not a map issue.
dm_vdeth1_v7
In high school I made a collection of deathmatch maps for Doom 2 and played them often with friends over a local BBS. They were terrible fun so I decided to remake them for HL2DM, especially since I haven't been practicing enough with the smaller types of maps this style of game is more accustomed to. I also used this as an excuse to try out a bunch of various traps and toys for players to use, both to further my understanding of the engine and to try and give players some unique experiences they won't find in most maps.
The new vdeth1 has some nice sheltered areas, a sniper spot with a mounted high-powered laser cannon, trap doors leading to slime pits, an insta-fort, and other various little gimmicks and objects.
dm_citadel_freeway_v1
This is my attempt at a "driving" map for HL2DM. HL2DM had crippled but functional airboats and dune buggies, and most maps centered around them tend to suck since maps large enough to be fun to drive buggies around tend to be too large to be hard to find opponents in easily. This map's designed with team-deathmatch in mind but is playable in regular DM. Combine spawn at a base near the foot of the Citadel (which you get to drive circles around on a raised freeway over water), and rebels spawn near an abandoned gas station at the beach on the far end of the map. Each base has 6 buggies and 2 airboats, each with its own particular ability or characteristic. The 'fast lanes' of the freeway are powered, so if you keep a vehicle balanced in the lanes then they're accelerated down them at incredible speeds.
UPDATE: I was planning on finishing this since it's still fullbright, it needs game logic that'll give points for racing laps, and has various other work that needs to be done otherwise, but in June 2006 Valve updated the HL2DM engine and broke some thing as well as removing dune buggies completely from the game. Without dune buggies to race with, this map is pointless and so there is no way for me to finish it unless Valve decides to put dune buggies back in.
dm_4_thebadplace_v3
This level is a faithful tribute to my favorite Quake level, DM4. In this one you can shoot rockets and grenades through the teleporters, there's TV screens above the teleporters showing the central area, there's a fun combine ball column instead of quad damage, and when someone falls in a slime pit it gets all steamy in there.
fy_iceworld_sim_v5
Here's my tribute to CounterStrike's infamous "fy_iceworld". In this map the iceworld room (the one with lots of weapons) is a 'simulation' inside a cube in another, much larger room. When people are in the outer room you can see them from the inner room, all giant-sized and running around. From the outer room you can see TV screens showing the goings-on of the inner room. Teleporters take you back and forth.
dm_killsphere_v8
The killsphere is a tribute to HL1's killbox. Indicator lights show which cubes are occupied by people, as well as showing team-affiliation in team-deathmatch. Among other things in the map there's an airboat with a death-bumper, and a sniper spot up top accessible by an underwater teleporter or by using jetpacks you can pick up with the gravity gun.
dm_wtc_singe_v8
This is my first HL2DM map and my first map since messing around with Quake nearly a decade ago. It's a full-scale replica of the WTC towers and surrounding area. There aren't any internal floors, it's just the two tower rooftops, the ground-floor plaza, and the rooftops of some surrounding buildings. I wanted to try my hand at some internal floors, maybe the restaurant at the top or the lobby at ground level, but the only reference photos Google Images could get me at the time I was making the map were of the exerior. I always wanted to visit the WTC but never got to, so this is the next best thing I could do. Teleporters take you from the ground to the roofs as well as transport you between towers and among the various lower rooftops. In team-deathmatch, the south tower teleporters will only teleport Combine and the north tower teleporters will only teleport Rebels. The map handles just about any number of players gracefully. Under small player loads gameplay tends to stick to the tower rooftops as intended, but as a server fills up the gameplay usually spreads to the surrounding area. Games with less players tend to stick to the towers' rooftops as intended, but there's room to spread out additional play in.
Recently a russian server, 32 players big, frequently busy, running only the WTC map 24/7, requested a special xmas version of the map with snow and whatnot that they wish to run only on xmas. But you can get it here dm_wtc_snow_v8.zip
