Name: Leaky Meat's Backyard Adventure
Start date: 10/4/2004
End date: 5/12/2005
Finally taken out of Beta: 10/15/2006
Creator: Ricky Bridgewater (original map)
         Leaky_Meat (over 7 months of mods, most of which was debugging errors 
         in the original map)
UT Version: GOTY
Install: .unr file goes into the Maps directory
         .umx goes into Music
         .utx goes into Textures
         .uax goes into Sounds
         .u goes into System

Contact: leakymeat67@yahoo.ca

I WAS going to upload an archive with a lot more files than this, with files 
that "may" be needed that I was undure of. Thankfully, I don't have to, 
otherwise the archive would have been over triple the size that it is now. 
Many thanks to Hourences from NaliCity for his assistance with this, and his 
assistance in helping me to get this map uploaded at all.

This is the first map I ever created. I chose this map to mod because there's 
someone that I like to play with who was unable to play the original version 
because of the harshness of the colour scheme. It would hurt her eyes, give 
he headaches, etc., so I gave myself a mission to make the map playable for 
her. I also wanted to see what I could do in order to fix any bugs that were 
in the original, for example being able to walk through the air at the bottom 
of the slide all the way until you reached the sand castle, hitting your head 
on the air if you try to jump on to the slide from the bottom, being cratered 
if you tried to teleport up the left side of the house, etc... The version 
that I had access to also had a series of 4 deemers on top of the house which 
people would keep grabbing and picking off other players at will until someone 
else went on top of the house to take him out, which I didn't like, either. I 
figured, "OK, basic mod, this shouldn't be any trouble whatsoever, and this 
way I'll build some confidence with UEd before I create a new map from the 
ground up." Oh, those were innocent days... after playing around with it, I 
discovered that the original version was basically a textbook case on how NOT 
to make a map. Just about everything was wrong with it... polygons were made 
to fractional sizes (I think I saw some ratios of pi in there on occasion), 
parts of the slide had surfaces made up of 4 points that weren't coplanar, 
things were unneccarily rotated (eg. plenty of the castle's components had 
rotations of 266240 when 4096 would be identical, 196608 instead of 0, etc)...
Quite frankly, even after trying to debug things for 3 weeks or more, I 
eventually had to give up on correcting what was there, scrap it and re-create
the object in question from the ground up... even though it may not look it at 
first glance, the house, the castle, the table, even the outer dimensions of 
the level itself were all created from scratch. The castle has the most 
obvious differences... for example, in the original there are 4 crenellations 
per side, in this version there's only 3... I'm not sure why, but that seemed 
to fix the bug that would occasionally kill you when you try to teleport into 
the top floor of the castle. The roof of the house is a single piece now, 
instead of having 2 levels of slants, and the hole in the front of the roof is 
mising. The rebuild of the fence fixed up bugs where walking along it would 
sometimes crater you as well. The dog dish, the barbecue, the slide, and the 
swing set were all unresolveable, as was the table. The table was recreated to 
look as close to the original as possible, but the slide was created as a far 
cooler one, IMHO, also doubling as a sniper tower, the swings were replaced by 
an adult sized see-saw, or teeter-totter, if you prefer, the dog dish was 
scrapped (I guess the poor dog ended up starving to death), and the barbecue 
was replaced by a campfire with a marshmallow on a stick. As for the deemer 
hoarders, I've got a few surprises in store for them... The deemers on the 
roof are all over top of weakened sections. There's a warning sign on the 
lawn, but for those who try to get them anyway and fail, there's a pretty 
grisly death waiting for you, and a "tell it like it is" death message, "Sucks 
to be you, <player name>. Next time, read the sign." The deemer on the window 
is also on overload (glowing read with alarm klaxons going off), so anyone 
stuped enough to try and get that one gets fried. There's also more hidden 
areas than in the original, including 2 completely SAFE deemers... see if you 
can find them! :-) The state of the house as well as the sign on the lawn 
makes the campfire especially ironic, IMHO. There's also a hidden easter egg 
in the house fo those who dare to frag themselves, but sometimes it doesn't 
always allow you to look around when you kill yourself there. Take a look 
around and see if you can find it! :-) The idea for that came from an actual 
incident that happened to people living across the street from me. One year 
they had a major, MAJOR flood, and just about everything in the basement was 
completely destroyed. However, on top of a now destroyed-by-water table, the 
top of which was floating above the water level, standing upright, untouched, 
in mint condition, sitting there as calm as you please, was an unopened box of 
Chips Ahoy! cookies, as far as I know the only thing to actually survive. The 
Easter Egg inside the house is my homage to that single, solitary bag of 
cookies.
OK, so you're probably wondering, why, after finally completing the map after 
7 months and 212 revisions later, why did it take so long to finally get this 
map released? Well, the visuals were only the first part of the troubles... 
after all that time, after saying what a great job I did on the map for 7 
months, after FINALLY getting it to a releaseable state, what does she say? 
"It's a great map. I only wish I could play it"! Apparently, all this time she 
was sucking up the fact that she had a problem with the music, which was 
chosen by me specifically because it WASN'T a UT cliche, those being either 1)
the UT Menu song (come on! if you're going to put all that work into creating 
a wonderful map, then the same care and attention should be used in selecting 
a song to create just the right mood... if not a custom song, then at least a 
different stock one), 2) techno, or 3) something dark and depressing along the 
lines of "everything sucks, we're all gonna die, but before the end I'm gonna 
rape your mother" etc. This one I wanted to be really upbeat and positive to 
counteract all that negativity. At first I told her what I thought about her 
withholding that critical piece of info all this time, and she insisted she 
"hinted at" her dislike of the song (instead of coming right out and saying 
it) until some time that I apparently indicated the deeper meaning it had to 
me personally (quite frankly, at some points during the editting process, 
during the dark times when I was more than happy to give it up, hunt down 
Ricky Bridgewater and tell him what I thought of his shoddy mapping 
techniques, in flagrant violation of UEd rules, the song was the only thing 
that kept me going), at which point she decided to back off, until the day 
that I announced that it was complete... THEN she decided to drop the 
bombshell. Quite frankly, I felt betrayed... At first I was determined to 
leave it the way it was. Then, after some seriously heavy soul searching for a 
couple of weeks, I decided that I would change it. After all, my main mission 
for this map was to make it playable FOR HER, and if the music was all that 
needed changing, then change it I would. I searched far and wide for more 
music that I could potentially use, maintaining the "upbeat and positive" 
attitude, but nothing really felt the same to me. Some of the beta testers 
liked pretty much everything I suggested for replacement music, others were 
indifferent, others hated everything I came up with. Needless to say, I was 
pretty depressed about the whole thing. In fact, it was due to this deep 
depression that I entered because of this map that I didn't do any more 
mapping of any kind until almost a year and a half had passed. In the end, on 
10/15/2006, I decided that enough was enough! This map is now done, and nobody 
can change my mind. I suppose in a way, I failed in my original mission, which 
was specifically to make the map playable for her, but in the end I decided to 
stay true to my original vision, which I'm releasing here and now for everyone 
to enjoy.
Although I found myself getting increasingly frustrated with this map (chosen 
specifically because I thought it would be an "easy mod"), so much so that I 
started cursing Ricky Bridgewater's name, there's also plenty in the original 
map that was also done amazingly well, and I don't think I could have learned 
as much about mapping as fast as I did without his original map to play with, 
and for that I give him my thanks. It was a tough struggle, but ALL of the 
original "suicide bugs" have been resolved. There are a couple of bugs left, 
but neither of them create any playability issues whatsoever, and quite 
frankly, most people won't even be able to discover that they're there. This 
is a map that fills me with great pride.
To all of you would be mappers out there, take a lesson from my experience 
here. Choose your beta testers wisely. Make sure that they can help you find 
any bugs and are willing to put in the work to do so, and make sure that they 
feel free to give suggestions, but in the end, anything that you create is 
YOUR map and no one else's. If the ideas have merit, go ahead and incorporate 
them, but if they violate your principles in any way, you can also tell them 
to get stuffed (as diplomatically as you'd like to make it). It'll undoubtedly 
create some sore feelings at first, but in the end you'll undoubtedly end up 
being a lot happier with yourself. Good luck in all your future endeavours, 
and keep on mapping!

                                                    Leaky Meat.

P.S. When I first tried to upload this map to NaliCity, it came back with an 
error message, either because of the ' in the name or because the map name was 
too long (it cut off the file name at "Adventur" when I tried to upload it), 
or both. Once it's unpacked, please put the ' back in the file name, 
especially if you're hosting it on your own server, to prevent the spread of 
multiple copies of identical files under slightly different file names. Thanks 
in advance.

                                                                 Leaky.