Interview With A Custom Map Legend

After my last post talking about Half Life and Counterstrike, I ended up doing a little bit of digging and I managed to get in contact with everybody's favorite custom map maker, Nipper. He turns out to be a really cool guy, and he was okay with me sending him a bunch of questions about his map work. His answers were all really good, I am posting them in their entirety here. So without further adieu, read on and learn how it all got started.

To start off, I was just wondering if you could give some background on yourself, and how you got into making maps.

The nickname Nipper came from my two older brothers. It started when I was very very young so I don't even remember why they started calling me that.

There was a little clan called $tL or something. I was asked to join that clan when I had first started mapping. That clan disappeared pretty quickly except for me and one other member. The two of us then jokingly formed the Cherryclan, named after the candy (the candy is
now called Cherryheads). I played a few league matches with a clan called Malicious Intent. We did really bad and that never went anywhere.

The Cherryclan was originally just a small group of my first "fans" who would regularly join my listen server to play my maps with me and bots.

My first ever map was a horrible attempt at a D-Day map for Day of Defeat beta 1.1. I didn't have much luck with DoD mapping so I figured I would try CS.

The first CS map I made was cspaintball, a simple arena deathmatch map. It seems pretty lame now but back then there were no fy_ or aim_ maps.

To many players, the original crazytank map is legendary, what is the story of the crazytank? Where is it coming from and where is it going, and what were your inspirations, goals, and thoughts, going into making that map?

crazytank started as a thread in forums.joe.to where I asked people what I should put in my next map. Most of the suggestions were ignored but a few of them weren't. There's a billboard easter-egg in the bottom of the chasm that references the people who contributed. I knew I wanted one team to have to pile into a big transport vehicle. And I knew I wanted the Ts to try and set up an ambush for the big vehicle. It was the same concept as crazycar which was one of my first maps.

I have no idea how it became so popular. It was one of my many experimental maps that I didn't think anyone would play besides me and my buddies.

It seems as if throughout your map-making career, you've gone through a few distinct styles of maps. There are lots of the vehicle concept maps, such as crazytank, airfight, and supercrazycar, then you have the series of crazy maps, such as nippers_opus (which I love by the way), and finally you have a lot of maps that are inspired by movies or other media, such as xcom, black hawk down, etc. Just wondering if you can give some background on the process of deciding how to make maps. Do you sit down and say, alright, today I'm going to make a map just combining every creative idea I can make work in the engine? Do you try to build for playability or overall look? What's your goal been with your different maps throughout the years?

I've always tried to do a variety of maps.

The main reason for so many car maps was a small 4-person lan party I went to right after I had started mapping. We got around to playing crazycar and it was ridiculous. Everybody there loved it. There was talk of having another lan party so I started making a lot of car maps just for us to play. Crazycar_v2 was made, car_fight, supercrazycar and a bunch of others.

Sometimes with my gimmicky maps they will start by taking an aspect of one of my existing maps and then focusing on that. Like ow_cc_even_owyer is a simplified version of ow_cc.

Or something funny will happen while playing a normal map and I'll make a map that revolves around that. Like when I noticed smashing breakable windows with grenades was a lot of fun I went and made he_glass.

I have done plenty of "normal" maps too but nobody plays them, at least not in 1.6.

Almost all my maps are inspired by some movie or tv show or commercial or a building I saw in real life. It doesn't matter if it's not an action movie or even if I hated it. Like de_cliffcabin was inspired by some horrible Sandra Bullock movie.

The whaaa / huhhh / blahhh / nippers_opus maps have always been the most fun to make. I just love the idea of abstract level-design. They are a lot more structured than people think though. I probably spend more time planning those maps than I do any other. Blahhh has a right-brain vs. left-brain theme for example.

"whaaa" was the first map of that kind and it was my excuse to make an odd map. The first version had a button that spawned gibs and when the button was pressed multiple times in a row it would crash the server. I wanted to fix it but I couldn't find the .rmf for it so I made "huhhh" to replace it. When "huhhh" became so well received by my server regulars I knew I had to make more maps like that.

(editor's note: Nipper's series of abstract maps are actually incredibly creative uses of the game engine, while playing nippers_opus I found myself genuinely surprised from room to room, delivering an experience more akin to what I would expect from a single player map)

The first time I found a server running a lot of your maps, it was pretty surprising, it was almost like your maps were this big secret I discovered. From the beginning, how have you gotten maps out there? Besides the FPS Banana site, how have you gotten your maps to players and on servers? Is there any center of the custom map community?

Originally I was making maps for me to play with bots. I would create a listen server and just play by myself. Occasionally someone would download the map from me while connecting to my server. I kept making more and more maps and I started to notice the same people would be back every time I was playing a new map.

My maps didn't get out much until I found a custom map server that let people upload their own maps directly to the server. They had a website with an upload map area so I uploaded the first version of playground and a few of my other first maps. The server was pretty popular so a lot of people ended up playing my maps from there.

Then joe from www.joe.to tracked me down and offered me my own forum. Then after the forum he offered me my own 24/7 nipper maps only server.

Moving from the original CS engine to Source, is there a lot more freedom and capability you have making maps? Do you prefer one over the other for what you can do or any other reasons?

Overall I like Source more. For one thing I can do a lot more weird entity-related stuff. The displacements and props make it a lot easier to do outdoor areas that don't look horrible.

The one downside to Source is that it relies so heavily on props and since I can't make custom models I am limited with what I can detail my maps with.

Do you plan to or have you already done any map work for any engines besides Half Life and Source?

Well I had mapped for BUILD engine games like Duke Nukem 3d, NAM, and WWII GI before HL1. As far as new games go I don't plan on mapping for anything else.

Do you have goals to make it into the videogame industry, and maybe design maps or mods professionally?

No. But if anyone wants to offer me a job in the industry feel free. :p

Do you get a lot of fan feedback or other forms of recognition about your work?

I used to get emails from people all the time, mostly asking for my .rmf files. Not so much anymore. Not that I mind.

I'm always amazed when I am playing BF2 as Cc_NIPPER and someone will ask me if I'm the map-making guy.

On the state of vehicle work in Source, I saw your crazytank_hq map, where the tank doesn't move. At the moment, Source vehicles don't work so well, but if you look at some of the work going on with Garry's Mod, http://www.garry.tv/?p=159 you can see progress is being made. Is there any chance of seeing a brand new version of crazytank, or some new vehicle map ideas, coming from you for Source?

Unless valve actually goes and adds the func_vehicle entity to CS:S it's not going to happen. The garrys mod thing is using HL2 models as the vehicle and I don't think I'll ever learn how to make custom models. I just can't do crazytank with the airboat.

I've seen stuff using physboxes and thrusters but it's just not the same.

What are your favorite maps and weapons in CS? Any server configs you prefer?

The m3 is my favorite weapon. Default server configs are my preference. I hate annoying plugins. I always liked cs_siege back when it had the APC.

If you want to, could you talk about one moment you had playing CS or Source that really stands out for you? Anything fun or interesting would be cool.

cs_spooks beta test, it was the first round. I was on CT, I tell everyone I have a plan. "Get ready to rush the front room" I say. Everyone stacks up and is ready to rush in. "Go go go!" and the whole CT team rushes in the front door and falls to their death.

Do you have any advice for other map makers trying to get started?

Don't decompile.

Any shoutouts or final words?

Shout out to my j2 buddies! Hooah!

Hope that gives everybody a little insight into Nipper's work. I cannot thank him enough for the opportunity to conduct this interview! If you're looking to download his map packs, and see what Nipper is currently up to you could go here or check into the forum where he has his own subsection, here. Feel free to post a comment if you've had any interesting experiences playing Nipper maps!

Videogame History Part 1: Half Life And Counterstrike

This kicks off a new series here called Videogame History, where I'll be replaying and talking about some old videogames, and recounting some old war stories. I've been playing a lot of Counterstrike: Source recently, and it made me a bit sentimental for the original, and all the fun I had with the old Half-Life engine. Getting all misty-eyed, I decided to dust off the first Half-Life and give it another play-through, and recount some Counterstrike memories.

Half-Life

I've been playing the hell out of the original Half-Life. I had it back in the day, but on my pentium 166 (overclocked to 200!), I had to run it in a tiny window. Imagine playing an entire game in somebody's animated gif avatar for a forum or something, and you basically have it. Of course, I've played Half-Life 2 semi-obsessively, and by semi I actually mean ridiculously. I've gone through much of the game switching to noclip mode over and over to check out the surroundings and overall level architecture. If I ever get a pet dog I'm going to name it Robot.

Anyway, while playing the original Half-Life, I had some initial difficulty dealing with the look, having become accustomed to Source and its delicate, understated beauty. As you can guess, I like the Source engine, but I got used to the original Half-Life and its modified Quake engine again pretty quickly. The gameplay still holds up really well. The feel of movement is awesome, except for the horrible time I had trying to grab some ladders, which I believe may have been a change to the engine wrought later on, perhaps for the multiplayer part or something. Overall though, the shooting, running, and jumping are all fun. There is also a decent degree of physics implemented fairly well.

The game takes you through some interesting situations. Although the massive, chunky architecture, due to lack of polygons, unsophisticated textures, and pixellated static backdrop images make it a bit of a harder sell than modern games, the game still does a great job of immersing you in the locations, and the story which unfolds through non-compulsory character speech and the occasional scripted event is actually really awesome. Being Gordon Freeman kicks ass. Inexplicably, at one point in the game I found myself all of a sudden thinking the phrase "it resembles nothing more than a crystalline beef processor." It was probably around 5am when I thought that, but it made no fucking sense even to me, and I was the one thinking it.

I've been playing the game in hard mode of course, and this shit is HARD. I usually have to replay each encounter, and then cleverly engineer the situation ahead of time, rigging different spots with trip-mines and moving boxes to create cover. It almost makes it into a puzzle game, because some of the enemies just attack too rapidly and devastatingly for me to fight off in pure, simple combat.

All of the set pieces are still cool, and you can really see how Half-Life 2 grew out of this. Similar to many HL2 scenarios where the Combine soldiers are getting their asses kicked by antlions, or the rebels are fighting Striders, you'll often come upon battles in HL where you can wait for the military and Xen forces to wipe each other out, sometimes giving you control of a cannon to kick a little ass of your own with. You also get nice scenes like fleeing from the giant creature long enough to call in an airstrike on it.

One retarded thing, playing in retrospect, all of the security guards have Barney's voice, and many scientists have Dr. Kleiner's voice. It actually doesn't bother me as much as it may bother others, but it's like I'm playing with a cast that consists of a vast collective of clones of just those two characters from HL2, and they are horribly slaughtered over and over for my enjoyment.

Another problem, I have to turn off my damn bit-torrent downloads to log in to Steam to play. It's fine to turn back on later, but executing the game runs like its setting up a server and then you log into it. Also, maybe due to the fact that I downloaded this iteration on Steam, I got all these weird bugs, like occasionally loading a new map only to have it half load, leaving me either stuck in place staring at half-formed crap or running through a level without some vital creatures and objects spawned. There are some other issues as well, like the fact that the last few levels are pretty crappy. Also, sometimes I'll be riding elevators and just get stuck in them, and the vehicles are mostly buggy pieces of crap, although hilarious and fun as hell to use. I owe hours and hours of my life to the buggy Half Life vehicle code, but I'll get back to that in a bit. First, I have to talk about the most important mod ever created.

Portal to Xen

Counterstrike

Everybody knows about Counterstrike, it's the greatest mod for any game ever made. It's still got more players than Counterstrike: Source, and it's been the main event at videogame tournaments for years running. The first game to take a realistic approach to bullet damage and burdened movement, Counterstrike raised the bar on competitive gameplay for first-person shooters to a degree that Source couldn't even surpass. Up until version 1.4, where the jump lag that is the bane of my existence was implemented, no online shooter could possibly compete with CS for purity of control and balanced combat. Before World of Warcraft, CS was the original online destroyer of lives.

In addition to the regular map rotation in CS, dust, dust2, office, aztec, seige (at one point), assault, and a few others, eventually some custom user-made maps began to see some regular play. Almost any CS player is likely to have played fy_iceworld at some point or another, and probably scoutzknivez as well. These maps were and still are far more common than some of the original maps and playmodes implemented by the designers of CS, such as the escape missions. The real fun starts with the more rare custom maps, usually played on all custom servers.

In the climber maps, your job is to make increasingly impossible-seeming jumps

Nipper

Any true veteran of custom Counterstrike maps will be familiar with the name Nipper. An incredibly prolific map-maker, specializing in unrefined but conceptually innovative maps, produced such classics as crazytank, megacrazycar. All of them feature the buggy Half Life engine vehicle code at length. For those who haven't played crazytank, imagine the CT's starting off next to an enormous drivable tank with multiple floors, traversing a set path to the escape zone, including a cliff you have to drop down, versus a group of terrorists each with their own personal motorcycles and mounted turrets assailing the CTs as they are trying to escape. It was neverending fun. Half the time the tank driver would get you stuck in the walls and smash half of his own team, but the times I would slam my motorcycle over a ramp, crash headlong into the tank, infiltrate it and slaughter the entire enemy team from the inside stand out as some of the greatest times I've ever had playing any game in my life.

As the years following Half Life's original release went by, Counterstrike maps saw increasingly over-the-top retrofits to keep things fresh. I remember an entire 48 hour period straight my friends and I spent on one server that had ninja ropes that let you swing like spiderman across the map. On crazytank3, Nipper's third version of the legendary battle, the tank is placed on a giant boat that the CTs are trying to navigate through mine-infested waters. The Ts get smaller boats, but with ninja ropes the boats were meaningless, you were already totally free. Getting good with them turned battles into graceful airborne carnage.

Interestingly, Nipper still makes maps for CS:Source, much more refined in look this time, but still hilarious. His website can be found here. If anybody has any of their own crazy custom map experiences they want to talk about, hit the comments people!