Concourse of the Crown

A deathmatch map for 4–10 players, about 90 × 85 m. Every zone has one colour, one light and one landmark, so you can tell where you are from any single frame.

Relief materials

• Every surface is a heightfield, marched per pixel inside a thin shell under the polygon. Joints, tie holes, rivets, louvre blades, grating bars and coffers have real depth, occlude each other and shift with parallax. The geometry is the same simple sectors and solids as before.
• Detail fades by how far the relief would move on screen, not by distance. Below half a pixel of parallax a surface is two texture fetches and reads as a clean, classic texture; up close it gets up to 32 march steps, a secant refine, and a short self-shadow march toward the sun or the strongest baked light. Steps shows the cost; Flat turns the march off.
• 16 layers are baked on the GPU at load from procedural programs: sintered regolith and precast concrete, exposed-aggregate pavers, cast treads, a coffered soffit, plain seamless cast concrete, brushed stainless, ground and polished slab, lapped riveted plate, checker plate, bar grating, hazard plate, louvres, crazed glazed tile, techbase panels and perforated deck. Each is two mipmapped array layers: colour + roughness, and normal + height.
• Shoot the walls. Bullets and craters (right-click) carve into the same heightfield, scorch the surface and glow briefly, then heal over about 15 seconds.
• Used-future techbase. Vent Hall panels come from a kitbash generator: each 1 m panel is recursively subdivided into sub-panels, proud or recessed, and every leaf is a working part (pipe runs with clamps, ribbing, cable looms, bolt strips, turned bosses, vents, hatches, conduit boxes, stencils). Five seeds give five variants, picked per panel.
• Wear follows the geometry. A second bake pass reads each heightfield's curvature: grime and oil pack into crevices, edges polish to bare metal, and dirty runs streak down from every ledge.
• Micro-detail. Up close, a second library of 0.25 m micro-materials (orange-peel paint, brushed steel, rust scale, concrete fines, oily grime, crazed glaze, polished stone) adds about 0.5 mm detail, clean or worn per pixel, rotated per panel so it never tiles. It fades out by footprint, so distant pixels pay nothing.
• Water. Puddles fill the heightfield's recesses first (joints, then low slabs, then craters), with a dark wet rim, sky reflections and glints; walls get rising damp, a crusted tide line and drip runs from the tops of faces.
• Quality (Q) sets render scale, the step cap, self-shadowing and micro-detail.

Lighting

• Baked indirect light is stored per 25 cm lightmap texel as L1 spherical harmonics: the light arriving from each direction, not one colour. Any per-pixel normal reads it correctly, whether it comes from a flat face, a normal map or ray-marched relief.
• The bake runs in your browser when the page opens, in web workers: a BVH over the map's triangles, then direct light, then two bounces gathered over the hemisphere. A quick 16-ray pass appears first, then the 48-ray result replaces it.
• Static lights stay live. Each gets one of four shadow-mask channels. The mask stores only visibility, and the light itself is shaded per pixel, so specular and relief respond to its real direction. Lights that cannot get a channel (the Halo's ring of fill lights) are baked into the SH.
• The sun is never baked. It comes from a 4096² shadow map over the whole map, about 3 cm per texel, so its edges stay hard. It is high and from the north, so at noon the Sump's light well drops a pool of sun on the Red Armor.
• Views: Light shows lighting on grey, Bounce shows only the baked indirect light, and Unbaked turns the lightmap off for comparison. The bake time and ray count are in the panel.

Zones

• Atrium of the Crown (centre, open sky). A sunken courtyard ringed by a two-level arcade, four pinwheel stairs, and a stepped plinth. The Quad Damage floats on the Crown slab 9 m up, under the Halo. Reach it only by the plinth jump pad, which leaves you visible from every gallery.
• Red Hall (west). Rusted plates, hazard bands, red light. The Rocket Launcher sits on a narrow bridge over a slime pit; the Mega Health is in the pit itself, reachable by the pit stairs. Catwalks wrap three sides.
• Blue Cistern (east). A flooded pillar hall. The Railgun is in a lit niche at the end of the long axis, so whoever holds it sees the whole hall and the atrium gate. The Yellow Armor is on the mezzanine, reached by stairs or by the cistern jump pad.
• Amber Cascade (south). Three short flights falling into the Sump, with terraces on either side looking down.
• The Sump (far south). The lowest point of the map, under a single sky shaft. The Red Armor stands on a pedestal in the shaft's light, overlooked by balconies on three sides.
• Vent Hall (north). Green-lit, with pillars as strafe cover and the Plasma Gun in the middle. It leads to the teleporter, which throws you onto the Red Hall west catwalk.
• Corridors. Two upper corridors join the Vent Hall to both side halls at gallery height; two lower service corridors join the side halls to the Sump, with long stairs.

Item loops

• Power loop: Red Armor (Sump) → Cascade → Atrium plinth pad → Quad. About 25 s, and every step is exposed.
• West loop: Rocket Launcher → pit stairs → Mega Health → catwalk stairs → north door → upper corridor → Vent Hall → teleporter, back onto the west catwalk.
• East loop: Railgun niche → pad → Yellow Armor → north door → upper corridor → Lightning Gun on the NW gallery → atrium → east gate.
• Lower ring: Super Shotgun (SE arcade) → south gates → service corridors → Sump. Safe but slow.

Sight lines

• West gate → Crown → east gate → Railgun niche: one 80 m line through the whole map, broken only by the plinth and the cover blocks.
• The four galleries see the Crown and each other; arcade pillars give cover below them.
• Sump balconies look straight down onto the Red Armor; the shaft light makes anyone on the pedestal easy to see.

Controls

Jump pads fire when you step on them. R or the Respawn button cycles the 15 spawn points. The minimap shows items: ◆ power-ups, ▲ weapons, ■ armor and health.