First off, where the hell is your TS3 info? Can't find it anywhere. Would love to get on and talk to you guys.

Now to the point of this post. A while ago I got verbal permission from Cloak (Invis' brother) to clean up Proving Grounds. Last night Fokker came on our Mumble and we played on your CTF server for a bit. I was disappointed that I had to download a 60 megabyte file for Proving Grounds. I then remembered my plans long ago that I would clean up this map.

So, today I wrote an email to Cloak. The rest of this forum post is my email to Cloak which describes how I changed Proving Grounds. It also has a link to the updated map.

Also, I don't check your forums often, so if you want to contact me please PM me and/or give me your TS3 info.

=========================

Hey dude, I hope you're doing well.

So, I finally decided to clean up your brother's Proving Grounds map.
I'm writing this email to get "official permission" to make my work
public. I was on the FSK405 server last night and was really
disappointed when I had to download a 60 megabyte file to play a
relatively small map. It is a very nice map, and I want to put it on
my servers too, but not in its 60 megabyte state. A classic map,
really.

Here is the cleaned up version of your brother's map:
http://daffy.nerius.com/maps/ut4_provinggrounds_.pk3
It's a 10 megabyte file now. It used to be 60 megabytes (yes, 6x as
large as what I have created now).

Here is the things that I have done to it to make it smaller:

1. The first step involved just removing resources from the original
PK3 file (which is just a ZIP file renamed). After carefully
examining the map, I removed all resources in the original PK3 that
were not used in Proving Grounds. There were lots of them. The PK3
for Proving Grounds was cluttered with all sorts of Crenshaw stuff. I
determined what wasn't being used via a laborious process which
involved analyzing the compiled BSP file and all shader files included
in the original Proving Grounds PK3. By just removing unused
resources and LEAVING ALL OTHER RESOURCES UNMODIFIED, I was able to
reduce the PK3 file size to 30 megabytes (a factor of two savings).

2. I then proceeded to rename some resources so that the original
ut4_provinggrounds name would not conflict with the new map. I
decided to rename it to ut4_provinggrounds_ (with an underbar at the
end). I did the following:
a. Renamed maps/ut4_provinggrounds.bsp to
maps/ut4_provinggrounds_.bsp (no modifications made).
b. Renamed levelshots/ut4_provinggrounds.tga to
levelshots/ut4_provinggrounds_.tga (no changes).
c. Renamed maps/ut4_provinggrounds.TGA to
maps/ut4_provinggrounds_.TGA (no changes).
d. Renamed scripts/ut4_provinggrounds.arena to
scripts/ut4_provinggrounds_.arena.
e. Modified the contents of scripts/ut4_provinggrounds_.arena to
reflect new name.

3. Finally, I wanted to make the map smaller (it was now at 30
megabytes). I converted all .tga images that do not contain
transparency to .jpg, using GIMP and saving them with 90% quality
settings (pretty high quality, higher than default). I now have a 10
megabyte PK3 file as a result.

You can play this map, and you'll see that it looks the same as your
brother's original. I carefully went around the map to verify that
nothing was botched. In fact, the FPS seems to have improved (I don't
know why).

Could you run this by your bro? In particular, the BSP file in my new
PK3 is 100% the original file from his original 60 megabyte PK3. The
only "real" changes are that I've converted some of the TGA image
files to JPG.

I also want to give this new file to the FSK405 guys. I think this
map could be a pretty big hit, even though it was released 3 years
ago.

- Rambetter

Thanks for cleaning that map up! Their TS3 is FSK405.com, default port.

Thanks for the effort many of us really enjoy Provinggrounds but rarely play it due to the size of the download and past FPS issues. I have uploaded the revised version and we will play it tonight and add to our next months map cycle if the map tests out well.


As for Team Speak 3

out Team Speak 3 IP is: fsk405.com -or- ts3.fsk405.org
both IP's should resolve to: 74.53.204.82

feel free to join anytime.