Here's yet another article after a long period of inactivity. Man I can't believe the last article I wrote was in June, I was about to finish my internship back then, and now I'm continuing my education in hopes of attaining a better future for myself. Be warned, this article will be a feast for your eyes.
ttt_exclusion is a map that I've had laying around for a few years. I'm talking about December 2019, same period of time that evil cluster B whore shattered my heart and stuck a knife in my back and killed me. I want to believe this is what inspired me to make such a depressing and empty feeling map. I had been into S.T.A.L.K.E.R for a few years before that so maybe this event in my life was the catalyst that forced my hands. Even now, my mapping efforts and fueled purely by spite and bitterness.
I'm not sure if I always intended to make this a TTT map or simply a do whatever you want Sandbox style map, neither do I remember why I stopped working on it so early in development, although I can imagine why, same thing as always, same thing with the rest of my maps, I start projects and never intend to finish them or they become too complex to turn into a reality with the skills I have at the time.
But I like to think that this time it will be different. This is why I have placed Lonely's Fightclub in an indefinite hiatus, and until then, I'll be working on this map.
Just a few weeks ago I resumed development after booting it up and seeing the potential in it. I just flew around in noclip and started spawning NPCs and I was like "I already did half of
the work, I could work on it a bit further and release it", and ever since then I've been slowly grinding away at it.
And indeed, half of the work was already done, I only had to expand it a bit further to have a playable TTT map. The parts shown in the pictures above are some of the first ever worked on for this map. It consists of two mirrored office buildings, one of them with running electricity and acting as a makeshift military outpost, while the other one is totally abandoned and only illuminated by ambient lighting.
These are some of the first photos ever taken of this map. I quite like the lighting in the second picture, so I'll bring it back. Third one shows the early stages of the untitled factory which I'll get to in a moment.
Some older pictures (except the third one that's new) that bring me to my next point regarding the map, I want to talk about radiation for a moment. At first I wanted to include pockets of radiation marked with these signs which would damage the players over time, but then I thought that would be lame. As I develop the map further, I might reuse this idea to block off the map limits. Something like a heap of radioactive trash that would make it impossible for the players to leave the designated area the map takes place in.
Newer photos showing that mystery factory from before, this time with an actual interior. Not a whole lot to say about it except that the ceiling mounted crane ripped straight out of Episode 2 can be moved around and rotated.
Here's a quite realistic electrical substation, not much to say about it. It breaks countless safety standards by not putting up fencing around the electrical bits. It's an area I want to revisit in the future, as I find it to be too open and sniper friendly. I fixed this issue in the other areas by placing more foliage around the place.
Some of the locations scattered around the 3D skybox, you got the brain scorcher (while it's turned on), the Duga 1 radar array and Pripyat in the distance. There's more to this map but I wish I was given more time so I could write a shorter and more concise article.
