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I don't think we know why Plains was cut, same goes for Plantation House.

Most levels was worked on by most devs afaik, except the Town, that was most worked on by Brian Moore.

MinePass wrote:Found this last night. The image is of the player on top of the dam looking down at a pair of triceratops. Can be found on pg 5 in the image gallery.

Oh, right, that one too. I think there were a few more among the lot... must check the dscussion from back then when we got all those pictures.

tatu wrote:

and Tatu, we gotta find that heightmap. I don't care if it's in .RAW format or .BMP or even in a max file. It's gotta be found.

I know Glitch, I know. Trust, I have no given up yet. If it exist anywhere out there, we will find it. I hope I still will be lucky and bring more surprises to this community

It may be more than one. From what I can remember reading, they used several "layers" with various degrees of detail, and added them all up inside 3DS MAX to generate the actual terrain mesh...

MinePass wrote:Does anyone know why PH was cut? The Pl was cut due to issues and PV was cut due to bugs. Compared with the walkthrough aside from the start point, dividing mountain, and camp it's pretty spot on. The dividing mountain was probably put there to cut down the draw distance or something (point is its not supposed to be there). Did they have to pull people from that level to help on other areas?

I think an old interview with Richard Wyckoff by the old project PV team attributes some of it to performance problems. I doubt that was the only reason of course but iirc the idea was to allow you to see for miles in all directions. That had to be kinda rough on the engine at points. Especially if they intended on having tall grass.

I'm not even sure if the location of the Hunter's camp is right. There's an area to the right of the plantation house that has two little pits that kinda fits the trenches that the hunters set up.

glitchhunter09 wrote:I think an old interview with Richard Wyckoff by the old project PV team attributes some of it to performance problems. I doubt that was the only reason of course but iirc the idea was to allow you to see for miles in all directions. That had to be kinda rough on the engine at points. Especially if they intended on having tall grass.

I'm not even sure if the location of the Hunter's camp is right. There's an area to the right of the plantation house that has two little pits that kinda fits the trenches that the hunters set up.

Back before Far Cry 3 I used trespasser lets play videos for reference for my Far Cry 2 trespasser map and in one of those videos someone mentioned that the reason the PL was cut was because the dinosaurs couldn't function in large open spaces. And the limitation of how many dinosaurs that can be active at one time might also be the reason. Recently I thought of ways the devs. could have saved PL and one possible solution was to make this a night level. With it being night there would be fewer herbivores out and the player would of had a much more limited visual range (like the fog used in JPDS levels)

ooh.... I'll have to take a look at that . And your right the hunters camp is not in the right location, according to the walthrough its supposed to be east of the monorail path. It also mentions that the hunters labeled the house as a POSSIBLE secondary base but that's it. The only hunter evidence there is a bike helmet and gun. Theory, the camp seen in game is the main one from the movie, some where down stream is where the baby Rex was chained, and the secondary base was established as a look out point with a few barriers erected (no vehicles or heavy equipment).

PL surely had an ingame version at some point; Tatu's version of IT without the PL/dam area should be evidence enough. ..

Tatu, thanks, will have to check the DL section later.

MinePass wrote: And your right the hunters camp is not in the right location, according to the walthrough its supposed to be east of the monorail path. It also mentions that the hunters labeled the house as a POSSIBLE secondary base but that's it. The only hunter evidence there is a bike helmet and gun. Theory, the camp seen in game is the main one from the movie, some where down stream is where the baby Rex was chained, and the secondary base was established as a look out point with a few barriers erected (no vehicles or heavy equipment).

The location I was talking about is just east of the plantation house if we use the Construction site as north and northwest of the hunters camp music trigger on the other side of the mountain the riverbed passes by. I have a screenshot of it hang on a sec.



Here it is. There's a similar one on the opposite side. This may be something else but I'm not really sure. The trenches kinda remind me of the ones described in the walkthrough.

As for the music, They may have just been using triggers to test music as on certain maps (notably IJ) certain music tracks are either in the wrong place (eg the final battle music playing at the beginning of IJ or the Helicopter crash theme playing somewhere other than where the helicopter actually is) or are off by a few feet. (eg Cathy's beach)

glitchhunter09 wrote:

Here it is. There's a similar one on the opposite side. This may be something else but I'm not really sure. The trenches kinda remind me of the ones described in the walkthrough.

As for the music, They may have just been using triggers to test music as on certain maps (notably IJ) certain music tracks are either in the wrong place (eg the final battle music playing at the beginning of IJ or the Helicopter crash theme playing somewhere other than where the helicopter actually is) or are off by a few feet. (eg Cathy's beach)

I've been wondering what this is too. This is in the middle of the IJ stream, as it starts furture back towards the PH steam.

As for the music. Some of the music are totally only placed as test or to show them off. However, I do believe the helicopter music in IJ is NOT displaced. In E3 if you check underground, the joystick for the helicopter can be found directly below the music, while in the PCGamer version it is removed as the helicopter is moved to the swamp. My theory is that the small stream towards the mountain is where they first intended (or at some point) to place the helicopter. The music is still left there in b96 IJ. It is possible the helicopter were in there before E3, but they removed it (and missed the joystick) to not reveal it during E3.

I'll still have to take a look to get the full scope of that area but I think I found those during my first play-through or at least the first one. They might have been added just for the preview and would have been removed when they brought over the IJ stream. Nice find Tatu, I went over there to see if the Monolith was there and found that track by chance, if I remember correctly there's a fallen tree around there.

The monolith wasn't added until sometime after build 96. So your efforts were in vane lol. And you could be right, but I think there's more to it than that Tatu. If you'll notice, the helcopter's new location looks like it was caught on fire at some point. Due to all the dead grass and trees. Perhaps, this is the fire Anne mentions in a Voice over and it was started by the helicopter crash!

"Hammond never mentioned a fire… I wonder how it started?"

And granted, I know it may have something to do with the Hunters' camp as well, but you never know. (unless Anne's script specifies so)

Also, while I'm on the subject, there's a discrepancy with the directions of things in PH and the Hammond Voice overs.

"We took a shortcut south to reach the site – west along the stream, until a tall tree shows itself, with a cluster of boulders at its base."

"Then walked northward, until the path appears."

The directions seem off to me. Mainly because the PH is located Westward of what should be an indicator of north according to the 1997 walkthrough (construction site) At no point to the PH do you actually walk south except for the river bed section and that's technically. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but maybe the directions are off? I mean, there's not even a real stream in a literal sense. Just a dried riverbed with puddles here and there.

If someone can explain at what point during the trip to the PH hammond was getting his directions from, that would be great. Otherwise, these voice overs might be for something other than PH.

The "Hammond never mentioned a fire… I wonder how it started?" voice over I am 100% was suppose to be at the Hunters Camp. Anne's voice over script is actually in proper order of how they were suppose to be placed, and I'm pretty sure that voice over is close to the Hunters Camp location.

I guess it is possible that the helicopter was only placed there once to try it out. Maybe they wanted it for E3 but decided to not show it, as in PCGamer it was moved to the Swamp, which also can be seen in one early screenshot we have.

Some "swamp" Looks more like an open field to me. I guess they never properly finished it.

More than one interesting theory here. I wonder if the log one must jump on in PH is the one indicated to have a cluster of boulders, at its base.

The "Hammond never mentioned a fire… I wonder how it started?" voice over I am 100% was suppose to be at the Hunters Camp. Anne's voice over script is actually in proper order of how they were suppose to be placed, and I'm pretty sure that voice over is close to the Hunters Camp location.

That's definitely true. I think the fire she is talking about was likely supposed to be started when Nick and Sarah sabotage the camp.

glitchhunter09 wrote:Some "swamp" Looks more like an open field to me. I guess they never properly finished it.

Yeah, that seems to be the case. The walkthrough has this entire area being a lake and then a swamp. Presumably they realized that this much water in one area would crash the game, so they never got around to it and instead replaced the entire area with the Blighted Forest.

machf wrote:OK, I uploaded 3 of the levels, you can find them in the downloads section.

Uploaded the 4th one, it's titled "Pine Valley 256x512". Look for it in the Downloads/Levels section.

Any idea if the heightmap pre-dates the E3 one?