Some History

My name is Don Carson, I am a freelance Illustrator and Designer. I most recently worked for Walt Disney Imagineering as a Show Designer, responsible for the artistic designs of several Disney Theme Park attactions. I am also a fan of 3D computer games. It is my belief that the potential of these games is only in it's infancy. I worked for a short time with Sierra Online and became fascinated by the challange of creating theatrically immersive environments within the limitations of todays 3D game technology. It was my feeling that with cleaver use of lighting effects, and pre-lighted textures, an extra depth could be achieved in these 3D worlds. Millstone was my first attempt at this theory.

I am a devoted Mac user and Steve Israelson's wonderful Marathon map editing program "Phorte v2.0a14" was, by far, the easiest way for me to experiment. I found it easy to adjust the designed environment's ceiling heights, light levels, and preview these without jumping in and out of the game engine. My Millstone Map (available for downloading) was designed as a test to see how far I could push the atmosphere of the 3D world. There are no weapons or sprites running around, only the environment to explore. It eventually became a showcase for the textures, and if you are interested I encourage you to download it and take a look.

Personally I have not tried it, but I imagine they could! Each texture is 128 pixels by 128 pixels (Marathon standard), and "should" work in games like DOOM, with possibly mixed results. If anyone has any success I would love to see it! You will of course have to save each texture individually off of the Textures Page and insert them using that game's own Texture/Map editor(s). The Millstone Map & Shapes files are designed to work only with Bungie's Marathon 2 engine.

There are two reasons: The first reason was, I wanted to try to create a sort of "Cartoon Noir" world to explore. I had not seen anything quite like it on the market and thought it would give it an original look. The second reason was time. With a black & white world I didn't have to mess with palettes and could focus on the mood of the environments rather than worrying whether certain texture colors "worked" with the others around them. Think of it as an old classic horror movie or an early B&W Hitchcock film.

One of the problems I observed in playing various Mac & PC first-person games, was the flatness of the textured walls. I knew from the theatrical theme park world that extra depth could be achieved by painting the shadows on simple flats. In some cases, the 3D textures used in these games are about as convincing as exploring a world made up of upright playing cards. It was my desire to let the textures do a lot of the work for me. These textures were created traditionally, then a PhotoShop lighting filter was applied to them. This gave the flat textures extra depth. The only time this technique does not work is on large expansive arena sized areas. In that case the multipule repeating pattern of lighted textures becomes distracting. This is why the Millstone Map sticks to relatively small sized rooms and corridors. The original textures were drawn as 256x256, for better control of detail, than reduced to fit the Marathon format.