as part of f0.am's tx00m project, I gave a 5 day workshop in groznjan, croatia-istria. the tx00m workshop was organised into two sections, game-space and play-space, both of which sought to engage and reinvent the site in different ways. play-space was built around a physical exchange with the site, using live action roleplay and groundplane renouncing 'derive' experiments. game-space however, was an interrogation of the physical composition of the site and sought to reinvent it within the technology of a video-game. initially the game-space workshop was going to be produced entirely in the Half-life engine, but due an overall enthusiasm for Linux, with a strong enough background amongst several of the particpants, we decided I should give the entire workshop in free software, at least up until the point of the Linux NVIDIA drivers and linux Quake3 ; )

being that there was only one modem on site the options of downloading required libraries and tools were grim, so it was necessary to bring a huge amount of data with me in order to ensure that as many things were covered as possible. luckily the immanent pix had a small universe of necessary bits and pieces and requisite greps to ensure that we were covered if out on a limb. a bizarre amalgamn of equipment was soon dumped onto our lap, weird cards and chipsets. all this ate our sleep for the first couple of days, and also my face, which apparently looked as broken and colourless as both the horrible Gericom we were trying to get hardware accelleration on [ and a local Croatian giant ].
[ they say blondes get it more often ]
the workshop attendees arrived that night and after a brief introduction to the workshop, modding and game-art
[ projected onto a beautiful old stone wall ] we began our mod of the little town of Groznjan.
a couple of the students has some 3D experience, yet none had mapping [level editing] experience. i showed them around gtkRadiant [our q3a level editor] and how to strategise world and world design. after a couple of days they were confidently mapping.

many hundreds of photographs were taken of the site and edited into useable textures, which were placed onto the world mesh as best as was able in the extermely short period of time available to us.
the game-space group met every night with play-space group who were actively researching and constructing mythologies relating to the site.
the design began as a huge tiered ontological diagram of some kind, charting the evolution of the player character across the meridians and thresholds of the playable universe. this however was far too ambitious given the 5 days participants had to build the project, and so brutal prioritisation of elements had to be enforced. one theme however was consistently retained through all designs, that of gronzjan being a floating citadel or castle - this relating to the topography of the site as groznjan is 240m above the surrounding groundplane. other elements like the blue fire, or light were also important. decay of corporeality at the perimeter also reresented a geographical falloff and transition into the afterlife.

to play it yourself download plot.zip unzip it into your QuakeIII baseq3 directory [where the other *.pak files are]. run QuakeIII and hit the ' ~ ' key. this pulls down the console.
in the console type, 'map masterplane1g' and hit return. if you can find the boat jump in it and wait ten seconds. it will leave the pier and take you for a tour.

game development team: nik gaffney / steven pickles / goran kuzmanovic / martin schlingmann/ misja van laatum / rob wilton / matjaz kaizer / peter faric / marko