Development of Desertruin

Desertruin has seen plenty of changes throughout the years. Often seen as one of the most iconic maps in both the GoldSrc mod and its sequel, the level set in a north african desert underwent through tweaks and overhauls for the intention of perfecting the map.

GoldSrc Map

The original Desertruin was released alongside the first official release of Pirates, Vikings and Knights, in December 2000.

On March 2016, Crazytalk ported the GoldSrc map onto Source and it's currently available on the Steam Workshop.

YeeHaa's Desertruin

Desertruin was one of the five original maps launched with the first official release of PVKII, back in January 2007.

Holy Grail Mode

The only known screenshots of Crazytalk's take on Desertruin, which would become Sandstorm, later in development.

After the release of Beta 2.2, in July 2008, Crazytalk and YeeHaa had plans for improving Desertruin visually and gameplay-wise, an overhaul which pre-dates Latteh's Desertruin by seven years. One major aspect of this new version of Desertruin was a big fort which was meant to replace the wooden towers, with an oasis inside and fully functioning garrisons. The few existent screenshots of this version of the map suggested that this new version of Desertruin would imply that a team had to defend the stronghold from the other two teams in a fashion similar to the castle in Island. However, throughout the development of Beta 2.3 the team decided to make an overhaul of the Territory game mode, being able to house multiple territories as many as the mapper desires. With Desertruin lacking landmarks other than the wooden towers, the team decided to migrate Desertruin onto Holy Grail mode, opening up previously closed paths, with the towers now being inaccessible, existing only for cosmetic purposes from then on. The version of Desertruin with the fort would be further developed and went on to become Sandstorm.

On December 2010 Desertruin migrated to the Trinket Wars game mode, for it improves several aspects of Holy Grail. Apart from that migration, only small tweaks in the lighting and the spawn locations were made. For the following years Desertruin only received really minor updates on improving its optimization. As time went on, players noted how dated the map looked dated compared to the rest of the official maps.

Latteh's Desertruin

Right after the release of the improved Sandstorm, an overhaul of Desertruin with updated visuals started development right away, in early 2015. While the main goal was to revamp the map's aesthetics and visuals, the changes on level design were kept to a minimum to prevent any exploits. On May 2015 it was revealed to the public that the map was in development, showcasing early screenshots of key areas of the map, such as the obelisk, which replaced the wooden towers. On June 2015, with the release of Beta 3.2, the map was accidentally leaked. A patch released later on removed the map from circulation.

This version of Desertruin boosts the geometry to levels of detail similar to fellow map Sandstorm, making use of Egyptian architecture instead of the more ambiguous, rustic look of YeeHaa's version. Several new props were created for this map, based on Ancient Egypt's architecture, such as sphinxes, pillars with hyeroglyphs, as well a new, more lush 3D skybox. Earlier versions of this map had bright lighting with a yellow hue and it was filled with props scattered around the level; as a result the map, although finished visually, it was cluttered with props and collision boxes which mangled the level design, not to mention that the lighting's brightness led to several visual bugs such as shading artifacts on models and brushes.

Latteh had to leave Desertruin unfinished due to getting a job at New World Interactive, the developers of Source Engine games such as Insurgency and Day of Infamy. With that, Colonel Sanders and Schatzmeister worked sporadically on the map, due to both dev members working on different projects inside PVKII, with Schatz working hard on Temple's improvements.

Roald's Improvements

In Late 2017, then-contributor Roald received the task of improving Latteh's map. Throughout the first half of 2018 the map went under a lot of cleansing, getting rid of the props obstructing the level, the lighting tweaked into a cold, orange hue, as well receiving new textures by Phone Booth and models by Momo.

The map was finally released on July 27th 2018 with The Desertruin Update. The update was released alongside a trailer showcasing the history of the map, from its GoldSrc origins to its final form.

Official Maps

Booty	Forgotten - Island - Pinegrove - Townsquare
Trinket Wars	Desertruin - Fort - Frostbite - Temple - Tortuga
Last Team Standing	Arena - Cathedral - Gravedanger - Town
Territory	Cara - Sandstorm - Tortuga
Deathmatch	Fort