Digital Paint Discussion Board
Development => Mapping => Beta / In-Progress Maps => Topic started by: shockk on January 11, 2015, 04:21:02 AM
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Hi, I started working on this before the holidays and although it's my first bsp map, I think it's a good idea and will be fun. This map is made for CTF matching. Two bases, each with a main flag and a side base area with an upper and lower level. The upper level of the bases feature a 2nd flag, each right near mid. Mid low below these flags is the white flag surrounded by lava. On the bottom level of each base there is a small circular wall which has an ice patch which allows speed across the bottom level of the bases. This speed path allows a person to quickly grab flag 1 in the base and speed up to main ice along the opposite side of the map.
The main ice speed on the opposite side of each base has its entrances accessible by a simple ladder or double jump. Also capping by rushing from this speed to the cap spot (at flag 1) allows for easy capping because the cap area is set high above the first flag just like napalm's is.
The middle of the main ice speed can look towards the rest of the map through a glass panel I have made shootable. I wanted this to be a one way shooting glass for the people not on ice, but have compensated by adding a couple obstacles on the ice path to make it a bit more difficult to speed and shoot. The ice speed also has an entrance to a teleport path, which a player can choose to use if they wish to avoid the fire they are taking from others on the map. They are then teleported directly to the white flag at low mid opposite side. So teleporting can have benefits by grabbing but also puts you back in open territory.
I put 5 spawn spots in each base, 1 in the higher level to even it out and hopefully avoid spawning. I also put some guns out in case a player wants to switch from the one they spawn with. I also placed a few ammo boxes around.
I do want this to be a map that can be matched quickly, that's why it is set up the way it is. There are a few cool jumps that can also be done but aren't worth explaining here right now.
White flag = 2 pts
Main base flags = 4 pts
2nd base flags = 7 pts
Let me know what you think. The map is at 401 numportals right now.
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pictures
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a few more
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From the sshots, the outdoor area looks a little over-bright. You may want to consider toning down sun_light a little.
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I think I used the standard sun brightness, and the sky is a bit cloudy in map so it's not bad. I'll check it out though
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The one really bright spot, though, is the room with the wall made of lights. By default, these lights are ridiculously bright, especially in an indoor setting, so you may want to adjust the brightness of that wall.
I'll take a look at the map later today if I have time.
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Okay thanks. Maybe it is too bright, it looked normal on my screen tho I'll change my settings up and look again
I did want it to be slightly blinding to also compensate for the fact that I couldn't get a shoot through one-way wall.
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Anyone else think of anything? I don't know where to go from here
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I think this map is very good, and nicely done. But if I were make it I would leave only main flag + white flag. This map is too small for 3 flags, and it would be too easy to finish and win match.
ALso likeBase said, this room with Ice and wall full of lights texture is too bright. I would change surface for 500? Or just make it brightness to 0 and add some color light entities. I think it would look better.
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updated OP file to beta 2, lowered the brightness in the ice speed room
the top light wall was 5000 brightness, but the bottom one was 50,000 so I changed it to 5000
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I still don't like this lights... If this is what you want, good. But for me it's just ugly. Too bright, floor looks like bright-white-sth without textuxre. It just looks so flat.
Rest level is very good, except flag amounts :P
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This map looks cool, I like it :)
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I definitely need some light there, would it look better if I lowered the brightness more? Maybe I'll remove the top wall of light...
And the flag pts stay! It's a cap fest :p
Thanks knuddle :)
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I definitely need some light there, would it look better if I lowered the brightness more? Maybe I'll remove the top wall of light...
Ok, flag can stay ;)
You can try lowering light's, but I think you should try make light entities and choose some color 'nearly' white. Mayby some verylight blue would be good for "ice room" like this. Make this "lights" surface to be just normal brush, and create light non-brush entities. But you should decide what you like best ;) That's my personal opinion ^^
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That's definitely possible too, I have lanterns at the top of the ice room, I could create another kind of light entity for the big wall. Maybe i'll check out some architecture and build something cool ;)
I appreciate the criticism
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I've uploaded your map to the beta server and sent you a PM on how to connect and load it.
Some quick feedback:
- Keep all your water levels at the same height. It has to draw the reflection for each water level, and by default only renders 2 reflections. You've got 3 different water heights. That kills r_speeds and causes some of the reflections not to render.
- Make the ice area next to the curved wall more obvious. I didn't realize it was ice at first. Knowing it's ice makes the jumps a lot easier.
- On the note of ice, you should not make the lantern things block you. Maybe put them on the opposite side, or use clip brushes or do something different to light that area. Kind of annoying to run into them.
- Lots of the map looks like it's not aligned on a 32 unit grid. There are slivers of block textures and such visible when everything should just match up perfectly. Snap everything you can at a 32unit grid, and it'll make editing a lot easier and things will look better, too.
- Some of the ladders are unnaturally huge.
- Missing a texture, and it has a very questionable name (pornlava).
- Barrels are misaligned (off by 1/3).
I think that's enough feedback for now. Carry on!
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- Missing a texture, and it has a very questionable name (pornlava).
All the porn* textures were made by a dude from q3 named pornstar. Awesome texture packs. Here's a link to it:
https://mega.co.nz/#F!TIV1kIAL!9IHGJGrFXIVjlm7xq7JNiA (https://mega.co.nz/#F!TIV1kIAL!9IHGJGrFXIVjlm7xq7JNiA)
It goes in 'pornstar-custom/pornlava.wal'
(http://puu.sh/fZIsL/a1da7942a8.png)
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I've uploaded your map to the beta server and sent you a PM on how to connect and load it.
Some quick feedback:
- Keep all your water levels at the same height. It has to draw the reflection for each water level, and by default only renders 2 reflections. You've got 3 different water heights. That kills r_speeds and causes some of the reflections not to render.
- Make the ice area next to the curved wall more obvious. I didn't realize it was ice at first. Knowing it's ice makes the jumps a lot easier.
- On the note of ice, you should not make the lantern things block you. Maybe put them on the opposite side, or use clip brushes or do something different to light that area. Kind of annoying to run into them.
- Lots of the map looks like it's not aligned on a 32 unit grid. There are slivers of block textures and such visible when everything should just match up perfectly. Snap everything you can at a 32unit grid, and it'll make editing a lot easier and things will look better, too.
- Some of the ladders are unnaturally huge.
- Missing a texture, and it has a very questionable name (pornlava).
- Barrels are misaligned (off by 1/3).
I think that's enough feedback for now. Carry on!
Jitspoe I appreciate the feedback. And thanks for uploading it to the server I'll check your pm.
I'll work on this stuff when I get a chance. Currently slacking on schoolwork haha
I agree the lanterns do get annoying, I'll move them to the opposite side.
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Okay I made b3, added to the original post
- The light wall by the ice speed is smaller now
- I changed the ponds in the middle of the map to the same level as the lava, so I think that's just 2 water heights now.
- I didn't do anything about the ice beside the curved wall. It is difficult to spot at first but realized if I changed the colour of those ice textures it would look sloppy and the ice brushes aren't a nice curve shape like the wall. It's a bit more blocky.
- The lanterns were moved to the opposite side and don't block the path anymore.
- will the pornlava texture not be downloaded automatically if someone loads the map? Is there another texture I should use for lava
- I didn't know what to do about the barrels misalignment so I left them as is
- A few more small changes
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Uploaded to the beta server & played it a little.
Some things I noticed:
- The colored bar things next to the lava have some gaps that look large enough to fit through, but you can't, so it's really frustrating when you get stuck. Consider spacing these so it's plainly obvious which ones you can squeeze by.
- I'd do away with the second water. The map has pretty high r_speeds for what it is already. The second water doesn't really add anything. I'd also consider making the ground less steep there. You've got kind of a unique bunker with the one-way visibility, but it's super awkward to play around because of the hill and water.
- For the lava, you could use the purple metal texture (like in bombsaway). If you're going to use a custom texture, make sure you put it in the appropriate directory. It looks like it's using the pball texture directory. Custom textures should use their own directories.
- For the barrel alignment, since it looks like all the barrels are misaligned the same amount, you can just select them all (in BSP, you can select by texture), make sure they're unlocked (alt+U), move them up ~22 units (or whatever it takes to align them), lock them (alt+l), and move them back down.
- Spawning up high can give you a big advantage. Not sure if that's good or bad.
- Lots of textures are still misaligned (blocks on the walls next to the ground are the most obvious to me).
I'm not sure there's much you can do about it without major changes, but you really need to keep visibility in mind. You have windows/transparency pretty much everywhere, which means all the map and players will be rendered all the time. This is bad for both networking and rendering performance. On future maps, you should try to break the map up so not everything is visible at once.
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-Are there any other options I could use for that second water to slow movement down there? I have the current set there but it only pulls you in the set direction when youre standing still. Moving it doesn't affect it at all.
-Ill try to rearrange the mini pillars
-can I move that custom lava texture to a proper directory for it to work right? I really wanted lava and not the purple paint
-I'm not sure how big the advantage on the top spawn is, I think I'll need to play it a bit more to find out
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What are you trying to accomplish on the water hill? The water is much lower, meaning you'll only be slowed by it if you go almost all the way down the hill. You could bring it up to the same level as the other water, which would reduce the number of reflections. I'd consider just doing away with it, though. It just seems like a mild annoyance.
You can move the texture to an appropriate directory (or make your own) -- just don't use the pball texture directory. I would also suggest finding a texture that has a high resolution (probably 256x256) version. If the one you used was a .wal file designed for quake2, the colors probably won't be correct, as Paintball2 uses a different palette.
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It was simply meant to slow movement down in the area, as walking is fine on that slant, but trying to strafe the whole section base to base quickly will cause you to fall in at some point due to the physics. I'll see if it's a small change of water height as that might do, but I did want the water to cause an inconvenience for moving fast in that area.
Okay, I'll try changing the texture subfolder to pornstar-custom/ as mentioned by ace in bsp editor and paintball for the next beta.
edit: I changed the directory to textures/pornstar-custom/..
I hope quickly changing this in bsp editor will be enough to make it work properly as a few people have mentioned they don't have the texture downloaded when they enter the map, because of this directory issue?
also it is only a .wal file in bsp editor.... in my pball folder it is a .tga, does this make a difference?
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you can use whatever file format that is compatible. the wal. file just tells the client where tolook for it. .tga should be compatible.
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You'll also have to share the file so it can be uploaded to a server. I'd save it as a jpg with a quality of 96 or so. TGA files are large because they have no compression.
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Ace had sent me the textures on a different forum post http://dplogin.com/forums/index.php?topic=27513.0
is tga okay or should I change it to jpg? would I have to change the map file to jpg as well?
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Paintball looks for a textures with any of the extensions, whichever is there will be loaded. I know wal are looked for after TGA/JPG, but I'm not so sure what order TGA and JPG are loaded in. The point is the map file is fine as is. You could convert to a JPG to save some download size if you want. The texture is pretty large, so the quality loss shouldn't be a big deal.
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Here (http://dplogin.com/forums/index.php?topic=27008.0) jitspoe said that the order of loading images / textures is png, jpg, tga, pcx/wal.
I suggest using jpg as jitspoe mentioned, TGA is a lossless format so I guess converting the images to jpeg could decrease the size by more than 50% without a real loss in visible quality. I just tested it with the pornlava.tga (1MB), exporting it as a jpeg picture with a quality of 90 makes it 187KB large while keeping the quality at a point where I would not be able to tell which picture is the compressed one.