flatearth_arena by TiNi

[Tini]

Hello,

I present to you, my first installment of possibly many more to my wonderful map repertoire; Flatearth_Arena.   

I wanted to give mapping a go with my first Pub/cheese 2v2/3v3 map similarly to dhemap and daylight. This current pandemic gave me some extra free time. I think it has a good and fun theme that is troll in nature for teams like [ b ]allers to play on. 

The map was aimed to emulate the map of the flatearth theory; ie they believe the world is surrounded by a ring of ice.  There's an infinite amount of combination jumps due to this unique ring of ice.  The mid game play is too slow and doesn't contrast well with the ice-ring but oh well.  I would had liked to of scaled this map down probably by 25 percent too. 

I will work on adjustments accordingly based on feedback.  thank you all papa bless

[3lf]

The grass texture doesn't tile that well, you can see the seams clearly. Crates are misaligned.

Gameplay-wise the map was fun and could be a blockbuster pub map IF it wasn't 6k wpoly. I get just unplayable performance. There are some 90 degree angles in the mid that you get stuck on and lose the momentum. Lighting looks nice

[redguy]

Hi, i gave your map a quick look. I don't want to nitpick everything, i think you will definitely work on your mapping, but here are the most important things.

First of all, try to follow the given guidelines before releasing a map.
- give it a beta extension, your map is clearly not finished
- I'm pretty sure that you used custom textures. Zip your map before releasing and put every other media in it (Be sure to include the correct directory structures).
- fix all leaks. I found several leaks on your map, which is pretty much the biggest no-go in a map. Load the point file (TB) which will lead you to the leaks.

Mapping wise:
- try to get a better brushwork and avoid overlapping brushes. Look at the first sshot (ice_brush) to see what i mean.
-> low felt awkward. i barely could get the "perfect momentum" out of it, mainly because of the way itself (I'm blaming myself on this and the wand brushes that are sticking out.
- try to align textures right at the start. Use the scale tool if you are scaling brushes down, the textures will automatically scale with the brushes in this case. Most importantly, the top of the barrels should be aligned correctly. Select the faces for this.
- think about visblocker. Your map is pretty much an open space, and the engine - which the game is based on - is not made for such maps (we even experienced server sided lags because of bad vis'ing in previous social saturdays). You used many smaller brushes and wpoly reaches up to +5000 (it is shown red for a reason .

There are also some aesthetics that could be improved.
Try to set the flag on the middle of the cappoint, it doesn't has to be the perfect middle, but it really shouldn't be ugly placed like that.
Also, try to work on the smoothness in your map overall, the "terrain" is weirdly placed at some points (example: "terrain" sshot).

The map is overall really fun . I really liked the jumps, the ice-circle and the possibility to use a low-path to grab flag. Opens up many ways for a fun and intense gameplay!

[Tini]

thank you for your suggestions i'm going to revisit the map this week and work on the edits

[jitspoe]

Seems you've just shared the bsp file and not the textures?  Or did I miss those?  As others have mentioned, the grass texture doesn't tile.  It also looks bad (really bad jpeg compression artifacts or it isn't a power of 2 size [64, 128, 256, 512, etc]).

r_speeds are REALLY high.  There's a lot of things that can be done to improve that, like remove the "flatearth arena" text on the sides, make the terrain brushes larger, and fix all the little edges and gaps.  Going further, you could add visibility blockers so you can't see the whole map at once.

Almost nothing is aligned.  You probably want  to use a grid size of 32 when doing most of the layout stuff, then switch to something smaller for things like the railings and other details.  Also, you need to scale the crate textures down to .5 so they align with the smaller brushes.  Too many things to point out.  In all honesty, it would probably take less work to rebuild the map with a larger grid size and keep everything aligned than to try to fix what you've got here.

Try to make your terrain more deliberate.  Minimize the number of brushes used to create hills and stuff.  You've got things that at a large scale look very blocky (big rectangular hill) but then a whole bunch of little brushes inside of that that just make it all jagged.  Instead try using 4 or 5 large brushes with various slopes and angles to make a hilly area that's not rectangular and looks more natural.

Which editor are you using?  Clipping planes are your friend for things like terrain and rocks.

[Rick]

I heard there was high r_speeds, so I had to add more. I am the king of r_speeds.

On a serious note, good attempt at your first map!

[jitspoe]

When I saw how much you'd cleaned up the geo, I figured the r_speeds would be much lower.  I was wrong.  My poor computer was dropping to like 100fps WITHOUT other players and paint flying around.  Lower end machines are really going to struggle.  Looks nice, and I like some of the creative things you've done with the texture usage, but there are probably a lot of tweaks that can be done to cut back on the r_speeds.  ex: railings could be the same thickness of the posts so the geometry lines up flush and doesn't add a ton of extra triangles due to the splitting.  Not sure if that'll help enough, though, because fundamentally it's a massive, open area with no vis blockers.

Really surprised to see you release more than 1/4 of a map though.  You feeling OK?

[Rick]

This was only to give TiNi some inspiration, I sent him the map file privately... so I still don’t count this as a completed map by me