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IronFist

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« on: May 29, 2005, 12:23:53 PM »
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« Last Edit: July 25, 2010, 11:32:55 PM by IronFist »

jitspoe

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Re: omg a new map: Marsh
« Reply #1 on: May 31, 2005, 12:52:11 PM »
I'm going to be brutally honest here.  I don't like it.  It's a big box.  r_speeds are high, considering.  There's no cover in the middle.  The terrain looks very unnatural, as do the flat rock walls with mixed textures.  Nothing makes sense about the towers -- the support post is made out of floor planks, as are the sides, and the edges of the sides are made of metal, while the inner edges of the floor are made of lights.  There's unsourced lighting underneath the outside of the tower.  Also, putting tiles in a wood fortress doesn't make sense, and they're not lined up with the edges, either, which makes even less sense.  You have a crap ton of weapons and stuff in the towers, too.  If you want everyone to have a particular weapon, spawn them with it, then selectively place one or two upgrades.  Also, there's no need to have like 4x's the equipment as players the map can feasibly support.  There are also some misaligned textures.  This is going by the screenshots.  I haven't had a chance to look at the map itself yet.

Sorry if I was a bit harsh, but this is 2005.  Yes, we're stuck with the crappy Q2 level format, but we can at least make designs that look remotely like something you'd see in real life.  Stop using other pb2 maps as inspiration.  Stop trying to whip out a map as fast as possible.  We have hundreds of crappy maps.  We need more quality ones.  Use current generation games for inspiration, like Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 2004, Call of Duty, etc.  It's kind of funny -- I was playing UT2k4 the other day and realized the 1-vs-1 maps they had were larger and more complex than the vast majority of pb2 maps.  We really need to push pb2 map design forward about a decade.

IronFist

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« Reply #2 on: May 31, 2005, 07:58:21 PM »
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« Last Edit: July 25, 2010, 11:32:44 PM by IronFist »

jitspoe

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Re: omg a new map: Marsh
« Reply #3 on: June 01, 2005, 11:48:15 AM »
A few more things, after having looked at it.  First of all, when you release a map for public testing, you need to give it some kind of beta extension, like Savage did with his map (read the do's an don'ts thread).  Second, the grass texture has a multitude of issues:
- Size isn't a power of 2, so it's going to get scaled and lose quality.
- There's already a highres grass texture that looks almost exactly like that.
- No low-res texture was included for those who need to disable highres textures.
Third, as I mentioned before, the terrain is unnatural looking, but also there are some areas too steep to walk up (particularly around the flag, which is a critical location).  If you make the terrain more gradual and use arghrad's phong shading feature, you could probably make it look much more realistic.  Fourth, the blue base has a significant advantage -- the board ramp is shorter, and you can easily get onto the base from the terrain without even using the ramp.  Also, the texture on the sides of the blue ramp board need to be rotated.  Last, the towers don't touch the walls -- you were probably doing that to reduce r_speeds, but as a side effect, no portals were created and VIS really did nothing for the bases -- that's probably why the epoly is so high, because all those weapons are visible, even though they are behind a wall.

The design might work, but most of it probably needs to be remade from scratch.

Termin8oR

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Re: omg a new map: Marsh
« Reply #4 on: June 05, 2005, 04:53:53 PM »
Wow, looks to me like you spent a lot of time and with a lot of brushs for this map, Nice Map.

-Termin8oR

Eiii

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Re: omg a new map: Marsh
« Reply #5 on: June 05, 2005, 04:57:16 PM »
Yeah, right. Just whip up a random heightmap and put it through that tool who's name i can't remember.