Interstellar Structure, beta- and final thread.

[Hipshot]

Remember this?
http://www.quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9495
Yes you do!

Obviously a map that large would never work I who was aiming for a 1vs1 and all, but I got tired of that map and I started with a source map, about ~2 months ago I started this map again, redid alot of things, made it smaller, tighter, etc and I now I have this:




Now it's a very playabe map, plays poor with bots though, they can't understand the level really, but it doesen't matter, I mostly map for me and my friends to play at our LANs, well I did until they stoped playing FPS ~3 years ago, and now we don't LAN anymore at all :( Anyway, it's a beta, please comment it, bad/good, add/remove so I can release it as final. I have another Q3 map on the layout/design/brainstorm stage you see and I feel that I want to let this map go now :)

Before you write anything, I have already taken some notes on this release, please read them.

Code: Select all

* Bad detail inside (player feels a bit small), what to do about it? Pipes? Cables? What will happen to the overall fps?
* Items, add more? And where?
* Botplay's no good, a player with normal skills should be able to win over several Nightmare bots (this may probably never be fixed).
* No VIS-opt has been made at all.
* Uses detail textures, if you wanna see them ingame, use r_detailtextures 1.
* You need to jump before the slope to get the RA, or get it from the other side. Design decision. This will not change if the RA stays where it is.
* Poorly player clipped at the top, you can RL jump to most of the pilars, but not jump to all of them. 

I have a evaluation page here, where I write down notes and changes on the map, so if you say anything usefull I'll take down that. That page also disps the development from alpha 1, what has been changed on these few days.





Download = http://www.zfight.com/misc/files/q3/is-beta.rar ~13MB.

[Hex]

Certainly unique in look. (good thing) I liked the jumppads. Didn't try bots, or people, just ran around a bit.

Some areas of the whole sky were doing some weird gyrating and pulsing - on purpose? or was something malfunctioning? I couldn't make sense of it.

There was lots of funny vis stuff for me. Maybe just my rig, dunno. screenshots here http://www.mhgaming.com/forums/hipshotis5

(personal opinion nitpick) When the player falls to death - trigger the falling.wav a little bit earlier. Lose the ssss damage sound, thats usually associated with lava burning. Make him fall farther to let the falling wav play out almost fully and then die (gib instantly) only when he hits the very bottom. Like q3dm17 - but make the falling.wav trigger earlier. Kind of a nice touch if done right I think.

Some of those textures could be made smaller (filesize)? do you need 512x512 jpgs? I know for many people nowadays downloading big files isn't a problem, but theres going to be lots of graphic card texture memory swapping going on with the size of those textures. Also your thumbs.db files are in the pk3.


Otherwise, it looks ready to pak and ship. Nice job.

[Lenard]

I have already made a large portion of my opinion clear in the ss thread, but after actually playing it I have more feedback. I agree with hex on all his stuff. I don't know about the pulsating, but this is definitely one of the coolest skies I have ever seen. I personally love the layout but can't stand playing this without ramping. I am going to want to play this on loki's revenge. I am going to want to do that very soon. The weapon spawn decals are awesome. Nice touches alot of places. Placement looks good, although alot of it will be all rail. You did a good job of hiding LOS with random pillars and stuff though. The vertical element is superb in this map IMO. The feel of this map is perfect. It is realism but it is not. I can tell you have reserved the right to use whatever you want in your map to achieve your goal. This map is art imo.

[Hipshot]

Hmm, you are getting Zfighting (how ironic) on my lamps, windows, everything that is made like overlays, you re also getting zfighting in the skyportal, I can only relay this problem to either, you are playing with 16bpp, or maybe an ATI or nV has a lower z-buffer? (16bit), old card?. Please tell me, because I can only reproduce this error by lowering my bpp from 32 til 16, but I never play that way so I didn't notice it.

Also, if you play with very high settings, like I do, 1600x1200, 16AF, you could get moire effects in the portal, on the zfight (red statue) building, I will probably change that texture...

[Lenard]

I don't actually get most of those errors. I don't think I get any of them. Your map owns on lrctf btw, especially the highest portion where everything gets chopped off.

[Oeloe]

The gyrating/rotating saturn ring-like effect looks intentional to me (would look better if it rotated a bit slower i think), but the yellow effect (the yellow specks/stars) that bounces up and down just looks dumb. A little error in your shader?

I don't use an ugly cfg (picmip 0 and lightmap), but i needed to change r_overbrightbits from 0 to 1 and r_intensity from 1.6 to 1. The high contrasts (completely saturated bright sky) hurt the eyes too much on my normal settings on this map.

You can do a nice jump with the LG jumppad btw. Shoot a rocket ahead at the JP it sends you to and do a timed RJ on it to fly way over that bridge.

[a13n]

I hate to say but this map looks cpma jump friendly.

Edit: no at least on my pre-pre-gen environment(got only a few fps)

[Hex]

Yes I was in 16bit changing to 32 resulted in no zfightings.

I also had to turn down my default r_gamma 2 to r_gamma 1 but figured thats just my own fault for liking everything bright (so I can see those bright green enemies real good)

[corsair]

I awaited this one, the 13mb and the shots predict that i'll quite like it - gonna have a look now.

[corsair]

fancy game 8D - works great as a fast speed ffa map. I didnt dislike playing versus bots because I hardly play anymore.

A bit unbalanced is that the red armor, a yellow armor, and the megahealth, can be taken all within 6-8 seconds maybe. Whereas on higher floors there isnt much upgrades to pick up.
As you stated in your notes, you could(should?) replace that red armor :]

Anyway i'd like to hear if this is going to be played online soon, I feel like seeing how you look gibbed

[spookmineer]

Hard to add anything that hasn't been said before
Looks great and plays good, I only stumbled upon one problem:

Near the lightning gun there is the jumppad combo: if I jump on the first one, it all works, but if I just walk on it, I overshoot the second one.

[Oeloe]

Hard to add anything that hasn't been said before
Looks great and plays good, I only stumbled upon one problem:

Near the lightning gun there is the jumppad combo: if I jump on the first one, it all works, but if I just walk on it, I overshoot the second one.

Doesn't happen on a listen server here (with 125 or 142 fps). If you jump back from the bridge lowest part of the first jumppad, you bump into the front of the second one though, but that's not abnormal.

This wall is pretty ugly btw, if you use a reasonably playable gamma value (1.35 here).

[v1l3]

..and the skybox award goes to...

Wow!

I like how it looks with r_fastsky 1, though it'd be nice if you could get the skybox lines out of the skybox for us ATI players.

It's nice to see the buildings in the background also...kinda reminds me of pjw3dm6 in that respect with r_fastsky enabled.

Great map, very original =)

[Lenard]

agreed with ati skybox lines.

[Oeloe]

agreed with ati skybox lines.

nVidia skybox lines here too (GF 6800 GS).

[Caffeine]

Very, very nice map. It makes me think that I'm playing another game entirely, which is a good thing (I don't like the usual styles of many baseq3 maps). The skybox especially is very well-done, and adds to the overall atmosphere.

My only problems were:
-The skybox bug on my nVidia card (hopefully this will be fixed in the engine).
- The ray of death from the sky looks a little ... strange (read: fake) with that explosion animation. I like the idea, but it's missing a little something to make it appear convincingly real.

[surgeon62]

Excellent!

I like the way everything is blown to pieces on this map and the way you incorporate the destroyed areas into the flow. I also like the part you constructed outside of the playable area. It adds a lot to the atmosphere.

Great inspiration for those who... ahem... still need to finish their first Q3 map. :icon23:

[wattro]

what an odd interstellar structure!

[Oeloe]

what an odd interstellar structure!

It must have taken quite a while to build a structure that reaches between two stars. :icon25:

[Hipshot]

*bump* (shy)

I've read all this and much more from other people, I'm gonna relase this map next weekend. Last change for feedback, before I make some changes and releases it.

[Billybob06]

It's strange to play compared with most maps.. I love it, think it has lots of character and never found any problems. Keep it up man

[roughrider]

I have posted a mirror of this map on my site. I truely like this map, over-all. There are some minor things about it that is attributed to personal taste, that I would have done differently but I wont comment on those as I feel this is a final release.
The mirror.
And an image to supplement the link above:

[AEon]

Awesome, fun map.

I especially liked the textures and the wonderful city-scape "backdrop". This very much reminded me of an UT2003 map, and I would not have expected the very vertical gameplay to work. But after 30 minutes and 100 frags, it turns out the gameplay is just great. Very clever use of jumppads.

Some suggestions:

• I played against, Bones, Sarge, Hunter and Klesk on Hardcore, and that worked really well. Might like to add these as the default bots.
• Some clever stair jumping happening (e.g. RA area), but I am not sure other areas with steps along the walls are used that much?
• I somehow never really played the MH/SG double jumppad area. Even though it is very nicely done. Possibly move more respawn points into that area, i.e. on that height level of the map.
• The internal areas IMO are a bit bland. No idea how to improve on this though.
• I am not so sure about the close proximity of the SG to the jumppad to the RG platform. Maybe place it at the bottom of the ramp to the jumppad? Though I had some very cool fights with Sarge: Me camping on RG pad, and Sarge picking me off with the SG in flight.
• Maybe add a "respawn texture" for the YA and RA?

Bots play the map a lot better that I would have initially expected, good job!

P.S. Played the map playing Clawfinger, Death Angel, Drain, Evanescence, Exodus and Grip Inc.... that rocked

[pjw]

It's nice to see the buildings in the background also...kinda reminds me of pjw3dm6 in that respect with r_fastsky enabled.

Heh. The skybox does that for me a little, but the overall feel of the map actually reminds me of pjw3tourney4 a little bit--just the very vertical kinda abstract feeling with a lot of over/under and jumps. Of course, this map is bigger and feels more...hmmn...dunno. Artsy? Sophisticated? Less blocky for sure.

As I ran around the map a bit, I only had two negative things that really jumped out at me. (1) The pulsating bits in the sky are annoying and distracting to me. I would either slow down the pulsation, or get rid of it. Yeah, I know that's very subjective. (2) There are a few different places where you have the uneven/broken stairs-against-walls, and they look like you might be able to run up them, but you can't, quite, and are forced to jump in spots, and not in other spots. This feels really clumsy. IMO you should either increase the granularity of the stairs (i.e. make them high enough so that it's obvious to the player that they'll need to jump), or (and this would be my preference) clip them sufficiently so that the player can just run up them without jumping.

You could probably do some improvement to the blandness in spots by just adding a few memorable visual touches here and there--a couple of unique mapmodels and/or decals or something. It wouldn't have to be anything that's a huge framerate killer. Also, "no VIS-opt has been made at all" -Why? Make some. There's no reason not to do so. I haven't really looked at the map with that in mind, but there's almost certainly at least some optimization that could be done.

Cool map.

[a13n]

...kinda reminds me of pjw3dm6 in that respect with r_fastsky enabled.

That sounds interesting.
It reminds me of pjw3quickie1 though.