Industrial Public Beta

[Hipshot]

Hello, new map.
This map, I consider to have the best gameplay of all maps I ever made. Pretty tight, fun TPs, good itemplacements, works great with CPMA and vanilla. 1vs1, 2vs2 and FFA, where I think 3 or maybe 4 players is good, the latter might be just one to much. There's a Quad in TDM mode.
It's been tested over and over again at the office with human players.

Downside, it's a pretty big download, for some reason (wonder what's that all about)...
Bot support is, well, it works, but it's something with the AI, they sometimes run around, shooting at the walls... the performance drops insanely, well well, It's a great map for playing w/o bots =)

http://www.zfight.com/misc/files/q3/industrial.rar ~45MB






Roaming home from my friend now, I need to sleep =)

[asiMo]

0_0 Amazing use of textures. Will have to wait till I get home to fully enjoy it

[WHAT!!]

You are by far, my favorite mapper for Quake 3.

[ALMighty]

Reeally nice, as always! Haven't played it yet, but it looks great! Seems to play great also. Lots of jumping options.

Hehe, good ole Kingpin boxes.

[MackXX]

When I grow up I wanna be just like Hipshot

Map looks great, I really like you're non-traditional take on Q3 levels.

[st3ady]

Are these your own textures? I am guessing half life 2, but if they are entirely made by you I say amazing job!
looks like a really fun level

[WHAT!!]

How did you do that blending in the terrain on this and History?

I read SimonOCs tutorial on how to do it, but even with the map files he provided I couldn't get it to work correctly...

[Hipshot]

Hey.
The textures are mostly post produced photos from cgtextures.com, some are mine, boxes from Kingpin and then one lamp and some metal are made by Rorshach.

@ WHAT!!, the terrain here is just a atlas, check the texture folder, ground. It's the same as with the lava. Very simple. In history I alpha painted terrain in max and compiled with a different version of q3map2 (q3map2_fs).

[Fjoggs]

Really nice lighting. Good job.

[sock]

Wow looks amazing, top quality textures. I love the attention to detail, like the wooden ledges for connecting upper sections. Very professional looking map.

Sims

[GODLIKE]

Tasty stuff. Really good work... Looks great, and has pretty decent flow, too..

[ALMighty]

I love the lava pits; reminds me a bit of the steel mill in Kingpin. Which is a good thing, I love those and this as well. Great feeling in the lighting in the lower regions especially. The green light you have in some places, and then the red light from lava. Great feeling.

How did you paint the ground? It looks really good. You have to teach me how to do that! :P

The only thing I thought looked a bit out of place to me was the sky. Seems more cartoony and contrasty compared to the rest of the textures. Not a big thing though. The sun is great.

This level is awesome.

[dichtfux]

This level is awesome.

Quoted for truth.

Nutpicking:
* This doorway needs clipping:

[obsidian]

Very nice map. The texture work makes it really "pop".

Just a few concerns, there are some texture tiling issues (outlined in red) that leaves a seam. This is just one example, there are a few others scattered throughout the map.

One other issue is the amount of T-juncs. You have a huge amount of them and they are causing a lot of unnecessary splits (green - I outlined just a few) to the brush faces. I think you can probably drop tri-counts by about 1/4 with a little optimization. Mitre, mitre, mitre to get rid of those T-juncs. Those stairs also have a huge amount of polygons that aren't necessary.

[lvlshot]http://members.lycos.co.uk/quakeroats/q3wtemp/hipshot_industrial1.jpg[/lvlshot]

[v1l3]

It'd be very nice if you could get the bots working I want to download it, but it's a pretty large file to play against no one. I'm on dial-up(pout, pout, whine)so.. I've played the hell out of hipshot_dm6, and dm8...with that said, I knows it's a good map.

[AEon]

Feedback... General Suggestions

Another really nice map, even though I am not much a fan of the industrial look, you made it interesting and beautiful! This map, alas, is a bit further removed from final, compared to Solar.

• The main issue is the frame rate (again compared with Solar), here the FPS really drops in some areas. Reason: Probably missing hint brushes. I have found quite a few line of sight optimizations, a hint face "cutting across" several of the building corners (right through the whole map, full map height of) should really help. If you like I'd create a top-down sketch for those.
• The other issue seem to be the unnecessary tris in some areas (as obsidian pointed out). But that alone still should not cause these lag-outs. Is this some texture memory issue (the 1024x1024 textures) on my X800?
• The problem with the bots - not knowing how much clipping you did (though I think it should be enough) - are probably all the areas the bots cannot access. Most striking example, obviously is the RA. Bots will *never* get there, but in this case that is OK. More importantly the bots are almost completely blocked off the lower level, i.e. the PG arena. Bots could jump down there from the upper level, but don't for some reason. The issue is the orange acid, bots cannot (or will not?) jump over the acid, thus they cannot move from the MH to the PG or the JP. The RG is also inaccessible to the bots. I'll suggest a few fixes below.
  
  I am not completely sure, but was not one of the reasons for lag the "not-working" of the bot pathing, i.e. taking up to much resources?

Bot maps vs. player maps

• Basically the question it, do you want to create a map that has a certain level of challenge to players, i.e. "tricky" jumps, or do you want to showpiece the map using bots. The former is fine for a less "dumbed down" placement of items (and geometry), but the chances that real players will actually play the map on servers, alas, is almost zero. So normally the player will be testing the map with bots almost exclusively. I go for the latter, with a very few exceptions, in your case the RA is placement is fine. Below I am assuming a change in map geometry to "help" the bots get around.

Gameflow

• IMO, the gameflow is pretty good, but since the bots don't use many parts of the map, could not yet be properly tested.

• [lvlshot]http://aeons.poweredbylasers.com/tmp/mapping/misc/industrial-1.jpg[/lvlshot]
  
  a) I am not really sure why these windows and their frames should be showing sparklies on the inner and outer edges. It is almost as if you are using patches instead of brushes. And that there is some LOD (level of detail) issue with distance. But that is not the case AFAICT.
  
  b) Sparklies.
  
  c) Sparklies.
  
  d) Sparklies.
  
  e) Sparklies.
  
  f) Here I was wondering if the red texture should not continue and replace the grey one here? The brick wall on the other side continues as well? (nitpicking)

• [lvlshot]http://aeons.poweredbylasers.com/tmp/mapping/misc/industrial-2.jpg[/lvlshot]
  
  a) Sorry to bother about this, but again the TP design IMO does not fit the map. It would be much nicer if you would use a ventilator, e.g. one of the two in Solar's main arena wall, place that in the floor and catapult the player up that way. As shader effect use e.g. the chimney smoke or similar.
  
  Alternately, it would be completely consistent (maybe boring though) to open up the door behind the TP, to teleport the player up on the upper walkway, "exiting" that door up there.
  
  b) More nitpicking, the respawn pad textures are nice, trouble, IMO, is the edge of the texture that "almost" fits the floor, but not totally, thus looks a bit weird. In this special case I'd keep the texture scaling locked, and then make the brush/patch smaller removing the outer edge. There 1-2 other cases where this would also look better IMO. For the RL (not the JP one) this is not nessary, looks good there.
  
  c) Alas the bots cannot or will not jump, thus they cannot access this area of the map directly. I appreciate the jump that almost fails and drops you into the acid, and the nice brushwork of crumbled concrete, but IMO it is more important that the bots can navigate the map. E.g. use a wooden plank, make it slim, or cracked in the middle even. That way the player may still fall through if not careful, and via botclip the bots could ignore the smaller gap and get to the other side.
  
  d) At least one of the acid pits needs to be traversable via (narrow if you like) wooden plank. Real-world-wise that would actually be more plausible than an obviously unsecured, extremely dangerous acid pit. This way the bots can reach the JP and the PG.
  
  Personally, I'd make the acid pits very flat, I hate dying (drowing actually) in them. After starting the map I fell into those pits 3 times in a row. Once running backwards. Dangers are fine and dandy, but in close combat they can quickly become very "destracting", IMO. Don't get me wrong, these acid pits look great, and should still cause damage, but should not be instant death, IMO.
  
  e) Wooden plank to let the bots reach the RG.
  
  f) This is where the bots hang out most of the time, they enter the TP to go on a frenzy up here where the RL is. Hopefully, once the map has been "dumbed down" for the bots, this will no longer be an issue.

• [lvlshot]http://aeons.poweredbylasers.com/tmp/mapping/misc/industrial-2.jpg[/lvlshot]
  
  a) Pity these really cool areas will "never" (well very briefly with a RJ) be seen by the player...
  
  b) ... that made me wonder if a few ledges and balconies or something of that sort higher up could not help the player better appreciate all the beautiful details, you normally only notice when looking up. Note: This will probably never happen, and probably does not make much sense to begin with, but I mention the idea anyway.
  
  c) RL needs a respawn texture? Or is the RL here an accident?

Cool things:

1. The 1024x1024 custom "ground" textures.
2. Rising smoke from chimneys.
3. Open doorways used as teleports "one" floor up, i.e. plausible navigation.
4. Cool designed acid pits. I love the arc of mini-healths over the largest pit.

Misc:

• JPG compressing the 3 x 3MB ground textures should significantly cut down the pk3 size.

Hope some of the above is useful.