Quake3World

Instead of re-creating the Arctic door side texture (trim4_3.jpg), temp_aetrim16_2.tga should already work?

todays build, off to bed. enjoy

http://www.filefront.com/14693139/Temp01.zip

Hey man,

What did you do to the lighting? It looks way worse for me. It's super rough and I can see every "bounce" that's happening if I look close enough.

Well, I was gonna get into item placement today, but I've been thinking about this map a little more lately and I think I can better articulate the general flaws I was only scraping at before.

For the sake of the argument I think we can break up large FFA maps into two groups: Ones that have a central room, and ones that don't. Obviously this is one that does. The PG/RA/MH/GL room is far bigger, better connected and more beautiful than anywhere else in the map. I am aware that I am about to get very general here, but I'm just trying to outline my basic theory.

Now, when you have a focal point in your map, everyone in it is going to be heading there in one way or another. This doesn't mean players won't experience combat in other areas, it just means that the main room will always be thought of, at least subconsciously, as each player's destination. This is good for the main room but bad for everywhere else. To keep side rooms and hallways purposeful, they should never be too far away from the action or poorly supplied with weapons or armor. The first part of that is especially important, because if a room is too far away, the player will most likely ignore it and head to the "fun" no matter what kind of items are in there. This problem, on a much smaller scale, is what I think is frustrating me about your floorplan.

pat howard wrote:Things are too spread out here. The gaps between rooms are unnecessarily long.

I didn't fully realize it, but I was definitely experiencing the results of the flaws above even back when I suggested cutting out some of your hallways and "stacking" the rooms together instead. Admittedly, I can't find another way to go about fixing this. Obviously you don't want to try decreasing the significance of the main room. The side rooms all have great gameplay and I love hanging around in them whenever I find bots in there, but most of the time I just feel really frustrated because of how far from the action I am. I can't tell you how many times I've skipped over items I knew were available simply b/c I was thinking about the frags I'd be missing out on if I took the time to go for them.

Whether you take my advice or you find a totally different way to go about it, I'd at least release a test floorplan that attempts to refine the side rooms and hallways. I'd love to discuss it and see how the map would play as a result. It wouldn't take too much time considering this is still an alpha. If you'd rather not, I guess I'll just shut up and move on to the item placement. Sorry if my feedback has been a little harsh lately, but that's kind of what alphas are for .

Later,
-pat

I kinda get where you are coming from but i disagree, you see i dont wanna map a map based on just bot play. yes bots always go to one place. but if you play em as much as i have you will notice that they will go where ever the last action was. if you goto say the railgun room and blast every bot which passes though there, soon it will be the main focus of the bots. Now, when playing with humans the whole game changes. they will play hide and seek, go different paths to trick ppl. ambushes etc while the whole time going for item ownage which results in movement around the map. bots are a poor bench mark for a levels gameplay.
now, level layout. you have been saying the same thing for a while now. and i really disagree here. this is because of 2 reasons. A) corridors etc are there for VIS. with out vis points when the detail gets up there the whole thing will crawl to a hault. im not going all out like q3dmp11 but im gonna try make it look sweet. B) they divide up the action so imo there are 4 mini arenas. you can get anywhere really fast if you know the map. the whole level imo is not a large map, its quite small. q3dmp4 was a large map. this lil monkey is small. im kinda done with layout now and im just gonna try get the items down so that they reflect how i want ppl to play the map, not how bots do.
cheers for ya feedback tho, its clarified what i need to do, and also what im doing

oh yeah the lighting, heh i used bsp -samplesize 2 vis light -patchshadows -dirty and i kinda like the more defined lights, but next time i'll make em a ittle smoother

I agree with fKd, though the PG arena is the central arena visually, it is not really the primary focus of the game, the other three areas are frequented often as well (Haste, RG, Quad arenas). Though I do agree that the Quad arena is the most problematic, since it is off the trodden path. And I am still not sure about the Haste arena, it still needs something IMO.

Battles between the PG and RG arenas are quite central and work for the most part, and those areas look nice too. I'd make the RG arena a bit larger though.

To improve vis between the RG and GL/PG areas, fKd, you might want to make the connecting door more "enclosed". I.e. move that door more into the PG arena, move the central column behind the GL more towards the PG arena, and then close off (another "door") in the RG arena, like an air lock. This as Sock pointed out would help with *vis* to keep the "better" arenas visually disconnected from each other. IMO, this is worth doing, because it should make the connection between the two arena more interesting, plus help vis.

E.g. introducing the AP in the PG arena, and the JP near the MH, helped disconnect (vis-wise) the PG arena from the Haste area.

I might be able to sketch something out, but the textures are presently my priority.

Hope you are still working on this map... don't get distracted ... this is the one to work on

An texture set update, alas, is taking longer than I would have hoped.

i've been busy working away, just not putting up so many updates. i'll add some screens later

I have some suggestions about jumppads concerning fixing some isues like Pat noticed
everythings on scrennshots













and about those strip holes in walls. mb add here glass, broken in some places, coz your map even without such holes is pretty open, adding glass may have benefit for gameplay

extone,
Though that stuff looks nice, IMO, it reduces some of the paths folks will want to take:

• Images 1-3, really nice design, only you can no longer exist the RG back door area to reach the upper Quad arena level directly. You have to jump down. Not something I'd like to do all the time. Though I agree this is very cool idea, the Quad arena may need to be rethought some more.
• Image 4, again, with glass that would probably be quite cool. But you do tend to bump into such "rings". Though in this case I'd agree it's worth a try.
• Image 5, hehe... now cutting off the edge in this clever way is cool. Add it
• Image 6, again the bumping issue with rings. IMO, in this case, it is actually very ugly... I'd drop that idea.

Half the fun of JP is the possibility to rail the folks using them. All this blocking will reduce the "fun" IMO, i.e. in the RG arena.

hmmm i did not release the .map with that build...