Old Map, New Paint

[BETTEH]

When i tried to open the zip it was coming up as corrupted

downloaded it again and it came out uncorrupted, will play around with the map

[Mad-Hammer]

I deleted the zip setting on the desktop, then deleted the copy setting on the server. So, instead of overwriting files, created totally new files. Maybe, fingers crossed, this fixed it.

[Boss Llama]

Betteh, me, Matt, and Clay ran around on the map a bit today, and hunted for issues. I took a mess of screenshots and wrote them up, but am going to link them rather than post here, since the screenies are full size and there are a bunch of them. Nice work on the map, hope these suggestions help!

http://truedungeonfans.com/tf2maps/warh ... dback.html

[MateoTheBold!]

Not sure how I missed this thread but good work on this so far Mad-Hammer; I downloaded it, played through it and was sitting down to post my thoughts but I thought I would read Alizee's feedback first. I found this within:

"I left out most texture related stuff since I know you'll worry about that later, but this one is easy to miss in the editor - the rock striation is counter-grained on bottom:"

I'll just back away slowly and leave the beta-testing in his insane OCD hands.

Seriously though, this is good work and I would love to see this on the servers someday. Keep at it!

[M's]

I'll let the pictures speak for themselves
BLU side

VIEW CONTENT:

RED side

VIEW CONTENT:

Another thing. The rocks at 1/5 engie can jump from the arch and build on top of them.

[TTHREAZ]

I hopped on the event server for a few minutes last night to take a look around myself.

Some of the things that Alizee didn't mention:

- When breaching BLU's tunnel wall (right under their spawn), I got a message saying that RED's base had been breached.

- As a Scout, I was unable to double jump onto the large bunker near 2/4 coming from the ridge. This is debilitating for Scouts attempting to cap 2/4 since their best approach is from the ridge, especially when the tunnel is crammed full of people.

[Mad-Hammer]

Okay, so I've been busy, I have read your comments and did a little bit of remodeling. I'll start with the changes I've made first referring to Alizee's feedback page.

Screenshots 1, 2, and 3 "bad textures", hopefully that is just an error in the .pak. If it occurs again, it probably means the files are corrupted and I'll have to edit them in VTFEdit.

Screenshot 4- Tweaked the sky-box so that it doesn't cast weird shadows there.

Screenshot 5- Added floodlights at the tunnel entrances to brighten the area.

Screenshot 6, 7- Added an env_light to brighten the area as well as a floodlight. Also tweaked the skybox pulling it away from the ridge line as well as making it taller in this area.

Screenshot 8- Moved the skybox making this area bigger. Weird shadowing a result of the displacements running through the sky box.

Screenshot 9- Not a sewing issue, that's just the way the displacements come together.

Screenshot 10- Not much I could do with that gap. It's less than 1 unit which means the editor either moves it too far in, causing a vertex collision or out too far causing an even bigger gap. For now, I put a texture on it hoping that it's not noticeable.

Screenshot 11, 12- Put "noclips" in that area. I tried it and it "seemed" to work, although admittedly, I'm not an experienced scout. That will take play testing to see if it's fixed.

Screenshot 13- Changed the pallet properties from "Not Solid" to "Use VPhysics"

Screenshot 14- Tweaked the sky-box here as well. Took out some of the sky-box displacements.

Screenshot 15- Moved the skybox making this area bigger. Weird shadowing a result of the displacements running through the sky box.

Screenshot 16, 17- Tweaked the sky-box here as well. Took out some of the sky-box displacements.

Screenshot 18, 19- I'm gonna call the wedgy shaped thing in the middle a ........ pylon. I checked, then I double checked and that thing holds to the exact height from Warpath. It's no bigger than the original pylon. Although, accepting your feedback, I decreased it's height 16 units. I tested that and it didn't seem to make much difference, so, that's gonna require play testing to see if you all want further adjustments. I say keep it though as my problem with that area always was that the sniper could see you but you couldn't see him. Now he's visible to another sniper.

Screenshot 20- That had a "nodraw" on it and textures were applied.

Screenshot 21- The spammy "Enemy In Our Base"....... I had two seperate "trigger_multiples" here and yes if some jagoff was so inclined, he could drive your team nuts with it. So, I replaced it with one huge "trigger-multiple" hoping that the spam factor goes down. Reduced the volume from 10 down to 7. I have searched Interlopers and TF2.net looking for better ways to set this up but, haven't had much luck. If someone was to twist my arm, I would just remove the warning as it's only purpose to me was to give away an enemy spy's position.

Screenshot 22- Increased the env_fog "fog of war" from 2000 to 5000. Yes, the frame rates will take a hit for this one.

Screenshot 23- Originally I kept the sky-box at the same level as Warpath 2. I did concede and make the sky-box higher at area 2/4. Still, I put a player clip up there so the demos can't jump out of the map. This won't affect their firing down on the enemy as before.

Screenshot 24- See Screenshot 21

Screenshot 25- Made both ridges identical as one clearly pointed out a path and the other kind of.......bleh. I didn't see the problem then, Betteh explained it to me. Changed the lighting up there as well.

Screenshot 26- Increased the size of the textures so they didn't look so compressed.

Finally.........................Screenshot 27- What do I look like, a friggin' geologist. I thought rock grew that way. A guy uses a little artistic license and gets persecuted for forgetting to rotate the texture 90 degrees. I'm just kidding, it's been corrected but I will admit Mateo's OCD comment had me laughing for a couple days.

Thank You Alizee for putting together a well thought out presentation. Helped me greatly.

Now onto the other details and bodywork.........................

mlite- I put "nobuild" behind the blockade to prevent engies from building back there. Admittedly though, I always liked that tactic. I thought we might go back to it since spies can use teleporters now. For now, the nobuilds are there but I hoped we might discuss it. Building on the rocks at 1/5, I did that on purpose. That falls into the "up for discussion" category but I thought it added another dynamic.

TTHREAZ- Fixed the linkage on the text message, you were right, it was linked to RED's text instead of BLU. Now for the bunker, you and Betteh both noted this and at first I thought you meant that you didn't like the ridge causing a tripping hazard. Then, I went back and looked at the Warpath map and it dawned on me that you meant you couldn't clear the wall now. I raised it 16 units to blend with the rest of the architecture. I really like how that all blends together......how about I give you a rock or a barrel to use to high jump up there?

Last, haven't uploaded a new bsp to the server yet. When I do, I'll post here and you all can have at it again.

Thanks To All For Hard Work And Constructive Criticism.

[M's]

Building on the rocks at 1/5, I did that on purpose. That falls into the "up for discussion" category but I thought it added another dynamic.

I like the idea of building on the rocks at 1/5. As for the blockade area. I perfer to leave it as a no build till breached. As I believe that if you teleport there while unbreached, your only option is to break out and comprimise the 2/4 area's.
If it where me I would completely get rid of the breachable wall and make it solid. But thats me.

[Boss Llama]

Glad the stuff was helpful, MH! Wasn't just me - Betteh was instrumental in the process, and Matt and Clay also came in to help out.

Another quick thing I just thought of that we ran in to - the starting gates, at the very beginning of the map, are very slow to open. It seems like they must have a delay in the neighborhood of 5 seconds? I like that there are two, and that they move at slightly different speeds, but the round starts and the gates don't open for a long enough time that it kept causing concern and comment each time another person joined us.

[Mad-Hammer]

Glad the stuff was helpful, MH! Wasn't just me - Betteh was instrumental in the process, and Matt and Clay also came in to help out.

Another quick thing I just thought of that we ran in to - the starting gates, at the very beginning of the map, are very slow to open. It seems like they must have a delay in the neighborhood of 5 seconds? I like that there are two, and that they move at slightly different speeds, but the round starts and the gates don't open for a long enough time that it kept causing concern and comment each time another person joined us.

The timers for the gates were set to "3" second delay. Yeah, seemed like 5 seconds to me also. So, went back in and set the timers to a "1" second delay and the "gates_up" sound extended to "5" seconds. Gameplay seems to be much smoother. The bots now don't run for a corner and hide as they did.

I liked mlite's idea about not making the breakable barrier.....breakable. I didn't change it in the map but it got me to thinking. Could you imagine the strategy it would force a team to come up with. You would have to dedicate an engy and his teleporters to that area if you wanted launch an assault through the tunnel.

If all goes well, I'll have a new version of this to look at Friday afternoon. I'll post a link.

Thanks for the input.

[dredfox]

Screenshot 21- The spammy "Enemy In Our Base"....... I had two seperate "trigger_multiples" here and yes if some jagoff was so inclined, he could drive your team nuts with it. So, I replaced it with one huge "trigger-multiple" hoping that the spam factor goes down. Reduced the volume from 10 down to 7. I have searched Interlopers and TF2.net looking for better ways to set this up but, haven't had much luck. If someone was to twist my arm, I would just remove the warning as it's only purpose to me was to give away an enemy spy's position.

If I understand, the warning is set so that it can only be triggered if it is not already playing due to the trigger-multiple. Could you just add 5 - 15 seconds of silence to the end of the audio clip to give it a reload period? Or perhaps 2 -4 seconds at the beginning to give spies less of a disadvantage?

[Mad-Hammer]

Screenshot 21- The spammy "Enemy In Our Base"....... I had two seperate "trigger_multiples" here and yes if some jagoff was so inclined, he could drive your team nuts with it. So, I replaced it with one huge "trigger-multiple" hoping that the spam factor goes down. Reduced the volume from 10 down to 7. I have searched Interlopers and TF2.net looking for better ways to set this up but, haven't had much luck. If someone was to twist my arm, I would just remove the warning as it's only purpose to me was to give away an enemy spy's position.

If I understand, the warning is set so that it can only be triggered if it is not already playing due to the trigger-multiple. Could you just add 5 - 15 seconds of silence to the end of the audio clip to give it a reload period? Or perhaps 2 -4 seconds at the beginning to give spies less of a disadvantage?

I put a 30 delay on it with no effect. Still spammy as ever.

[Boss Llama]

What he's referring to isn't putting an in-game delay on the sound, rather, altering the sound file so that it has a long silent part on it. That way, when it's triggered, it plays the warning followed by a period of silence. Nobody will hear the silence, but the fact that it's playing will prevent the sound cue from being spammed.

[Masakari]

Have you tried having the trigger play the sound, then have a delayed disable followed by a delayed enable of the trigger afterwards? That would prevent the entity from even attempting to trigger the sound for a period of time of however long we want.

I'll take a look at my copy of warpath3 to see how they handle it. Frankly, I think it should be fairly spaced out as it is (At least a minute apart, otherwise it'd just get annoying), and having sounds play silence is added entities working that decreases performance.

As for volume, do you have the sound tied to an prop entity or do you just have it just playing all over the map? Again, need to look at the default warpath VMF, but I thought that it was positional sound coming out of the loudspeaker on top of the point. That would help keep it localized to a certain area as well.

[Mad-Hammer]

I'm using an "ambient_generic" with a limit of 750 units. The version Sacrifist sent to me didn't have that trigger in there and darn I wish he had. Flags for the ambient generic are set at "start silent" and "not looped".