alm3ctf1 - Duelling Cottages [BETA 2]

[ALMighty]

DOWNLOAD: http://www.mediafire.com/?z3igrsvuyxn

[lvlshot]http://alm.gamedesign.net/images/shot0255.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://alm.gamedesign.net/images/shot0257.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://alm.gamedesign.net/images/shot0258.jpg[/lvlshot]
[lvlshot]http://alm.gamedesign.net/images/shot0259.jpg[/lvlshot]

I think this one is much better than beta 1 in a lot of ways. I would mostly like to hear thoughts, ideas you guys have where to take it from here. Item placement, layout, technical stuff or anything.

I tried making vis-walls like it was suggested for beta 1, but I couldn't get it to block anything more than without them. Right now I have most of the terrain being detail, while the middle walls that do most of the blocking being structural.

What I did before was to have caulk brushes up from the the structural terrain and all the way up to the ceiling of the sky brush. This didn't work very well, as I said. It visblocked good when I used noclip and flew up over the terrain to where the caulk brush was, but since you are never up there I thought it was useless. The caulk brushes also cast shadows on the terrain even with a func_group with no shadow spawnflag.

I made the .map file available to let anyone who wants to try and make the vis block more of the map. I'm sure it is very much possible to do, I'm just not very good at these things.

.MAP FILE: http://alm.gamedesign.net/alm3ctf1_beta2_mapfile.zip

edit: Oh btw, I included a Bot file this time. Turns out it was the auto clip of the ase models that caused the MAX_MAP_PLANES Error last time.

[obsidian]

I took a quick look at it and played it with bots. Looks quite nice, I like the models. A few items to fix...

By the end of the river at the lake area, under the bridge, there is a polygon in the terrain that is out of place, you can see into the skybox.

Trees and cottages are all non-clipping, which feels a bit odd. Put some clip brushes around the cottages and just the trunks of the trees. The cottages are also textured on the inside, since I don't think you intend anyone to go inside, you may want to remove the inside faces.

Try to reduce the size of the water brush, or chop it up into smaller sections of water brushes. As it stands, you can see that it kicks up the number of polygons in the map by quite a bit since you can see a huge block with lots of tessellations under the terrain. Use watercaulk on unseen sides of the water to prevent it from drawing. Add this to your common.shader

Code: Select all

// Obsidian: 2 usages for watercaulk depending on water brush complexity
// SIMPLE WATER BRUSHES - use watercaulk on faces between water brushes
// COMPLEX WATER BRUSHES - overlap complex water brushes with watercaulk
//		water shader should be nodraw, nonsolid, trans, *sans-water*
textures/common/watercaulk
{
	qer_trans 0.5
	surfaceparm nodraw
  	surfaceparm nonsolid
  	surfaceparm trans
  	surfaceparm water
}

What's up with this shader? Is it copied from another game? Make sure you comment this stuff out.

Code: Select all

{ 
	stage		heathazemap 
	map		textures/tr3b_water/water_norm.tga 
	scroll		0 , time * -0.2 
	deformMagnitude	0.4 
} 

I haven't taken a look at your caulk and hints, but there isn't a whole lot you can do on this kind of map. Just caulk whatever you can't see (there's a few terrain polys that you can probably caulk along the corner and edges of your map) and hope for the best. That said, it runs pretty smoothly even on older hardware.

[ALMighty]

Thank you obsidian! I'll fix those things you mentioned. I stole the water from Alice. I should make my own. That watercaulk worked nice!

I haven't used any hint brushes actually. You have any suggestion how to place them? Now that you mentioned it, I thought to maybe put some of them horizontally up at the mountain tops.

[dichtfux]

Hi, good to see another beta of this map!

thoughts:
* You should clip the cottages as Obsidian suggested, but I'm not sure about clipping the trees. You can get a lot of speed by strafe-jumping on this map and I think you'd get stuck in the trees way too often

* You need some kind of red/blue markers to make it easier to figure out where you are and where the bases are. The layout isn't that complicated but I think this is a must for a ctf map. Maybe some simple signs, like this:


(Don't bother telling me my kolourpaint skills are 1337, I know that.)

* I like the textures, lighting and terrain as I'm sure I told you before, great atmosphere. And I love those trees.

[ALMighty]

Good idea! I'm going to make some arrows.

I'm glad you like the atmosphere.

[v1l3]

Definitely the best looking ctf map out...very nice. It's also the first Q3 map that won't run on my computer though..in between r_speeds or whatever else locking the comp from medium to fast movement. I tried loading bots..and it got bad. I know alot of people have computers that have no problems I'm assuming but eh..

Im on a(if it matters)..

Windows
HP 3500+ AMD Athlon 64 Processor
Integrated ATI Radeon XPress 200 Graphics
512MB Memory/200GB Hard Drive

[Fjoggs]

I'm suprised you can run any map with that integrated GFX-card of yours :P

[Scourge]

Definitely the best looking ctf map out...very nice. It's also the first Q3 map that won't run on my computer though..in between r_speeds or whatever else locking the comp from medium to fast movement. I tried loading bots..and it got bad. I know alot of people have computers that have no problems I'm assuming but eh..

Im on a(if it matters)..

Windows
HP 3500+ AMD Athlon 64 Processor
Integrated ATI Radeon XPress 200 Graphics
512MB Memory/200GB Hard Drive

You got an emachine didn't you? Yeah those integrated graphics are not too great. If you have the means, you should pick up at least a cheap decent card. You could get one that would demolish that integrated crap for around $50 US or less easily.

[v1l3]

well. it's better than the Pentium2 I was using up until three years back...where you can play cpm1a and cpm3 and that's about it
My wife went out and got me Q4 and installed it on this computer as a suprise, and it ended up fryin up the Disc Drive, and a bunch of other stuff..I'm assuming from the DirectX9.1 or whatever it was..

..though not to hawk this thread about my comp..doh!

[dichtfux]

Just wanted to add that I've also got low fps on this map (radeon X1400 in an IBM thinkpad T60 laptop, fglrx linux driver), and this only happens with very few Quake 3 maps. Could be some strange settings or sth I messed up of course and I didn't have the time to investigate it, so I didn't mention it in my first post.