Drainage 5292025pr

Reconstruction​

Hi there, last playtest that was hosted 2 weeks ago was valuable! So I spent the last 2 weeks attempting to fix 2 of the most commonly stated problems playtesting has shown, which are scaling and sniper sight lines. The last playtest did have a small improvement over the time before, so I knew I was on the right track, however snipers making it hard to always play point was a persistent problem. So I decided to make some changes to the middle to make sniper less effect from more areas around the point while also making more "distinct" areas of play in terms of layout. The center of the map is basically the only place that gets action. So that's what I decided to try and solve with the next playtest with these changes to the middle of the map.

• Added 2 buildings to add more geometry variety to middle.
• Added some water barrels on the center point to improve cover in the area.
• Made the water in the middle take up less room.
• Made the center point bigger and doubled the time to cap.
• Adjusted Vertical Scaling by about 16 Hammer Units by the waterfalls.
• Adjusted prop placement on the outer-sides of the map.
• Adjusted Clipping in the area.
• Extended the turbine room to make the middle of the map have less space and provide more cover to the "Alt Mid" areas of the map.

These changes should be much welcome! And I also did adjust scaling in the map a decent amount too! Places like the garage have had their size reduced by about 48-112 hammer units while other spots had changes to improve map-layout and pacing. I hope these changes do have a positive effect on the map so far!

Fans Spin Round

During the first playtest, I actually didn't get much feedback about the turbine room other than how it wasn't clear you couldn't go past the railing and it having a sightline all the way in the back of the room. However, I was not happy with it while watching the server demo! All that room was entered for was basically just for the small health pack. which was NOT what I wanted after watching it. Combined that with the feedback of the map just having mostly mid as a fighting ground, meant that this room in the map had to be changed. Changes to this room were as follows:

• Made the room bigger to make it feel less claustrophobic.
• Changed the small health and ammo packs to a medium ones.
• Elevated the health and ammo packs and put them in between the turbines.
• Lowered the turbines and made it look like the ones in the 3rd point of cp_powerhouse.
• Added some windows into the room so it looks better and shows off more of the out of bounds areas.
• Added a wall separating the out of bounds area with the playable area.
• Added height variation to the room.
• Adjusted lighting across the entire area.
• Adjusted clipping across the entire area.

These changes are supposed to give this area more purpose. Swapping the small health and ammo packs out with bigger ones are supposed to gain more attraction to these areas. Fights should also be happening here between players looking for either health or ammo, with height being added to give the area substance, I feel like I perfected this area in theory. Only way that I would confirm this is with a second round of playtesting. But, guess what, a new build of this map will be uploaded today! Excluding the changing talked about in these blog posts, I also changed middle area garages for each base. Check out the updated version when it is being run for playtesting via TF2Maps servers!

Lower The Deck

During the first playtest session, I got some feedback about the upper deck location on both red and blue base. The main concern about the upper deck was the fall damage you took from the fall to mid. I 100% agree with this! Taking fall damage for what is the 3rd way to the control point is a problem, so I have fixed it here. The changes include:

• Lowered the roof of the deck on the side by the health pack to make the drop shorter.
• Adjusted bottom building ledge to make the drop even shorter.
• Added a truck with a water barrel to block a sniper sightline.
• Added a window to turbine room... More on this next post
• Added stairs on the deck so you wouldn't have to jump to traverse the other parts that are higher up.
• Adjusted clipping in the area.

The goal of these changes were to fix the problem with vertical scaling while also keeping most of that area intact since I feel that area was good judging by how nobody complained about it. This is supposed to be a sniper power position, so keeping the vision the exact same for that while fixing this problem was the main goal with these changes. Of course these have been applied to both sides as well!

Okay I get it! Drainage (Powerhouse KOTH basically if you didn't know some how) has some problems! But the good news is that I have been working on those issues that have been found while having the map be played on the testing server. From watching the demo and reading feedback lines, the problems I and others found in practice were respawn rooms, map scaling and sniper sightlines. There were a few other problems though, but I decided to just tackle it one at a time. So here is a change that are so far planned for the 2nd playtest that should happen within 2 weeks I would say.

Respawn Rooms

Yeah I agree with people, having to turn about 90 degrees to see the second exit is not that good. It just feels weird to do that! Combined with the room being too small already when there is literally nothing in there in terms of props would be a massive problem later on in development. So I decided to double the size of the spawn room and make some changes to them on RED and BLU sides.

• Made the second half of the spawn room on a different elevation level.
• Added a 3rd resupply locker towards the back of spawn.
• Adjusted Player Spawns to be more spread out with half of them being on a different elevation.
• Added a one way window to garage like how powerhouse spawn rooms have one.
• Added prop detail that would more closely resemble the final version.

The idea of these changes was to fix the problem of space and door location without reworking the map layout too much. Half of the player spawn points being on the elevated section of the spawnroom is supposed to alert to players that there is another door, while also fixing the sharp turn problem for players who spawn on the top half. You can jump over the railing in the image here, and with the player spawns facing the door, it seems like an okay fix for this problem. There has been more changes to this map though! So hopefully the changes I make for this 2nd play-test will improve the map!