Ivory a14

Still think I may push this into beta soon. But for right now I wanted to redo the spawn transition routes yet AGAIN to make them less sauceless while keeping what worked about them route wise. Also stared at heavy to mid timings on multiple KotH maps to look at the good average for wiggle room in scaling such areas up.

-Re-did the spawnyard and make it bigger

-Spread out the spawnyard transition routes & adjusted them slightly

-Fixed an issue where you could stand on the blue-mid security fences where the mirroring of the level had decided that they should just, be outside the clipping brush I guess

-Changed around team-yards and brought back some height variation which was removed in the last version

-Polished up the interior of the balcony building to not feel so janky

-Made a single ramp outside the flank transition route less steep

-Fixed visible nodraw brushes on each side of the map

Not really big on many of the changes here but I wanted to get a bit more experimental. Mainly to knock out a pretty safe Sniper holding spot but I'm not big on my ideas to fix it.

-Changed balcony's previous 45 degree entrance to a 90 degree one, so each team's Sniper cannot sit in the doorway in order to snipe across mid and rather has to expose themselves more.

-Raised flank's interior building to give it a little bit of highground advantage when exiting out to mid to make it slightly easier to push out of

-Extended the cover in flank's interior transition route to prevent bigger sightlines going outside the main doorway

-Pushed back balconies entrance balcony & reworked the interior & entrance

-Removed a crate from flank & made the small healthpack cubby smaller to make it a spot less prone for enemy players to hide to attack people coming out of flank.

Very little feedback again, so yeah I'll probably push Ivory into beta soon enough, i dee kay. But yeah very small changelog for this version.

-Rotated the map lighting wise to blue players will no longer get blinded by the sun when shooting onto the shack roofs

-Fixed holes in the back of the map

-Raised some platforms in the back of the map so Sniper cannot strafe jump ontop of them (as was the intention with their original height)

-Made some roofs on the back shack nobuilds (spots were not valuable outside of teleporters to give Sniper a silly hard to contest sightline, never saw use in any playtests but I may as well gut it early)

Didn't get too much feedback last playtest, which is surely a good sign but I'm still trying to figure things out in adjusting the layout of course. So here's a few more experiments to be playtested thrown your way.

-Removed the sightline blocker outside of flank's transition route entrance, in order to try and make rotations from balcony/valley to the flank easier

-Made the highground in valley's connector higher meaning it can no longer be crouch jumped onto, providing more cover, making it a more annoying spot for building on, while inversing it to make it better for attacking the point or valley

-Moved the medium health & ammo in flank

-Replaced the small ammo packs in the back of the map with small health kits instead, replaced the medium health in the same area with a medium ammo pack instead

-Replaced the full ammokit in valley's connector with a medium healthkit to see if it sees people go for riskier plays due to connector remaining relatively unused and the full ammokit not drawing enough eyes

-Changed the cap timer from 6 seconds to 9 seconds, a minor change but the point was capturing far too quickly previously to make it seem like there was a more active back and forth when a team had a much stronger hold (just further back than the point itself hence the point trading)

-Made the ramps up to mid slightly longer, (genuine statement I have 0 idea on how they ever became so steep it did not look intentional)

-Reworked the middle spawn transition to remove the sightline from flank's transition route which would've opened up after I removed the sightline blocker

-Moved the far back shack in the flank further back a smidge, a little iddy biddy bit

-Added some barrel props to valley/connectors cover to stop sentries being placed right in the corner of the point

-Once again made flank's transition route slightly wider

Look after finishing a new map I managed to get an Ivory version done in a day. Wow ! Exclamation mark !

-Removed the Sniper sightline from balcony's door to the enemy team's flank exit

-Removed the ability for classes to get on top of the crates outside of the flank exit by jumping off a barrel that was located next to them

-Removed one of the crates

-Decreased the size of the cubby in valley Engineers were using to nest outside of mid

-Removed the railing from valley's exit making it a smooth drop-down

-Decreased the height of balcony's entrance porch in order to allow for easier rotations from valley to balcony. (Players can now jump onto it rather than having to
walk all the way around to use the ramp to get up)

-Flipped each team's spawn again so the side exit now faces the left not the right

-Pushed the mid-shacks forwards a teeny bit a tincy wincy little bit like just a smidge

-Made flank's transition route hallway wider to allow for more dodging of splash when inside

-Redid the far left spawn transition route exit again

-Rotated the pickups in valley so ammo is now further away from the cubby barely

-Added spectator cams

haha whoopsies, fixed my packed hud (I changed my TF2 directory to my Hard-Drive from my SSD just before the 72 hour jam and forgot to fix my compile pal directory for my hud)

-Reworked the spawn & spawn exits once again, this is to try and have players take valley more often, rather than having them be drawn to main like they were in the a8 playtest. To achieve this the furthest left spawn exit now faces into valley rather than into main, meanwhile the main spawn exit is now closer to the far left and middle spawnyard transition routes.

-Fixed various clipping issues around the map, such as fences you could stand on, roofs, & some fences.

-Streamlined block bullet brushes on fences which were designed to be active cover. This is because there was a previous lip you could shoot through at the top of the fence, which is pretty substantial for sniping onto mid.

-Moved some cover around in each team's backyards.

-Raised each team's backyards to now be higher over their respective transition routes, ideally making it easier for each team to push out & hold. As the previous playtest saw a lot of aggressive play from the team that held mid.

-With the previous note, the balconies over mid are now mildly higher up, (but they can still be double jumped onto off of the fences outside of main).

-Fixed an issue where the prop jump up to main's exit wasn't working because the fence clipping was RIGHT on the edge of the wall preventing players from being able to jump onto the floor off of the crate (I designed the prop jump while I had clip brushes disabled haha whoopsies).

-Fixed an issue where the respawnroom brush did not extend to the back of the room on each team. Whoops again, punishment for me reworking the spawn so much.

-Rotated the sloped cover at mid 180 degrees, this is to try and make it so the ledge is over mid itself rather than over each team's transition route exits. Making it easier to splash when coming out of your transition routes rather than when you're holding the point.

-Changed the sun angle to make the sun be higher up to light the level up more (forgot to change the shadow entity or the sun entity to align with this haha whoops).

-Redid the entire spawn building, spawnyard & spawnyard transition routes. All of these have been pushed further towards valley, to try and give all routes a proper equal split between the back-yard transition route options, compared to it feeling lobsided in the past.

-Added a basic propjump in mid to climb up to each team's main exit.

-Fixed a single railing clipping bug where I accidentally left an old playerclip brush so you could just stand on the air. Luckily no one noticed it so we didn't have any levitating players last playtest. (Not that it was in an advantageous spot anyway)

-Added some mild new cover to valley.

(Update title is not a complaint just wanted to try some stuff out haha and I was a bit stumped to do anything major besides experiment, thank you for the warm reception to a6!)

-(Likely to change back maybe?) Rotated the far left spawnyard transition route exit 90 degrees to face towards the valley, this is to try and stop it from being the best possible route to take out of all the spawnyard exits (unless pressured). This change will hopefully see players take more agency over which specific route they choose. As it now takes longer to use it to rotate to main than other routes unlike in the past. (Long explanation)

-Streamlined the team spawnrooms to be smaller, more direct, & gave them some mild internal highground to try and mildly weaken any damage being thrown at main shutter.

-Opened up main's initial entrance based on feedback.

-Fixed some clipping issues where a roof was unclipped and luckily no one noticed haha.

-Decreased the size of far right spawn transition route's balcony by snipping a little bit of it. idk it was throwing me off didn't like it being so big and wonky.

-Decreased the height & size of the cover block at main's entrance in the team's backyard. Now with the far left spawn transition route exit being changed it no longer covers said transition route so there's no need for it to be so aggressive. Now the highground the cover provides on a crouch jump can be used by all classes from one side.