Shapes b0.50

Obviously a full art pass complete is gonna have a lot of changes so let's first list the visuals.

The first one to mention is Freyja's contribution to the map with how quickly she churned out the sheered basalt ground texture and how much it brings out the feel of last. Really important texture that one.

The displacement eldritchian abstraction that is above last also got a big upgrade, there's now abstractions above the original for depth and they all fully connect to the walls.

This got turned into the 3d skybox, and you'll also notice a bunch of abstract cubes floating in the sky too. Those were made by yours truly, though the pattern you see on them (and everywhere else with an abstract pattern) is done by Mrmo Tarius https://bsky.app/profile/mrmotarius.bsky.social. I just converted the patterns to a useable normal map through a lot of photoshop editing.

Also a bunch of the basalt rock wall textured geo (from the basalt pack https://tf2maps.net/downloads/ctf_giants-basalt-assets.14835/) behind the displacement spheres on 2nd got turned into skyboxes, but only ones that were out of the way visually as skyboxes always get rendered behind the level, so they'd look incredibly wrong if I tried to make the sphere side rooms have towering basalt walls.

Bunch of texture wrapping and uniformity was applied to make everything look better.

Cubemaps have been added, and the crystals have been made to be reflective. Something to give them that oomf that they are crystals.

Speaking of crystals, there's now a bunch of tiny crystal clusters surrounding the base of all the big crystals to help sell that they are in fact crystals. Though they are a mess to walk around and can hide stickies really well when func_illusionary so the ones around the mid of the map were sealed off by a grate.

A bunch of dustcloud trigger areas have been put in all the areas that they mercs have dug out, to help indicate that they are dusty from the mining/digging.

The middle sphere has been removed and in its place is a hole in the ground. I turned the clipping space that covered that sphere into a grate mesh, but didn't like how you could see across the point so the inside of this grate mesh is textured with a hazard gridle texture that I cooked up. This turned out to be important to do as that bright orange sphere provided a focal point visually for the whole map due to the visual weight of how different the colour was from the rest of the surroundings. So I amped up this by throwing a light underneath the grate/gridle combo to lighten up the insides and applied hazard decals around the cap trigger area on the outside.

This hazard gridle texture was originally made for the last point hexagonal prism platform that the point sits on.

A minor brace prop was made to give a feeling of security for a lot of the seemingly floating metal platforms. Gives them a sense the mercs put them there.

Speaking of mercs putting things there a bunch of "displacement sphere bricks" have been scattered around the map, and some can be seen poking around the edges of various chokes. This should help give a sense that these were preformed before the mercs found them and they had to break them apart to get in. A lot of these also function as a bit more geo to move about the map on, for example, the right side transition with the big v has some to create a small platform to stand on and the cave exit sphere has some on a cart that helps give some space to stand on.

The wire spool was stacked ontop of the power generator next to the big sphere->pyramid transition entrance, so that people can jump up those props into the far side of that sphere.

There's now also a bunch of wire connecting to every light source from all the power generators, I even made a little eyelet spoke to make their existence make a lot more sense. All the outdoors non tube light models also have godrays coming off of them now to really sell their look.

The distorted glass on 2nd got a complete rework, this took a long time to get right and working. Partly due to me not knowing "Refract" as a material type even exists and that it was causing people who use mastercomfigs at dxlevel 8.1/8.0 to have visual seizure inducing moments when looking at them. So now they are fully functional for all involved.

Related to this, people didn't like that they didn't know they could be seen from the other side. So I made a poster tell them that they can be seen. Specifically made it feel unsettling to match the mode of the map. Also all the arrows were removed and some were replaced with arrow decals, but Xs didn't exist (for when the dropdown on last gets shuttered) so I made some Xs.

Finally to the actually big gameplay change: The underpass on mid was closed off, and some health and ammo packs rearranged to accommodate. This obviously needs testing but since players didn't use this as much as bots did it basically became a place where scouts could top up on health and freely flank the enemy team with no repercussions causing a lot of chaos. I think the mid should help feel more like there's secure places to be as a result.

There is A LOT to this update. Let's go over them in order of importance.

(Note: most of the artpass is only on blue's side to get feedback before I start duplicating it for red.)
First: The spawn times adjustments on capturing 2nd have been equalized on both teams. The reason I was struggling with these timers for so long was because at some point in time like versions ago when I was changing them about I only changed the adjustments for one side's 2nd and not the other. It was definitely noticeable in the average team's win rate.

The sentry nest infos for engie bots in the dropdowns have been removed and the func_nav_avoid triggeres in said dropdowns have been enlarged. Hopefully this discourages the bots from trying to get through this area when the door closes this time.

There's been a bunch of platforms added to the pillars on last. I felt in testing there wasn't much spaces in the middle of the area to stand and fight but maybe these platforms are too strong and result in too many positions to keep track of. Hopefully they'll at least help prevent the attacking team from getting into last too freely.

The patterned textures by Mrmo Tarius have been reworked slightly. They kept their scale but I remade them with much more reduced normals (with the highest rgb value of these being 25). They look much less intense on the eyes now.

Three big geo redos had to happen. One for the dropdown, another for the inner domes and a third for the pyramid transition. The dropdown had a noticeable gap between the geo slates so it had to be redone. It took about 12 hours as I also decided it would be a great time to try and do through a perfect hexagon and that required making the tunnel at 1560x1351 and then scaling it back down by a sixth, which also then required redoing all the geo that was connected to it which required a lot of rotations and dealing with vertex drift.

The inner domes had to be redone like three-four times, each. that's 15-20 things to have redone. Each time I did it I noticed an issue that had to have it be redone. A solid week on these things alone, but hopefully now with my newfound understanding of how scale, subdivide, sew and sculpt all work at a more fundamental level that I shouldn't have to remake them again.

The pyramid transition had to be redone as it started leaking from a tiny hole. It was a good time to have to redo it as there was a lot of messy geo around it and remaking it was relatively painless in comparison to the others, though the pentagram opening wall was a struggle for some reason. That needed to redone as well to improve clipping so sliding up the ramps doesn't immediately stop you in your place.

I started doing a full art pass on blue's side. I've been wanting to do a Basalt theming for last and transitions into 2nd from last for a long while now but was dreading making the stuff myself. I got super lucky when I found out about Pont's basalt assets and they've become an immediate staple.

Many corners and ceilings in the transitions from last to 2nd have a bunch of basalt props now. The thinner basalt props were also used as the ramp leading up to the dropdown. I used the thin ones so people could walk underneath them easier than the thick pillars I had there previously. Also the clipping ontop of these pillars has been fully smoothed out with the dropdown so you can smoothly slide up it instead of getting stopped by the lip.

My first very own blender model was imported! The translucent pink pillars on last were simple to make and thus a great tutorial to blender. They were also the last model I ever made from scratch with blender. Regardless, I made them transparent to help with visibility issues on last that b4nny had mentioned in the previous viewing of b0h.

These pillars point up to an abstract hive like floating displacement structure in the sky. It's a work in progress but I think it really gives off a feel of otherworldly-ness to the map. They were intended to be 3d skybox stuff but since I found out that displacements are rendered fully through skybox texture they've been left there for now, I'll get to them in the future.

Almost everything on blue's side has been textured. There's one thing that I still need to finish it, and that's a texture of a flat top of basalt that looks like scrapped/chiselled basalt props + dirt and gravel mixed in. That's for the future. The sand textures have been recoloured to fit the dev colour schemes. I also turned the unused skysand texture into a normal and learned that ssbump makes them look real nice. So I've used it for the "scraped" part indicating where the mercs have dug or cut out pathways.

A lot of props that didn't have the other team's colours I imported into blender and gave them a new colour. The hardhat, thermos, wheelbarrow and crane control panel all got recolours. But the biggest one was the foldable chairs. These are HL2 chairs so I had to do a lot of editing to their textures to make them look like TF2 chairs, but they look quite nice now.

Finally, I remade the floating spheres on last while learning propper++ and how to do skins. Tempted to make them without normals so they look really out of place.

2nd still needs a lot of work, gotta make wallpaper props and telescope parts props and cut out bricks of the inner dome walls. Also hanging wire textures and little chisel ring eyelets to put into walls for said wire ... or whatever they are called. For last I need mini-pink crystals to put into the mine carts and wheelbarrows and to have them grow around the big pink pillars so they look more natural. I'll also need to make a bunch of clumped dirt of all the varying dev colours to indicate that these are pushing through the ground. Finally I'll need little bolt connector models to highlight how all my platforms are staying in position like they are.

Lots of game logic changes in this update.

• Mid cap spawn time changes moved from -3 to -2. I can never tell which is better.
• When 2nd is capped by attacking team, defending team gets a forced respawn. Hopefully this will help teams that don't understand that they shouldn't feed onto 2nd when 2nd is being capped.
• Dropdown blocking shutter should now open if you are trapped inside or are on the other side of it.

And some other changes:

• The stepped stairs have been reworked. The geo is now more uniform with regards to vertices.
• The ceiling has been raised even more, it feels nicer to rocket jump through it this way.
• Both the stepped stairs and the ceiling of these stepped stairs have been clipped. This helps somewhat with rocketjumping.
• An arrow was not properly rotated.
• Some textures were misattributed.
• All custom textures have doubled (quadrupled? went from 0.25x0.25 to 0.5x0.5) maybe this will not be as distracting but it might just be the normals are still too intense.

Version b0h featured different transitions from 2nd to mid. Blue side had them and red didn't, but after 4 rounds of testing players couldn't tell which one was better, so I got another round of feedback from B4nny for this map. There is a lot of large changes here so I ended up going back down to an alpha instead of a beta, as the series of b0 versions were meant to mainly test the new textures.

This led me to use the connector on blue's side for both sides, and to rework how the pyramid transition connected to mid. The goals were to simultaneously make it far more open and to prevent sniper sightlines. Making the inner pyramid much larger and then opening up the sides of it while blocking the front accomplished this goal, and removed the complex geo that was there originally, and gives a clean and safe place to retreat to cover, something that was sorely lacking.

The 2nd bit of feedback he gave was that there wasn't really a good way to fight the point from a mid distance. Putting a ledge on the new forward slanted wall that blocks the pyramid transition sightlines gives a bit of height over the point, and I removed the boxes and mini slope that created effectively a valley directly in front of the point. Instead it is now a large smooth slope to the point letting you fight from much more different distances and approach much easier, and makes that area not so deadly.

Speaking of deadly valleys, the one area that was a struggle with the map since the first time I reworked this map based on B4nny's feedback has now been solved. The area inbetween the highground granted from the stepped stairs transition and the pyramid across the way from this transition entrance was a massive death valley. If you fell there as a medic or a support class or even if you were weak you were just dead as getting back up was cumbersome and there was no solid retreat options from there. The new larger pyramid transition helps with the retreat options but it didn't prevent how often falling happened and how bad it felt. The fix was honestly really simple and a big eureka moment for me. The slope that connected the lower portion of mid to the entrance of the stepped stairs was simply made much bigger, such that you had plenty of space to move about and dodge on it, and as a medic you could stay on this platform while healing your heal target that was approaching the pyramid and could safely fall down when they started to push down the other side of the pyramid. But it being bigger meant that you could actually jsut jump to the thin platform with a mini healthpack that overlooked the point.

These thin platforms have also undergone a change. Everyone of them used to have 2 fences blocking the front of them meant to be a safe place to stand. Frequent complaints about how they obstructed the game meant that I had to consider removing them. Previously this wasn't possible as they blocked deadly sniper sightlines but with the change of the pyramid transition I can now remove half of those fences so they are far more open. And I also made them not fences but walls so you can't see through them so you can play with them more.

B4nny had said that the connector that was made to connect the V transition to the pyramid transition was a place that could hide people quite easily. So I made a slice of the wall into one way glass so people pushing into 2nd from mid could see people in this connector easily. It also made me think that I should add a ledge across this wall just as something else to attack the transition with, since the connector made defending team also have highground over the transition.

The stepped stairs transition also received flow improvements. From clipped walls to overall raised ceilings across the board, makes it possible for a soldier to rocket jump through this transition. It's still a challenge however and I think I like it being hard to do.

The prism like structure overlooking the packs just outside of the 2nd side of the stepped stairs transition was shifted over a bit to make flow better.

Previously blue side of the pyramid transition had a one way glass distorted window that overlooked 2nd. This has been inversed such that this glass now looks into the pyramid transition from 2nd. I did this because there are 5 exits to watch on 2nd so having more visual info to effectively make it 4 exits to watch instead should be better for defending team.

Cap times on mid was lowered from 8 to 7, and the respawn time reducer for owning mid was increased from -2 seconds to -3 seconds advantage.

Another set of sloped prisms was added in the lower transition from 2nd to last, just to give that corner something. Further, there is a small ledge right above this transition that runs along the wall. I have smoothed out the wall to make that place much better to navigate and made the ledge slightly bigger.

Last has received a vertex overhaul, basically everything has been shifted/cropped/resized a little bit to make everything connect visually smoothly.

Finally, nav_mesh has been added back in. A lot of work has been done to get it fully functional and now bots should feel like they flow and play a lot smoother. Also there is a lot of engie bot hint locations so while they still struggle they don't pace around in spawn anymore.

This update changes a lot about how the transitions between 2nd and mid work.

They are only done to blue side however, so please compare and contrast which features of each side you like best.

Changes:

• Connected pyramid and right angle transitions to make a short route between the two. I noticed people were just bashing their head against a choke instead of flanking so maybe this will help decided to flank.
• Pyramid transition is bigger.
• The triangular prism doorways are also much bigger, but they are also straight, potentially meaning there's going to be a lot of sightline issues but also a lot more vision pushing out of pyramid.
• Sphere side of pyramid transition has one side been turned into distorted glass so you get more vision of the point instead of having to turn kind of blindly since there's no safe way to get vision here.
• The ceiling of both the entrance and exit of the sloped stairs transition have been raised a fair bit, making jumping through them a lot more smooth.

This is a minor update to hopefully address mid being too hard to recapture.

• Spawn time adjustment to owning mid went from -3 to -2.
• Mid cap time value went from 9 to 8 scout seconds.
• Mid is now locked at the start for 45 seconds to prevent point bum rushes from being complete blowouts.

The big change for this update is replacing the brushwork domes with displacement domes. They now look smoother, the texture can be applied better, and most importantly, less face side count so I have more leeway during art pass.

Other notable changes include:

• Spot lights for the nooks of the smaller domes so people can see better.
• Clipping brushes for the dual sphere paths in some of the smaller domes so people can walk up them butter.
• A cap value time of 9 scout seconds instead of 10 for mid.

You think I wouldn't do it?

Regardless, this is the update on the feedback gained on the new textures of the last test. These new textures are 4096x4096 instead of 2048x2048, and are much less intense in the differences between its highs and lows so hopefully it seems more like low background contrast and not full visual weight focus contrast.

But there's also some gameplay changes.

First I increased the cap time on mid by a value of 3. Didn't like scouts capping mid before the other team even got there.

And second, I completely resized the staging area on last that leads into the left flank, making it much larger, more fluid and more open for combat. I did not like how there was so little one could actually do when exiting from one of those flanks.

This update does a few things:

• Puts the mini on the ledge overlooking mid back.
• Lowers recapturing time of 2nd down to 5 seconds. Yes this breaks the hud.
• Expands the left flank route from 2nd that was a zigzag into low ground. There's now three steps to it and it has two exits into mid.
• Brought back the locked drop drop down when 2nd is capped.
• And as the namesake of this update title says: Puts in A LOT of custom textures every where that features complex patterns.

a51 contains very few changes, as the primary goal is to try and see what little things I do can solve the "eternally fighting at mid" problem that's been occurring in playtesting.

• Removed a bunch of health packs and ammo packs around mid and in the central transition to mid.
• Reverted the upside down pyramid to the smaller a49 size, while kept the top part from a50 making it a diamond.
• Increased spawn times by 1.
• Increased spawn time variability upon capping mid from -2 to -3.
• Increased second cap time by 2.
• Lowered spawn time variability upon capping 2nd from -2 to -1.
• Removed the xox door that appears blocking drop down when second is capped.