Okay, after a long hiatus I am back. Long story short I was busy.
Glad we got that part over, now for the updates!
Thanks to your great feedback from the last gameday and on the several posts above I was able to get a lot done over the course of this week. Here is a summarized list of the changes made:
Spawn areas: I have started to draft out the looks of the spawn areas, they are not final, but at least you are not anymore in a black box when you first enter the map. There is even some coffe there for you. I have fixed the weird respawn visualizer issues and now everything should be working properly, including: Doors!
Resupply lockers: I have taken away the fake metal doors on the buildings to the left of the yard and on the sewer entrances, and made them into resupply areas for each team. These foward resupply lockers should help engineers, demos, heavies and snipers set up a good foward defense wirth a safe point to fall back to. Also controlling the middle area is now critical to prevent the enemy from setting up strongly near their resupply.
Cave: The cave has been refitted with a crack in the ceiling to let some light shine trough. Along with more waterfalls and vines hanging from the ceiling, the cave now is a lot more fit to the nature of TF2 gameplay. The metal walkways are gone and are now incredible rock formations that should make any geologist intrigued.
Invisible walls and playerclipped areas: I have remodelled the outside of the hangars so that there should be no strange invisible walls blocking your way. These new areas still need some fleshing out, but should provide some cool gameplay areas where pyros and demos can set their traps and spies can hide on to recharge their cloack and change their disguise. Also engineers looking for a little strategy should find good spots to hide a teleporter from the enemy right under their noses.
FPS: I have reworked all the expensive tree models and especially the skybox foliage to prevent the drop on FPS that was very noticeable on the last version of the map. Although it is not perfect yet (I have to make better oclluders and some minor tweaking on a couple models) the small drop in FPS I notice on my low-mid end machine (with3ds, photoshop and hammer running while I test) is barely noticeable.
Directions: Check the first image below to see the new signs I made for now. Nothing too snazzy, but they do their job.
Anyway, I hope to meet everyone expectations since I am now taking a major step towards Beta. My guesses are that if this next testing goes out smoothly I'll be moving from Alpha to Beta on schedule for a possible final release by the end of the year.
And in the spirit of the heavy update:
TOO MANY TINY LITTLE WORDS, WANT BIG IMAGES, CLICKY LINKY BELOW
Download link:
http://forums.tf2maps.net/downloads.php?do=file&id=376
Thanks a lot everyone so far!