wm_test_a1 [Experiment]

Yourself

L1: Registered
Jun 13, 2009
30
1
This is an experimental map I made over the last couple of days. I was brainstorming on someone else's map idea and the thought of a maze came to me. Now, replayability is something of an issue with a maze since it can be easy to memorize the way out. But then I remembered the "Lost Woods" style of mazes that would pop up frequently in Nintendo games (most notable the Legend of Zelda series and one appearance in Super Mario RPG). The maze is constructed from a set of identical rooms linked to one another through teleporters that are hooked up to one another in unintuitive ways.

The goal in this map is to be the first team to reach the end of the map 8 times or simply score the most "goals" in 10 minutes. What makes this tricky is the spawn exit leads you to a random location in the maze and the maze shuffles itself after each goal (but not completely random; it's always possible to get out). The maze is fairly small, being comprised of only 3 rooms and I was able to escape 6 times in the first 5 minutes (use your spray and bullet holes to mark rooms).

I've never tried it with other people. Some problems that would arise in that case is getting stuck inside players from the other team if you both end up teleporting to the same hallway. There could also be some camping issues (the entire maze is nobuild, though I haven't tested this). It would probably work best in a melee only setting, if it's even fun to begin with. As noted in the title, this is just an experiment, so I really don't have any expectations for the gameplay value.
 

Tom Foolery

L1: Registered
Apr 13, 2009
48
4
Very interesting. I'll have to download this and look around.
 

Steff0o

L6: Sharp Member
May 31, 2009
295
132
I'll play it to
 

Penguin

Clinically Diagnosed with Small Mapper's Syndrome
aa
May 21, 2009
2,039
1,484
Sounds pretty great. Now to get it working with CTF mode...
 

Zanpa

L4: Comfortable Member
Jan 17, 2009
164
43
I played this map a few years ago.
Oh no wait, it was in Pokemon.
Fun idea ^^
 

Yourself

L1: Registered
Jun 13, 2009
30
1
The empty gray room is just holding a bunch of entities that you can't see. There were a lot of entities needed and other parts of the map were starting to get cluttered, so I just moved them all to their own little box (rather than creating more visgroups). The entities in that room are "global" entities in that their function isn't specific to any particular location in the map itself. So things like the score counters, the decoders for the score displays in the spawns, the light_environment, fog, and the game win entities are all in there. There are room specific entities in each room which are responsible for shuffling the exits as well as picking a random spot for the spawn teleport to take you to.

Here's the vmf to see how I did everything (right-click save as).
 

SiniStarR

L8: Fancy Shmancy Member
Mar 31, 2009
585
116
i havent played it yet but i will later, do teams encounter each other at all?
 

Yourself

L1: Registered
Jun 13, 2009
30
1
I already decompiled it, and was pretty amazed at your setup. You keep everything tidy (yet very busy) and I loved the pit idea. It did seem a bit long though :p

Yeah, I just wanted to make a really gigantic pit. I thought about making a 3D skybox (which is what I was going to do with that extra entity room) that would make the pit look even deeper, but never really cared enough to get around to it.

And I tend to keep entities close to the action, but organized at least in some kind of pattern. It helps me remember which entities control what. The next map I do, I'll try to be a bit more diligent when it comes to visgroups, so I can reduce some of the clutter. Although the next map I make will have a lot more space.

When it comes to maps, I'm really mostly interested in the entity setups and what things I can do with that. Especially when it comes to interesting game types.
 

TMP

Ancient Pyro Main
aa
Aug 11, 2008
947
560
I know me and a2h came from the GM universe. (Suprisingly, both of us primed from 64d.)

If you're looking for new gamemodes, TF2 isn't really flexible, at least nowhere nearly as flexible as TFC was.

But judging this on the way it looks, it's pretty good. To be honest, I don't know why you even bother to use hint optimization, as it doesn't even affect this. The way the room is constructed, the hint setup causes the entire room to be rendered at any point anyways, so it's not really vital.

Literally, I had to comb the entirety of this to find that, and it's the only thing I can even nitpick on. It's really well constructed. How long did this take for you?
 

Yourself

L1: Registered
Jun 13, 2009
30
1
If you're looking for new gamemodes, TF2 isn't really flexible, at least nowhere nearly as flexible as TFC was.

So I've noticed. Valve did a good job hard coding everything important into the game itself.

To be honest, I don't know why you even bother to use hint optimization

It's habit-forming.

Literally, I had to comb the entirety of this to find that, and it's the only thing I can even nitpick on. It's really well constructed. How long did this take for you?

Well, I spent about 12 hours putting the rooms together including the pit (the displacements made it take a lot longer than it should have because Hammer's a bitch and this was my first TF2 map ever, so I'd never worked with displacements before) as well as hooking up the teleporters and making the spawn rooms, so the map was playable at that point. The score counters I added later and that took me another couple of hours. I had wanted to be able to shuffle the maze from the beginning so replayability wouldn't be destroyed by memorizing the layout (which, since I designed the map, I had done) and I had a Eureka moment where I figured out how I could shuffle the maze without breaking it. Each room always leads to the same parts of other rooms. However, what gets shuffled is which of the exits of the room go to each of those destinations. Since the logic_case entity has a PickRandomShuffle (or whatever it is), that will give a random permutation of its cases, I used that to permute the exits in each room. It's a basic shuffle, but it's sufficient. That took another couple of hours to implement since I had to hammer out some details about how the entities interacted with each other. All this work was spread out over about 3 days.

After all that there were some minor cosmetic tweaks here and there. I added lights over the score displays to make them look like they're glowing (I should have split the wall behind them so the lightmap wouldn't bleed through the display border like it does). I got lazy after that since it was pretty much done and it was really only meant to be a proof of concept.
 
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