The Little Imperfections

Shadow Tyrant

L69: Deviant Member
Aug 7, 2009
69
3
So, recently I've been paying a lot more attention to the detail in maps, and something came to my attention. There are a lot of overlooked details in maps that are pretty glaringly obvious. To me anyway. And it bugs the hell out of me that hardly anyone else notices them. Particularly Valve. I don't care how good your layout is, if you have a wood box sticking halfway out of a rock wall (Here's looking at you, Yukon), you clearly have some issues to fix. Fastlane is a particularly large victim of this. From its "half-rocket" to its windows with solid wood behind them, it's just an aesthetic nightmare. Or here's another one. A block that's concrete on top, but wood on the sides. How is that even possible?

Please tell me I'm not the only one who notices and is bugged by these things.
 
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TMP

Ancient Pyro Main
aa
Aug 11, 2008
947
560
Well being bugged over the location of one crate that is in the location of one wall really isn't game breaking, and to be honest, is rarely noticed.

Its times like this when the words "CHILL DOWN" should be taken to heart :p. I know what you mean by the fastlane rocket (But hey, in game you rarely look up through that rocket because someone's gonna explode you then), but the other things just seem insignificant, even by picky standards.

Really though it makes me remember that people overlook things when they're concentrating on something else, like how the game flows rather than "Is that box there inside of a cliff" or "Does that make sense?"


But yeah I notice things like that when I run through a map, but its not pressing.
 

Shadow Tyrant

L69: Deviant Member
Aug 7, 2009
69
3
It's not pressing, per se, no, but it does irk me slightly that pretty obvious things like that slip by without even a "...That can't be right."

I mean, they're not even that hard to fix. Come on, mappers. D:
 

Eternal

L69: Deviant Member
Jul 8, 2009
69
10
Bugs me as well when I'm working on a map I'm extremely nitpicky about making sure things are perfectly aligned ect ect.
 

Ninjilla

L420: High Member
Sep 13, 2008
445
116
Concrete on Wood isnt something to fix, if it looks nice without being too far out there (like a huge concrete block on one pole), then I would say it's fine. TF2 maps dont try to be a realistic Industrial wonderland.
 

Ravidge

Grand Vizier
aa
May 14, 2008
1,544
2,818
Particularly Valve. I don't care how good your layout is, if you have a wood box sticking halfway out of a rock wall (Here's looking at you, Yukon), your map isn't official material.

If I'm understanding this post right then:
Valve maps have detail issues.
So does Yukon.
=
Yukon is not official material. But the official Valve maps are? or
The official Valve maps are not official material, and neither is Yukon?

What? Please tell me I misunderstood because that doesn't make sense.
And Yukon is a great map.
 

Ninjilla

L420: High Member
Sep 13, 2008
445
116
Maybe he's annoyed that Valve didnt do a sort of "quality check" to see if anything was out of place? Or if they did, that they missed said box?
 

Shadow Tyrant

L69: Deviant Member
Aug 7, 2009
69
3
If I'm understanding this post right then:
Valve maps have detail issues.
So does Yukon.
=
Yukon is not official material. But the official Valve maps are? or
The official Valve maps are not official material, and neither is Yukon?

What? Please tell me I misunderstood because that doesn't make sense.
And Yukon is a great map.

Yukon is a fine map. It's really well made. It's just that easy things like that get completely overlooked, when all it takes is half a second to fix it and it would look so much better. It annoys me on Valve maps too, but not as much since they tend to hide them better, and they're very small at best.

I didn't mean to sound that harsh, but come on. Would it really hurt that much to take ten minutes to go through the map and check for stuff like that before releasing it?

Also, you guys seem to think I'm freaking out about a single box in a single wall on a single map. I'm not. I just chose that as an example of what I'm talking about. There are plenty of other misaligned railings and awkward displacements I could have gone with, I just chose the box because it came to mind first.

Ninjilla's correct, I just want a little more thorough searching of the maps for small things like that before they get released, that's all.


Well, I should say it doesn't really annoy me..It just makes me wonder how they missed something like that.
 
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Freyja

aa
Jul 31, 2009
2,994
5,813
I love to see Nodraw faces in valve maps or things like on Pipeline and Gravelpit how the spawnroom doors' motors are hovering in mid air.
 

Ravidge

Grand Vizier
aa
May 14, 2008
1,544
2,818
Saying Yukon isn't "official material" when the actual official material looks like this: [ame="http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=6535"]Silly Valve - A Thread of Odd Map Finds - TF2Maps.net[/ame] and [ame="http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=3303"]Valve should have waited with Badwater Basin - TF2Maps.net[/ame] really confuses me.

What can I say... I don't see a problem with a few detail errors in a map. Some people seems to think the valve standard is much higher than it actually is, their maps are not perfect.

Mappers should of course fix all the errors they come across, but it's still impossible to find everything yourself. If something looks bad, screenshot it and tell the author, it's as simple as that... If it's not reported, then it probably won't get fixed.
 

Stormcaller3801

L5: Dapper Member
Jul 5, 2009
249
28
There's a thread in the tutorial section about this- I think the title is something to the effect of 'Don't sweat the small stuff.'

The other night during the Detail 202 session, we hit Sawmill to look at examples. There's a decal of tire tracks that gets clipped oddly because it hits the edge of a brush. There's a building that has no door anywhere on it. There's nodraw edges, walls that stick out of roofs, and badly aligned textures. Similarly you can hit 2Fort, or Goldrush and find areas that aren't right.

But how many of these get noticed in actual play?

When KotH first hit, the servers I'm regularly on ran Sawmill KoTH regularly. There'd be a good dozen rounds of play there every day for me. I ran past that building that has no doors over and over and over again- I never noticed. Why? I wasn't really worried about it. I was more concerned with the other team. Similarly I never heard anything about it on chat- and the comments in the mapping class suggested this wasn't isolated to the servers I play on.

Little imperfections, and even larger ones, aren't that big of a deal. You're likely to notice them when you're staring at them with nobody shooting at you, but in actual play, a lot of people are going to skip the little things. They'll probably notice the big ones, and depending on how you lay out your map they may run into an area and suddenly have dozens of details to take in at once, where they'll stop and appreciate the work you've done- but most of the time, the issues they're going to care about are the ones that would come up if everything was rendered in dev textures:

  • Are there enough ammo boxes and health kits?
  • Do I know where I'm supposed to go?
  • Can I get there (wherever there is) quickly?
  • Can I defend/assault that objective effectively?

Past that, I'd guess that 90% of the people who'd notice the details are your fellow mappers.
 

Psy

The Imp Queen
aa
Apr 9, 2008
1,706
1,491
Jesus christ. Who the f*** cares? If you think such a simple and honest mistake suddenly makes a map crap then you seriously need to reconsider your outlook.

Oh look! Displacement gaps in Goldrush. Clearly it is now the worst map ever!
 

drp

aa
Oct 25, 2007
2,273
2,628
Jesus christ. Who the f*** cares? If you think such a simple and honest mistake suddenly makes a map crap then you seriously need to reconsider your outlook.

Oh look! Displacement gaps in Goldrush. Clearly it is now the worst map ever!
now you've pissed off psy, god help us.
 

Sgt Frag

L14: Epic Member
May 20, 2008
1,443
710
It's easy to miss small stuff like that and not that big of a deal IMO.
Can't say how many times I played fastlane and while I noticed flaoting rocks in an early vers I've never seen the rocket or crate issues.
Of course we all want our maps to be perfect but it takes so much time to build them and little things can be easily missed.

Sometimes you think you have a map fully polished then at some point you accidentaly select/nudge a crate into a wall and never thinking about it it gets missed.

I know sawmill (every vers.) has a 2 crate stack in a corner that has 2 extra crates z figthing. Obviously the mappers went to clone that stack for use elsewhere and did one of those nudges and ended up with an extra set of ccrates that is hard to see unless you are in game in front of it.
Nobody pointed it out and it stayed, will Valve update 3 maps and make everyone re-dl because of it, should they? probably not.
 

Shadow Tyrant

L69: Deviant Member
Aug 7, 2009
69
3
Jesus christ. Who the f*** cares? If you think such a simple and honest mistake suddenly makes a map crap then you seriously need to reconsider your outlook.

Oh look! Displacement gaps in Goldrush. Clearly it is now the worst map ever!

Yeah because that's exactly what I said. :glare: