dom_bootcamp_a2

Brief comments after the playtesting tonight:

The brushwork looked solid and interesting. The layout seemed varied with good use of upper and lower levels but...

...even though it's just a beta test, you really need to get good sign posting up first. Because it's still in orange texture stage, the player doesn't even get environmental/texture clues as to where they are. I love the DOM gameplay type from the little I played on TheBladeRoden's map, but unfortunately didn't really get the chance to get stuck in with this one because I didn't have a clue where I was. At one point I couldn't even find the other cps.

As soon as you have some signs up, from what I could see of the map so far, I think it's going to be excellent.

Looking forward to the next release!

Comments after playing it:

Epic! I love it!
I think that either the domination points go up too slowly or the map is too large, probably a comination of both, whilst Roden's complex suffers from being too small, this is the opposite.
You've got a nasty problem in several areas where the cap point is off the ground, the holograms can be seen the floor below... doh!


Also:

This entrance needs to be modified, either the whole tunnel needs to be made taller or the displacements at each entrance need to be flattened, I had some problems getting into it smoothly sometimes.

Edit: oh yeah, CANT WAIT TILL ITS TEXTURED!

Oh yeah I forgot ot mention before: put playerclips on the stairs (you do have stairs right? there was an all orange map on the server last night and it needed clips on the stairs to prevent jerkyness and I think it was this one)

Also: when you come to detail this, just a request from me: please make it all one team's style with the exception of where the other team spawns initially. so thats all red or all blu (update it to the tf2 style of course )

I just read some of shmitz suggestions, and I have to say I disagree with most of them.

I think that rather than shrinking the map, you can instead make the points just go up faster.

The other reason I can think that people might want the maps shrunk is to make navigation between points easier, but I think that the addition of signs and textures will help with that.

If the map gets shrunk then I am afraid it will end up like complex, only friendly really to Soldiers and scouts and crappy for pretty much everyone else. At the moment on complex I cant play as an engineer because the map is just to small.

Shmitz suggests spawn rooms but I dont think they are needed, complex which is much smaller does not have them.

I would have to say my favorite part of the map so far is how you can get to all sorts of places just by jumping and running on small ledges, makes for all sorts of interesting game play.

ryodoan said:

I just read some of shmitz suggestions, and I have to say I disagree with most of them.

I think that rather than shrinking the map, you can instead make the points just go up faster.

The other reason I can think that people might want the maps shrunk is to make navigation between points easier, but I think that the addition of signs and textures will help with that.

If the map gets shrunk then I am afraid it will end up like complex, only friendly really to Soldiers and scouts and crappy for pretty much everyone else. At the moment on complex I cant play as an engineer because the map is just to small.

Shmitz suggests spawn rooms but I dont think they are needed, complex which is much smaller does not have them.

I would have to say my favorite part of the map so far is how you can get to all sorts of places just by jumping and running on small ledges, makes for all sorts of interesting game play.

Click to expand...

Regarding spawn rooms, whether or not they're "needed" is no reason to not have them. Consistency with all other TF2 maps is reason enough to have them, and I can't see any reason why they would hurt gameplay. They would provide a use for certain dead areas, as well as tightening up some interiors that are currently too large to effectively place sentries in.

Also, I still think even with shrinking the map bootcamp would be far friendlier to engineers than complex is. After all, it doesn't matter how big or small a map is since a sentry can only shoot with a 1024 radius. The important thing is the layout. In complex there just aren't very many good places to put sentries where they will have effective cover. Bootcamp has several places where sentries can be particularly effective. Most of the sentry placement troubles in bootcamp actually come more from areas being too large.

My reason for thinking the map should be shrunk has nothing to do with navigation, but rather to address the fact that the map currently has a lot of dead space that sees little to no action.

Just played bootcamp and engineers didnt seem to have many problems, other than I've learnt to burn around corners as pyro now.

Ok so you should make the entire map a respawnroom brush for the begining 10 seconds (thats less time than it takes for scouts to meet each other so its fine) You can do this by enableing the respawnroom brush with the game_timer entity, it has an OnRoundStart output so you have OnRoundStart that enables it, people can change class safely for 10 seconds, then an OnRoundStart that disables it with a 10 second delay.

You could even do something similar on a per-spawn basis (this is gunna get messy)
Have a respawnroom brush for every spawn point, that is only 64 units wide and deep and enable it with a player spawn (I think the teamspawn has an onspawn output) you then have a logic relay to work out which team has just spawned (based on who the teamspawn entity belongs to) that enables the respawnroom brush, then the respawnroom brush will have a filter for that team, and when the player leaves the brush have it disable itself. of course this would mean an extra two brushes and one logic_relay (without actually thinking deeply into how it would work) for every single spawnpoint - so you can see how complex it would get.

EDIT: also, you need to change the name of the cap points from roden's to your own