Hey RedMser, we played your map in an impromptu today.
Here's the feedback, and
here's the auto-recorded STV demo.
Thanks a lot for that! ctf_hayfever_a15 has been released and should contain a ton of fixes related to most of the problems people were having (didn't find solid solutions to the big reflective room and the general openness of the map, please let me know if you have ideas for fixing these problems)! :blushing:
Because there was a lot of confusion and ranting about many bits, I wanted to summarize what I've gotten out of it:
(Most of the things listed here have already been fixed by now)
The reason the bridge wasn't crossable is because there used to be no guard rail, so not only could you shoot down from the top, but you could also get double the amount of ammo and health to stay up longer and dominate the bridge, so I just cut it in half. But as I've added guard rails now, there was no real point as shooting down makes you incredibly vurnerable (especially trying to build a sentry there now will mostly fail), so there isn't a real reason to have the bridge cut now.
I wanted to have a big room in the middle, but do something special with it. There already is the shiny and awesome looking floor everyone adores, but because the spawns inside are way too close, I put something in the middle to stop that: The big window.
That way people won't be able to shoot from one spawn to another or just run right up to it, and there is still a way to get to the other side, only not such an open one. I am not sure what to do with the middle other than that, other than making the middle room smaller. I am not sure what to put in it either, possibly something like you have in Turbine:
Some hard to reach high areas (containers) and some obstacles to obstruct the pathway (generators).
All of the complicated geometry is func_detail'ed (I should be shot if that weren't already the case). :closedeyes:
The map is too open. This is a hard one, as it would be quite hard to change that. The fact that the front area of the intel is encased was me already trying to prevent that in the back areas, but it is true that the middle is very open. If anyone has got any idea to prevent that, please let me know! I will mess around with it, see what I can do!
The intel room is too big. I wanted it to be a big room to be able to have much hiding space, but as there is literally nothing on the left side of the intel room, I just moved the wall from there closer and made it a little smaller. It will be filled with some farming equipment, but not in a way that it would be obstructive.
The darkness of the map is because of the amount of iterations I did to the map. I constantly moved the sunlight in different directions and messed around with the values, but as I have a pretty good setup for it now (at least I think so) I will try to illuminate the areas that are now pretty dark (like the intel room or the area out of spawn).
I am not quite sure how to get the "fun" out of an area. The reason you go to an area in a singleplayer game is either to progress or to get some bonuses out of it (like items), and if it is for fun, then it can be a minigame or filled with many monsters, but in TF2 the only way to make an area viable and fun is to either reward you (medkit and ammo), get a dangerous hazard in it (sawblades, pits, ...) or make it fun to get around in it (rocket jumping, platforming, ...). But I am not sure how to do it here. Going rocket jumping or sticky jumping in this map is quite a fun thing to do, as it is very open (which it shouldn't even be :O ), but as there isn't anything special to it, there isn't much of any other fun.
I wanted to get specific hazards into it. Initially, there was a pit in the middle instead of the window that over time had doors in it opening and closing, which would change the map flow and could get you killed if you were there at the wrong time. That idea turned out pretty badly, because first of all, there wasn't a way to incooperate the blockade for making the middle less open and split, and second of all, the randomity and the fact that there was no warning to the opening and closing made it kinda game breaking. If any event, like capturing the flag or the like, would toggle them, the players could control the doors and that wouldn't make them as much of a hazard as they should be. I want to have something special in the map, but am not sure what to do.
TL;DR: This post just shows how bad of a map designer I am! :bored:
