We need more tutorials! - Essentials.tf is asking for mapping guides

Fruity Snacks

Creator of blackholes & memes. Destroyer of forums
aa
Sep 5, 2010
6,394
5,571
Hey guys,

I was recently asked to help lead the essentials.tf mapping resource guide portion of the project. If you haven't heard about what it is, you can get some more information regarding it over at this reddit post. I can also take questions and forward them to the essentials team, to get more direct answers.

Anyways, the point of this post is to state what we need: guides. We have a lot of them in our Tutorials and Resource Section on the site, but many of them are outdated or don't cover some aspects of mapping. This is where you guys come in: help rebuild, reformat, update and straight up make new guides for whatever aspect of mapping we need. All we ask is that it's a quality guide that can help someone who hasn't necessarily done what you're making a guide about.

All your guides should be posted here, or on steam guides... this is to ensure that the authors maintain their credit.

So yea. Make guides! We needed to touch up the Tutorials and Resource section a bit anyways, so now is the perfect time. If you have suggestions on what could be made, you can put them here (or, even better, make them yourself!).

Thanks everyone!

P.S: Crash and I already plan to do the "how to get started with mapping" guide. No need to worry about that one.
 
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fubarFX

The "raw" in "nodraw"
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Jun 1, 2009
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I would feel weird documenting an editor that has been around for nearly a decade, you'd think this thing has been figured out by now. I agree that our documentation needs an overhaul but now is not a good time to jump on the tf2 mapping train anyways... not even sure we should bother, but that's just my narrow minded opinion.

I'm also saddened about having to go back to square one on documentation instead of pushing forward into technical stuff. But yes, the tf2 mapping documentation is a very real issue.
 
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Fantaboi

Gone and one day forgotten
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Mar 11, 2013
892
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Valve just released new mapping assets, I doubt what we have currently is going to be around for much longer, therefore I think it's more important we teach theory, not technical stuff as it wont become obsolete in a matter of years.
 

henke37

aa
Sep 23, 2011
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Like say, the developer wiki? You know, the one where all existing information is?
 

wareya

L420: High Member
Jun 17, 2012
493
191
Question #1 is: Will the content be community-editable, directly, like a wiki?

If not, I'm not going to make any new material for it. I'm happy to let me existing material be repurposed for it (non-exclusively) but I'm not going to start for something that's not proven friendly.
 
Jul 30, 2014
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If you do anything like this, I suggest you post it on comp.tf as well. It is already set up and gets pageviews, and the guy who runs it Kaneco seems pretty cool as well.
 

wareya

L420: High Member
Jun 17, 2012
493
191
I don't like comp.tf for personal reasons, and I really don't think general map guides would survive naturally as such on a comp-oriented wiki.
 

Fantaboi

Gone and one day forgotten
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Mar 11, 2013
892
1,050
I'm going to ramble about what tutorials we should have so bear with me.

What we need is people talking about theory, not technicality.

The most we should have is just people talking about their design choices in their maps, i'd love to see people talk about why they have they have 2 medkits and 1 ammo in their KOTH map, challenges they had whilst making it and how they accepted the problems and changed it.

I'd love to see a tutorial on how to properly market a map, I mean there are some massively popular ones and i'd like to know how ashville became the king of comp and how Glassworks got noticed so well, so far all I know is "post an imgur album to reddit then a video trailer."

I remember the first written tutorial I had wasn't about how to "make a super cool arch with less polys" but a guy lecturing about aesthetics that can affect game-play (deterrents, eye-catching, contrast etc) how to properly plan-out paths and coming up with map designs. Since this was all theory when I quit mapping for that game all of the theory carried over to tf2, and if one day tf3 comes out or half-life 3 mp I hope to god everything I learnt about mapping will carry over.

Sorry if i'm rambling i'm really tired but in my opinion Theory>Technical at this point, source 1.0 isn't going to be out for much longer so we might as well teach stuff that is going to carry over, and we already have plenty of technical tutorials for those getting started (hell I feel more comfortable in hammer than microsoft word and I barely started 2+ years ago)

Here is a perfect example I'd love to see this community talk about their maps and go into their theory.
 
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WolfMachina

L1: Registered
Aug 9, 2014
1
6
Hi everyone, I approached Frozen about this. I want to put together a site where anyone can access all the great content and resources that so many people have made for TF2. A place where from the front page you can access any of the main facets of the TF community, refining to all areas. Also, where you can find any resources through a friendly search system, instead of only containing comp stuff from the first page.

The way the site will be put together means that anyone who creates a guide or resource will retain total ability to edit them as they will be hosted either via steam guides or whichever site the creator chooses to use (tf2maps for example). It's your work we just want to give people a way to find it easily.

That said, we would like to have a set of beginners guides as the main content for each area, leading to a directory for more advanced guides. Hence Frozen and Crash are creating a refreshed beginners guide to mapping, even if the tool has been around for 14 years.

The site will be designed to make these resources more accessible to all levels of player in the community, with a hopefully intuitive interface and eventually updated versions of older tools that have fallen into disrepair (config generator etc) and new tools (pov demo library/viewer).

If you have any questions at all, please feel free to contact me through steam

Also, I'm not normally this formal, I just wanted to get a nice site explanation typed up xP
 

xzzy

aa
Jan 30, 2010
815
531
A good guide, but mega intimidating and sometimes hard to find what you need, if it's even there.

Then maybe we should spend energy fixing that? It's an open wiki, anyone who makes an account and verifies their email address can edit it.

Especially at this stage in Source's life. With a new engine in beta release it makes a lot more sense to update existing docs than start a completely new project.
 

Berry

resident homo
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Dec 27, 2012
1,056
1,898
Late on the topic but if anyone wants to make a really useful guide, an updated Propper setup for TF2's hammer would be very useful.