KotH Timber

  • Thread starter Deleted member 20029
  • Start date
D

Deleted member 20029

plagiarism

I admitted to copying things from other maps before, and I used this map mostly as a practice to specific set of things i wanted to improve. I was pretty happy with outcome and decided to publish it somewhere to get feedback on what im doing wrong, and for that one person that actually helped me, thank you. For now I am looking for way to delete this and abandon the project, like I wanted to do in first place.

Tunnel is copied because I cant for shit find any tutorial on how to make them propely. And yes, I do feel bad about copying things from other maps, but then again I didnt even plan to release the map in first place.
 
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Kraken

Few more zeros and ones for the site to proccess
Dec 21, 2014
430
121
That looks gorgeous and you dit it in eight days?
 

seth

aa
May 31, 2013
1,019
851
Downloaded it and ran around for a bit. Here are some things I noticed in no particular order.

Your cubemaps do not appear to have been built. Here's how I build mine.
http://puu.sh/iCu6M/bbaa8c4a18.jpg

You forgot to pack your map. I like VIDE.
http://puu.sh/iCub1/361b44e3c9.jpg

As you pointed out, your spawns are rather messy. A lot of the trim looks weirdly out of place and the lighting is pretty intense, which helps to create some blocky shadows. I'd just either kill the lights and open the ceiling a bit more, or at least tone them down. They're very bright. Also there's a displacement poking in through the wall in the corner there, looks a little odd. It's only like this in Blu spawn.
http://puu.sh/iCvns/15351549a7.jpg

There's also no differentiation between the Red and Blu sides of the map. No texture swaps, model swaps, anything. The only way you can know which side you're on is seeing if things are flipped or not from where you spawned. If you don't switch textures/models etc., at least add a little signage.

You have a really weird seam running down the center of the point area causing some hard shadow transitions. I don't what could cause this other than your lightmaps being misaligned, so take a look at that area.
http://puu.sh/iCuwo/38656de3f4.jpg

The window frames above the point on both sides are all very dark. Since they are models, their lighting origin must be inside the brushwork somehow so you could put a few info_lighting's in the window space to get them to light properly.
http://puu.sh/iCuzA/9870667407.jpg

As I'm sure you know, you have lots of misaligned textures. Just rotate these 90 degrees to fix them. There are more than what I've posted here, you'll have to do a run-through to clean these up.
http://puu.sh/iCuLj/e7438cdedf.jpg
http://puu.sh/iCuoX/cef3e80bba.jpg
http://puu.sh/iCupQ/a8f6437630.jpg
http://puu.sh/iCvC1/9012e0c4bb.jpg
http://puu.sh/iCw7G/66a507c4b9.jpg

This room is a box with no exits. How did they get all that wood in there?
http://puu.sh/iCv9S/b79e2a8f89.jpg

The top steps of stairs typically lie flush with the floor, looks a little awkward and forces you to lower the lightmap scale if you want to have the face sticking up be properly lit instead of a black strip.
http://puu.sh/iCv6b/992ef14529.jpg

Are you compiling with -staticproplighting, -staticproppolys, and -textureshadows? Your foliage props look especially fullbright and cast block shadows.
http://puu.sh/iCvFT/7f0fa4c43f.jpg
http://puu.sh/iCwia/b83e25fc0f.jpg

I know these are props and the wood texture used on them looks a little out of place. I'd recommend just making it out of brushes and texturing it with the stuff you used on the floor above it. There's also a bush prop poking through the wall there.
http://puu.sh/iCvNs/7fe218fe2f.jpg

You have lots of little brushes like this where some of their faces are hidden behind other brushwork, which will end up being lit very darkly or even completely black because the lightmap scale is too low. If you're going to stick with little details like this, you'll need to lower the lightmap scale to at least 8, probably 4.
http://puu.sh/iCvW9/27a35b437d.jpg

Some z-fighting and odd lighting going on here. Just delete one of the z-fighting brushes.
http://puu.sh/iCw4E/a5aba57eb9.jpg

The space under the waterfall is easily visible from a rocket jump. Just add a water brush here or something.
http://puu.sh/iCwgO/be73d7e999.jpg

Walking up to the point from the lower route makes me feel very vulnerable. I can't see who's on the point until I'm actually standing on it if I come from the lower route up these stairs and the defenders can't see me until I'm in their face. You might want to try evening out height differences in the point area as how it stands right now defenders only have a short time to react to attackers from any position.
http://puu.sh/iCwp3/15c250d4b9.jpg

Displacement seam. You can just select them both in Hammer and even out the texture transition to help alleviate this.
http://puu.sh/iCwH3/d6a6835c78.jpg

That's all for now, submit it to a gameday so we can play it!
 
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D

Deleted member 20029

Changing status to beta, haha :D Yes, as much as I did rush with the map (you can see it clearly), many of mistakes are because that I am simply unexperienced and its my first map. Big thanks for the feedback, will work on it :)
 
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tyler

aa
Sep 11, 2013
5,102
4,621
You might also want to change your name. There've been like 50 million random maps named Timber. Some of them get farther than others, but basically name conflicts lead to people getting booted from servers for having the wrong map file or whatever. Or it leads to confusion over whether someone has adapted their older map into a newer one, etc. You can do a name search on tf2stats.net but I'd also google as well, because it doesn't cover everything.

And ALWAYS make a blue side of the map.

Also ALWAYS version your map name. Now when you update your map, people won't know if koth_timber or koth_timber_b1 or whatever is the latest version, and that can also cause map name conflicts.
 
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tyler

aa
Sep 11, 2013
5,102
4,621
OK, having had a look at the map in game, it really shows that this was done in 8 days or less. Not in a positive way.

Your detailing is a mess. It's all over the place, and I'm sorry to tell you it's not very thought out. Meaning it isn't good. You've got metal spytech doors in wooden buildings that are half sunken into dirt. You have prop spam all over in amounts usually only seen on prophunt maps. Misaligned, seemingly random textures. Tons of displacement seams. Rocks you can see the (invisible) backs of. Lighting errors. Missing models. No soundscapes, and your capture point is way, way too small (and unmarked). You're using areaportals, but they seem to do nothing, as literally the entire map renders at once. Many props are half submerged in the ground, sometimes concrete. ALL of the prop renders when you do this, despite the player not seeing it, so do it sparingly. The container/tire/ladder ramp looks cut and pasted straight from Mountain Lab. You've got outdoor lights inside the spawns, and random Doomsday props also. That's not even half of it.

It looks like Mtn Lab from far away, but not up close.

Likewise, your routes to the point are mostly hard to use. Lots of long, open paths, or thin planks leading up very high. I advise you look at the height diferences on Badwater, which are some of the most extreme in the game, and think about (1) why they are so high (2) why no other map goes so high (3) why it works in Badwater.

Finally, I don't know where fights are supposed to happen. There's so much clutter and stuff around the point, that surely you don't intend players to fight there? If you do, please clean it up greatly and make it far more accessible. If you didn't intend for players to fight there... where, exactly? And why not?

Not to mention that as I've already said, lacking a blue side is very bad. It's impossible to know where you are on the map at any given time.

Frankly, I strongly suggest you go back to alpha, with zero or almost no detail. Then test the layout. It will be a lot easier to adjust layout based on human testing when you don't have to constantly readjust all the detail you've added. Test a few times each version until you have an idea of what you want to do, until you decide it's ready to be detailed again. And then take your time, do it carefully, and make an area and environment that makes sense, has team sides, and doesn't look like the model browser threw up into your vmf.
 
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Apr 14, 2013
663
343
And to make a tunnel, you can get along just fine with the following method:

1) Build your tunnel as if it was a simple door- a floor, two frames on each side, and a ceiling. Make the "door" frame as thick as you want the tunnel to be
2) Displace the frame
3) In the displcement menu, click the "subdivide" button
4) Admire the results
 

Lenny

L2: Junior Member
May 2, 2013
90
35
Changelog
>rip

Did you just copied 4/5 things?
The rest of the map is good then!
Dont give up..

I think it's less of the fact that they copied something and more of the fact that they copied something and tried to pass it off as their own/not give credit