Terminal

Terminal B1a

14bit

L14: Bit Member
aa
Oct 5, 2014
642
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Terminal - Space-warping robot escorting action!

IT IS THE YEAR 20XX

In an effort to finally finish the great moon lumber war (see plr_orbit), RED decided to build their own space base as a forward command in the battle, as sending endless waves of bombs to destroy BLU’s equivalent bombs wasn’t working (see plr_orbit). With this, RED hoped to finally secure Lunar Lumber Co. (see plr_orbit).

In an effort to stop RED from gaining control of Lunar Lumber Co. (see plr_orbit), BLU designed a bunch of robots hack RED’s security terminals running the space bases’ defenses. Unfortunately, they were spread across the world and linked via MAGIC satellites. To counter this, BLU constructed a new MEGA-TELEPORTER to distribute the robots quickly and then get to the space base for the final assault.

In an effort to stop BLU for succeeding, RED snuck in and turned the instructions for assembling the MEGA-TELEPORTER upside-down. BLU proceeded to build the MEGA-TELEPORTER upside-down.

In an effort to launch their assault quickly, BLU did not test the teleport before the assault on RED’s space base. This has been widely regarded as a bad move.

In an effort to continue to function while being built upside-down, the MEGA-TELEPORTER did what it does best. It teleported stuff. Instead of teleporting the robots and BLU team to RED’s facilities, however, it teleported all of the different facilities to where BLU team and the robots were.


Introducing Robot Escort!
Defend robots, hack computer terminals, and capture the point in this all new game mode! Capture the control point to win! Escort your robots as they slowly head for the computer terminals in groups of three. If any robot reach a terminal, it will be hacked and give an advantage to the attacking team. If time runs out or enough power cores are collected, the defending team wins! (It’s like steel, but with robots that act like self-propelled payloads in place of control points)

Other notes:
A bots have the least heath, while C bots have the most.
A bots drop very few power cores when killed, while C bots drop a lot.
Bots slowly regain heath over time.
When all three bots are killed, the group will respawn at the start of the map.
Once a terminal has been hacked, its corresponding bots will no longer respawn.


FAQ
What’s up with the HUD?
Glad you asked! I tried to make it as intuitive as possible, but there’s only so much I can do with the HUD. On the left is the control point capture thingy. To the right of that is the power core bar, which shows how close Red is to winning by collecting power cores. The required amount is shown below that. The large letters above the bar are the computer terminals. They change color to show when they are captured. Please refer to this image if you don’t get it:

8d3c9c4a5e.png


No, I mean how did you do it?

Excellent question! 14bit’s MagicHUD™ is a miracle of modern Source engine technology, using the latest in hacky workarounds and rarely used entities. I’m going to to a writeup on how I did all the logic for the map at some point in the future, but I’ll briefly explain how I did the HUD here in the meantime. It’s basically a highly modified version of the Robot Destruction HUD, with some other fancy things tacked on. The RD gamemode was coded to load it’s HUD from a .res file that can be specified in hammer, presumably to make it easier to rapidly iterate during beta testing. I created a custom .res file based off of the existing RD one that hides blu’s half of the HUD and (mostly) centers it. The terminal indicators are custom textures that are being displayed via a env_screenoverlay, just like the train on the HUD in cp_snowplow. Each possible combination of terminal ownership has its own texture, as there can be only one env_screenoverlay enabled at a time. Finally, I just stuck in a control point adjusted it’s position to fit correctly. Ta-da! Fancy HUD. (Originally I wanted to use the flag indicator for RD to show how far the bots were in the map, but I couldn’t get it working. Who knows? Maybe someday someone will figure it out.)

Hey, what happened to the fancy mini-map thingy you showed off in the mapping chat a bunch?
I ran out of time. There were so many more gimmicks and jokes that were meant to be included, but due to prior obligations, I did not have time. One of the cut features was the mini-map system. All of the logic for it exists, and some of it is still in the map, but I didn’t have time to integrate the rest of it. It might still be added in a future update!

Cut gimmicks and jokes? Like what?
I want to keep some of them a secret (I’ll add them eventually) but here’s some of the more notable ones:
  • The training target in the Medieval area was supposed to play the Suijin gong sound when shot.
  • The spells in the Medieval area were going to be a different gimmick, but the entity I needed wouldn’t cooperate, so spells were subbed in.
The map won’t load/it crashes when I try to play it!
First off, that’s not a question. Second, I have no clue why some people are crashing. Maybe try downloading it from here manually? It’s a large file with lots of custom content, so that might cause some issues. I also messed with the HUD a bunch, so custom HUDs may or may not cause issues. One of my testers (The wondrously talented voice actor Glitchy647) said that it works fine with EVE HUD, so I don’t know. I’ll look into the crashing as soon as I can.

Why does my frame rate suck on this map?
It’s not optimized. At all. Just over a third of the map was built during the last 24 hours before I had to leave town, so I didn’t have time to optimize.

The voices are too quiet/loud!

Again, not a question.

Why are the voices too quiet/loud?

That’s better! Getting them to play in game was top priority, fixing volume differences was not. Again, this map was horribly rushed near the end. I didn’t even have time to make BLU’s spawn look like I wanted!

As always, thanks for any feedback! This is a strange new gamemode designed as a joke map, but I'll still try to respond to any feedback or questions you have.
 
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Star Bright

L2: Junior Member
Jan 4, 2016
75
65
So, just so I understand this correctly, BLU's primary job is to capture the point (the robots help them accomplish this somehow), while RED's is to collect the cores?

EDIT: Just tried playing it privately and it constantly crashes on map load. Tried uninstalling custom stuff, tried redownloading it from here, nothing. :<
 
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OctoBlitz

Sabotage related, and Tak approved!
aa
Jan 15, 2016
357
193
Cannot wait to try it!
 

14bit

L14: Bit Member
aa
Oct 5, 2014
642
2,065
So, just so I understand this correctly, BLU's primary job is to capture the point (the robots help them accomplish this somehow), while RED's is to collect the cores?

EDIT: Just tried playing it privately and it constantly crashes on map load. Tried uninstalling custom stuff, tried redownloading it from here, nothing. :<

Yep, that's how the gamemode works! I'll try to make it clearer later.

I have no idea why it's crashing for some people and not others. If anyone can help me figure this out I'll be very grateful! I'm out of town and can't use hammer until Sunday night, but I do have internet here. If anyone does figure it out, just shoot me a PM.