Gridiron

Gridiron rc1a

  • This map is featured! Our best maps, all together in one place for your viewing pleasure.

Tiftid

the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil
aa
Sep 10, 2016
518
391
Hey Pieman, little detailing-feedback tidbit (although I feel bad giving any detailing feedback when you haven't even finished detailing yet, and could easily already know everything I'm about to tell you):
upload_2021-8-1_16-12-41.png

The texture repetition is really obvious on these distant buildings, and even on the non-distant ones you've used the metalwall textures that have those holes in them, which makes repetition really obvious.
Admittedly, since it uses the same textures, Foundry suffers from this too.

I'll start with the roofs - metal/wall025 might be a really cool texture with multiple colours and holes, but it's really obviously repetitive thanks to this hole. Foundry uses this texture too, but it only does it on the really small roofs:
upload_2021-8-1_16-16-39.png

The larger roofs have the much less repetitive metal/wall028.
You can still get some great results with metal/wall025 - I already mentioned using small roofs, but I find that scaling it up to 0.5x masks the repetition well, and the texture's distinct colours help to make it look less ugly even when it's at a low resolution:
upload_2021-8-1_16-22-16.png


Over here, you seem to have had great results by using smaller roofs and rotating the texture:
upload_2021-8-1_16-23-43.png

This is good and all, but in the further-away buildings it becomes obvious how this effect is limited, and using metal/wall028 or metal/wall011h instead would probably have been better.

Also, in the top left, it becomes apparent how metal/wall011 (the one with the holes) does not repeat well.
In particular in this building, the noisiness of the texture and the similarity in the colours makes the windows pretty much invisible:
upload_2021-8-1_16-28-11.png


Foundry doesn't really suffer from this problem as much, since it doesn't have distant buildings - the furthest-away object in this scene are the chimneys, and everything else is largely in a ring surrounding the playable area.
upload_2021-8-1_16-33-6.png

This lets the designers not make any one wall big enough for the texture repetition to become a problem, and even when it does, they can decorate it with details such as windows, signs, numbers and pipes, while leaving some walls blank so they contrast with the rest of the scene.

But in distant buildings, this isn't an option, since the designer has probably used enough detail in the playable space to mask the texture repetition that using it again on the distant buildings would impact framerate way too much, or make the entire scene blend together, with no clear distinction between playable space and out-of-bounds, or between different areas of the same map. (Honestly, this is already a problem the foundry theme has, since every wall uses the same textures - no need to accentuate it by also building OOB areas with the same issue.)

So, to avoid this, you can either not have buildings far in the distance, or the buildings in the distance need to use different textures to the buildings in the playable space - either the variants of the metal textures that don't have holes (although they're still pretty noisy and repetitive), or different textures entirely (such as the white metal texture metal/wall015g that I recommended to you for the interiors, which is especially suitable because it has holeless top/bottom/mid variants), or a totally different material (brick buildings could be cool).

Now onto the really nitpicky things:
upload_2021-8-1_16-43-31.png

Not a fan of the texture alignment here, though this also echoes Foundry. You could shift it just a little bit to the right and it'd align with the beams far more pleasantly.

upload_2021-8-1_16-58-15.png

This sawtooth roof is sorta weird. Firstly, it suffers from repeating textures, but it's helped out by the fact that the roof goes out of the playspace, so looking at it from the inside makes the repetition less jarring as the roof flattens towards the horizon, so no issue there.
Where the weirdness comes from is the windows - typically sawtooth roofs have the wall part of each triangle be a window to let light in and don't bother with windows on the side, particularly since no one's going to be standing in there to look out of those windows.

I recognise that you need to do something to make the goal building stand out, but you already have an interesting and functional roof as well as a sign - maybe you could try raising the wall and putting industrial windows into it, or not raising the wall at all and letting the contrast with the heights of all the other buildings and the fact that there's clearly no space beyond it distinguish the goal building.

Or, you could try using a different texture for it. I would recommend making this the wood building of the map, but then the "RED Iron Works" sign would feel a bit ironic. Maybe you could try the rusty variants of metal/wall011 and metal/wall019, so the "RED is old-fashioned, BLU is new-fangled" part of other themes (e.g 2fort, where RED's base is wooden and BLU's is metal and concrete) now carries over to the Foundry theme.

Lecture over. Sorry if I was preaching to you about stuff you already knew.
 

MegapiemanPHD

Doctorate in Deliciousness
aa
Mar 31, 2012
1,937
1,280
-replaced large machine things at mid with thin barriers to still provide cover but help negate soldiers dominating that area with the high ground
-moved around speed boost pads and added a second one to both sides
-adjusted respawn wave times
-swapped small overtime goal to the larger goal props and included short training annotations to point them out when they become active in an attempt to help players know they exist
-removed throw in goal closing in overtime
-detail adjustments to use props that make more sense in some areas as well as attempting to make repeating textures on some buildings less obvious
-adjusted some health and ammo locations and amounts
-probably other stuff as well

Read the rest of this update entry...