I don't see how the little railing and shift of stairs in the ramp room changes that sentry location at all.
The main issue was that a single sentry could be placed that had sightlines (if not necessarily awesome ones) on the balcony, the grating, and the courtyard stairs. Adding the fence means any sentry in this location is easy to see and easy to bombard, or even shoot (with non-arcing weaponry) through the gap below the fence.
The steam vent that bypasses half the base... I don't see the point. Either everyone will use it because it's an awesome shortcut, or there will be someone camping the bottom and then nobody can use it.
True. It's a high-risk high-reward path, but it should be especially useful for spies (who don't need to push through the crowd in the upper-courtyard) and for BONK!-equipped scouts.
As much as it increases the assault abilities of the enemy, the defending engineers can return to the basement extremely fast.
Yeah, this does bother me a bit, but it would be weird to have a door in your own base that only the enemy team could open.
The area overlooking the intel room, while an interesting idea, is way too damn cramped and has zero clipping to aid in navigability.
I'm considering making some of the machinery insubstantial and adding short octagonal clipping columns. The cramping part intentional, to make it a hostile place for any sentries. A big purpose of the new room is to allow attackers new ways to edge/bombard sentries already inside the intel room, hence all the props. (The railings are only player-clip, so you can shoot rockets through them.) Additionally it serves as a third exit from the intel room, and even if you die soon after the drop-chute should allow some touching of the intel to keep it in play.
The opening you made in the computer wall has a few issues. Firstly, the viewable distance goes beyond the cutoff and you
can see the skybox in the command room. Tiny slip-through-several-cracks sightlines like that are also very annoying when a sniper sits at the other end.
Ouch. Didn't notice that. Hrm.
The reason for the gap is that it helps weaken the possible sentry position at the bottom spiral, providing cover someone can dash to without forcing them to approach the sentry in order to go around the bend into the intel room. (I don't anticipate snipers wanting to sit around guarding that particular spot, though.)
How about if I resealed the gap and instead punched an L-shaped corridor through the displacement-wall? (On the right of that screenshot.)
I don't see why you changed the door for the basement resupply. It moves ungodly slow now and you crash into it. This is never acceptable behavior of a door. (This happens with the new primary spawn's door too)
I'll see about speeding the various doors up (maybe test them as a scout with high fake ping) but AFAIK the basement door speed and triggering distances are unchanged.
The box/barrel at the top of the stairs seem terribly pointless. All I can see it doing is allowing an engineer more cover to camp behind while maintaining a gun. (and inhibits enemy escape coming from the stairs to a minor degree)
I guess the scenario I had in mind was a soldier going down the vent, grabbnig the intel, and coming up via the stairs, and then dealing with a top-floor sentry near the short-fence.
The box is, strangely enough, just tall enough to block all of the sentry's attacks when you crouch, while short enough for you to shoot rockets directly at the sentry. The barrel lets you break line of sight (to retreat when the sentry swings the other way) and makes the box look less lonely.
The two barrels in the front hallway are completely unnecessary. They only impede the flow of movement and do nothing to provide cover, considering you have two new nooks to duck into.
Yeah, it still feels a bit cramped even with the clipping aid on the barrels.
With the addition of the drop-vent, I thought more engineers would try a sentry spot which looks down that hallway, and I wanted to provide some cover for enemies to edge the turret from. (Even right-handed ones.) The other goal was to split defender traffic in the area to make it so a Spy could choose to walk on whichever side the enemy didn't.
The shortcut here with the three small metal panels is really cumbersome and annoying to traverse through as well.
Yeah. I wish I could make it smoother. The baffles are there in order to break up the sightline and prevent another sentry spot. It's certainly unsuitable as a major pathway, but it should give attackers some more choices in terms of how they want to enter the lower courtyard.
Ooh, what if I made it a low-wall with some clutter on each side? People could hop from one side to another, but it'd be tall enough to prevent sentry targeting.
Displacing the ground inside the bases. I do not see the purpose it serves, and it only looks, to steal a line, pants-on-head-retarded in the blue base since it is concrete.
Yeah, it looks weird in BLU base, but the goal is to allow scouts to do sneaky FAN jumps up into the grate. Currently on 2fort you can only do it inside RED base. Is there maybe some other material I could make the bump out of?
p.s. good lord do something about
your HDR. (I'm guessing improper tonemap controller, not a lack of one)
It's the original tonemap controller present in the SDK release, but the skybox texture is different from before because the SDK release won't compile correctly. IIRC the original is
sky_tf2_04 but I swapped it for
sky_day02_05 since it was sunny and had roughtly the same ideal sun angle. Hopefully I'll figure out what VTF-tweaking magic I need to do to avoid the compile warning over the original skybox before final.