CP [CP] Granary Storm V1

[Miki]

It's Hurricane Season​

A hurricane has swept over Granary, but a little storm won't give you time off work. A periodic storm will come crashing down and limit your vision, giving you a window of time to push Sniper sightlines or strike an ambush.

Features:

• Dynamic stormy weather 2.0!
• Cut content: mid setup gates like in CP Well!
• Flooded map, beware the Pyrosharks!
• Bot support!

Gamebanana mirror
Steam Workshop mirror
Linktree (my links)

Spoiler: Credits

Thank you to these UGC content contributors.

Yrrzy - Modular Weather Particles
AsG_Alligator - Hi-res hazard stripes
TF2Maps Swamp Team - Swamp pack assets
Valve - L4D2 Rainscapes

 

[Miki]

Granary Storm is a small project intended to test converting my dynamic weather to other maps. The storm comes from Left 4 Dead 2’s Hard Rain, which I ported for TF2’s Super Zombie Fortress mod recently in the “Sugarmill Escape” map. While it looked promising testing solo and in a small group, putting the map into the hands of full server revealed many problems.

Sugarmill Escape had severe FPS drops in certain areas and other bugs in normal full server gameplay, which was not present in small group tests. To experiment with these systems further, I put my storm in a different and established map for testing. Granary was chosen for its flat layout and complex interiors, perfect to test with. The following storm changes were made:

1. The Swamp Pack rain has been replaced with non-simulated rain particles thanks to Yrzzy’s modular weather. This should help performance as the rain is no longer physically simulated. It was just too expensive despite Sugarmill using the alternative mistless rain particle.
2. Transitions between storm and rain now use traditional point soundscapes instead of trigger soundscapes. Trigger soundscapes would often fail to sync with large servers, and my method did not pay off. CTF Helltrain used a similar soundscape transition system, and so did Palanquin Ship (a custom VSH map) and I will be using their methods instead.
3. (Granary only) Storm fog’s opaque distance has increased slightly so that Sentries will not target through fog (from 768 to 1100 HU).
4. (Granary only) Water slowdown was removed. Players don’t like being slowed, and if they must, there should be a fair reason. Water was a hazard in L4D2 that halved your movement speed making you an easy target. In PvP, water is heavily nerfed to slow by about 10%, almost negligible I thought. But lesson learned: even small movement speed changes have large implications. In the case of L4D2, Tanks can now outrun Survivors. For TF2, water does not slowdown anyway and I kept that behavior consistent.

For fun, I also made some changes to the map. Besides the flooding and nighttime, there was an unused relay calling for middle setup doors, which I speculate functioned like cp Well’s setup gates to the middle point. It was probably removed for good reason, and no other 5cp map does what Well did, but let’s put it back in just to see why. Bot support was also added.

In conclusion: this map serves as an experiment for the storm logic and how to iterate making one using an existing layout as demonstration. I went ahead and gave it some nice touch-ups for people to enjoy playing on it, and I think people who like novelty and unique ideas will be drawn to it.

What happens after this? I want to update Sugarmill with the iteration from Granary Storm, should it get the results I’m after. I also want to write a tutorial how the storm functions and a prefab download so other mappers can use it in their own maps (update: here). Thank you for reading (amazing how fast you lose that!).

 

[Miki]

(update post)
- Fixed cubemaps not being packed. I checked with sv_pure 2 and everything, but something happened and they weren't there. File name has not changed (so replace your download if you got it early).

 

[Miki]

Hey folks,

Yesterday I worked with Redsun to playtest Granary Storm with 32 players and the results were a success in my book. The goal wasn’t focused on the map’s reception and more so a stress test of the storm with high player countsーit had no more lag than a typical 32 player server would have. Besides that, you may be curious how the map was received ingame.

During our playtest, one player coined the gameplay “Pyroshark Mania” as half of both teams were a Neon Annihilator Pyro once they figured out shallow water still grants crits. Some said the water made Pyros overpowered (ironically enough). Nobody told them play Pyroshark, many people just gravitated to it. Despite this, the flamethrower proved a more reliable weapon, but a niche against the Darwin’s Danger Shield made the Neon worth using against them. It also made explosive jumping reach higher (which I was aware of).

No one commented on the storm itself. I changed fog to be more visible and a farther distance compared to Sugarmill, pushing it closer to normal TF2. I think keeping the intense fog would have raised visibility complaints, so no comments perhaps are the best outcome. Even though we were testing the storm logic in a large server rather than map layout, here are the heatmaps from Sunday’s playtest:

Although I can’t filter melee kills, I can filter Pyro kills at a low distance. So the “Pyroshark OP” evidence would be found here.


In my experience, using the Neon Annihilator was fun but risky. It had the best use turning corners where enemies were guaranteed to be wet, such as CP2/4. Besides that, it was just a stronger melee dealing 156 damage, and melee was already a risk getting close to the opponent. But that's the beauty of data, it's up to you to interpret it.

To wrap this up, if you didn't know, I have released a prefab for the storm used in Granary Storm here! If you want to use this storm in your own maps, go for it. You could even make a blizzard or sandstorm with some adjustments to it, cool possibilities. As for me, I'm using what was learned here and will put it into Sugarmill Escape.

Update: I forgot to make a note on setup time. It did what the developer commentary said; it let every class reach middle and wait as a group for a stronger midfight. It wasn't bad per say, though unlike Well it introduces more downtime because there's nothing to shoot at (in Well, you can get kills before the gates open). I think it was scrapped because the downtime was deemed unnecessary even if it wasn't intrusive, and the concept fit Well more than Granary.