cp_industrial

[IrishTaxIDriver]

This maps existed in some form since December of last year. I've been in a serious drought of feedback lately so many of the changes to the map between builds have been out of personal preference. I'm hoping by posting it here I can some more feedback and make good changes.

Industrial started out as a test map to learn TF2 mapping. I made a map for Portal called test20 (here) and decided to try TF2 mapping . As I went along I started liking the layout, and decided to turn it into a full map. That was january I'm surprised that it has taken this long to make, but I really like how it looks finally. The problem now is balancing. My prior mapping experience to these have been a few Svencoop and Vampire Slayer maps.

I've just posted beta three here and carface's post made me think of posting it here to get more feedback. Screenshots can be found following the link.

The main problems that arose from beta two (and I hope are fixed now) were:

1. Get Blue to cap 4 without taking the same route as red.

This is fixed now, but I'm unsure if the new route is better, because blue emerges from a bottleneck. I'm interested in expanding it out.

2. Cap 2/4/6 are hard to take.

I'm hoping that the various fixes I've done to the cap's environments will fix this, but I'm betting that cap 6 is still going to be hard to take because of the spawn movement. I'll update this if I can get a server running it.

3. Its confusing.

This is due to me trying to make a map that is somewhat non-linear. I've restructured round 3 to try and fix this, and hopefully it helps, and round 2 has received some work too. I've also placed a ton of signs and moved sign locations to help people around.

Past those three major things, the skybox is updated, I moved some props around, fixed bugs, and started hint/skip optimizations.

Now, as for testing, I really don't have an avenue for testing the map. FLOOR_MASTER of 2fort2furious has been pretty damn generous in helping me but I need more data.

If anyone plays the map, can you please record a demo and send it to me, via a PM here or FPSbanana or whatever?

Bonus shot of how cap 2 started and how it looks now:

Before / After

 

[Cerious]

*sigh*

I wonder how maps like these never get attention. Especially when they bring something new to the table.

Anyways, I ran through the map and there are certain ugly props that just appear black, can you fix those?

 

[MangyCarface]

Irish probably knows what the problem there is but posting anyway:

Prop origin stuck in world geometry. Move the prop or create an info_lighting and set the prop's lighting source to be the info_lighting.

 

[MrAlBobo]

meh ive found that unless you do something really well, or really bad there is minimal input you will receive...
and of course there are some days when there are something like 20 new topics and something like this can get buried
but meh...anyways a description of what type of map it is here would have helped...im always looking for good dustbowl maps

EDIT: Holy crap over 100mb!

 

[Chilly]

We played around on this map with a group of 8 people. Most of them said it was too confusing (which you realize). Some said there were many areas that appear like they won't get used, but that might be a result of being confusing. And everyone said it was too dark. We like the night map idea, but it still needs to be a lot brighter to be playable in TF2. I'd love to see future work on it, since it has potential, but I think your main goal should be simplifying it a bit.

 

[MangyCarface]

We played around on this map with a group of 8 people. Most of them said it was too confusing (which you realize). Some said there were many areas that appear like they won't get used, but that might be a result of being confusing. And everyone said it was too dark. We like the night map idea, but it still needs to be a lot brighter to be playable in TF2. I'd love to see future work on it, since it has potential, but I think your main goal should be simplifying it a bit.

Unfortunately I can't agree on most of those points... 8 would make the map feel barren/confusing, any map needs to be played multiple times to be learned... and for the darkness I go by the "taunt test" if your team color is vibrant when you taunt then it's valid. Maybe in small amounts these can be addressed... most easily changing the environmental ambient lighting to achieve a "movie dark:" most scenes in movies set at night are lit nowhere near dark as actual light; instead they're lit indirectly at a medium amount: when the entire scene is lit evenly, it's a comparative darkness that gets "night" across without actually being dark as night.

 

[MrAlBobo]

yawn...10mins should be sufficient to learn enough of a map to be playable, maybe 30mins to get the little details of strategy
though I agree, 4 per team is not a valid test group
im going to see if a can get some people in my server tonight or tomorrow, we'll give this a shot

 

[IrishTaxIDriver]

*sigh*

I wonder how maps like these never get attention. Especially when they bring something new to the table.

Anyways, I ran through the map and there are certain ugly props that just appear black, can you fix those?

Its more of a higher priority to get everything else finalized, but yeah I'll be going through fixing them. It might not make it into the next beta, but it'll get done.

I'm pretty terrible at PR, so I haven't gone around promoting the map. Really I've just posted about it on SA, FPSB, and here. I'm waiting for the problems to be fixed.

Irish probably knows what the problem there is but posting anyway:

Prop origin stuck in world geometry. Move the prop or create an info_lighting and set the prop's lighting source to be the info_lighting.

I know they're not stuck in world geometry, except for one door in the very first outdoor area. But yeah I'll be doing this.

The skybox is the reason the maps so huge. It adds 50 megs to the map size and I don't even want to GUESS what it'll look like with an intro video.

 

[Uriak]

24 players test sessions last night, and err, it was boring. In the first 2 rounds, the blue didn't understand where to go and were overwhelmed. In the 4th round, the defence was installed, and we had more than 15 boring minutes to chain kill incoming red players.

I should check the problem with others, but my viewpoint is while the night setting is refreshing, all the level was quite dull looking and not diverse enough. It's brown/greyshing appearance, , the presence of so many catwalks made me feel playing into a quake level ported to TF2. This combined with a rather complex level design pushed people to wander aimlessly into the map. Once a valid choke had been identified, it was defended easily maybe because the other team did'nt found an alternative route.

 

[MrAlBobo]

The skybox is the reason the maps so huge. It adds 50 megs to the map size and I don't even want to GUESS what it'll look like with an intro video.

That seems like a rather large problem...i mean...its basically black with little white spots and a misshapen moon...i think you could afford to reduce the quality and compress it a bit...

anyways...pics

Its really dark on that ledge and there are alot of open pits in the map, you should add some railing, perhaps broken in some places or at least a danger sign or 2

crates are incredibly dark

moon just looks kinda misshapen...its just something that seems to stick out

dark

the one piece of sheet metal is significantly darker then the other and it just sticks out

For a last point this looks really difficult to defend, its a small inclosed area, multiple entrances, there did not seem to be many good sentry spots. One uber would blow apart the entire team...

But...in order to make the 3rd point defend-able you would need to do a large amount of reworking...I suppose a temp fix would be to make that route to the left either inaccessible or difficult for the blue team to use...

I think making the defending spawn exit over here and making the tunnel have another bend in it might make this entrance much more difficult to use

 

[IrishTaxIDriver]

I'm thinking of removing that shortcut. It had more use when Blue's spawn was in a different location, but now its just a straight shot to cap 6. I've fixed all of those black models and I'll look at the lighting.

 

[IrishTaxIDriver]

Released B4 here: http://www.fpsbanana.com/maps/67867

 

[MrAlBobo]

it still seems to be unnecessarily large in filesize...
any chance you can send me a link to the overly large skybox if i can't find it online?

 

[Cerious]

If the skybox seems too big and people just don't like it, I recall there was a night-time sky that Valve released with the Heavy Update. Some map used it before (arena_nightshift, I believe), and it looks like it might fit well with your map.

Though your skybox is fine as is.

 

[MrAlBobo]

that one is quite grainy I recall...
but yeah...50mb is ridiculous I want to see if i can reduce it in filesize a bit...

 

[IrishTaxIDriver]

I can reduce it myself, but I'd rather not.