Experimental Maps and Their Results

[Waffe]

Map Name: cp_sleekcrete
Author Name: Waffe
Link: http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=22175
Brief Description: A 5cp map made for the 2 Skillsets Competition, which featured some delicious curves but most importantly, a surfable dam.

Extended Explanation:
So when making this map I had the idea to have the mid on a dam. Later, this made me think about opening the dam and letting the players surf on it to the other side. This became somewhat harder to accomplish, since you would require a lot of speed to surf upwards. All classes but scout, soldier, demo and pyro (with a detonator) would have huge problems surfing across. That's why I added a small ledge so that you can start of higher and surf a tiny bit downwards to the other side, as any class. Also, the healthpack I added to the middle (to award players successfully surfing across) served as a midway platform from where you could jump and surf a bit higher.

Since the map was reflected instead of rotated I had to take rocketjumping into consideration. I added a fence to the opposite side from the wall so that it wouldn't make a difference from which side you jump, as there's always a wall to your right.

Personally, I wanted the dam to encourage soldiers to sneak around the mid to second. I wanted the surf route to feel like a optional flank/secondary route. These things didn't really happen as the map already had plenty of flanks around second, so they rendered the damn dam flank useless. The surf ramp idea was really silly, in the end. Many players wasted most of their time playing around with it, so it was distracting from the rest of the map. What didn't help was that the surf ramp was placed over a death pit. That's just screaming sillyness.

Maybe it would have some tactical use when playing competitively.

PS. I still think surf ramps could be used in a serious map. You just have to make surfing a useful, but not mandatory task, and also avoid any hightower-levels of sillyness that could result from it.

PSS. I also got a lot to say about making things round in Hammer. In short, don't.

 

[Kube]

Hmm, for some reason, cp_shortcut seems to link to koth_trainsawlaser. It must be a sign from the Train God...

 

[MegapiemanPHD]

Map Name: turf_whiskeyriver
Author Name: MegapiemanPHD
Link: download
Brief Description: From the winter 72 hour mapping contest, King of the hill with 3 points instead of 1. The active point is randomly chosen at the start of the round and changed between owners.

Extended Explanation:
Turf war was on of my favorite game modes from Uncharted 2 and I've seen some people attempt to add a randomized point feature to their maps a few times in TF2. Well, read about their ideas on how to do so as I've never seen a map try it out.

It took me a while to figure out the logic so that things worked the way I wanted them to but I did eventually get everything to work. One of 3 capture points would be picked to be activated at the start of a round, the timer for whoever's team caped that point would go down while they owned it. If the other team caped the active point from it's current owners, the countdown would pause, the current point would be deactivated, and a new point would be randomly chosen.

I did come across a big issue with this map, and that was making sure players knew what was going on. This, was my biggest failure.

I wanted each point to be unique which meant that the map would be asymmetrical. This ended up being confusing. The map was laid out like a triangle, with each teams spawn on the sides of the triangle and a cliff area on the bottom. This was done in the hope of balance as that each team was close to 2 out of 3 points and far from 1.

I also wanted players to be able to get from one point to the next easily and put way too many paths everywhere which only lead to confusion. The biggest issue I had was making sure players knew which point was activated when. I tried playing around with making the active point glow as well as covering up signs pointing to non active points but neither ideas where successful and both where scrapped. It didn't help that I only had 72 hours and was constantly thinking up better ways to do what I wanted but couldn't change what I was doing due to the time limit.

I chose to get the map out there in hopes of doing some prototyping instead of waiting till I developed the map more. Response was as you would expect, some found the idea interesting but mostly everyone was so confused they just refused to play it.

While Whiskeyriver is a truly awful map and one that I will never release, it did help me learn a lot when it comes to working with entities. I have since been working on a new map where I'm streamlining the layout as well as making it easier to know what is happening when. It would take so much work to fix Whiskeyriver that there really is no point in trying to do so, but, I do hope that I can apply the lessons I've learned from it to this new map and make something substantial with it.

 

[UKCS-Alias]

Map Name: mvm_intercept
Author Name: UKCS-Alias
Link: http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=22137
Status (at time of writing): Waiting for valve to finish the style of rd_asteroid. Then i will continue... on which i have been waiting for 1 year.

Brief Description:
For players: It breaks the general 'bots attack 1 place' system most maps have. Which for more experienced players makes a game more interesting. But poor players just get overwhelmed.
For mappers: Only fun if you like entity work
And it was 2nd in the layout phase of the 2 skillset contest

Extended Explanation:
Ever since mvm was made i liked it more than the main game. First by making waves, then by making skullcove. Then valve released mannhattan and i liked the idea of capture points. But at the same time i found valve doing a bad job at balance by making it harder to defend against cp2 than against cp1. I wanted to improve it.

By that i came up with a system that allows a more steady wave of getting it easier. So i came up with the gravelpit method of balancing things, which ended up as a very good way to make a map instantly alot harder (that includes harder for the mapper).

But at first couldnt bother with the entity work and to also have to detail the map in 1 go. Then the 2skillset contest started and i thought it was a good idea to let the map get a very good indication, so i took part into it (with a good result).

The map showed that an mvm player that is capable of handling expert does not have an issue with the higher complexity of the map. They instead liked the part that you have to dynamicly move through the map making the roles of even the static classes alot more interesting (especialy the heavy and engineer noticed it). The concept was a success.

At the same time it also showed a 2nd issue. It was a huge pain getting the entity work to act as it should. Since there were alot of possible scenario's i had to come up with some intelligent system that reduces its complexity to be more equal to mannhattan, and at the same time also have that same equality for popfile making. For that i came up with a method that only required 2 gatebot types and only 2 events. A and B were used for the first stage where they had to attack 2 points and as soon as that phase is over the map itself changes the system to focus them to go to C using the old single gatebot method (so bot A had both A and Normal as gatebot setting). This system in fact made the entity work infinitely easier to manage as i could simply spread the entity work for both A and B and use visgroups to handle the viewing in the map itself.
And up to this day the entity work is still equaly hard and equaly efficient. Especialy since i managed to strip all events to seperate relays that gave it a well readable chunk. The only following issue was the prerequisites that might still have to be edited when the map gets detailed (but at least most of that can be easily done).

The 3rd issue that came was obviously: how to detail the thing. Originaly i had skullcove which i had fun detailing with, but i generaly hate general styles as to me i find them hard to create (i need breathing room at what is acceptable). So once valve came with the moonbase style i liked how those maps feature simple shapes and focus on smaller details itself. It was excelent for my map i thought... which was 1 year ago.

Im still waiting up to the point where valve gives asteroid a major update, in the meantime i did a few detailing experiments... but its just not worthy enough for me to realy work on the map since i dont know what solutions to details valve comes up with. I might detail the map only to find out i did a bad job compared to valve. I just cant take that risk as that point would become a permanent cancel to releasing any updates. Waiting for that reason was more efficient.

Oh well, at least i have the general idea of the map. So when i want to detail it i know what to edit and i know mostly in what way to edit it.

The tldr version of 50% of the story: Dont rely on valve time as it will dissapoint you. But if there is no choise... who knows.