Hello! Got back into Hammer after 12 years, working on remastering an old gimmick map

[Panegyr]

Hello! I've recently started getting back into using hammer for the first time in a while and my current pet project for grinding the rust off I've taken to making an effort to remaster an existing map from 2009 that I have fond memories of, balloon_race_v2b, I've posted my current progress to my gamebanana page here: https://gamebanana.com/mods/392486 Though when I get a chance I'm going to update the version numbering on the page and file names to better reflect the standards set forth in the release guide.

Here's a screenshot from yesterday of my current project of overhauling CP3 on balloon_race, currently it comprises of a three story interior environment with the Control Point being on the lowest level situated underneath a rocket, with cp_well being a pretty obvious source of inspiration. There are still some pretty big issues with the geometry in the center octagon and I suspect this is because of how it was originally constructed, by rotating an eight face cylinder to better align along the axes I wanted to construct in and then hollowing it, and I will probably need to rebuild the geometry in this area from scratch before I get too far.

As far as history with Hammer goes, I tried to get the hang of it in 2010 but never released any maps, but now it's coming a lot more naturally and is frankly a pretty zen experience.

Thanks for reading!

 

[worMatty]

Hi, there.

I haven't played Balloon Race in a while, but I never found it that fun because it always felt fundamentally flawed in a few ways. If ever I was to take a crack at remaking it in some way, I would have made some pretty big changes to the way it worked.

I would have made the airships much bigger for a start, and placed the emphasis on mid-air combat. Not just spamming rockets, stickys and sniping from the top deck but a much greater variety of combat action.
I would have made the race aspect a bit fairer, eliminated or reduced the need to be teleported to the ship (preferably spawning on the ship which is more realistic IMO), changed the way the stations worked so it wasn't a fight to permanently capture a single point, but maybe each team had some task to perform while fending off attackers.
And would have looked at ways to keep the race close, and have last-ditch attempts for the losing team to catch up so the victor was decided as late as possible.
I was also looking into how it was possible to build a sentry at the top of the ramp onto the top deck. I considered the possibility of making the airships static objects and moving the rest of the world around them, in order to engineer buildings.

 

[Panegyr]

Yeah the engineer buildings is a tricky thing, I found this thread from a few years ago that may have had an excellent solution, but it seems to only work in Live TF2 and I'm primarily designing this map with TF2C in mind, the compiled test map loads fine in TF2C but the solution the author provides only half works, allowing buildings to be built on certain tracktrains, but they don't stick, and get picked up by the next tracktrain that happens to pass by. It warrants some further research to see if it's possible to fully implement.