Pipeball Ultra

[The Asylum]

new thread: https://tf2maps.net/threads/pipeball-ultra.46374

so i'm back

I've been gone a long time, and TF2 and mapping for TF2 was nowhere close to being on my mind. When I finally did return, I found that the community landscape had drastically changed. Melee Fort was the pride and joy that I watched grow from a seed to a flower- even if it was less of a flower and more like a persistent weed. I came back to find the garden it grew in to have grown barren and toxic. The funmap scene is by and large dead and buried, and Melee Fort is now dead and buried beside it. Project I-13, my super-secret TC map, has sunk into the earth as well. I guess there's nothing left for me to do but start making real maps.

.... nah. There's just one more thing I wanna do. One last kick at the can. One more thing I just HAVE to do.

If not for Melee Fort, I'm the guy known for Pipeball. Love it or hate it, you'll never forget it. And with Pass Time being introduced, I feel slightly vindicated for all the flak I got over the years from it. Perhaps the funmap scene isn't completely dead. Perhaps it's time to finally right one of my most egregious wrongs.

Remember if you can, the horrendous brainfart that was Super Pipeball, my first attempt at making Pipeball bigger and more complex. A thinking man's Pipeball, if you will. All that ended up sucking ass, so every Pipeball variant since has been based on the original Pipeball map. Making Pipeball bigger, however, has always been a nagging itch in the back of my mind.

Now with Melee Fort and other funmaps fallen to the wayside, the beast rattles its cage again.

For better or worse, it's time I let it loose.

help i broke my rink!​

Aside from the obvious deviation in shape, this may look like a regular-sized Pipeball rink. Nope!The playing areas are actually much, much wider, and the overall length is a hell of a lot longer. Even longer than Super Pipeball's, and that was looooooooong. It's fuggen HUEG, ok?

Not your average game of Pipeball​

As you can guess, it's also gotten a hell of a lot more complex, too. Scoreboards? Control Points? Some weird shit under the floor? Ball dispenser on the ground? Boy, if you thought you knew Pipeball, you haven't seen anything yet.

And then there was more!​

Yes, in previous Pipeballs, control point entities were only used to display scores. Now, in Pipeball Ultra, there are ACTUAL control points, and, believe it or not, they do serve a significant purpose. Now of course the object of the game is still to win by sinking the ball in the enemy's goal pipe, but capturing and losing those points will greatly affect the tide of the game. How? Pffft, like I'm telling you now. You'll have to wait until I've built more.

 

[radarhead]

It's happening!

 

[Auraelus]

I love to see more good fun maps and I'm sure I can't be the only one. Cheers and best of luck to you!

 

[The Asylum]

So let's get a better look in that fancy building on the side, shall we?

Believe it or not, this IS Pipeball​

RED can expect this building to be swarming with BLU's at all times. And vice-versa with the building on BLU's side when I finally get around to copy n' swappy this too

A familiar place​

That all leads into a drop-down vent behind RED's defenses. Remember the behind-the-goal rooms? Sure you do! But tread lightly here. Crafty Engineers can use this stack of blocks to stage elaborate booby traps. When leaping out of the frying pan, you just may land in the fire...

FWOOM!​

And here's the new ball dispenser pipe. Remember Super Pipeball's ugly scrimmage device? You know, where you had to concentrate all your team's fire on a target to knock the ball towards your opponent's goal on the "serve?" Yeah, this replaces that eyesore. And it breaks up a huge sightline between the spawns too. The ball gets launched upwards, and teams try to shoot it out of the air. A much better idea for a scrim, isn't it?

I wonder what those cannons in the back are for, then...

 

[The Asylum]

MOAR PIPES​

So let's take a better look at what's under the floors here. Yes, it's a not-so-hidden underground pipe! But it starts with access to it blocked. I wonder if there's a way to unlock it...

30 should be enough, right?​

And now a better look at the scoreboard. As you may have guessed, much like in most real sports, there is no upper limit for points. Don't worry, I'm not quite that sadistic enough to make your team score 30 points to win. I'm merely offbeat, not outright insane. So how does the scoreboard work?

Do not ask how long this took to get right​

To cut down on entity useage, the scoreboard "gauges" are controlled by sending the red/blue trains toggle outputs, timed precisely to display one or two increments at a time. But why would I be adding one point or two points at once?

Good question!

 

[The Asylum]

Gosh Grandmother, what big hazard lines you have!​

The goal pipes. As I'm sure you're familiar with, the overarching goal of Pipeball is to hit the ball into your opponent's goal pipe. So why is this trim around the goal so fricken huge? And what's with all the train entities around it? The control points may have something to do with it...

Where it all begins​

This is a primary spawnroom. But there's 16 spawn points there already, how can this be a "primary" spawn room? The answer is because both teams will be able to spawn in the same room. Confused yet? Good! Because in good time I'll start talking about the bonus rooms.

And it's all behind this locked door!​

Stay tuned!

 

[ExtraCheesyPie]

I'm very intrigued! I kinda want to play passtime now :s

 

[The Asylum]

I think I probably should re-iterate that this isn't a Pass Time map, and that Pass Time and Pipeball are very different. For newer players wondering what Pipeball is, here's the three current flavors; Classic, Haloween, and Medieval

Pipeball Classic

Pipeball Event

Pipe Balle​

It is a lot like Pass Time, only the ball is a spherical physbox brush as opposed to a point entity, that can only be shot at and not picked up. Also the playing field pretty small and has little cover so it's 4-5 minutes of absolute chaos

 

[ExtraCheesyPie]

Oh, so it's the soccer/ball pushing minigame from Carnival of Carnage, but with weapons?

 

[The Asylum]

pretty much, yeah

 

[ExtraCheesyPie]

Okay, I have a cool new idea for a pipeball map, tell me what you think: Ballwater

It's badwater's last but with a few modifications (and both teams have it, of course)

 

[The Asylum]

ballwater

it sounds so.... dirty

 

[The Asylum]

So I'm sure you all want to know what's with this "bonus room" idea. Sounds cool, right? I bet you'd really really like to see it, huh?

Some other time, perhaps. Meanwhile, let's talk about those control points.

Capturing the control points will unlock "perks," as I like to call them. RED will only be able to cap the point behind their team-colored shield, and the point way back in enemy territory.

Shoot the ball in here to make it fly!​

Capturing the point behind the shield will unlock your team's ball cannon. No, not the main ball serve cannon in the middle, but these bad boys in the background:

An express ticket to the other side of the rink!​

These cannons will shoot the ball into the other team's side of the rink, so if your team is getting swarmed and unable to push the ball out of your end, you'd better cap that point if you want to relieve some of that pressure.

And the control points deep in enemy territory? If you and your team are brave and skilled enough to capture this point, you will be rewarded hansomely. How handsomely? Well, it takes the enemy's goal and turns it from this:

Before capping...​

into this:

After capping!​

Seriously, if you can't land the ball in this, you're either afk or playing Casey at the Bat.

This, I hope, will cure a maddening trend I found on Pipeball and Pipeball Event (and Pipe Balle, to a lesser extent): Viable offensive classes like Soldiers and Pyros camping out comfortably in their own end of the rink, acting purely defensively. Not that there's anything wrong with defense, but what fun is spamming rockets from across the map all day? This will provide a motive to go in there and storm enemy territory. Remember those buildings on the side? Easily acessible from the opposing team's side of the rink, to provide a lengthy, moderately safe conduit to the other end of the rink.

These perks won't carry over to the next "round" when a goal is scored, though. Nope. Once you're back from the bonus room, you have to fight for the perks all over again.

I should start talking bonus room sometime, huh?

 

[The Asylum]

So I guess I've nothing much left to talk about now other than bonus rooms, at least until I'm finally able to actually compile this thing at least once.

Basically, if you'll remember Pipeballs past, your big reward for sinking the ball was a killer guitar riff and you being one point closer to victory. In Pipeball Ultra, it goes a little further. A hard respawn command goes out and resets the map, with the scoring team now occupying the scored-on team's spawnroom. Like when BLU wins a segment of Dustbowl. The loser team now spawns further back into their base, and acts purely defensively, like the final point defense of Hydro. And the whole thing looks something like this:

The big reveal!​

Cool, isn't it? In this example, BLU scored on RED's goal in the main rink. Now BLU gets to make a push to score extra points in RED's bonus room.

Even the shields look all spytech-y!​

For the next 30 seconds, BLU will try to score once more and RED has to try to stop them. When 30 seconds pass, everything is reset, and we're back to the regular rink. If BLU does manage to score, they're rewarded with not one, but TWO points. So scoring a goal in the main rink and again in the bonus room will net your team THREE points! Then it's back to the regular rink and the game proper continues.

But surely, you may ask, if one team completely steamrolls the other and crushes their spirits, you won't torture them for the entire length of the match, would you, Asylum?

Of course not. There is a way to mercifully end a steamroll before the main timer runs down. Conversely, there is also a way for a team that makes a sudden surge steal victory from a mightier team.

It's the ultimate game changer. One that I'll talk about sometime else.

 

[The Asylum]

So I've been quiet about this for a long time now, huh? No, I haven't forgotten. Low entity count being essential, it's becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of what trigger is sending what output to where, and when. It's quite the headache. Then I've actually got to build the rest of the physical map itself, and that alone is going to take a long ass time, even without going detail-crazy.

The good news is, I've got nothing else to work on but Pipeball Ultra from here to April, and I'm really hoping to have something at least playable, if not aesthetically pleasing, in time for April Foolsday. (We're still doing that, right?)

 

[The Asylum]

In lieu of any concrete evidence of progress, I suppose I could spill some more beans on how this crap will work

The standard match time is 5 minutes. When it's bonus room time, that main timer pauses. When the bonus room is over, the timer resumes. Whichever team has the most points when the main timer runs out, wins the match.

Except...

If one team crushes the other, or one team makes a sudden successful surge, and they win two consecutive bonus rounds in a row, they win all the marbles. Doesn't matter if it's a 6-0 drubbing within a minute, or a 6-14 sudden victory for the team with lesser points. If your defense weakens for too long, you'll lose everything. This is what I hope will create not only an atmosphere of constant pressure and the need to keep it all together at all times, but also give an outmatched team a slight glimmer of hope, so that they don't just give up and lollygag around in the spawnrooms when the scoreboard reads something like 1-8 against them.

It's a controversial feature, but one that I hope will add some new value to this tired old concept.

 

[The Asylum]

In case you didn't know, Canada has this little thing called Family Day this weekend. It's a stat holiday, so my employer will be paying me to sit at home and do whatever I want. Why not get paid for working on Pipeball Ultra?

Slowly but surely, this IS getting done.

 

[The Asylum]

disaster

I've mad my PC for a long ass time, and the more years pass, the more it shows its age. A few months ago, it had a catastrophic crash, but I was lucky enough to save all my shit. It's performance, however, was crippled. It's been a laggy mess since then, but just functional enough to make hammer tolerable.

Just last month, it suffered another, and this time I'm not so lucky.

Oh, I've still got all my files, but now I may as well be running on a toaster. I can't even compile a little test map without my machine crying for mercy. I'm so sorry, but Pipeball Ultra will not be making it's debut this April, or anytime soon for that matter either.

I have failed it.

 

[Moonrat]

Welp, little reason to exist in April now...

 

[worMatty]

Sounds like you could benefit from a fresh installation of your OS and software, after a drive wipe.