Map&Criteria|Aesthetics|Design|Optimization/Technical
cp_bridges_b2|3|5|7
cp_excavate_b2|9|6.5|9
cp_highnoon_b1|4|4|8
cp_keikoku_b1|x|x|x
cp_shiro_b1|x|x|x
koth_petrichor_a1a|4|3|5
koth_swampwater|5|5|3
CP Bridges
The detailing on this map is interesting. You held your theme together reasonably well and the colours of textures and overall atmosphere of the map is great, this is partially because you did a reasonably good job with soundscapes too. Some desert maps (looking at you, gullywash) feel really drab, and nothing really comes together.
Here are some things I found.
Why is this clipped off? Blue spawnrooms in A/D maps force the players to sit around for over a minute. There's no reason to arbitrarily clip off areas like this that the player could explore. It doesn't change the layout, gameplay, and generally makes your spawn more interesting to wait around in. It's especially bad because it looks like you can walk there!
These fences could have really used the -textureshadows compile option. Most of the time you can get away without compiling it, but here, when there's a big wall of just chainlink fences, the shadow looks really odd and just creates dissonance. Even disabling the shadows may have been better here, as in reality with light refraction and diffusion there wouldn't be that much shadow at that distance anyway.
Floating root/bush/shrub thing In general I felt that the top of your cliffs could have been improved. Look at dustbowl or goldrush and see the top of their dividing cliffs, they have fences and shrubs and weird up and down shapes.
This fence isn't aligned properly and causes a really odd looking floating barbed wire section.
This empty space is another example of random, arbitrary clipping. Put some form of barrier there, even if it's just a simple rope or a randomly placed crate. Just something to explain why you can't walk through it.
I don't understand this. Not only is it below the "horizon line" of your in-general-far-too-small 3d sky, which causes half of it to be covered anyway, it's an odd choice of a prop, being a farmhouse and windmill in the middle of a desert. The main problem though is how disconnected it feels from the rest of the skybox because you can't see the land below it. (And noclipping shows just how disconnected it is).
This ground area is very empty. Ignoring the huge error model you've sure heard about by now, this entire area is a bit boring. You've got a few rocks, put some clutter around them. In a windy desert, rocks like this is here grass clings too, and it has the double effect of making the area less orange. Place some of the small, scattered rocks around, just give the area a bit more roughness to it because without an interesting building behind, the area feels way too clean and stark for a desert.
This building was weird to begin with, gameplay wise, but now detailed I'm afraid to say it's even weirder. It has no reason to exist, it's not even structurally logical. A wood building with a flat roof like this would not only collect moisture and rot super fast, it just looks really odd in contrast with the rest of your map which has angled roofs on all your wooden buildings. Additionally, it feels very "gamey" because it has no reason to exist apart from gameplay. I would have extended it too the right, made it a rock conveyor or something similar just to give it a bit of justification for being so weird.
This facade is probably the most boring part of the entire map. Not only are your roof and cable props sticking easily visible out the top, the entire thing is incredibly gray, boring, flat and...just ugly. From this image you can't even tell it's blue's spawn room. It also doesn't, again, have justification for existing. It's simply a random concrete block building in the middle of the desert. One of the most fun parts of detailing spawn rooms is how creative you can be with what's behind them and what they are. Detail a giant industrial building, or build it into a mountain like badwater, because at the moment this is the weakest part of your map.
This bridge still looks super odd. The wood constructs are far too thin to hold up a bridge that trucks roll over and even has an entire builidng on it. If you look at
real life trestle (3 links) bridges, they have huge logs to hold up even less weight than your bridge. Additionally, they spread out to distribute the forces, and are thus wider at the bottom (triangles are very strong shapes, squares are _not_). Your bridge would probably fall apart at the touch of a leaf. Additionally, the water you chose here looks really really odd in a desert.
Misaligned grain texture. This building is also
another very strong case of "flat roof on wooden structure" but at least this time it's a metal roof. The windows here also really need a frame or something because it looks very odd right now.
This building also has a lot of these, the broken wooden walls. While granted, look cool, they make no sense. If you "closed" all the broken wood areas, you'd be left with a building that no one could enter or do anything with. It makes very little sense.
This would look far better closed. Not much else to say about it.
Floating Stairs. You have a few of these around the map. Please add a trim, they look far nicer anyway.
I can see the top of this cliff (or lack thereof) through here.
Walking through this area you can see very large, visible pops as the buildings around A pop and out of rendering.
This whole C building is incredible empty and monotonous. I don't even know what this silo is meant to do in the context of the TF2 universe. Is it for storing a missile? Your only part of context is the random computer desk in the middle of the spire. Even without doing any of that, throwing pipes and cables and stuff up here would go a long way to making it more interesting.
Not sure what this is, a rogue brush perhaps
Final Breakdown
Aesthetics: Your Aesthetics is okay. The map's theme holds together quite well, but there are a lot of points of dissonance, things that bring you out of the setting. There are also many misaligned textures and things like floating stairs that hurt the aesthetic rating a lot. 3/10
Design: The design is interesting, mainly because I think this category has a lot of overlap with aesthetics, so it's hard to grade. That said, I think the design was reasonably okay. A lot of the buildings did not make structural sense, like your main bridge, the skybridge thing at blue spawn. C cap does not do anything to make the point important apart from the fact that it's in the center, it places no importance on it in the grand scheme of the map. However, your lighting was okay, you didn't have any bad dark spots, signs were reasonably common and I don't recall getting lost. 5/10
Technical: Your map ran absolutely fine for me. No noticeable frame drops at all. The only lost marks come from the huge and obnoxious error model and the random rogue brushes and such. 7/10
CP Excavate
This map was pretty strong overall. You are quite masterful at creating a location and atmosphere and the sound design is great. I still remember your detail mini contest entry quite vividly. I love the rock, quarrying theme. In general I felt the weakest part of your map was the lighting.
Here are some points:
This is what I mean by weak lighting. With all the detail shutter doors you have in your map, it would really help to give a lot more prominence to this one, as well as the other setup gates. It's good you have lit up the resupply cabinet, but doors are very important too, especially when projectiles can come flying through them.
This entire area doesn't feel very...naturey. Primarily because you didn't have detail sprites which would have helped a lot, but I felt this area could have been improved with random tufts of grass that are oh so common in alpine maps, as well as the small rock props scattered everywhere. Especially for such a "rough, rocky" theme that you're going for with the whole rock crushing thing.
I am not a fan of how this rock just sort of molds into the wood next to it. It doesn't really fit well.
This is another area that could have been improved with lighting. Deliberate or not, I really like how the signs on the left are lit up, but apart from the giant arrow, there's very little to suggest to the player where the point is. I feel that if you could have creates the same daylight-effect on the point area, or at least done something to show that the point was there would have helped a lot. I remember when playing this on kritzkast, people were legitimately getting lost and couldn't find the first point, on both teams.
I really like what you've done inside a lot of the buildings to break up the walls without affecting gameplay, like this shutter door. It's a nice detail.
Another example of where lighting could have helped. Looking at this, it's relatively hard to tell at a glance where the attackers are coming from. Your eye is immediately drawn to the back wall, which is not necessarily a bad thing because that is where most of the fighting over the point takes place, but it does draw you away from things on the left, especially that window far to the left behind fences.
Few things here. First, which is just nitpicking, the train gate collides with the rail. Second, I don't really get this awning. I understand why you needed it there, but it makes zero sense. Awnings are to keep water off the window, not off a random out of place concrete thing :/ Honestly I'm not really sure what I would have replaced it with, but even maybe just a pile of wood could have worked better.
Some of the areas in red spawn like this felt really empty. Just some junk or pipes or even random overlays could have helped.
I really like the creativeness of this crusher and rock conveyors. I think it's a really smart replacement to the lava pit from the original map that fits your theme really well.
This room could have really benefited from something. Even just wood beams like you've done in most other buildings.
Final Breakdown
Aesthetics: Your aesthetics are really good. The map feels really nice, I'm a huge fan of the alpine theme already and I like that it felt alpine without heaps of green grass and trees (that would be my own fault with alpine). The progression was also good, Red's base felt really imposing, and you detailed the cave really nicely. 9/10
Design: Like I said earlier, the main thing that hurt this map was the lighting. People were genuinely getting lost (which is a huge thing!!) because important game play areas were not lit up properly and felt like they blended in. The overall immersion was great though, except for a few things like that weird awning, so 6.5/10.
Technical: Very good. I noticed zero vis popping, my frames never dropped except looking back at B, but a very small drop. No missing textures or models, there was misisng clipping on the stairs in spawn which lost some points but was in general pretty good, and HDR cubemaps. Additionally, your welcome camera is in such a black void I thought my tf2 had crashed. 8/10
CP Highnoon
I don't really have much to say about this map because honestly you probably know most of it. It's unfinished and rather empty, but still the result is quite amazing given how long you actually did it in.
Here are a few things:
This wood texutreIs way too overused. It feels way too noisy. It's actually a bit overwhelming and rather confusing because of it.
Likewise here. Bad texture for big walls, especially with nothing to break them up.
I'm not a fan of this huge random wall. It doesn't make sense in context, it feels really game-y just to divide the areas.
Final Breakdown
Aesthetics: I like the refreshing lighting and atmosphere, but I actually feel it makes the map feel quite drab and visually flat. The phantom lights probably don't really help that, they seem to fill in all shadows which makes it feel really...icky! The rushed detailing really shows through and hurts the map. 4/10
Design: Like I said in the previous point, much of the map feels very samey, both from textures and lighting. This leads to the fact that each area doesn't really feel unique. 4/10
Technical: I didn't have any fps issues. There's not much to get stuck on so I guess clipping is quite good, except in spawn with the large thick beams, though it not mattering as much in spawn. 8/10
KOTH Petrichor
In general I felt that this map's detaling, apart from the middle point, was okay but uninspired. All the buildings feel cut and paste of each other, even the sides don't have their own personalities. A few coloured stripes only to differentiate them. Also you lack HDR cubemaps which really really hurt the aesthetic. Overall the map felt very monotonous.
These trees are not compiled with full detailed compile options. It's a pet peeve of mine, granted, and even gorge does it, but I feel it just makes them sooooo ugly. They're so flat and don't have any depth to them, and in your map a little depth would have really helped.
A lot of your roofing like this could have really done with some extra stuff.
Look at roofing in say, gorge, you can see that their roofing is full of junk which really helps break up the squareness and monotony of the building.
The Point was the biggest weakness in your map. It makes no sense and it's visually uninteresting, which is a real shame because it's quite an interesting canvas. Even varying the texture a bit might have helped, or making a concrete building with wooden scaffolding or something.
Obvious fade on these props
In general I liked these little areas of detailing off to the side, through windows and such. The main building indoors was actually pretty good, generally, but the outside is what lets this map down.
I can't see any of your 3d sky without noclipping. Either get rid of it or design the map so the open edges are more open so you can see it. At the moment it's just wasted, albeit small, performance.
Final Breakdown
Aesthetics: Your indoors has a rather nice take on spytech going for it, but the entirety of the outdoors feels incredible drab, visually flat (not helped at all by your choice of environment lighting and skybox). I always felt that gorge's visuals only succeeded being very white and bland was because the environment itself was so incredibly vibrant, from it's strong greens and blues. Your map lacks these and it all very much blends together and it looses all visual interest, even with interesting indoor areas. 4/10
Design: The cohesion of the theme is so,so. The map is consistent in it's detailing, except for the point which while using the same textures, feels so out of place because it's unexplained. It has no purpose except to be a weird shaped concrete block. Things like
this also don't really help. Where's the tap? Many of your details just seem to be there to break things up and don't serve logically (like the current/fuse box things next to the doors at spawn). 3/10
Technical: Missing HDR cubemaps really hurts the visuals, especially when your maps lighting is drab as it is, turning off HDR isn't a good option. I could not find any issues with clipping, and FPS is pretty fine. Not as high reaching as the other maps but not as unreasonable as my own. The missing HDR cubemaps is the real kicker here. 5/10
KOTH Swampwater
I'm not really sure about this map. It's really atmospheric but much of the detailing is really strange and doesn't make sense.
Some things:
This wall does not look like a cliff. It looks like a mutant alien blob come to swallow the map. Maybe swap it out for a rock texture would go a long way.
This rock wall looks far too artificial. It tiles on itself! As a prop!
If it wasn't for the bugged lighting on this door I wouldn't even know this was an exit. It would really help to light it up, for attacks and for people coming out of the spawn.
I...Wow...
The edge of this cliff, dirt thing is very straight. Even if it was manually dug out yesterday it would have become a lot rougher in the rain and water. It looks too artificial.
I'm a bit confused as to why there's a vent here. The vent feels extremely out of place and far, far too clean compared to the rest of your environment. I also think the red lighting is a bit extreme and will make team colours confusing, not to mention the strong red light on blue side.
The point building in general really confuses me. I'm not sure why plants would be growing there, I'm really not sure why plants are growing down under the water on the bottom either. The vines don't seem to be following anything. In fact in general your vines didn't make any sense and I felt detracted from the map.
These are melting into the concrete
Some misaligned wood grains
Why is this arrow not centered? It feels off balance, (like an unclosed parenthesis
Really not sure what's going on with this
Final Breakdown
Aesthetics: While you really captured the rainy, swampy atmosphere, I felt in general the map just felt too tacky. The vines detracted a lot and I think the map would have been better in general without them, and the entire point building made no sense. The skybox was nice but the water flows uphill which is both humerus and immersion breaking. Many things like the vent and clean metal walkway near mid break the cohesion of the map too. But I like your embedded narrative, like the severed hand in spawn. 5/10
Design: I think the biggest issue I had with design was the water. This map places a lot of gameplay emphasis on the water, and choosing the theme you did and the water you did meant the water was extremely foggy and didn't make for very good gameplay. The harsh coloured lighting also serves to make team colours less distinct than they already are in the dark map. 5/10
Technical: This map gives me lower FPS than Shiro, and that's saying something. Anywhere in mid and spawn gives me <80fps with no players on the map, while on other maps in the contest I get 320+ under similar circumstances. From a look in wireframe, your entire map is being renderd at the same time. I see you have a lot of areaportals but they don't remotely help, maybe look into occluders and hinting, and auto-closing areaportals on your spawndoors. There was a lot of clipping issues on things like the fireplace, and
the props in this room, as well as some stairs missing clips. 3/10
