What ideas have you had for maps you can't make because of Hammer limitations?

[lerlerson]

You all know what I mean. Hammer isn't exactly all that flexible when it comes to certain things, like flags, and class filters and such... so... it's inevitable. Everybody here that's a mapper, even some people that aren't mappers, you all must have had a really good idea for a map you couldn't go through with because of Hammer and Team Fortress 2 limitations. So, what are they?

I had an idea I thought was really cool for a CP/CTF hybrid kinda maptype, which would be called 'Resource Nodes', or 'RN'. The map I envisioned was RN_Snowblind, or Snow something anyways.

The theme of the map was that Red and Blu were both running mining expeditions in the Arctic, and found each other by accident one night. So, it's night-time, but incredibly bright lights like you'd see at baseball games prevent that from being a problem.

The gameplay of the map itself is that in the middle, right and left of the map there are control points, although they're called 'Resource Points'. When your team is in control of them, your 'Resources' slowly go up, and the goal is to get to 2000 resources. The thing is, is that simply having 2000 resources is enough.

Every time 100 resources are amassed, a flag is placed in that team's base, called a 'Resource Node'. The true goal is to have 20 of those, and how many you have can be determined by seeing how many resources you have on the HUD. Now, what is the point of these? Well, they are flags, so the enemy could capture them. The points could theoretically be 1900/2000 resources for one team and 0/2000 resources for the other, and the losing team could Scout rush the other team's base, grab all nineteen Resource Nodes and capture them at their base, and the tides would be turned. 0/2000 resources to 1900/2000.

 

[TheBladeRoden]

Well I know at least the first half of your idea with the resources is possible, don't know much about what can be done with flags though.

 

[lerlerson]

Well I know at least the first half of your idea with the resources is possible, don't know much about what can be done with flags though.

Nah, can't be done, the whole issue of multiple flags among other things makes it impossible.

 

[Shmitz]

A lot of hybrid concepts aren't really possible in terms of ideal gameplay due to missing required hud elements for everything to work. I always wanted to make a CTF map where the capture zone was in the third point of a triangle (the intel locations being the other two points), but was only active for the team that held the control point there. I've never wanted to put the effort into it though unless I could have both the flag score/status/radar and the status of the CP in the middle.

 

[Vilepickle]

Spazball, the 4 team map in which they battle over a "flag" in the middle and bring it to any other team's hallway. Has jump pads, wouldn't really work well. The scoring also subtracted 1 from a team when they were captured on, and once they reached -5 they were sent to the "spectator room" on the upper area

Dissect, the map in which there are 6 sequential capture points on each team and players bring a flag to the "open" capture point. This would be possible in TF2 as a CP "race" to see which team could finish first, but it had 6 capture areas per team, and TF2 is limited to 8 per map.

Border, which has 3 teams, the mexicans, escorts, and border patrol. Not possible without more teams.

 

[Snipergen]

Super Mario Galaxy Gravity, if somebody ever find a way to make this work I drop everything I'm busy with and make a globe map.

 

[trainRiderJ]

Super Mario Galaxy Gravity, if somebody ever find a way to make this work I drop everything I'm busy with and make a globe map.

I'm pretty sure this would require a pretty thorough mod, if not a different engine altogether. I would be pretty surprised if someone was ever able to hack something up through hammer, func_pushes around a floating brush and somehow rotating axis POV.

 

[Spacemonkeynz]

Anythings possible if you spend countless hours working on it.

The Resource thing looks doable, might have to make some adjustments though, like instead of flag use something else.

 

[WarMecha]

Your idea is perfectly possible and the logic for that can be done, I would even hazard a guess you could frig the ctf hud overlay to display 'resources' instead. Now I dont know if its possible for it to count as high as 2000, but if not, you could always just go to 20 instead. There would be a fair amount of logic involved but its possible, and also you would have to overcome a few problems with a multiple flag setup (http://forums.tf2maps.net/showthread.php?t=999&highlight=multiple+flags). One player is able to pickup multiple flags it seems and the flag they were carrying is killed when a new one is picked - you would have to have some logic watching the current status of the flags. You could get around this by parenting a target to each flag and then spawning a new one as required. I mean it would take a lot of experimentation and a lot of time to build I think, but I don't see why it isnt possible.

 

[YM]

Well I was going to put a big satelite dish in bloodstained, ya know, like the whopper in hydro?
Well there I was thinking 'hmm how should I do this' then I took a look at the decompiled version of hydro and was like this - "its a displacement!?!?!?!?!"
I quickly changed my mind about having a dish in bloodstained.
so thats something I've wanted to to but couldnt due to lack of knowledge and time.

 

[Dox]

I wanted to make a map of islands floating in the sky... i might be able to do it but getting it so that it doesn't kill framerates since you can see from one island to the others would be impossible.

 

[Jazz]

Super Mario Galaxy Gravity, if somebody ever find a way to make this work I drop everything I'm busy with and make a globe map.

I thought of the same thing, except, you could walk on walls and stuff. Rather than a sphere.

 

[A Boojum Snark]

I wanted to make a map of islands floating in the sky... i might be able to do it but getting it so that it doesn't kill framerates since you can see from one island to the others would be impossible.

Short(-ish) max render distance, low poly versions of said islands in the 3D skybox, and some relatively thick fog to mask the transition? World is rendered before skybox, so it should fade out properly.

 

[necro]

Well, I thought I'd be able to easily remake cz2 from TFC. But after reading all the headaches DrHaphazard went thru, and now reading the open letter to Valve, I suspect its just not possible with all the bugs/limitations. The biggest hurdle is the fact that theres not a built in way to limit the number of item_teamflags a person can carry. I've spent all day trying to figure out a work around. The filters might be a way, if only they worked right. It certainly wasn't this difficult making unique maps for TFC.

Dr, if you're still around, I'd love to know if you were successful.