WiP in WiP, post your screenshots!

[ScorpioUprising]

Another random stuff.

Edit : In game

Is this 5cp or koth? It looks like yukon middle which hasn't seen a ton of competitive play in a while. Interesting to note that the old version of yukon had the control point where you have it in the screenshot, and then moved it up to the bridge from competitive player feedback.

Looks cool otherwise, maybe a bit too small (doorways look very narrow).

 

[EArkham]

I haven't posted here in a while, so heres some assorted screenshots of ctf_urbanbrook.
...

the area between red's spawn and red's intel

I'm not a big fan of the different coloured vans being all jammed into this one area, but the rest of the map is looking damned nice. Damned nice indeed.

 

[Moonrat]

I've been fuckin round with Underbid, jacked up the lighting brightness and gave a unique texture to every area.

 

[SSX]

 

[RaVaGe]

Just a word of advice, competitive players generally don't like snow or night skyboxes in maps, and your map has both. Night skyboxes make it very hard to see rocket jumping soldiers or demomen, and seeing that that's a key part of competitive TF2 I'd predict you'll get requests from competitive players to change the skybox. Snow apparently can result in low fps (although I've never experienced it myself), and also makes it hard to distinguish between players for colorblind players.

That's just my two cents. Maybe you'll want to talk to Scorpio or someone else with a lot of competitive mapping experience under their belt.

Well I know about these "issues", I have no idea why a snow texture could cause a fps drop, that's just a general belief. Maybe snow maps need more props or such, but I don't see why a change in the texture could cause a huge difference in the FPS.

About the night issue, i'm really aware of it, and i'll work really hard on the lighting to be sure that the map will be readable, I really want to keep the map as simple as possible to avoid overlaoding it with useless details, as I said I aim the competitive audience wich means a really low level of detail, wich is a good challenge for me since I tend to details a lot.

Is this 5cp or koth? It looks like yukon middle which hasn't seen a ton of competitive play in a while. Interesting to note that the old version of yukon had the control point where you have it in the screenshot, and then moved it up to the bridge from competitive player feedback.

Looks cool otherwise, maybe a bit too small (doorways look very narrow).

It's a 5CP map, and yeah I'm a bit scared about that point on the lowest level tbh, but i'm still not sure about how it will play, but I think i'll move it.

About the doorways I tend to overscale a bit my maps, it's a 192*128 door so it's not a bad scale for such chokes, I might open them more if it get too spammy at some point.

 

[YM]

Where's Yukon's point now? I know Mangy moved that around a lot, for a long time it was in the pit and imho that was just fine.

 

[Zed]

Where's Yukon's point now? I know Mangy moved that around a lot, for a long time it was in the pit and imho that was just fine.

The point is in the middle of the bridge now, and the bridge has been widened to compensate for it.

Also, snow is generally disliked in competitive maps because colorblind players have difficulty identifying blue players against a white background, and weather particles degrade performance.

 

[Uncuepa]

The point is in the middle of the bridge now, and the bridge has been widened to compensate for it.

Also, snow is generally disliked in competitive maps because colorblind players have difficulty identifying blue players against a white background, and weather particles degrade performance.

I am colourblind. Severely colourblind. Can see shit fine on snow.

 

[Moonfixer]

I haven't posted here in a while, so heres some assorted screenshots of ctf_urbanbrook.
Feedback on how to make things prettier would be appreciated.

Blu's facade from mid.

Red's Intel "room" (the blimps move btw)

blu's spawn room

the area between red's spawn and red's intel

blu's intel room

red's facade from mid

right outside red's spawn

another view of red's spawn

I am really impressed with your use of the urban theme. I don't know why but I've always liked that style in tf2.

 

[MaccyF]

I am really impressed with your use of the urban theme. I don't know why but I've always liked that style in tf2.

for me it's because it fits the TF2 setting (timewise) so well, a 60's industrial farm looks fairly similar to a modern one, but compare a 60's city to a modern one and there's a huge difference

 

[Idolon]

I am colourblind. Severely colourblind. Can see shit fine on snow.

There are many different kinds of colorblindness.

 

[EArkham]

Snow is a problem in comp because:

1) having a very white texture everywhere can contribute to eyestrain for everyone, not just the colourblind (I know I'm making this issue even worse on snowycoast because I've got stretches of unbroken white in some areas lit up by bright spotlights and I'll have to fix that sooner or later).

2) BLU team on white readability is an issue for people with a certain type of colourblindness. I think there was only one or two comp players that this was an issue for and they've since retired, but I could be wrong.

3) the particles kicked up when you walk on snow have a negative impact on FPS... if you're using old hardware. On even remotely modern GPU/CPU it should be trivial or not even noticeable at all.

4) snow weather effects have a much more noticeable impact on FPS. If these are flagged correctly as "weather" by the map maker, players can disable them in options and those become a non-issue.

Otherwise, there's a lot of "falling snow hurts FPS therefore all snow hurts FPS" confusion going on where players parrot misinformation.

There's some legitimate reasons for not going full out snow in comp (eyestrain, colourblind), but there's no reason to kill every patch of snow in a map because of perceived FPS issues. Especially if it's custom snow that's set to "mud" or whatever so that the footstep particles don't get kicked up, or the snow is only in the corners and rooftops of a map.

 

[Pocket]

I wonder if it's possible to pack in a custom particle for the kicked-up snow that's flagged as weather so people with that disabled don't even have to put up with it.

 

[YM]

You could just change the surfaceprop like I did for snowplow. Though it had 0% impact on my fps. I checked. Player rendering is why snowplow has poor performance. It's literally _just_ player rendering.

 

[Vincent]

You could just change the surfaceprop like I did for snowplow. Though it had 0% impact on my fps. I checked. Player rendering is why snowplow has poor performance. It's literally _just_ player rendering.

That's also where I see the majority of my FPS impact regardless of the map. Even on the most detailed maps I'm not going under 180 unless I get a teamfight going.

 

[Corvatile]

Attempting to make a new TF2 theme with my non-existent art skills. Every texture in the picture was either made by me or edited from a Valve texture with the exception of the ground, the cliff and the Casali sign.

What do you guys reckon? Can you see a map looking kind of like this?

 

[Muddy]

Looks awfully grey and washed-out. No wonder that Spy's depressed.

 

[Berry]

Attempting to make a new TF2 theme with my non-existent art skills. Every texture in the picture was either made by me or edited from a Valve texture with the exception of the ground, the cliff and the Casali sign.

What do you guys reckon? Can you see a map looking kind of like this?

I like it, but what theme is it meant to follow that's not already accomplishable?

 

[tyler]

I wouldn't have known you were going for a new theme with that.

 

[hutty]

That's also where I see the majority of my FPS impact regardless of the map. Even on the most detailed maps I'm not going under 180 unless I get a teamfight going.

Snowplow is a special case, I went onto it alone and was still having below average framerates. I popped up the budget window and it showed a rather large strain coming from particles. I popped over to cp_coldfront to see if it was a snow thing. Its not, coldfront is fine fps wise.

Either snowplow has different (more expensive) snow, or its non-snow particles (the sparks from the train?/smoke from the skybox) that slow things down.