New Map Needs Beta Testers

[Ginko]

Awesome comments, good to hear the input. I have some work to do and I'm sure the next Beta will be an improvement.

Thanks again,

ginko

[Ginko]

I got a decent skybox working now, it does add a nice dash of realism. I forgot how easy it is to add. I've also corrected that ground texture to a grassy one, and placed an invisible landing under the Udamage... They jump to it now, but they won't jump off until someone shoots at them. I'll get it eventually.

Next will be the work on the trimming and more detailing.

Nobody mentioned that some of my weapons are stationary & mounted to walls while others have the standard rotation. I do plan on making all the weapons static, but I'm assuming this inconsistency didn't bother anyone.

Thanks again for all the suggestions, keep 'em coming,

ginko

[[did]Madis]

I like, can't wait to see what it looks like when lighting is done.

[Sergeant Todd]

I authored Incamanned 1 + 2, 40oz of Pain, Wrednex, and The WareHorse.

40oz of Pain?..I loved that map. Hey, what was the rifle you imbedded in the map? I can't remember...

[FraGnBraG]

okay, Ginko, I'm not sure whether you'd like posting regarding beta feedback here, or in private via email. I noticed some things you should really fix regarding construction, and definitly will advise you regarding the bot-pathing (that's quite bad in spots). Texture usage, trimming and theme elements (including lighting) I'll leave to others to discuss... let me know

[Ginko]

I'm not sure whether you'd like posting regarding beta feedback here, or in private via email

Here is fine Frag ... and like I said earlier, don't worry about my holding back with the comments, it's all good.

I know this thing will not be an epic map; no real work of art or thing of beauty. I just want to polish this turd as best as possible before I upload it to the great unwashed. No matter how much work I put into it, someone will love it and someone will hate it. To that point, since my outside area is rather large, my skybox is being magnified, so those masked skybox mountains look all bitmapped to hell. Since this is truly just a background for those who happen to glance upwards, I'm not going to put in the time to fix this. I know I'll lose a point or two on someone's review, but I'm fine with that.

Hey, what was the rifle you imbedded in the map? I can't remember...

Not sure Todd. Funny you brought that up ... the whole reason I I'm doing this map was because of Moodc0w's videos on 40ozpain. He had found my underwater secret room but didn't know how to open the Redeemer Room from the outside. I told him where to 'hump the wall' to get the door open. Both secrets are here:

[[did]Madis]

Maybe someone can help you find better skybox textures? Or you could just build out the surrounding mountain terrain into the skybox.

[Ginko]

That would prolly work, but the skybox scrolls faster than a static plane in the skybox area. I will see if I can find some better res mountains, I'm sure it will help.

Thanks Madis,

ginko

[FraGnBraG]

Okay then, here we go

1. Boxes like this (and such things) can be semisolid - the cuts on the floor will disappear. Not too much of deal in this small area, or a 300 brush map, but in large areas and complex maps it's almost essential.
2. Red lines = bad, Blue lines = good These nodes are not correctly placed. In fact, many of your doorways or openings are actually too narrow for easy movement by players or bots (especially in HC mode where movement is enhanced). 128uu is too tight, 160uu should be considered a minimum... yeah, that sucks because it does not look right in your frustom/pov but it's a fact.
3. Always centre doorway PNs - one on either side, and make sure the line turns blue. If it's a red line BOTs *rarely* use it. If it's a really tight situation, or a curved corridor, use linked LE-LC-LE through the passageway. Bots will use it. (PNs often won't work (i.e. turn blue) if a curved corridor is narrow (or bsp deco'd) This is due mainly to collision anomalies.
4. These are really narrow walkways. The brushing is also a bit sloppy. A little chat about intersecting brushes is coming up...
Since this room is quite small, I would suggest remove the plank by the window, widen the plank holding the ammo, and have the bot player just jump from the ramp/doorway side to the ammo plank. Piece of caek, actually --> LE-JS-LE. That's all it takes.

5. Continuing, a comment on texture usage. okay I said I wouldn't, but I want to plant an idea here: These textures don't really fit together. I know I know, it's unreal and in DL mode maybe it all looks nice and who cares anyway -BUT- i'm going to say my bit: generally, floor tex on floors, wall tex on walls, trim tex on edges etc etc. There lots of ways to use a floor texture on a wall (as part of a deco) and sometimes a wall tex on a floor or ceiling (again as deco) but it's got to seem believable, like it belongs there.

You can do this - make the room or area, then step back and ask yourself who lives in this locale? Who were the folks that built this place? did they have stone, or brick, or mortar, iron, steel or wood, fire or electricity? Is it clean or dirty in here? Same true of modern themes or even space ships etc. For your map's locale, (To my mind) not too far a stretch that the builders (or current inhabitants) have wood - cause they have wooden crates, etc. Okay, I think the mayan/chizra wall base tex should really be wood of some kind, or timber planks with some kind of metal edging because it feels like an ancient temple where the current inhabitants are modern, and thus might have fixed the place up. Well you might think that's a wanky way think about a friggen game map but thinking like that gives you a chance to make the map feel more believable and a lot of people do appreciate that.
6. Another thing is indoors vs outdoors - outdoors usually dirtier than indoors.
7. The material of the "cutout" window whould be the same as the material of the wall, unless it's a window with a frame of some sort. On that note, any transition from one tiled surface to another tiled surface should have a separating structure or inlay (part of trimming) The trim police will get you if you don't
8. Try to transition from outside (not seen here) through the door to inside. again, the mayan texture doesn't really fit here imo. The main floor texture itself looks scaled up (i didn't check that) and this makes the crates look oddly small. Anyways, I noticed some other scaling issues like the outside walls of the main temple building. This is a 128x128 base texture scale up x6. If you find yourself scaling a texture more that 2x in any area a player can touch, look for another bigger texture - there's plenty around. small footprint textures scaled up and seen up close looks really bad, but hey
(more to come)

[FraGnBraG]

continuing...

9. Again, a bit narrow for manouver here, look at #10
10. Nodes are not placed correctly... should be all blue here. One good idea in pathing a map is to use as few pathnodes as possible but remember that weapons ammo and other navigation actors like LE and LC *ARE* also pathnodes...
11. okay, (speaking of the PNs you placed on top of the obelsiks outside) you really don't need to do this, and they don't work anyways. Better to just buff up the BOT (or player) and place LE-JS-LE appropriately.
BOT's often jump when they're healthy, or want to kill you, but that depands on how high, and whether they are affraid or not I won't discuss this right now, but you can play with the "fear factor" somewhat. For the situations you have here I wouldn't bother. It looks like a survivable height anyways.
12. Mover door - here's how you do this: (simpler): name the mover tags the same; use ONE normal trigger placed exactly in the center of the mover doors; adjust radius to cover complete access to the doorway from both directions; set event = mover tag; set to mover initial state to trigger control; set other mover properties as required for sounds etc - oh yeah, don't use any delays and make the door open fast enough that game flow is not interrupted... same theory as lifts - too slow movers in UT99 = *suck*

13. There's no point, remove these nodes, BOTS won't do this unless you make that a much wider ledge and put something out on it that they will want to get
14. This is an alternate view of the obelisk situation described in #11. This might seem silly, but you could put things like udams on the peak of the obelisks, and then set up LE-JS-LE to drop a jumping BOT onto the powerup, but that you'd have to fiddle with and likely only people would go for the goodies... might be worth trying that but for now I wouldn't bother (plenty of other things you could do
15. You have a few of these (clipped?) wedge like brushes around - these look like they are not co-planer in the geometry, I'd remke these to have the same cross-section (i.e same slope and height), with one just vertex edited for width and then rotated. That's just me

(more to come)

[FraGnBraG]

continued...

16. H-O-M
17. Cause of hom. Vertical Non solid sheet is penetrating the horizontal lava zone sheet. I fixed this easily.
However I discovered issues with the brushing in the area (see #18) To fix the hom I did this:
Snapped the verical sheet onto the 1-grid and moved the sheet off the wall by 1uu.
(note that it appears you free placed the sheet un-snapped. Okay, but that practice will bite you in the a$$ sooner or later
The I vertex edited the sheet to pull the bottom vertices up to clear the horizontal lava sheet; rebuilt; hom-gone.

18. There is absolutely no need to intersect this cylinder with the surrounding geometry. In fact, unless your makin a preFab or mover or have a really good reason to, intersecting brushes is not a good practice.
19. & 20. This is bad brushing. You have skewed clipped cones (at least that's what they look like), and then intesected these things on each other. Quite a messy situation. But that said, and UE1 being such a "forgiving" peice of technology, you've gotten away with it - this time You could redo this "feature" just using primitives Vertex edited or a careful use of 2dse shapes.

Note about skewing brushes like cylinders and cones - if you are going to do this you have to be careful to make sure the screwed brushes polygons remain planer in their orientation, and that the face vertices are planer with the surface you're mating them to (or subtracting from). As you see in #20, you have vertices which are not planer - hence the missing line. This situation can have seriously bad results when a map becomes complex (1000+ brushes).

Missing lines on brushes can be corrected by the command "actor align". However, because theses brushes are scewed and intesected I would not recommend it.

To find out why you could do this for fun (on a copy of your map, of course) Select #20 and type in "actor align". Hey the line re-appeard! Now "actor align" brush #19, and rebuild - OMG! boom! wtf happened! Because the brushes are scewed and you've now snapped the brushes verts all to the fixed grid, some or all the polygons on the scewed brushes are no longer planer, and thus UE1 is rendering those surfaces naturally as "holes" because it can't draw their surfaces. Of course, if you built everything from scratch using just simple brushes then no such worries.

Alas, since the hom was caused by the non-solid sheet, just leave #19 and #20 alone, unless they end up causing a problem later.

21. So I think you know what's wrong with these Pathnodes here?

(and just one more)

[FraGnBraG]

last one...

22. 23. 24. Shown are various examples of brushes that are (imo) unnecessarily intersected. Intersecting all these brushes adds a lot of nodes to the bsp, as indicated in the 2.82:1 polys/nodes ratio shown in the build stats dialog. (see #25). As you see It's only 304 brushes, yet look at all the polys/nodes!

Not that it matters much at this point, since you're almost done by the looks of it. If you did do a bit of re-construction, you'd likely get the value down some, but as it is it should run fine, imo, so I would not bother.

Some thing to think about for your next maps...

Corrupted brushes (like #20) can cause BSP errors, seam tears, texture corruption or worst of all, collision anomalies (like invisble walls or holes where you just fall out of the map) The conventional wisdom is that it is always better to use a greater number of simpler brushes to make a complexed area, than it is to use a lower number of complex brushes that have more polygons and nodes on them (i.e. like what you get when you intersect brushes with the world-geometry).

There's no need to Intersect much anyways - UE1 uses each CSG brush's data and it's ordering in the map (like a stack) when calculating the BSP tree and whenever you create a complex brush by intersecting you're actually adding a shitload more data to a CSG brush and thus into the equation - which probably isn't helping things in the end if you 've been doing it gratuitously.

Un-intersected subtracts like a cylinder poking out of a wall might look messy in the editor wireframe viewport, but the brush integrity and brush ordering is the most important thing (Hourances refers to this as "clean brushing") and Yeah, sometimes you have to intersect things like a tunnel in a terrain for some reason, but most of the time you don't. And you you will have to make prefab decos, pillars, movers and other things like that, but they are usually things added afterwards into a stable playspace, and these will usually only affect the stats a bit.

Anyways, a few paragraphs for you guys
Hope this was helpful in some way
Cheers

[Ginko]

Dude, wow. Thanks for all the time you spent capturing screenshots and indexing. I'm quite impressed.

My plan was to go back and retexture from the inside out. I started with the outside and worked inward, the theme doesn't jive with itself. I think if I start in the middle and work to the outside, there will be more of a consistant feel.

I'll go back and rebuild the lava room ... I always thought that de- & -intersecting was the way to go, but I see how it does complicate the cuts.

Thanks for disecting this frog, great input. I shall name my next child after you.

ginko

[FraGnBraG]

well I can tell you i've been around the block a few times with this stuff (I started mapping in UED#1) and since those times there's been so many "camps" and "gurus" saying this is best and that is best - it's really a lot of bugger anyways. If it works it works, players (i.e. the customers) don't realy care how it's built, just that it works and they have fun. I intersected everything in early days, cause some guru said do that, stopped doing that later on when another guru said don't, eventually figured it all out for myself...

I'd say for your map the textures and bots could use a bit of attention, and you've still to do skybox and lighting. Generally good FFA and sniping layout, imo. Detailing? meh, you could fill it up with piles of trims n' things but you might want to just keep things simple and clean. Nice lighting, mobile bots, decent layout and some fun gameplay features = map that will get played and not kill computers I'd just tweak/simplify the pathnodes in a few spots, maybe speed up the lifts a bit, fix that mover door and also that HOM, and you're good to go Cheers

[Creavion]

Good and really helpful mappers at the same time are really rare nowadays, really good work, FNB^^.

BTW: Since I know you you overlook it sometimes .. please check your PM folder, thanks.