Once seen , cannot be unseen. Map Flaws and Afterthoughts.

[Que]

so this is just a small post pointing out a few glitches or after-thoughts.

See here on Agony it seems they added the extra mis-formed step as an after-thought;



and in deck16][ the corridors just would'nt line up towards the Elevators;





any glitches in the default maps you've noticed?

[Chrysaor]

Yeah, that's funny, I never noticed either of those and those are two of my favorite DM.

There is a texturing error I noticed on Deck16. One of the ramps up to the top level has the wrong texture on the side of it. It's dark green instead of pale green. The one that bugs me the most tho is CTF-Face. He has these beautiful opposing themes, but the very top of one of the bases has the wrong texture-like from the other base-on the ramp by the BA.

That said, I had to map as fast as possible because I was getting paid, I'd make so many more errors! These maps are pretty clean.

[UnrealGGecko]

One of the more known mistakes probably: DM-Phobos has Pulse ammo, but no Pulse Gun.

[Swanky]

A lot of maps were done on the fly. It's not like people spent days on their maps looking at them from any angle to find all the little things that don't line up perfectly. That kind of qa / passion was neither in time nor monetary budget I suppose, and is mostly done by mappers spending weeks on their projects (fun fact: there was a quite visible hom in my DM-Vrais uncovered for several years).
That said, the Phobos thing should have been caught in QA and the Agony step is to make sure that you can smoothly transition over to the upper ledge without having to do a jump or an awkward turn. And I recall that the original Deck16 was done in an extended break or something like that, a really short time frame either way.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Actually some of this is because UT took more than a year to develop (starting as merely an expansion pack for Unreal turning into "More Unreal but little different" standalone game until being turned into what it became) and there were changes. There used to be pulseguns at some point in Phobos, and the ammo was forgotten to be removed in a rush, the demo version which was pre-release has pulsegun(but otherwise limited selection of weapons).

Sometimes map rebuilt or changes caused this and this, same applies for some original unreal maps as well.

[Dennis]

Glitch or flaw it is not but it is a fire hazard to place a fire where flames touch wooden material - accident about to happend in near future - though Agony has been played in 23 years without the fire fighters taking part of the game

Shot00000.png

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Those same issues like in Deck16II I noticed also in the beta version of AS-HiSpeed btw. It often just goes away during rebuilt.

[Chrysaor]

Lol, I never noticed the missing pulse gun in Phobos, that's great! Definitely a "once seen, cannot be unseen."

[Buggie]

Teleport on DM-Deck16][ outside map, and bots never take redeemer or chase you here.
AS-Overlord trigger which goes from wall and ruin gameplay.
AS-Mazon - wrong work of assault targets if you use hammer jump for get inside base and pass map in wrong order.
CTF-Face contain masked not-solid walls, and dead spot on top of tower. All on red side.

I think there a lot such stuff. Maps created by humans, not by gods. And this is only trade off for perfection and time.

I even not consider talk about paths. it is very complicated topic and there a lot possible flaws, which make bot behavior very unnatural.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Yea...the pathing tends to be tricky and it doesn't help it behaved differently across versions and UT changed a lot of version numbers thorought developement.

Either way I believe it was a mistake by Steve Polge and co. to rely on pathing. There were bots made for quake that automatically learned the maps (not his reaper bot iirc), but even with Unreal they experimented early on with automatic stuff for example monsters used to hide behind geometry without needing paths in version 0.83 for example. But then the game was rewritten half a year later and made less native code oriented and that's when the AI started to be more basic and relying on unrealscript and navigation points more.

It is kind of a flaw in design really and I just don't get what the appeal is. Though it can get worse to the other extreme. I remember having to set up waypoints for custom half life bots like pod bots etc. Because otherwise they kept running into walls like retards. So Steve Polge is definitely not the worst one in this lol....

[Que]

missing texture by light in doorway on Liandri;



and what is this supposed to be? AfterThought...

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Given that Liandri is one of the most often changed maps during the entire developement, who the hell knows? It was revamped so many times the only thing that remained is the cave lava theme and some misc things.

though that section is somewhat similar to the one with the double doorway and the teleporter in the 221 version. and there was just some fancy circular thing at the ceiling.

[Swanky]

Yea...the pathing tends to be tricky and it doesn't help it behaved differently across versions and UT changed a lot of version numbers thorought developement.

Either way I believe it was a mistake by Steve Polge and co. to rely on pathing. There were bots made for quake that automatically learned the maps (not his reaper bot iirc), but even with Unreal they experimented early on with automatic stuff for example monsters used to hide behind geometry without needing paths in version 0.83 for example. But then the game was rewritten half a year later and made less native code oriented and that's when the AI started to be more basic and relying on unrealscript and navigation points more.

It is kind of a flaw in design really and I just don't get what the appeal is. Though it can get worse to the other extreme. I remember having to set up waypoints for custom half life bots like pod bots etc. Because otherwise they kept running into walls like retards. So Steve Polge is definitely not the worst one in this lol....

Iirc Steve Polge was specifically drafted to work on bot AI. Having them to rely on pre-placed pathing may have been a result of assault maps or simply bots not behaving as intended when they learned a map without things. Not sure how indepth solutions for it have to be but I image it to be pretty heavy on realtime processing and the engine melted enough PCs back then.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Yea...the pathing tends to be tricky and it doesn't help it behaved differently across versions and UT changed a lot of version numbers thorought developement.

Either way I believe it was a mistake by Steve Polge and co. to rely on pathing. There were bots made for quake that automatically learned the maps (not his reaper bot iirc), but even with Unreal they experimented early on with automatic stuff for example monsters used to hide behind geometry without needing paths in version 0.83 for example. But then the game was rewritten half a year later and made less native code oriented and that's when the AI started to be more basic and relying on unrealscript and navigation points more.

It is kind of a flaw in design really and I just don't get what the appeal is. Though it can get worse to the other extreme. I remember having to set up waypoints for custom half life bots like pod bots etc. Because otherwise they kept running into walls like retards. So Steve Polge is definitely not the worst one in this lol....

Iirc Steve Polge was specifically drafted to work on bot AI. Having them to rely on pre-placed pathing may have been a result of assault maps or simply bots not behaving as intended when they learned a map without things. Not sure how indepth solutions for it have to be but I image it to be pretty heavy on realtime processing and the engine melted enough PCs back then.

Assault wasn't a thing until botpack, so at the very least couple of months after Unreal's release in summer of 1998. He got in to work on Unreal on the monster AI at first but because Epic saw ReaperBot for quake. The bots for Quake that used to learn paths themselves, it only needed to learn it once then it saved it to a config file or something, and Unreal used to do this on old "alpha/beta" versions before the big rewrite in 1997. Of course since Steve joined Unreal the plan was to make bots as well and at first they were part of the player code, not even separate pawns. If there was no player to posess the playerpawn the AI automatically took over the player's pawn...that's how it used to work. that is long before release and before Assault was even thought of.

But yea the AI used to just go by the room, the AI used to be simpler of course but it could start hiding behind pillars, like in this video I recorded:

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Automatically merged

Re: Once seen , cannot be unseen. Map Flaws and Afterthoughts.
I can understand why some of the navigationpoints got introduced, it can't hurt having help for some very specific things like setting up a "homebase" and such but the rest should have been kept more automatic imo, just like on the Seti map shown in the video. There are really no navigationpoints helping the manta, the AI does it automatically.

[Diablo]

Glitch or flaw it is not but it is a fire hazard to place a fire where flames touch wooden material - accident about to happend in near future - though Agony has been played in 23 years without the fire fighters taking part of the game

Shot00000.png

Weird guess here, but remember, this is more than 200 years into the future, right? So some scientists might have created an invisible 'damage-proofing' material, that was applied to all Liandri owned Tournament arenas. That might be a great explanation to why even the Ultima Protos never can totally destroy an arena, and only just exude some rocks, and then the walls rebuild themselves.