emp_atomic, also chris0132's fabulous blog.

"scout vehiclespeed skill upgrade" + "3phase" + "jeep" + "viper turbo jeeps" + "halfpipe" = win

 

It was fun on delta when it didn't have water. If the vehicles didn't auto balance themselves in mid air it would be better though.

 

It also helps in general with using vehicles in a confined space, because you don't suffer as much from hitting the walls, you just get steered back in.

Definitely going to see how fast I can make the vehicles without making them hard to control, probably going to put a couple of 3phase jeeps in though.

Haven't got much done this week due to having another assignment to get in, got next week off though so should get more done.

 

Hokay so I did a bit more work on the BE spawn building.





This is the interior of the building, it sits over the drainage canal. BE will spawn on the far side of the building from the flag in a little room, and will have to cross the catwalks to reach the flag, there isn't much cover between the flag and the BE spawn while the flag itself has cover leading right up to it, so this should allow attackers to make progress if they keep reviving and working in groups. Down in the drainage canal is where the BE vehicles will spawn, and it has a clear run to the basin which will have an elevated flag position in it.

Needs more stuff, going to add some ductwork on the ceiling and maybe some more pipes, but the general layout is about done, except for the doorway I need to add.



This is just outside the BE base, there is a large bank of transformers here which will be interspersed with barricades, functionally it's a hall of pillars with walls in between some of them, gives you lots of ways to move through it, but it's fairly linear, it will lead to the centre building. Also looks nice and busy. In general the routes between buildings are linear, but there are usually more than one. You will also be able to get to the centre from the spawn/generator house route. Think district except over a couple of city blocks, so you can take a different road rather than running into the HMG fire.

 

chirs those concrete blockades inside look silly also those things can weigh like a lot and the railing does not seem like it could wear it

 

Make me some big crate models that don't use fifty million polygons and I'll use something else.

Well, I'll use them mixed in with the barriers, I like the barriers, there's a huge-ass heavy-tank sized door right next to them and the entire building is made of 20 foot thick concrete, unless BE install a concrete barrier exclusion field around their structures I don't see why they wouldn't be used indoors.

 

The railings look crooked for some reason. First thing I thought was poor BE, they can't even afford straight metal posts.

beautifully detailed as ever chris. The only thing I could really comment on would be the layout and flow, which is hard to comment on without being able to see the map in game.

will there be any buildable barricades? or rather, destructible barricades?

The only thing that I would be concerned with is a team holding the other team out of the administration building completely. It might work better to have a single diagonal entrance from the generator building to the admin building, then having a direct path from the start building to the generator building. It would give a second entrance to the base for infantry rather than making the base a turtle building. unless those doors on the generator buildings actually open up.

again, I might be misunderstanding the layout. if the areas inside the map but not highlighted are all open areas as well, it might work out just fine, as that would provide much more diversity in the gameplay.

You might also consider having "money flags" on the map in different spots, like the walkways leading into the admin building, to govern the res flow on the map without affecting actual map control. Of all the bad aspects of glycen city, the locations of those res flags does introduce a sort of metagame, where if you can capture them all without anyone noticing, you can afford support vehicles when the other team can not.

Other than that, I'll have to save any more comments until i've played the map.

 

The rails are crooked, they bend inward towards the catwalks, that's just the style, they're combine railings but they're the only ones that come in 512 sizes. The other rails are like 64 tops.

Admin building is going to either have no spawn or it's going to have the spawn be in the basement or something, with the flag being on the roof and roof access on all sides.

Basically all I have to do is keep the spawn away from the flag and make sure there's no good cover between it and the flag, that way you have to leg it a bit to get to the flag.

Basically admin is going to be a building, but it's going to be very open, and it's probably going to be mostly a killing zone from the outside, it will confer a height advantage and it will be the crossroads of the generator-canal paths, but it won't be a strong location, it's going to be contested and it will be designed to be contested.

The map doesn't have res, it's a flag map with vehicle spawners.

Buildables probably not, I can just allow walls in places that I want people to be able to barricade.

The layout is all open, basically if it's not inside a building, it's probably outside and divided up by small walls and obstacles but there should be a route across it, think of it as a busier duststorm.

The other side of the map is basically going to be blown up/ruined/under construction or something, so the NF equivalent of the BE spawn has no roof and a big burning fuel fire in the middle of it.



Still needs more ruination though, more decals, more crap littered around, need to basically make more debris prefabs to place around the place.

Also my texture mod didn't take for some reason so those roof girders look like ass, have to fiddle with that some more to see if I can fix it, looks much better in hammer.

 

hrm, my mistake, thought that there would be spawns at the flags around there. Good to know it'll be very open. With this level of detail, I'd say fuck walls and turrets. Turrets because it's an infantry map, walls because they look like shit compared to most proper textures in the game. Wall spam sucks as well.

Looks like it could also be fun as a capture the flag map or king of the hill type gameplay.


Small suggestion on that screenshot. instead of those red lights being on the left or right side, have them be symmetrical when looking at them, so one left and one right, whichever you prefer. It might just be me, but it feels odd having those lights both on the same side.

and maybe instead of small stair lights, have an exposed electric cable or something providing a bit of spark lighting. Just for the sake of lagging dubee's computer ^_^.

It would also add to the recently blown to hell feel you seem to be going for.

 

I think you should add sequence random to the flames, and make them spawn from a single point so it looks like a pressurised stream.

 

I like it how it looks now tbh

Anything useful in dizzy's props? http://raegquit.com/dizzyone/dump/dizzys_crazy_props_01.rar
http://raegquit.com/dizzyone/dump/dizzy_crazy_props_02.rar

 

It moves a lot faster than natural fire does so it already looks like that.

Also it's supposed to be coming from the nozzle on the generator so it needs to be at least as big as that.

Some of the lights are out and others are flickering, I'm going to add sparks to the ones that are working.

 

Got the texture mods working so the trusses look a lot better, also played HL2 again as a refresher of how they did rubble.



I actually wanted to use the detail prop system to spawn little rocks and stuff on the rubble piles, but that would require me to change the materials on a bunch of props to unlitgeneric and wrestle with the detail prop definitions and stuff, and while I might be able to use bspzip to mount the changed files only for this map, I don't know if it would cause problems later on, so I don't want to waste time doing it only to find it sucks.



I also remembered that there was that nice ICA crate texture in the materials so I made some boxes with that on it. Might actually recolour the texture sometime as you can actually tint things using just vmt files, so I should be able to make red blue and green versions of those crates with a little typing. Or I could photoshop it, whatever.



Think I'll have a go at the admin building so I can think about how to connect it to the two stations, as well as get some obstacle prefabs for dotting around it.

 

someone already made green/blue/etc versions of the icacrate. download provinggrounds.

 

Easier to just add some RGB values to the VMT.

Did some work on the basin, this is a good indicator of how it's going to play out:



Essentially the basin is something of a swamp, a swamp filled with toxic waste that melts any infantry that step in it.

Vehicles on the other hand should have no difficulty driving over the shallow pools of face-melty radioactive acid, and can happily shoot each other and any infantry that happen to be crossing. Infantry need to move around the pools but as the pools are not physical obstacles, they will not grant the infantry any cover from the central structure, which is probably going to have a spawn of some sort connected to it, likely on the roof, and which also has good visibility to the surrounding area (and good cover from tanks).



Now the basin will have some obstacles in it once I get round to making some, because infantry need some cover after all, and wall placement will be largely free in this area I think, so you should be able to employ standard empires tactics for getting close to the enemy, but it is going to be a very different game for vehicles and infantry in this area. Both however should focus on mobility, trying to surround the enemy and keep them spread out, defending the centre from all sides, and maybe consider trying some suppression from further back against infantry spawning on the roof. I might add some good sightlines against the roof from the admin building, which will make capturing the point significantly easier for a team attacking from that location.

 

If you spawn in center building are you pretty much isolated?

 

There's going to be a tunnel leading to the admin building from the basin, and/or possibly a catwalk, but I would expect the basin flag to be among the most contested, given that it will be right in between the two vehicle spawns on the map.

Assuming people like driving tanks, expect regular tank combat in the basin, with infantry supporting.

Also remember this is supposed to be a 64 player infantry map, or at least it's supposed to scale to 64 players, it should be small enough to be playable with 12 or so, but not get clogged all to shit like district with more. Also don't forget that you can quite easily walk to the two flags either side of the basin within a minute or two.

If you mean the central building in the entire map, then no, you're within spitting distance of every other flag on the map, people will be running into you left right and centre.

 

you've never played slaughtered?