hair dryer gun will make u forget about the map glitches and dry (shoot in head) BE hair(heads) makes no sense but....have a nice flight
Aye, flounder, from what I have heard from the community (or at least OuNin) is that the map doesn't have enough cover for Infantry, but otherwise man this map is great, played on it today. All I have to say is this; the place where the capital building's bridge is broken should at least have the broken piece on the floor, because otherwise it doesn't make sense.
If you want the map to crash constantly/lag unbearably/not play at all, then yes, he can. B2 is a massive improvement over b1 flounder, congrats I would suggest making the lighting a little more orangey though, and re-enabling walls across the map. Oh, and change the grass texture used for the majority of the map to that used on the playground, then use paint alpha to dirty it up a little, especially around buildings and walkways.
agreed on the grass, my only complaint is that one team seems to win a lot on that map o and i want WALLS!
A letter from the editor Wanted to address some issues you guys have brought up in the thread. Walls Personally, I hate walls in this game. But the main reason that I removed them was because people complained that they were really annoying in B1. However, I think a non wall commander map is unheard of, and a lot of people are frustrated now in B2 when they go to wall in a comm and they can't make their walls. Plus I want the map to be somewhat exploitable (first guy who can find a way to get on top of the capitol wins), so I think I'll reintroduce walls. There are enough alternative routes in the map to allow fluid gameplay even if some people wall spam a road or two. Verdict: I will remove the wall restriction in the next patch. Grass I feel that there is so little grass in this map that it's not worth the effort to create all of the displacements needed to make the grass look more natural. The gains of a minor increase in visual quality would also not be worth the performance hit of using displacements. If there was a way to blend the textures on a regular brush without turning it into a displacement I would do it in a heartbeat, but as of now there is no support for that in the engine. Verdict: The grass is gonna stay the same unless someone can convince me otherwise. Skybox I would also prefer a more orange ambient light, however I cannot find a skybox color that has an orange light and is dark enough to work with all of my street lights. If you look at this skylist, there are some good candidates in the episode 1 sharded gcf section, but they are not working on my computer (most likely because I don't have EP1, but then again, I'm sure a lot of Empires players don't, so I probably shouldn't use these skyboxes). If anyone knows a good skybox to use for an early dawn atmosphere, please let me know. Verdict: I need to find a way to get the EP1 skyboxes working before I can change the map's ambient lighting to something more orange. If you can help me with this, or can help me find a workaround, let me know. Other Considerations I'm making big changes to the map that should allow for more buildable base areas and more interactive buildings. But this won't be done until after 2.2 comes out. I'm thinking that B3 will be done sometime just before Xmas. Back before I released B1, I gotta say that I was worried that I would spend all this time making a map that no one would play. But everyone has been very eager to help me distribute it. Thanks a lot everyone for all of your interest!
walls - prolly for the best, 2.3 might allow you to restrict only engy or comm walls to narrow it down grass - disp's take like no performance hit on the map, add some flat ones where the grass is so you can apply a belnd texture that also has 'grass' details on it. there are tutorials on it and it looks WAAAAAY better.
As bitchslap said, displacements have a negligable impact on performance, (actually, using them instead of brushes to make pipes and stuff can actually increase framerate) and by the looks of the grass areas, it should be easy to convert the visible surface to a displacement and spam alpha paint all over it. As for the skybox, the values on that page are only guidelines, and you can often get away with taking down the brightness, and altering the colours considerably without any clashes with the skybox. From looking at the stock HL2 textures, I would suggest either sky_day01_07 or sky_day01_08, for the best lighting, even though what is present at the moment is still pretty good. You do need a env_sun though.
Beta 3 is coming along with a lot of changes. I'm moving NF start to the dockyard and removing a ref or two. Along with these moves I've also created more space in the city for base building. I'm also creating an interior for the capitol building, which will hopefully look a lot like the picture for the 2.2 main menu. It's taking longer than I thought it would, and frankly with the holidays coming it's taken a back seat to other things. Who knows, maybe I could get it out on Christmas day, that would be cool. As always, thanks for the suggestions. You two have actually addressed all three of my issues dead on and I will definitely make the changes.
Sounds great flounder. This map is fantastic as it is. With some polishing, it will be more than good enough to stick in the next major release of Empires, if the devs allow it.
read the thread. new one coming soon (prolly first post update) edit : flounder, here's a sexy screenshot for your promo of beta3
up on the noob server, if all goes well it'll go in rotation as this is a fun city map (least last version was)
