I don't think tropicvendetta is any more gimmicky than district, escort, or urban chaos. Seems like a silly reason not to make it official.
actually most servers have a fast download server(ie a separate server from the one thats hosting the game server) which hosts it to download like you normally would with being faster and having smaller downloads since it has all the files basically zipped/compressed to a much smaller download. So you have faster downloads and smaller downloads, I think viper is the only real empires server not to use this. For instance tropic vendetta rc1 is 75 Mb unpacked and in its playable state, however on fast download server its compressed to like 20 Mb. Making your downloading life much easier.
Some servers are fast, some servers are slow, but I have a 25mbp connection and normally download at speeds of up to 2 mb/s. Servers still take a long time to get maps. I don't like it and I usually disconnect. Finding them on the forums isn't that straightforward either. You're already downloading 850mb like he said, so it's going to be one of those overnight dl's for most people.
Agreed. Gameplay of tropicvendetta isn't at all that different from standard classic maps. If you can throw newbies into escort where they have no clue "why BLU has so many more tickets and RED no tanks" then you can expect them to adjust to tropicvendetta as well. IMO tropicvendetta is even more noob-friendly than classic maps, because the CV is somewhat more protected from griefing.
I'm still yet to play the map because despite having downloaded the map in advance, the server I saw it on and tried to log on to wanted me to sit for 5 mins to download a parachute model (oddly because I'd been on other servers with the silly parachute thing on before). Too many 'sit for 5 min downloading' in a row is really annoying (one is bad enough by itself) - the worst bit is if its a long dl time for either a quick or not good map so by the time you get to join it's over or just not fun. I know it's better the second time etc, but it's tedious too. Coming back from a decent length of time away from empires was quite an annoying process
That's the best reason why every popular and bug-/exploit free map should be official. When you dl the installer it doesn't make much difference if you have to load some MB more for additional maps.
What would happen if it was over land? As an idea, so that rather than ending the game when you lost the flag, it simply made your CV more vulnerable?
Yea, on redirects we archive the .bsp into a bz2. Tropic Vendetta's .bsp is 75mb, its bz2 is 20mb, for example. :D
the problem I see with this is the water waves come from 1 direction and our map is surrounded by water, you see how he shaped his map so the water will only be seen comming from that one direction? while I do agree this is pretty badass looking its not too viable for us to use. EDIT: I was thinking this would be a great feature for something like coast, where the water does only come from one direction.
The rocks on this map have invisible chunks on the sides that have been pissing me off lately.. I have to walk like 5 feet out in the open to shoot past the rock so I don't shoot some invisible part and kill myself. Although it did save me once too cause some rifleman unloaded a clip into it and instead of me.. I still think they shouldn't be this way.
FUCKING YES! I have been cooking my grenade for ages and then someone comes out and it bounces off. Boom, I die, our rush fails.
Yeah that happened to me alot during the last time I played it, mortars hitting invisible clips and shitttt Fix them ;D Oh and also you can walk through one of the trees in the north (pathway to NF flag)
I would if we had more rocks to work with, and ones that matched the scenery. I dont like the invisible walls either
Mapping wise, there's no way to trim anything off of models, thje models would have to be recompiled. I believe shandy and keef are waiting for new palm models as well as rock models for their next version and that's been lik ethat for some time. Till then, use the rocks to your advantage i guess.
The current rock models are the only ones that even remotely match the scenery while having the least amount of oddities. The Lost Coast rocks' collision models didn't work in multiplayer, so you could go through them, or even build turrets and drop mines inside of them. We're not waiting on new palm tree models - we already received the new ones, but it was shortly after our RC1 release of this map. The new ones look the exact same, but have level of detail filtering and include some clusters (so that we don't have to place so many individuals when using them in the future). The collision models are bigger than the actual rock models. We noticed it from the get-go back in Beta 2, but unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it unless a modeler steps up to the challenge. I haven't touched Source SDK in well over a month, and can't really be bothered to at the moment. As for the palm tree you can drive through up in the North Western tree gauntlet, we know about it - found it shortly after we released RC1, and it has been or will be fixed for the next release (whenever that may be).
