LOL

We just had a nice little session on mine, CJ's and Ferret's maps. My impressions are...

Ferret's "dm_fairytale" is polished as hell with a few suspect areas, for instance the caves are a bit buggy and the waterfall is still tricky to use. We had just the right amount of people for the map I reckon (5 of us) and gameplay seemed good - plenty of up close and personal shotgun and crowbar fights in the interiors with just the right amount of spam potential for the exterior. Lack of vertical play is perhaps a bit of a worry - most of the action is single tiered - and it does mean that gauss jumping is all but pointless, but it was fun nonetheless. And of course it looks ultra-sexy, meaning it will definately be in the running for the top spot.

CJ's "Persian Letters" has more potential than pretty much any other DM map I've seen, but in its current shape it leaves quite a bit to be desired. Anomalies such as func_illusionary handrails with no clip brush, or seemingly solid bits of rubble that you can fall righ through, detract quite a bit from the stunning first impressions. It runs like a dream considering the awesome grandeur and detail, and while gameplay was hampered by some questionable weapon placement (which can be attributed both to CJ's original plans for a non-DM game mode which has so far failed to materialise, and no doubt lack of time) the layout and z-axis combat mean this could be one hell of a player as well as a looker.

My map, currently just known as "flatshaded", ran better than I expected it to given the ultra high w_poly, and was quite playable even with a 200-300 ping. As it has no weapons so as to maximise performance, the modified initial equipment provided an even playing field right from the off, every time. Unfortunately it also reduced the sense of purpose in the gameplay - normally accumulating weapons gives a reason to explore, but in flatshaded that reason is stripped away and means you might as well stand still and wait for the action to come to you. Lack of scenery variation also hurts it somewhat - time dictated I HAD to use a near symmetrical layout and this doesn't make it hugely interesting to look at or play. But it does have sharks, and lets face it, that means it should take the number one spot

• Giganormous, lots of height variation for gauss jumping/ambush
• Looks "good" apparently, according to others
  
• Messed up ladders, clipping issues.
• Too open in some parts, leaving the crossbow to be too dominant.
• Water doesn't prevent fall damage (wtf?!)
• Too dark in some areas. Whoops. A bunch of areas not that polished lighting-wise and architecture-wise.
  
• Need to implement dynamic King of the Hill gameplay so that a small amount of players can generally have a good time. In current state, would probably need at least 10 to provide a good pace in-game.
  
• Not enough weapons (?)
  

• Polished good stuff. Upside down rooms/frosting river and stuff = win
• Not nearly enough Z-Axis fighting. There's a bit in the enchanted house, but that's pretty much it. Due to the "single level" nature, shotgun is very dominant.
• Some of the clip brushes aren't accurate or clip too much - the map looks open and should accordingly play openly. This pretty much prevents gauss jumping from being very effective, like ReNo said.
• Too many teleports, I think. Makes the map feel like it was completed, so the ends were chopped off and connected with teleports. Though that surely isn't the case, it certainly feels like that with some of the teleport locations.
• Not enough health or batteries.
• Giant gaping HOM in the caves, large enough to disrupt gameplay in some cases.

• Cartoony. Looks great. The layout/skybox really makes the whole map seem incredibly vast and huge (probably because it actually is)
• Giganormous r_speeds!
• Shark jumping is too hard!
  
• Default weapons reduce a lot of strategy involved in DM. Basically all you do is jump around with gauss and stuff. There's no worrying about ammo, health, or armor really since you start with 100 each.
  
• Don't really want to say this, but the map is basically one giant, glorified, flatshaded killbox. But hey, at least the layout is easy to learn. No offense to ReNo, of course.
• Crossbow way too dominant, very little in the way of cover, only solution is to keep running and moving.
  

and RENO WINS!

www.mapcore.net is having a glorious time with Campaign and my Maps, you guys should post yours there too and blow them away lol

hlgaming.com has an article up as well.

Lep, you think you can package all of them up into one mappack or something? (ignore this if you've already done/are doing this)

force, i've started uploading the zip that i made earlier.

i find it quicker to make one big zip if i'm installing lots of maps together.

all i do is put all the maps in a folder on the desktop. the zips that have 'valve' root folder get right clicked/extract here. then drop the others into the valve folder thats just been made, and right-click/extract here. everything ends up in the right place, other than the couple that are only a zipped bsp+txt. they're easy enough to drag and drop to their right folders.

the zips like persia and hogwarts, that want to be unzipped to their very own folder get r-c/extract here. then 2 seconds to make a new zip from the contents of the unwanted root folder, that can be extracted as above.

simple, and it means i avoid 20 episodes of guiding the winzip wizard all down my directory tree to the bowels of steam. maybe thats why it seems a lot quicker.

Hi everybody. First of all, great site with great maps.

As some of you might have read on the HLCCL forums (from which I am banned ) every map from the Mapping Competition, and loads of others are available on these servers:

Pure Chaos AG6.6 #=pc= [ARENA]|15ms|131.211.231.89:27015
Pure Chaos AG6.6 #=pc= [TDM]|19ms|131.211.231.89:27020

It's Steam, HL AG. You can download AGmod here: http://www.uhl-null.de/storage/ag_66.exe

To vote a map, you have to bring down the console and type:

vote <mapname>

To vote on a vote that someone has started, simply type yes or no in console.

A few weeks ago, I've uploaded about every single map there is on the Pure Chaos AG6.6 server. Latest count of maps available is approximately 1315 . If you feel like your map needs to be on it, contact me on irc: irc.quakenet.org , channel #=pc=.

Regards,

crz aka Rush|PC