dm_residential is a map centered around a 3-way intersection in a residential neighborhood, with a hill and seven accessible buildings in the vicinity. It takes place around early morning (or late evening); most of the lighting in the level comes from streetlights and building illumination. All of the accessible buildings have their own interiors and several ways of entry and exit, providing many potential routes around and throughout the map.
Beta 3 was released on August 8, 2007. The final version, assuming all goes well, should be released in a few weeks (almost surely before September) with only some minor tweaks to the beta 2 design.
You can check out some discussion and work-in-progress screenshots in the forum thread (see below). Thanks for looking!
Killboxes have little to no room for map specific strategy, other than sniping from afar or ducking between one of the few obstacles. My point is players are much more likely to play adopt a custom map that is accessible and easy to understand. Sometimes we have a tendancy to create overly complex maps and although these designs are impressive and may offer the most gameplay potential for people who actually stick with the map and learn it, there is alot to be garnered from really observing the killbox phenomena. Making beautiful, yet highly accessible maps with fairly simple layouts is a much better approach if you really want your maps played by the community. I adopted this principle with a couple of my halflife 1 maps and they are the ones that stuck with the community. Same thing with my map Swamplight. The first iteration was a f**king beast of a map and way too complex. I chopped it in half and created something much easier to learn. These kinds of problems should be addressed before the detailing process starts - this way you don't find yourself wanting to make large scale changes on all of this near finished art. It could be painful.
The whole killbox discusssion in an interesting one. I personally understand why so many people (mappers and hardcore players) despise them. I aslo understand why so many players like them. Either way, you can't deny that they are popular for a reason, and we are better off trying to understand that then just turning our nose to them. That is, of course, if we are really trying to create playable maps. If you just want to make pretty art - honestly, who cares about gameplay.
Alright, so.. the beta must come out by Sunday. :smile:
Finger:
You're right. I wish I were more of a playability whore, I have a rather poor sense of what works exactly.. I play it all the time, I just don't really have this sense of what to look for. There's plenty of variation in height/range gameplay (close-quarters inside a number of areas, sniping across the map, fights spanning from a rooftop across the map down to the ground...). I enjoy it but I hope I can get some feedback from everyone else.
I have tomorrow off work, I'll map my ass off.. with the last four hours tonight and tomorrow, I must finish the interiors and cutting down the gameplay area.
Morphine and Finger: are you guys available for a playtest on, say.. friday, or maybe saturday if it came down to that? Three coming potentialities: Friday at like noon PDT; Friday at like midnight PDT; Saturday at like midnight PDT. I'd like both of you guys in particular to be at any kind of playtest I hold, as well as anybody browsing around here.
honestly, if you want to do yourself justice, you should try to get a playable version with just the basic layout and none of the polish much sooner. I've found that if I can bang out a solid layout that I know works, all of the detailing falls right into place. Good tip for the next map - get the basic flow and structures in; let some people test it out; let other mappers look for potential performance issues, then start working towards a true beta. The sad truth is, if the map fails to play well, it fails in a much bigger way than if it just looked bad.... this is why killbox maps are popular even though they look like ass.
Oh, interesting.. I recently took up an interest with it, since I thought it wasn't a word. I looked it up by Googling it and it had a "Definition" link, so I assumed it was a word.. irregardless, I'll continue to use it. I love it. :biggrin:
I didn't get as much done last night as I wanted - okay, honestly, I didn't really do anything. :o
I did a lot of thinking though, and I've got down what I want to do and starting now I've got like 6 hours of time to do it. So... yeah.
I also really need to finish off interiors. As soon as that's done, I'll post a beta - I really mostly want the flow to be there. The beta should be "here's the layout, now I just need to add detailing and tweaking and performance improvement".
Irregardless (I like that word) - I'll just mess around and try my best to come up with something.
That isn't a word :wink:
So when are we going to get a download link?
This little explanation for the word I found via google made me laugh:
"USAGE NOTE Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style, when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing. Coined in the United States in the early 20th century, it has met with a blizzard of condemnation for being an improper yoking of irrespective and regardless and for the logical absurdity of combining the negative ir? prefix and ?less suffix in a single term. Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel, it has been considered a blunder for decades and will probably continue to be so."
Sorry to hijack the thread. So when's ze download?
Posted by 7dk2h4md720ih on
Wed Aug 23rd 2006 at 11:50pm
Irregardless (I like that word) - I'll just mess around and try my best to come up with something.
Woohoo for good timing. :smile: I see what you mean, I'll certainly think about it.
Right now I'm adding on to the apartment buildings with the extrusions... and kind of extending the environment out realistically in one direction (down in the direction of the debris that cuts off the street).
Posted by reaper47 on
Wed Aug 23rd 2006 at 10:17am
reaper47: I'm not sure what you mean - reducing the size of the parking lot by half or a third? And what do you mean by "ramp" of the park? The sidewalkish-area leading up and around the park?
yes and yes. Don't forget what I said about never having played your map also. Maybe the dimenstions are fine and there is no need to make these areas smaller.
