Competition 2005 (pre-thread)

Agent Smith said:
I've got an even better idea! Lets have a killbox competition!

Or we can find our Favorite killbox and do a remake!

Yeah! Super Awesome!

/bans

I like Cassius' idea too, though as ever it will still have to be a fine DM map.

I have not read this whole thing yet. I will post my response, then go back and read the thread cause I do not want to be swayed into another reply.

1st off, we need a theme that has the greatest chance of success.
2nd, we need a theme that even the most basic mapper can achieve.
3rd, we need a theme that will draw the biggest portion of participants.
4th we need a theme that we have not yet done.

I suggest a "Rat's" theme.

Rats maps are very popular, Rats maps can be made by anyone and we have yet to have a Comp. with that theme.

/ 2 cents.

Now, /me goes back and reads preceeding 4 pages.

[edit] allow me to re-iterate. we need a theme that everyone can achieve. I like many of the ideas, but we always pick a theme them excludes the entry level members, and in the end, we end up with perhaps a dozen maps only.

lets just this once, pick a basic theme that anyone can make in the hopes that our turnout is the grandest yet.

Think about it guys..

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Rats? No thanks. I don't mean to sound "do it my way or I'm not
playing", but I think the majority of long time members here are none
too keen on the rats theme.

And you say "just this once", but our last contest was a hugely open
theme, and it did see entries from mappers with a wide range of skills.
Even the contest before based on concept art saw a good number of less
experienced mappers getting in on the action despite being perhaps
somewhat difficult to pull off.

I agree with your intentions when it comes to keeping to a theme that
won't alienate newcomers, but I don't think we should pick one that
will alienate many of our long time members to accomodate them.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

Yes, I would rather stick to Rats map. As I said.

Rats are, indeed, real popular, templates can be taken from almost
anywhere. You can, for instance, use an inside of a PC to make a rats
map (actually, that's more like an ants map xD), you can take a living
room as a template, a WC, or even make it happen inside a printer :biggrin:
(or a tv :wink: )

You can also make it happen on top of a tree... and make a small skybox around it...

These were just mere examples that came into my head (partly because I
am always surrounded by most of these and partly that I have played
some like these).

For instance, a PC-case would mostly consist of rectangular blocks.
Only wires etc are a bit... less rectangular . It would be easy
for entry-level people to make. I would also stick to one, just because
I have a big, huge and cool case to use.

For advanced ones, they could make it more difficult and make it all
happen in a sandbox - toys and buckets lying around and huge
displacement areas.

These were just few thoughts, I believe you can come up with lot more.

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HL2 tutorials 'n' stuff: http://madedog.pri.ee
217.159.236.34:27050 - CSS Server - Clean | koffer.ee

You know, I used to say the same thing. I hated the maps because my frame rates were atrocious. Now however, with the new engine I have reconsidered my thinking.

And, I think that although all of our competitions have been successful, I also feel they were still made with "only" the pit members in mind.

We need a competition that will draw more members. Even if a rats theme is not the answer (which i concede is in all probability the case) we need a theme that will draw outside members. to entice them to come here.

I can count on one hand the total number of "Pro" mappers who have joined this site with their skills established "before" membership. I would like to see that number increased a few hundred fold.

BUT, I want to stress, we need a theme that does not exclude the entry level members.

I disagree strongly with you Duncan, but I know that you have the best interest in mind as well so would side with you if my idea is Vetoed.. for the site I would. I still feel I am on the right track, just chose another theme. AND DAMMIT play an HL2 rats map before you s**tcan my idea

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Rats maps are an acquired taste. If done well, they can be really good, but most end up as glorified kill-boxes. They tend to be a little too open for DM, but personal preferences I guess :/

I'm just going to go with whatever is decided as this whole process of choosing a theme gets to a point where everyone fights over different ideas that benefit their skill-set best :wink:

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You Got To Get Through What You've Got To Go Through To Get What You Want But You Got To Know What You Want To Get Through What You Got To Go Through

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting Adam Hawkins</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>

I'm just going to go with whatever is decided as this whole process of choosing a theme gets to a point where everyone fights over different ideas that benefit their skill-set best :wink:

</DIV></DIV>

This is my point exactly. In the end, we will chose a theme that the upper echelon will decide is best. Not what is best overall.

As I stated, pick a theme that can entice new members, AND include entry level maps. Don't veto a rats theme because we may end up with 500 killbox clones.. we always end up with a few imperfect/improbable maps anyways, why should this competition be any different?

The only thing wrong with a RATS map is.
1) poor design
and
2) poor design.

the theme is not inherently evil, or wrong.
until someone comes up with an idea that incorporates my thinking, i will stick with voting "RATS!"

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Well I've decided anyway, and it shall appease ye all. :razz:

While I personally don't go for rats maps, I do have one problem with
them that is more than just a personal dislike. Generally a rats map is
set within a realistic room, with all the trimmings. The standard HL2
texture sets don't really accomodate the rats theme well, as there
would be a need for custom texturing and props, skills that are beyond
most of us. While that may be considered deciding on a theme that suits
my skill set (though I can do custom texturing), I think its a problem
most of us would have. While I've got no problem with people using
their own custom textures/props, I think it would handicap a number of
people.

Just a thought.

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Consider this.
I HATE PROPS! so it wouldn't hurt the theme to not have them. At least the props that are hurled around. But seriously, there are rocks set to hurl in Island 17, why do you have to use stock props in a rats map? set a few fly turds and dust bunnies to prop and hurl those about. :wink:

and, although I agree that bedrooms and kitchens have been done to death, there are a gazillion maps yet to be made in factories from a bugs perspective. :rolleyes:

I have a strong feeling that the theme will be vetoed, simply because I ALWAYS chose the wrong side of a discussion, but still.. the theme is not evil, and can be used in some maps destined for the server rotation perhaps???

I am genuinely tired of OUR ROTATION!

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The best things in life, aren't things.

rats maps can be fun if they are made well. How about a specific rats themed map, say dioramas.

You all remember those don't you?, the little worlds you make in a box, or an egg shell, with a hole to look into?

this way you get to make more stuff within the scale of props, but you have to use your imagination to suggest that its all part of a bigger world.

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Quote from Nietzsche....God is dead
Quote from God....Nietzsche is dead

Orpheus said:
I have a strong feeling that the theme will be vetoed, simply because I ALWAYS chose the wrong side of a discussion, but still.. the theme is not evil, and can be used in some maps destined for the server rotation perhaps???

That's right, blame everyone else rather than your own bad ideas :heee:

Leperous said:
That's right, blame everyone else rather than your own bad ideas :heee:

I'd argue. except it could be considered proof of your point. Shame that there is just to much truth in it for my comfort.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

http://www.dynamicdioramas.org/MODEL%20SOURCE/Against%20the%20Wall/source/1.html

http://www.dynamicdioramas.org/MODEL%20SOURCE/Tribute%20to%20Rome/source/1.html

http://www.2scale.com/portfolio.html

Get creative with a custom skybox or a giant room and anything is possible.

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Quote from Nietzsche....God is dead
Quote from God....Nietzsche is dead

Mhh, rats... not really my favorite... but nevermind.

I know the subject has already been decided, but I got an idea
recently. It comes down to choosing from a set of layouts, and building
a theme of your own with the given layout. Weapon and trap placement is
up to the mapper, as are visuals.

I've seen something similar on thewall.de. They had a contest where you
had to remake an original HLDM level, but differently themed. Some
interesting results came from that...

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

How about this..

Use the word SNARKPIT as a basis.. What would a SNARKPIT look like? Would it be Alien in nature, or a LAB in some mountain location? Would it be located in space, or deep within the ocean? Would it be a overrun with alien goodness? or would it be clean and prestine? Would it be well lit? Or Dark and forboding? Maybe its a jungle island with ruins.

I think making a map around a simple word like Snarkpit would be the best theme to go with. Would be interresting to see what each person views the term in a map perspective to be.

I like that idea above but my favourite idea so far is nature because it's what I tend to map really...

Indoors is not my bussiness.

Leperous said:
That's right, blame everyone else rather than your own bad ideas :heee:

I'd argue. except it could be considered proof of your point. Shame that there is just to much truth in it for my comfort.

Orph, dont take stuff like this as a personal attack. Lots of people threw out ideas and they were rejected.

I doubt that any one here doesn't agree with your resons for picking
the theme (to open the doors to more mappers) but people just didn't
agree with the rats idea.

whispers to Doc

no one was upset. have you not been here long enough to "see' upset yet?

Lep was joshin, I was concurring with his assessment.

When lep and I lock horns, the website trembles, there'll be no doubt. :wink:

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The best things in life, aren't things.

whispers to Doc
no one was upset. have you not been here long enough to "see' upset yet?

Lep was joshin, I was concurring with his assessment.

When lep and I lock horns, the website trembles, there'll be no doubt. :wink:

oh, another example of how the sence of emotion is lost over the internet.

I just tend to expect the worst when anyone "argues" over the net. :razz:

DrGlass said:
oh, another example of how the sence of emotion is lost over the internet.

Humor is one of the most fleeting of concepts online.

Tis one of the reasons that I initiated the "lightblue" humor text.

over time, it also encompassed "sarcasm" for reasons that are still unclear, but.. most can tell sarcasm from humor so there is few instances of confusion.

Also, humor is in the eye of the beholder. Although Leps comment could have been sarcasm, I chose to view it as humor and all remains well. :smile:

Few of us here hide our emotions behind obscurity. Its usually plain that humor is humor, anger is anger and so forth. :smile:

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Anger is BIG RED TEXT with angry smilies, sarcasm could be blue / green
with winking / rolly eyes smilie, happy = :smile: , sad = :sad: and humour
equals pink / ornage / blue and tongue smilie.

Great now my idea is lost in another bunch of off topic Bull poopy. Way to derail yet another thread jack-asses.

And the contest theme will be colored red. True.

Anyway, when is the contest going to start, and what's the deadline? Or
do we have to have some patience (while gathering inspiration)?

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

<DIV class=quote>
<DIV class=quotetitle>? quoting MoneyShot</DIV>
<DIV class=quotetext>[color=lightblue]Great now my idea is lost in another bunch of off topic Bull poopy. Way to derail yet another thread jack-asses[/color].

</DIV></DIV>

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The best things in life, aren't things.

I'm just wondering what everyone's major distaste to using props is? I guess it's the fact that it's too easy to be seduced by the ability to use the same model again, especially if someone else has already made one.

The thing is, the props give you a lot better performance. I'm not sure if Hammer has this ability, but if a structure is purely detail, convert it into a prop for several reasons. Props run faster because all the geometry for them can be sent at one time since it is uses fewer shaders/textures, making it so the renderer doesn't have to switch as often. It's not how much you send per frame, it's how many times you send per frame.

Also they are much cheaper to store. You only have to store the model/prop once in memory, and then just a transform matrix(4x4 matrix, 32bytes per element), and some other unique identifiers for it that are low memory for each time you use one. Also with them you usually have control of the collision bounds of them as well. That transform matrix gives you a lot of control over the model as well, you can move, scale and rotate as much as you want on any of the three axi'(sp?), allowing you to drastically alter the look of the object. Infact we had a really cool effect where we turned all our models large and flat along the Z axis, making things look like Paper Mario, or putting animated models onto a movie projector.

Yes I know it takes a bit of time to learn out to use a modeling program, but it's really worth it, especially with the tools available for making complex geometry. I think to help you need to promote modellers to come here, or make friends with those over at Polycount and create the ThePolySnarkCountPit!!!!

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"Every time you make something idiot-proof, someone creates a better idiot." -Anonymous

Aelon.net for Gaming News

I like props and such, but I feel they're not very good for beginners.
Heck, most of them probably won't be able to align the props correctly.
But most of all it de-emphasizes brushwork and encourages a lot of
sloppiness on the designer's part; definately not very good for
learning.

Oh, and you can't scale props in Hammer... When you think about it,
Source is rather inflexible and limiting already (compared to other
engines), and it's only been about half a year! :sad:

I think that most people dislike probs becuase they can be used to mask
poor brush work. It used to be a feat to make a simple hallway
look great back in hl1, but now any noob can make a square hallway that
would look like crap, but if that noob adds a bunch of pipe probs it
looks quite good.

This could be seen alot when CS:S first came out, all these crappy maps
came out but the pubilc praised them becuase the public (who is mostly
stupid) saw the stacks of car probs or the barrles and thought that it
was great.

I love props, they look great and can do what brush work cant. I
think that any mapper can see through a prop based map, its like iceing
on a really horrible cake.

DrGlass said:
I think that most people dislike probs becuase they can be used to mask poor brush work. It used to be a feat to make a simple hallway look great back in hl1, but now any noob can make a square hallway that would look like crap, but if that noob adds a bunch of pipe probs it looks quite good.

This could be seen alot when CS:S first came out, all these crappy maps came out but the pubilc praised them becuase the public (who is mostly stupid) saw the stacks of car probs or the barrles and thought that it was great.

I love props, they look great and can do what brush work cant. I think that any mapper can see through a prop based map, its like iceing on a really horrible cake.

I have seen this to be fact in some of the CS maps that were released with the game. de_prodigy is an example. There are misaligned textures all over that map. But to be honest you could make a map that was ugly as sin, and most CS/HLDM players would not care.. they just run though a map and never really look at that texture or the thought of placing that prop just so. As long as the general theme was there they are cool with it. Uhm There is a town thats is like an old west town.. CS players love the map.. even though its quite ugly.

But Back to the theme.. what do you all think of my idea of making a map based on The SnarkPit?

This isn't going to be only for snarkpitters is it? if not then
the idea wouldn't really work, if so... I like it but the other ideas
(and the fact that lep already has one) really kills it, tbh.

Campaignjunkie said:
I like props and such, but I feel they're not very good for beginners. Heck, most of them probably won't be able to align the props correctly. But most of all it de-emphasizes brushwork and encourages a lot of sloppiness on the designer's part; definately not very good for learning.

Exactly, almost anything (within reason) can be fashioned out of brush-work but a pre-built bucket prop is always going to be a bucket.

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You Got To Get Through What You've Got To Go Through To Get What You Want But You Got To Know What You Want To Get Through What You Got To Go Through

You know, I thought that I'd be able to enter this year...

But right now Hammer hates me :/

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Signature? What signature!?

Fjorn said:
But right now Hammer hates me :/

Hammer is extremely stable. If its borking on you, look inside your PC. Either you have some conflicting drivers, or another program is using something it needs to run properly.

Over the years I have heard endless tales of how WC/Hammer has been a pain to run, but in each and every case its been the authors fault, not the editor.

Care to enlighten us on how you are the first person to have a defective Hammer editor program?

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The best things in life, aren't things.

SNAP!

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Ham and Jam Contributor
http://www.hamandjam.org

'Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!'

Ok I think I'm gunna go with something someone said earlier about nature and abstract s**t.

I think a naturistic area with some crazy abstract building in it would be a great idea. Avalon by 3D mike was a cool looking level, we could do loads of stuff like that, I think it would be fun not only to get away from the HL2 theme but also to do something crazy.

So I vote for Nature with crazy abstract architecture. If anyone wants to see some interesting architecture then look at Calatrava, and try and make some of that stuff- really beautiful architecture, and whats more, some of it moves...

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

DrGlass said:
This isn't going to be only for snarkpitters is it? if not then the idea wouldn't really work, if so... I like it but the other ideas (and the fact that lep already has one) really kills it, tbh.

You obviously haven't seen the title of the thread, or been here long- It's always only snarkpit members that participate in this competition, it's how its always been. It also atracts quite a bit of publicity and we get new members around competition times. Its basically finding out whos the best mappers on snarkpit :razz:

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Fjorn said:
But right now Hammer hates me :/

Hammer is extremely stable. If its borking on you, look inside your
PC. Either you have some conflicting drivers, or another program is
using something it needs to run properly.

Over the years I have heard endless tales of how WC/Hammer has been
a pain to run, but in each and every case its been the authors fault,
not the editor.

Care to enlighten us on how you are the first person to have a defective Hammer editor program?

My fault!

But to be fair, it was a pain to fix... if the door's origin isn't in
the same room as you you can't hear the move/stop sounds... threw me
for a loop...

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Signature? What signature!?

True... Hammer is stable, but steam is not... I remember when there was a massive memory leak when running hammer with steam! 30 minutes into mapping my PC would die on me because it ran out of memory... RAN OUT OF 1GIG OF RAM MY ASS!

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

Agent Smith said:
Or
perhaps we have to find a real life location, take a photo and recreate
that. That would probably fit the standard texture/props better as its
all real world stuff.

I'm up for that, I could do the pier down here, and no not the west pier, that's burnt down. ( this is the website: http://www.brightonpier.co.uk/indexflash.htm )

I'm fed up with this "recreation" crap. Its what uncreative people always do because they can't be arsed to think of something... We should do a better map competition like the old times. I liked the contrasting theme one, that had good results!

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-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

I'll announce our next competition next week (probably Tuesday?).

I was browsing through the maps made before I joined the Pit and I
really liked the results of the Contrasting Themes. The snow
level with the lava was awesome (ReNo, was that you?).

However, I think if we're going to go with nature I agree with Myrk
that there should be some sort of abstract element thrown in.
Otherwise its just displacements everywhere (besides I have some cool
ideas brewing for a map along those lines).