dm_plastic_beta2a

###

Preface:

I'm probably 75% done at this point. There's not too much left aside from tweaking the weapons placements, dialing in the lights, and putting in all the light props, detail props, decals, overlays... etc. The eye candy and dress up stuff.

Once that's all finished I'll do the Optimization overhaul. Which is a very tedious and boring task. So map Optimization is the LAST thing I'll do. So you'll see FPS down in the 20's in some of the large open places on the map.

With that in mind...

Remember kids, this isn't in any way a tuned final version, it's just a playable beta so I can get some feedback and comments for changes and improvement.

###

The big new features...

The trapdoors have been rigged so that when the trapdoor operator captures someone they get credit for the trapdoor kill. This was no easy task to make work, but it seems to work well, and it's quite fun to toggle between trying to get people in the maze with the trapdoors, and defend assaults on the trapdoor control room.

A sniper tower has been placed in the glass maze. It has a floor made up of two large breakable crates. There are windows in the sides of the sniper tower that allow the crates to be shot out from under the sniper. This drops them down a shaft to watery death.

I was able to salvage one variable gravity room while keeping the 'in:' rate on the server under 300. It's filled with cars and trucks, all weightless and slow moving, all with a mass that will kill you if you get stuck between them and something else. Using the ggun to hop around the room weightless while fighting is a blast. It still may prove to lag the map too much, so the jury is still out on if it will make the final cut.

###

Map: dm_plastic_beta2a
Map Type: deathmatch
Rel: In a few months
Author: Mike Jones - [EM] Moike_the_Squid
Email: moike@squick.net
Spawns: Several
Size: About 7.5 megs

###

• Screenshots:

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta2a

• Download

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta2a/dm_plastic_bet2a.zip

• EFNet #Motorcycles Server with the map in rotation

66.127.103.165 / moto-games.squick.net

Since this map is in the very early stages, Feedback is Greatly Appreciated...

###

Features:

• Four player controllable trapdoors. Three of which cause death, scoring the trapdoor operator a frag for the trapping of the opponent.
• One large variable gravity room. Effects objects and players, and prone to violent chain reactions.
• Rotating center column containing a ladder that leads up to the trapdoor control room. Sits on a triggered moving platform, confusing -and- fustrating.
• A sniper tower in the glass wall maze that has a floor that can be shot out from below. Dropping the sniper into watery death.
• Hanging heavy bag room that will kill any opponent in it with the loft of one grenade or combine ball
• Spinning puke tunnel that can kill you.
• End to end under map trolley system.
• Some hidden areas
• Glass wall maze

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

You didn't say what the map was...

---

-[Better to be Honest than Kind]-

This isn't close to playable ... I'm not sure how you can even call it a beta (Beta requires that the whatever is actually complete and is just being tweaked in minor ways to become even better)...

The resources needed to run this are rediculously high.

The most demanding point is that "gravity room", almost 6 or 7 resources max out there. (That's bad, by the way)

Throughout the map there are other things that max out periodically. In particular, sound, is one of them. Perhaps cut down the amount of sounds your map uses or combine them into a single file ... or ... something, because it actually causes poor performance.

Dynamic Lighting and vis seem okay (I only checked the budget, so, I'm not entirly sure)

Other then that, the actual idea of the map is cool. But some of the things you did are just too disorienting it becomes unplayable, even if it were running smoothly. I think the best example is the offcenter rotating floor room, with the ladder shaft in the middle. That is crazy to walk though, not to mention kill people in. And being that it appears to be the center connectivity point of the map ... it's in very poor design.

The actual access to everything may seem good, but it really isn't. There needs to be many more ways to access several areas from other areas besides two passages. (That just seemed how it was set up for the most part)

There are too many particle effects. So explosions don't show up. There are way too many dead ends. The entire gravity room is a deadend, I don't know if that glass is one way or not ... or if you can shoot through it or whatever, but it would greatly improve connectivity if all the dead ends became new paths some how.

An example would be in the stair well, where there's a clear ceiling and people can walk on the other side. If that ceiling was "destroyable" making it a new path up to that top level, there'd be added connectivity.

It just seems like a lot of attention needs to be taken to the actual layout of the map and less attention to the "gimmicks" it provides. Because, the map wont be much fun once the little things you worked hard to do become tiresome. At some point, people will want to actually frag instead of just trapping people.

Good start ... just work on it more.

[edit]
Sorry, some other things I noticed were poor texture choices at times (seem out of place ... misaligned, would look better at a smaller/higher resolution, etc.)

Are you not building your cube maps? Or maybe you don't have cubemaps acting on all surfaces that need it? Because several times I walked through, only in certain areas (like the underground rocky area with water), I noticed a refection of a checkerboard pattern. Meaning the cubemaps weren't built. The water, however, looked fine.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Crono said:
This isn't close to playable ... I'm not sure how you can even call it a beta (Beta requires that the whatever is actually complete and is just being tweaked in minor ways to become even better)...

The resources needed to run this are rediculously high.

The most demanding point is that "gravity room", almost 6 or 7 resources max out there. (That's bad, by the way)

Yeah, it's going away... I'll have to think of something else to put in there. Testing on the server showed that with more than a few players the crap flying around in the grav room just ate up bandwidth. So it's out.

Crono said:
Throughout the map there are other things that max out periodically. In particular, sound, is one of them. Perhaps cut down the amount of sounds your map uses or combine them into a single file ... or ... something, because it actually causes poor performance.

Weird, there are only about eight actual ambient_generic entities in the map. Three for the trolley, and five on a logic_timer for the overall map sound. dm_playground had an assload more sounds and it ran fine.

Ahwell, I'll poke it with a stick and see what happens.

Crono said:
Dynamic Lighting and vis seem okay (I only checked the budget, so, I'm not entirly sure)

There's only one dynamic light in the whole map aside from the environment light. I was careful with those.

Crono said:
Other then that, the actual idea of the map is cool. But some of the things you did are just too disorienting it becomes unplayable, even if it were running smoothly. I think the best example is the offcenter rotating floor room, with the ladder shaft in the middle. That is crazy to walk though, not to mention kill people in. And being that it appears to be the center connectivity point of the map ... it's in very poor design.

That's actually what I was going for. All four exits from there are identical once you're in the room. It's designed to be confusing. Nice to know it works.

Crono said:
There are too many particle effects. So explosions don't show up.

AHA! So that's why that's going on... Ahwell, the particle effects are going away when the grav-room goes away. That'l fix that.

Crono said:
There are way too many dead ends. The entire gravity room is a deadend, I don't know if that glass is one way or not ... or if you can shoot through it or whatever, but it would greatly improve connectivity if all the dead ends became new paths some how.

Those are sliding doors... Click on them with the use button, they pop right open. I can see I'll have to put a keypad model on the doors to make it obvious. No problem... I wondered if people would figure out they were doors, and that answers my question. There should be no dead ends at all in the map, and like you stated earlier, I made sure there were at least two ways to get to any point in the map.

Crono said:
An example would be in the stair well, where there's a clear ceiling and people can walk on the other side. If that ceiling was "destroyable" making it a new path up to that top level, there'd be added connectivity.

I thought about that, and tried it in a couple test versions... but I didn't like the idea... It'l stay a glass ceiling.

Crono said:
Sorry, some other things I noticed were poor texture choices at times (seem out of place ... misaligned, would look better at a smaller/higher resolution, etc.)

Textures are not my big concern right now... I'll do textures later. Playability, layout, and mechanics come first.

Crono said:
Are you not building your cube maps? Or maybe you don't have cubemaps acting on all surfaces that need it? Because several times I walked through, only in certain areas (like the underground rocky area with water), I noticed a refection of a checkerboard pattern. Meaning the cubemaps weren't built. The water, however, looked fine.

Honestly, I may have forgot... I've got a bad habit of doing that. And I should mention this wasn't a full normal/normal compile, it was a fast/fast compile.

Thanks for the feedback... I appreciate it.

-Mike-

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

Well, actually, I was thinking you should optimize more. For the gravity room a very easy way is to use a func_occluder. It blocks entities, if you didn't know. Apparently, it has a run time cost, however, in the cases of complex models (such as 18billion car models as you have) the time it takes to calculate whether you can see the entities or not is faster then just drawing the models (which is what is happening now.

You may also benefit from a few nicely placed hint brushes ... (maybe)

Look at this guide, it's pretty useful:

http://www.student.kun.nl/rvanhoorn/Optimization.htm

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I made a quick run through myself and heres my input:

The map has lots of cool features that makes it unique, and I think
thats very important, although it seemes like you have had so may great
ideas and just stuffed them all into the map.

Many of the ideas are great, but i think that you have put too many ideas in the same map instead of just using the best ones.

It feels almost like every time i get into a new room, im entering a new level with a new theme.

Remove some of the less good ideas and just stick with the best ones.

It seemes like you have taken inspiration from amusement parks in some areas.

I dont know if its just me, but i really dont like those areas.



I just love the gravity room, but as crono said, theres just too many
cars in there. Remove some of them and make the rest move a bit faster
aswell as removing the particles flying around after them, I dont
understand why you added them in the first place..

Im also a bit conserned over the playability of the map.

When running around, I almost focused entierly on getting past all the contraptions, just to get to the other side of the room.

If there had been any enemies there aswell, i would have serius
problems with avoiding the contraptions aswell as killing the enemies
at the same time.

I would have removed some of the more demanding contraptions, or made them a bit simpler to get past.

I think its great that you have focused on adding sounds to the map,
but i agree with crono on this one, you have put too many sounds in
there at once.

Remove or lessen the volume of some.

When I add sounds to my levels, i try to make them as discreet as
possible so that the players barely hear them, but at the same time
they do affect the feeling of the map.

Sound is a very powerful and underestimated tool, jut make sure that you dont over use it.

The overall detail level is good, but somewhat uneven. In some areas it
is very satisfying, while in some almost zero, but i think you are
aware of this.

Just make sure that you make a thorough check everywhere.

I will not comment the performance of the map since you said that you
where working on that part, and since my computer is pretty powerful i
didnt had any real problems with it. Although, looking on my fps meter
i saw that some areas created conserning FPSdrops.

As crono said, good start, but there are lots of stuff that can be improved.

Chrono:

I tried using some func_occluder brushes early on when I had two grav rooms in the map. While it helped if you were running the map solo, once the map was on the server all the objects flying around still ate up a ton of bandwidth as the server tried to spit the location data out to all the connected clients.

I yanked the grav room last night, did some tweaking, and overall FPS and 'in:' rates improved by about 30%

I'll think of something else to do with the grav room that's far less costly.

Hint/Skip brushes will go in later... There is no optimization at all in the map aside from dicing things up with area portals. And that's just something I do out of habit every time I add a new hallway or room.

MisterBister

I figured the gimmicky carnival funhouse theme of the map wouldn't be everybody's cup of tea. And that's cool... Some people that have played it have really been into it, others have logged off the server after two minutes.

The particle effects in the gravity room on the objects were added simply because I'd never used them before... It was more me setting up the gravity and seeing a toggle for particles... I thought it was kind of neat. But as Crono pointed out to me, way too costly to use in that fashion.

Thanks for the feedback.

-Mike-

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

Chrono/MisterBister:

I've gone through and done some quick and dirty rework based on your feedback, and some feedback I got during play testing. Numbers look good even with the very basic first past of optimization I did.

See if this is a bit more to your liking. Chrono, the keypads on the doors are just for you.

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta2a/dm_plastic_beta_2o.zip

Thanks for the feedback.

-Mike-

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

###

Map: dm_plastic_beta2a
Map Type: deathmatch
Rel: In a few months
Author: Mike Jones - [EM] Moike_the_Squid
Email: moike@squick.net
Spawns: Several
Size: About 8.8 megs

###

• Screenshots:

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta3a

• Download

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta3a/dm_plastic_bet3a.zip

• EFNet #Motorcycles Server with the map in rotation

66.127.103.165 / moto-games.squick.net

Since this map is in the beta stages, Feedback is Greatly Appreciated...

###

Ok... 26 'beta 2' revisions later we have a new release of dm_plastic to play with.

I've got some mild playtesting on my server and a couple other servers that get good traffic... and the response so far has been decent. People either love it, or want to gouge out their eyes. The latter seem always to demand a killbox be loaded up instead.

Big changes...

• People complained that there were too many tight corridors and not enough open areas for mele play. So I put a glass ceiling on the maze and created several different access points. This makes for a nice open killing floor.

• I raised the height of the sniper tower to something useful. I also removed the clips and lowered the wall height so it's now possible to easily jump from the tower down to the killing floor. I added some spotlights that shine on the crates visible in the windows in the sniper tower to make it a bit more obvious that you can shoot the floor out from under the sniper and drop them to watery death. Testing in server gameplay proves sickeningly satisfying.

• I added a help message on a trigger for the trapdoor control room to give a quick overview of how the buttons work and how the award is given. (see screenshot) I also increased the award to 5 points per trapdoor kill from one. This gives quite a bit more incentive to camp out in the trapdoor control room and rack up a fat score. Now that people understand what the buttons do, they seem to enjoy using them quite a bit more.

• The grav rooms are gone... which is sad, but the map runs much faster now.

• There is added connectivity in places. I've added rooms/tunnels/ladders in spots where you had to take long roundabout ways before to get from one area to another.

• Improved player movement/clips. I moved things around, or simply took things out to improve the flow in tight areas of the map. The big improvement being in the heavy bag room in the bottom of the map. It's much easier to get through there now.

• Timing has been changed on the rotating center column and spinning floor. I've slowed the column rotation speed and shortened the run time of the floor to 5 seconds to help with the fustration level some people were feeling trying to circumnavigate that room.

• Sounds have been stripped down quite a bit.

Things still to do:

• Textures still need to be gone through top to bottom.

• A great deal more Optimization is yet to be done.

• Final placement of lighting props, sprites, lighting adjustment.

• Eye candy details like ropes, sparks, decals, static props, negative space, smoothing and stitching of displacements... etc...

Thanks,

-Mike-

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

###

Map: dm_plastic_beta3a
Map Type: deathmatch
Rel: In a few months
Author: Mike Jones - [EM] Moike_the_Squid
Email: moike@squick.net
Spawns: Several
Size: About 8.8 megs

###

• Screenshots:

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta3a

• Download

http://moike.net/dm_plastic_beta3a/dm_plastic_bet3a.zip

• EFNet #Motorcycles Server with the map in rotation

66.127.103.165 / moto-games.squick.net

Since this map is in the beta stages, Feedback is Greatly Appreciated...

###

Ok... 26 'beta 2' revisions later we have a new release of dm_plastic to play with.

I've got some mild playtesting on my server and a couple other servers that get good traffic... and the response so far has been decent. People either love it, or want to gouge out their eyes. The latter seem always to demand a killbox be loaded up instead.

Big changes...

• People complained that there were too many tight corridors and not enough open areas for mele play. So I put a glass ceiling on the maze and created several different access points. This makes for a nice open killing floor.

• I raised the height of the sniper tower to something useful. I also removed the clips and lowered the wall height so it's now possible to easily jump from the tower down to the killing floor. I added some spotlights that shine on the crates visible in the windows in the sniper tower to make it a bit more obvious that you can shoot the floor out from under the sniper and drop them to watery death. Testing in server gameplay proves sickeningly satisfying.

• I added a help message on a trigger for the trapdoor control room to give a quick overview of how the buttons work and how the award is given. (see screenshot) I also increased the award to 5 points per trapdoor kill from one. This gives quite a bit more incentive to camp out in the trapdoor control room and rack up a fat score. Now that people understand what the buttons do, they seem to enjoy using them quite a bit more.

• The grav rooms are gone... which is sad, but the map runs much faster now.

• There is added connectivity in places. I've added rooms/tunnels/ladders in spots where you had to take long roundabout ways before to get from one area to another.

• Improved player movement/clips. I moved things around, or simply took things out to improve the flow in tight areas of the map. The big improvement being in the heavy bag room in the bottom of the map. It's much easier to get through there now.

• Timing has been changed on the rotating center column and spinning floor. I've slowed the column rotation speed and shortened the run time of the floor to 5 seconds to help with the fustration level some people were feeling trying to circumnavigate that room.

• Sounds have been stripped down quite a bit.

Things still to do:

• Textures still need to be gone through top to bottom.

• A great deal more Optimization is yet to be done.

• Final placement of lighting props, sprites, lighting adjustment.

• Eye candy details like ropes, sparks, decals, static props, negative space, smoothing and stitching of displacements... etc...

Thanks,

-Mike-

---

-Mike- is: Biker ~ Slacker ~ Iconoclast ~ Eclectic Thinker
MoikeNET ~ www.moike.net - Bad Cat Racing ~ www.badcatracing.com

Wow, that was a nice list och changes.

Too bad that the gravity room is gone though, one of my personal favorites..

I guess ill gametest it when I have the time.

If you need high optimization - talk to me :smile: I'm addicted to it

---

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