Posts by FMPONE

  • Site Changes and Feedback

    Quote from blackdog

    Dunno if there's any word from the team who maintain this forum system but... I have some problems in tagging people in a post. Dunno if it's my connection that is slow or something. I just had to tag a person here and copy-paste in another post to get it to work (dunno why even after reloading the page in the other topic I couldn't tag Sentura - while Sprony came up after I had tagged him in my first draft of this post here)

    I've dealt with this as well.

    Thrik

    @Sprony

  • My first attempt at street photography

    I really like the photos! You have a real eye for colors especially and I think that helps all of the pictures a lot. As for the morals of them, I guess what Chris is saying is that you don't want people to feel exploited by what you're doing artistically. IMO, I would just tell the person you like their shirt and want a photograph, or something beforehand. very easy

    Asking permission will make it staged a little bit, but in reality limitations are what makes great art

  • The Witness

    Quote from blackdog

    but the amount of puzzles that I've read are in to complete the game seems unnecessary in a game like this.

    It should have been like Portal or Portal 2, where the puzzles are edited down to the very best ones, and each is a coherent part of a narrative arc. Instead this game decided to go the Myst route, because when I think of a fun game, I think of Myst (...not)

  • What I'm Working On

    Quote from RivFader

    Speaking of the underground double path to B, though: you removed the hole to throw grenades into pretty fast and it stayed that way. How do you think the functionality of this double udnerground pathway developed as you improved the map?

    I wouldn't have minded keeping those little holes because they were pretty neat, but simple things like that destroy FPS because it's a portal into mid. Gameplay wise they would have been a cool gimmick because the worst thing that can happen is a nade goes up or down through them or if players are really feeling brave, somehow toss the bomb up/through them. It's the kind of feature you have to literally build your map around, though, and in the end they didn't present anywhere near enough value for the insane FPS cost/hassle of implementing to be worthwhile.

  • What I'm Working On

    Quote from will2k

    @FMPONE that's a MAJOR layout change especially around A, B and CT spawn. I liked the connectors in the previous versions (even before the first layout shown here - circa october 2015) but I guess all the "confused" players nagging about the layout took its toll at the end :D

    Best of luck with the new version, great map.

    PS: for the dates on the screenshots, don't you mean Jan 2016 and Nov 2015 instead of Jan 2015 and Nov 2014?

    Thank you!

    As for that feedback, I don't really care so much about what people say, as much as what people do -- ingame when I play with them or in demos that I watch. I will say that if people give specific feedback that always helps, and what I hear in-game matters a lot. Watching people play demos of Santorini, it was obvious the map had to be made easier to navigate for players and the map has certainly come a long way in that regard.


    I don't have that radar anymore, it was an early cut

    I agree, the most egregious construction area has been removed (rightly). Now that the map is literally out of construction, it'll be tapered back as a thematic element.

  • What I'm Working On

    Today I will release probably the final major update to Santorini. As the map has come quite a long way since release, I decided to put together a comparison of what Santorini's layout used to look like vs. what it currently looks like:

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/sezgrs0.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://i.imgur.com/7RUYhFS.jpg]

    You may ask, why all the cuts? The answer to that is really simple: what players were able to absorb in greybox testing and what players were able to absorb after final art, ended up being two totally different things.

    Back in November 2013, greyboxing testing began on Santorini. We developed a fun and dynamic greybox that seemed pretty ironclad. We were half-right.

    In a way, Santorini has truly humbled me as to the importance of greyboxing. Yes, obviously this is a critical stage in map development. Because Santorini was extensively playtested in greybox stage, we had a map with fundamentally good flow. However, because we overshot the complexity of our greybox (by quite a bit), it was later necessary to recreate our flow and what made the level fun and functional, on an almost totally different scale. In many ways this felt like making a second level, with all of the art and design challenges of a second level piled on top of an old one. Thankfully, I think we've got something with really solid negative space (most well-known Counter-Strike maps have large areas of negative space and limited numbers of negative space territory -- Santorini clocks in at about 12 areas of negative space, Cache has 10, Mirage has about 16, Dust2 has 5 [might this help to explain some of the map's enormous popularity...??] etc.).

    One of the really cool things about this process has been preserving the areas that work best artistically and gameplay wise, but having the freedom to ask "should we cut this?" I think all of the possible cuts have been made, and the map now has a pretty sensible competitive layout that will be (and this is important) easy for players to learn and navigate, with the flow and timings that made the map fun in the first place. I'd say I'm pretty proud of the improvements to this map, and the lessons from this process will stick with me for a long time.