Quote from ChA1NsAwAge of Empires IV (AoE2 gameplay)
So much this. I'd like them to re-cover the eight ages done in AoE and AoE II. Later eras just don't suit the gameplay IMO.
I'd also like Quake 1.5 (i.e. shamblers, knights, lightning-gun-discharge etc.) and Ecstatica III.
Edit: Oh and Day of the Tentacle II and Dark Forces III (going back to a good mix of guns and sabers, as opposed to the sword-fest of the ID-Tech 3 ones).
I love the contrast it adds, and I think it looks structurally sound thanks to the pillars.
This is a thing for producing heatmaps from demos, FYI. Dunno if it's the only one.
Thanks Austin. 
Thanks for the feedback ics! Lighting is definitely an area I need to improve. At the moment it's lit by the sun and then a bunch of instanced light sources, so I'll hone them for a little while longer and then collapse the instances and tweak the settings to provide some much needed variety. Good call on navigation as well, I'll take another look at signage and other visual cues.
Ayup! Would somebody mind loading this map up right quick and let me know if the custom assets load up for them? I've just had a comment on the workshop page to say they've got errors, but the current version's been up for nearly two weeks without any similar complaints!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/fi…s/?id=314256055
Cheers.
NVM, fixed it!
Seems I missed a step in packing last time I updated. It's obviously all my fault, but I'm super frustrated that people started down-voting it without leaving any feedback as to why!
Love it! I don't know if it's just my fond memories of System Shock 2, but there's just something about low-poly sci-fi that just can't be beat!
Here's a concept to fulfill the no-combat/exploration/space brief:
Setting: Ark-like spaceship carrying remnants of human-kind through space after collapse of Earth. The ark is operated by a computer AI whilst the humans hibernate in pods until such a time that the ark discovers a habitable planet.
Story: One of the hibernating humans (the player) is suddenly ejected from their hibernation pod during some sort of meteor shower causing damage to the ship. Only vital life support systems remain intact, so the player then has to traverse the ship, collecting equipment and resources to carry out repairs. During his explorations he comes across signs of previous strange events, such as other empty hibernation pods, strange writing on the walls etc. Eventually it emerges that the ark has been drifting in space for thousands of years, and at one point a group of humans woke up and went insane. Their ghosts still wander the hallways, but are they friendly or malevolent? And why does it feel like those humans still in hibernation are watching you? That's as far as I've got storywise with this one.
Gameplay: Revolves mostly around exploration and puzzle solving, maybe with some platforming elements or something.
Good points. Starting with something everybody knows is a good way to test the viability of the team. I'd like to throw the following two concepts in to the hat:
HL2 Episode
Set around the time of the main HL2 campaign, so the combine still have their breeding lockdown thing in place etc.
Somebody (the player) fleeing City 17 comes across a remote mining town populated by a group of civilians with lots of makeshift fortifications, built around a small stretch of river which they drink from. Shockingly, the community has a "ward" with around 20 pregnant women, all just a few weeks away from giving birth. Nobody knows how they got pregnant, but in the interests of humanity they must be kept hidden from the combine. Queue one or two missions clearing nearby areas of combine scout parties, one of which takes place at a nearby combine-held water-treatment complex that seems to feed some weird chemicals in to the river and must be destroyed. Just as the women go in to simultaneous labor the combine launch a large-scale attack on the town and you have to defend for long enough for the women to be helped on to a reinforced coach/people carrier and flee the town through a backroute. You jump on the back of the coach and have some fun "on-rails" shooting until you think you've got to safety. Then you hear a nurse on-board the coach screamin in terror, and levitating half-combine babies with telekinetic powers emerge from the windows! Queue boss-battle against weird floating baby things.
L4D2 Campaign: THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
The survivors come across a looping broadcast in a safe room, encouraging them to seek salvation with "The Order of the Space Druids", a cult group who believe that the zombie apocalypse is a sign that humanities alien ancestors will return to Earth after a millennia of absence. Figuring it sounds a bit wacky but they may as well join up with other survirors, the players follow further broadcasts and billboards with a distinctly Druidic theme to the cults' remote farm, where they've built a stone-henge structure to broadcast to the aliens. Sadly all of the cult members have since become DRUID ZOMBIES(!!!)(with black cowls so they're difficult to spot) so it's up to the survivors to put the cults' prophecy to the test. They fight their way through some crop circles to get to the henge on top of a hill where they trigger the final battle. Eventually a UFO(!!!!!!!!) appears overhead to beam them up to safety.
A mod about the crazy stuff the MapCore Moderation team do in the trees together at night would be very intriguing.
Long-distance working relationships can be really difficult, so I figure anybody who signs up needs to be aware not to be too "precious" about their own work -- i.e. if they disappear off the radar for a few weeks with no explanation they shouldn't be offended or surprised if somebody takes their most recent contribution and continues work on it without them. If everyone agrees to update a Google Docs spreadsheet with their latest progress at least once a fortnight then whoever's leading the team can keep a watch out for AWOL members and give them a friendly nudge to check they're still alive/motivated, and will also be able to see where the project needs more or less work put in to it etc.
Great idea, there's so much talent on MapCore that could produce something brilliant if they collaborated. I guess the trick is finding something that enough people want to work on.
I get why Tomm doesn't want to see an FPS mod (there are so many!) but I sort of think that seems to be where most peoples' experience lays around here, and also the genre with the most mod-friendly games. Of course, these days it's probably almost as viable to create a new standalone game using a free/affordable engine like Unity.
Personally I'd love to see a mash-up of Left4Dead and Quake 1 single-player. Something with bat-shit-crazy/scary monsters, fun weapons and very little narrative so as not to limit the level designers too much.
Can't play it atm, but looking at the screenshots I'd say that's a mighty strange choice of texture for the ground outside! I'd expect some sort of concrete or tarmac rather than rough rocky terrain in the middle of a city.
There were some 3-site maps made for CS beta (and possibly 1.6) IIRC? I guess they were axed because they weren't very popular, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried again.
The distrust of change is a major problem for the CS community and regularly holds the game back, so personally I don't think it's a valid reason not to try new things otherwise the game would never progress. There's also this weird notion that there's only a very specific set of rules and scenarios that can possibly be considered "balanced" (i.e. the closer you are to Dust 2 the better). Obviously the more elements you have the harder it is to balance them, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.
Long story short, I say go for it!
The fact that the guy who made that Imgur page can't even adequately describe what's wrong most of the time himself suggests it's too much to expect a non-native speaker to get it right to begin with.
Awesome, thanks for the trivia!
I guess if you can identify something specific with screenshots and show that they correlate to changes you made back in the day that would be a start. Having 'a feeling' probably isn't enough, as I guess when you work on any map you spend so much time in it that you develop all sorts of weird emotional and memory connections that will be triggered by anything slightly similar.
I wouldn't be that surprised if Valve had just taken the most recent iteration of each map and paired them back down to gray-boxes before dressing them up in their fancy new clothes, but I guess that would eliminate any of the visual work you'd undertaken.
I remember a couple of really cool maps from CZ that I'd like to find updated versions of. Do you happen to remember the names of the map where you walk through a crashed plane in a jungle, and the one with two giant round gas containers (again in a jungle I think)? Edit: Just answered my own question with some extensive googling. I was thinking of cs_downed and de_airstrip.
Quote from SquadLooks great as usual! Is this de_grace or yet another map you're working on?
Love the background mountain especially. Is it in the 2D skybox or a transparant texture/model in the 3D skybox?
I assume it's Season, as I think the sci-fi greenhouse is supposed to be somewhere in Asia.
Quote from tommYou allocate fucks to family
Why not split the challenge in to two stages? Entrants have a month to produce a whitebox including one "dressed up" area to illustrate the visual theme they intend to use. Then the judges (hopefully including some really good competitive players) pick the top four or five maps, giving a smallish prize to each mapper, and those five mappers then spend the next 3-4 months working on visuals and tightening up layout/gameplay based on feedback from the whitebox portion of the competition? Then there's a final stage of judging and the best map of the five is the ultimate champion of the universe.
Will there be any question of ownership of the finished product? I'd like to think the mapper would retain complete ownership as with any workshop item and be free to develop the map as they see fit, but of course if this is a big organisation running the competition they may have other ideas.
