Posts by jackophant

@Tyker I've flagged it as well. Good luck.

@MinorThreat if you can post your overview I'll happily annotate it and write up some feedback

You can't say with any level of certainty what does and doesn't work without getting the map made first, everything is relative. You need to focus on finishing a draft of the map, then we can test it to help you find out. You're worrying about a lot of small details without having the large details present for them to matter.

I would suggest the following in a rough order of importance:

• Add bomb site triggers (first one you place is always A)
• Make sure there are 20 spawns (10 for each team)
• make sure your walls / floors are no thinner than 32units
  
  • unless you plan to make it penetrable
• Don't bother with stairs for now, just make ramps so we can all get everywhere
• At this stage less cover is better
  
  • It's easier to add cover to help than work out which of 1 million crates is hindering gameplay
• select everything and apply nodraw
  
  • then using face edit tool (shift+A) reapply textures
• Fix your light environment (I've taken it upon myself to choose one for you as it's "dawny")
  
  • try these values from de_lake (skybox name = "sky_cs15_daylight02_hdr"):
    
    • Ideal Sun Angle = 0 296 0
    • Ideal Sun Pitch = -30
    • Ideal Brightness = 247 232 202 600
    • Ideal Ambience = 172 196 202 250
      
      • (seriously, just some good lighting makes the map feel 100% better)
• Add signs to the map and bombsites so we know where to go
• Watch tutorial on how to make radar
• Submit to mapcore for 10v10 play test

I also made this introductory tutorial for a competition we hosted a while back. It's since been buried, but might be worth a quick read through to get to grips with some things:

Hope this helps, good luck

Quote from cashed

Im going to go on a limb and say there was confusion between dead space and negative space.

how would you count dead space though? As a lay man, I would say dead space is unnecessary areas of map which don't add to game play.

Negative space would be the black patches on a radar that the lower a number of, the less interconnectivity of said map which could be indicative of a more simple layout.

And coming from an art background, if we were to draw something's negative space, say a person, those areas would be the shape created by having your hand on your hip.

Quote from Tomato

Well I guess it's not that bad. I mean, i clipped most of the basic stuff.Only thing left are spots where you can trhow the bomb over a wall or boost someone over a wall.
But then the player would be out of the map or stuck so There is no point doing it ( I hope)

The playtest is just for the layout though. i hope people will play it that way.

It's safer to just clip everything. It also prevents people getting snagged on doorways or props which can be life/death situation and you don't know how badly it can be abused. Favela in one of the early operations had a horrific boost in T spawn which broke the map and was heavily abused. You could get on top of the map and jump across the rooftops, but also had no draw surfaces so you could give information and basically had WH against CTs

I would guess there's a lot of unclipped stuff to climb?

Quote from DrywallDreams

What about Infinite? That game has such a Si Fi channel-ass story it's ridiculous. The whole beginning is just Ken Levine jerking off about religion, then it tries to say that racism is bad, then proceeds to make that oppressed group the enemy for the second half of the game(???). Elizabeth is such a lazy character: she's a *special girl*, so she has *special powers* but also has the brain of a fucking toddler, the only thing she actually knows is how to throw things at Booker.

Hidden Content

The game is trying to say way too much, it ends up being ham-fisted on all fronts.

With any time travel / alternate universe related plot, there is going to be a lot of "discussion" surrounding how the plot unfolds or even makes sense. I also think that maybe one of the elements you're missing is that good and evil can be about perspective.

But agreed, it does feel like maybe they were a little ambitious with how much they tackled at once compared to the previous iterations.

If I can, I go for the smallest build possible. If you just "build a computer and leave it", why not go Mini-ITX? It's not going to take up as much space, and is portable when you need it to be. The cost isn't that much greater either, maybe £20 extra compared to MicroATX or ATX counterparts.

As for extras, it always depends what chipset you go for. Ofc there will be less available on a Mini-ITX Z110 compared to an ATX Z110, but then how much of it will you take advantage of?

With the newer CPUs, they're so efficient you don't need ridiculous or oversized cooling, and for the really cramped cases, closed loop water cooling can be used to offset the height restrictions in some cases for a radiator elsewhere.

Let me just leave you all with this beauty I'm waiting to be released: DAN A4-SFX

Quote from Dosentti

Okay. Thank you for this. I'll try to solve these problems in next layout/version. The reason why I have places there so much windows and doors is that I have tried to make it realistic. But I guess those aren't practical enough.

Do you agree with R.I.P in the matter that my new layout still seems too complex?

Having windows is fine, but a lot of yours don't even have glass in them. Using an opaque glass texture and some wooden boards on one/both sides is a good way to create something that feels realistic and is partially penetrable to offer interesting wallbangs. But please, make sure both teams have at least one route that doesn't require them to jump to get into each bombsite. It might sound picky but it makes things run a lot smoother. Try not to get caught up being too realistic because maps play well when they're well designed

I don't think the layout as a whole should be binned, you just need to adjust it. I would definitely test it with us in greybox if you do remake a lot of it so you can make changes much faster.

I highly advise you do some reading on multiplayer level design.

I didn't notice the CT ladder up into the A window room until right at the end of the map when I was dead. Not only is it extremely fatal to try and get to having to jump out of a window and cross a T controlled mid, but there's nothing highlighting it's existence as it's almost the same colour as the underlying texture.

CTs have to jump through so many windows and doors and drop downs, it's honestly very unenjoyable. The number of times I died when Ts just appeared on A because they have so much cover only to die trying to get into a doorway or window was unacceptable.

There needs to be balance. If you've got a route that streamlines Ts to a bombsite with barely any chance for CTs to stop them, then the bombsite needs to be hard to enter or attack (think B dust2), but if you give them a more open route (close to your A long) then you can make your bombsite easier to plant in. However, your A route is very hidden to CTs, and if a CT dare peek, they get their head blown off from a lot of angles,including the side of their head from the windows Ts can push.

Less objects to run over would be nice, and try and make the spaces believable. That mid window for CTs is a drop from a super narrow staircase into a room with only a fireplace, window and vent.

@Sprony if you don't do it already, I highly advise using a cloud based solution for normal files.

Dropbox / Google Drive both use a locally cached folder system which can be interacted with just like any other folder in Windows. It would be great for any articles or reviews you are working on and you can always access them from a different computer without fear of losing them.

Google also let you upload unlimited photos to their servers as long as they are under 2MP and if they're over, they'll just compress them for you so it's another good way to save those memories.

@Sprony How old is the laptop? If it's saying no OS and isn't appearing in BIOS it's probably fubar and you might need to talk to a data recovery specialist as I have nfi how to progress from there.

I would definitely recommend sticking it in an external drive a) to make sure it's definitely powering up and b) chance of some level of file recovery. If you can access it externally, you may find the files are locked behind some form of windows security as it's not being accessed from the computer the OS recognises as it's own.

Another possible option if you can detect the drive, is to take a fresh installation of windows (you wont need a key it'll just be a trial version), install it with as little formatting as possible, and then once inside windows run a program called "Recuva" by Piriform (the same guys who make CCleaner, Speccy and Defraggler) and as the OS usually only occupies the "start" of the HDD. I would hope you would be able to scan and pick up a load of files.

These are the steps I would take, but you could also just take it to a repair shop and ask for help.

Thanks for the support guys. So far work have been pretty reasonable about the whole situation. It's not a huge surprise to me as work has become increasingly patchy and they're a small company, it's just massively frustrating given the timing.

But if anyone knows of someone looking for a guy who is capable with web technologies, graphic design and first/second line IT support (preferably around London) it would be greatly appreciated if you could point me their way

xxx

Guess who's about to be made redundant when their house purchase is almost complete and is getting married in a couple of months?

Why is it an archive post? Been taken down already?

Quote

• 'RZL is now permanently in God Mode to balance the teams (in his favor)

You need it after all the rocket league you've been playing

Simply from a performance perspective, it would make more sense and reduce the file size to block off A more effectively. Whether you edit the brushwork to make it look like it never existed, or close it off with doorways is entirely up to you.

I would also leave the map as close to the original as possible; you clearly like the map enough to have decided you want a short version of it, so I highly advise against altering the gameplay of it. Shaving a couple of seconds off initial contact isn't so bad as long as it's equal for both teams and the dynamic of the bomb site remains in tact.

I think the gloves could work, but there are 5(?) sets of different gloves, although a couple are re-skins, so unless they make a skin pack which includes each faction I don't see how that would work.

Looks nice, but I'm getting a "TF2y" vibe from it.

I think you'll definitely find that you need to reduce the number of paths available, but a play test shall tell.