Jump to content

biXen

Members
  • Posts

    108
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Article Comments posted by biXen

  1. Yeah, not only up and running but still very much alive, I follow it on twitter and it always amazes me how it still gets news updates up to this date. Well, it's good seeing you man, I hope you hang around here, mapcore's a badass community.

    Cool, always kept track of the Max Payne mod community success stories too ;)

    I will definitely hang around, seems like a great place, I have a CS:GO map project and are working on some skins. Decided I spend so much time on the game I might as well go back and follow the map making passion for it :)

  2. sorry for the OT, but are you the same biXen from back in the Max Payne mods days? :o

    I am indeed, saw your nick on some of the older posts, didn't know if you still hang around here :) Long time no see!

    In fact PayneReactor.com is still up and running, but I handed it over to the guy that used to write some news for it many years ago :)

  3. good job everyone :)

     

    Random Thought: I notice a trend away from fully playable maps / mods towards small environment art showcase scenes. That is not a critic just an observation! Considering how swamped everyones pile of shame is with endless amounts of amazing trippleA and indie games ... people are not exactly "starved" for content to play. Making something small in scope that shows of massive amounts of skill as fast as possible is definitely the more efficient/worthwhile thing to do at the moment.

    I think it's simply a matter of time. I remember taking a course with a game environment designer from Naughty Dog, and he said like 10 times, make your project small. Smaller than you think, and smaller than you think. 75% of didn't get how small it needed to be and wasn't even near finishing our environments :D 

    It just takes so much time. I mean considering just the time I've spent on the blocks on my map... 

  4. Now to my own suggestions - add a third hostage to a map. The hostages would not have to be far away from each other to allow Ts relatively quick rotation, but would force Ts to seek intelligence. As well as that, CTs would not deplete all their resources on taking the hostage, due to defense being even more split, allowing them to send lurkers to actually defend the way back (Nowadays, I can barely see anyone doing that). Why is the second part of hostage-scenario round so random and uncompetitive? Because no team has enough players left to hold on some actual map control and so, it is just a bunch of survivors trying to win the round with few resources they have left. This needs to be unconditionally changed.

    If you really want to play with the premise, just give the CT's the hostages unchallenged and have two hostage rescue zone further forward. No backtracking, T's still need to defend two sites if they don't know what hostage is taken. 

    Personally I didn't mean just one rescue zone, I was thinking of keeping both in my original premise. But I think a lot of things can work if executed correctly. That said, it's a superfine balance. That's what makes this game mode so hard to design for. I don't know what maps you refer to but something like Agency definitely had a lot of lurking for both teams. I didn't really play too much of the last operations maps so don't know about those. Insertion allowed some AWP lurking from CT, and worked in some sense. 

  5. I was playing with the idea if it was possible to script something so that when you rescued a hostage, you had to defend your location until the helicopter arrived or something like that. My reasoning for that was that if you compare the difficulty and comfort of rescuing a hostage to planting a bomb, you could have a 40 second timer you need to hold the location before escaping. Avoiding that uncomfortable walk with the hostage and being able to take defensive positions instead. Removing T's ability to lurk and making them retake instead. Thoughts? Apologize if someone mentioned it already.

    Either way it's not something for my map I think. I am still pondering having two escape routes, without making it unfair for T's. This is a quiiiiick horrible sketch of my map in it's current layout. Apart from not having the top  rescue location. Blue routes are CT, red are T. X marks meeting locations. H is hostage location, R is rescue location. Green routes are escape routes. 

    idea.thumb.jpg.ab489743ec5a160a8b2aa3865

  6. I think it boils down to what maps are comfortable to play. Insertion was interesting because it is kind of uncomfortable to be a T, there are no super relaxed positions because the CT's can pretty much come from everywhere, so the comfort is more with the CT's imo. The game's most played map is dust2, and I don't think it's because of nostalgia. CT's can hold comfortable positions, but at the same time there's enough map space to work with to employ simple and advanced tactics as a T. 

    I don't think any hostage rescue map has replicated this. CT's usually have to get to the hostages, which is pretty much like retaking a bomb site from a CT standpoint, and then they have to get to a secondary objective and watch out for lurkers. My thought to balance out this comfort is to try to make the T's a bit more in a time trap in the secondary objective. So they aren't able to run to one hostage zone and camp, but need to gather intel and perhaps gamble a bit. 

    We'll see if it works. But I think a very underrated reason to what is popular is the fact that there's comfortable things to do in a map. And it's such a fine balance, I think A on Nuke is a bit too comfortable for the CT's for instance.

  7. Very nice article, I wish you had written this 6 months ago, as so much of my mapping time have been trying to figure out the layout as I just can't make my setup work without it being hostages and not bombs :) But I hope I've learned something from it anyway.

    I guess playtesting will reveal if it works eventually, but I have one tight and "oldschool" hostage location, and one which is more off to the side of the map. Both locations have timed T's and CT's to see eachother at "good" locations, but in the tight one the hostage is between them, while in the other one the hostage is off to their side. I fear people will heavily prefer one of them, but my hope was that one site would favour full buy and AWP/AK/M4 and the other one favour SMG so it creates internal tactical reasoning within the teams. And I can see some nice flash and nade uses, but I think I may need to tighten the layout a bit still. Easy to just make locations too big for CS, from an architectural standpoint.

    We'll see how that works, but it's an interesting topic, because I like the concept of hostage rescue. But I've spent a lot of time wringing my head around making it work as well, always nice to get some input. 

×
×
  • Create New...