Crom's WIP map

[crombrom]

Hi.
Some wip's of my map.
Almost done but no items have been placed yet.

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


Bonus points if you know where these textures are from.

/Crom

[Deleted]

first shot is very nice

Yeah textures are powerful...

hmmmm...Red and white striped texture.....gambling....

OKE.....ALLLLIN....Unreal?..

[WizardExt]

Wow you come far, nice! Some detailed texture work already..


Here is my feedback:

The scale looks a bit off, looking at the first screenshot; stairs are huge. But it's hard to see, due to lack of player reference.

I suggest making the map cleaner. It's very noisy at the moment; a lot of colors, busy textures (trims/stripes/gratings). So make an iteration of cleaning up, removing some noise. Replace some of the gratings with metal/concrete textures and use fewer contrasting colored lights. They are fighting/contrasting each other, adding to the noise.

[Null]

Crombrom,

Great work! I got to say these are some really awesome and unique textures in your map!

But I have to agree with WizardExt, about adding some relief areas from super detailed textures, unless you want players getting seizures or getting paranoid about boogieman/aliens under the stairs or in the floor ducts
You could try trimming some of the grating grid-work from the stairs and platforms, to diffuse visual complexity, while adding more plain concrete or metal here and there. Often times I also find that using subtle pastel hues or lots of grays can create enough relief to balance high contrast colors (even neon with grays), and thus make the composition more soothing to the eye. (Eyes and brain need rest to focus on the game-play)

Currently some players will be overwhelmed being hit with all that detail all at once, and it might thrown them off their game enough for them to not like your map, which would be a shame considering how nice the texture work is. I see lots of potential for an enjoyable death match experience here. The rough areas can easily be remedied and smooth out by a few tweaks in key areas. Using lighting to provide depth, and visual separation in certain places can help to reduce confusion while navigating, by distinctly setting them apart.

Another thing WizardExt mentioned, you might want to adjust the scale somewhat to hit a sweet spot. The stairs do look somewhat massive to me as well, which might be an optical illusion. For example: by widening stairs, walkways and platforms horizontally, you can alleviate player's nauseating claustrophobic feelings so they don't feel trapped. Exposing the sky is another trick. Unlike in SP where you might want to present navigational challenges to get to the next level, in MP you want the players to get around largely unimpeded by giving them plenty of breathing room for action. Believe me... this goes a long way in death match and I can guarantee players will appreciate your map a lot more. After being an admin for many years, one learns that players prefer to have their lateral movement and strafing unrestricted as much as possible, unless of course they're trying to access hard to reach power-ups or playing jump mod.

Overall excellent work crombrom!
I got to say you're quite the texture master :-)

[crombrom]

Thx for the feedback I appretiate that.

The textures are from AvP2 (from 2003 i believe). Ripped Borrowed with permission naturally!

The stairs only look huge because of the fov and angle.
I Agree the map looks noisy but that's the point, it's supposed to be like that. (150 textures used eek!)
It will make sense once you see it and run around, its simpler than it looks.
I'm pretty much done with too much simplicity and symmetry, and the point IS to overwhelm the player a little, to push the limits, to make them see something they haven't seen before.

[jaydolan]

I have to agree with the previous replies: the texturing isn't coherent. Too many textures, and the application of the textures doesn't fit the brushwork. That said, you've got some nice geometry and personally I like your use of colored lighting, tho it's a bit too bright in shot #3. I also like your theme quite a bit. Question, tho: what do the .wal versions of these textures look like?

[crombrom]

These are .wal. Did you mean the other way around?
I guess r1q2 or some exec allows for other files to be used, I've never looked into that.
Most textures were 50% downsized to fit the q2 engine, max size for the engine is something like 256x320 whereas AvP2 used bigger than 512x512.

[jaydolan]

Oh. Wow! Those colors fit the Quake2 palette surprisingly well! They looked so colorful and crisp that I just assumed they were .tga

[spirit]

Very colorful indeed for Quake2, makes it look very futuristic.

I'm also a bit worried about scale. I guess if the stairs are not large, the rest is rather small. As I said in a comment for another map, maybe place some items for the next screenshots so we can tell the size.

[fifthelephant]

Really nice!!

[quake2dday]

WOW Crombrom very nice map you made there Great work.

[Null]

Thank you Crom for submitting your map! It's turned out very nice indeed.
There are some texture naming issues that you should fix, mentioned in the post below.
Here are some screenshots:


















This one is outside the map, but I thought it looked neat

[Null]

Great work BTW!

One thing... After loading your map onto a death match server we've noticed that players weren't able to load it.
Your map works fine if one is to unzip the contents manually, but the texture naming convention seems to prevent anyone on the network from downloading it.
I think texture paths like the following are the culprit:

cromavp2/floorceil2\ceilgrtbase
Warning, incorrectly referenced texture 'cromavp2/floorceil2\ceilgrtbase'

Here are the errors one gets as shown in the following condump:

pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BAwMma2G

There's still 4 days left in the contest, so there's plenty of time to adjust your map + texture paths and recompile it. Source map files are just text files, so you can even use a simple replace feature in notepad to fix all the paths at once. Try to to reduce the number of sub-folders, replace back slash "\" with forward slash "/" and keep all names lowercase. To test locally, to see if you're able to download the map, create a fresh quake 2 directory and connect to your local server running this map.

Simple mass replace could probably fix these issues, ex:: cromavp2/floorceil2\ceilgrtbase -> cromavp2/ceilgrtbase
Note: you'll also need to move these textures to reflect the changes.

[Null]

Crombrom thanks for working with me to resolve the naming issues. Awesome job! You're all clear now


It just goes to show that it's good practice to submit maps a few days ahead in order to catch problems early.
You can also come back and polish other areas now that you've got a chance to play through your map with players, which can be a big advantage.
Since this Contest targets Multiplayer maps specifically, the more you spend analyzing player feedback, and making small adjustments, the better your map will become.
I recommend others to do the same, with the 3 days they have left.

Also now that you're all done, and there's still some time left, you can even consider adding some awesome sci-fi props to spice up your scene, and add to the mood.
And if you do it as an override, there's no need to recompile anything, since it's just a layer over top of your bsp, which is a real time saver.

Check out the following resource, which has plenty of props for all occasions, including jpg previews for easy selection. I know there's even an alien egg there
And if you don't find anything that fits out of the box, there's also model converter there if you want to bring over Alien / AVP props from other formats:

leray.proboards.com/thread/3656/custom-model-packs-models-maps

[draxi]

brommelom