Good to see you so active and answering! How is the improved version going? I am eager to see it.
Two sounds? You're off by a factor of 10.
Haha, no. I said two different sounds (bell and birds' chirping), no two target speakers.
Would be hard to miss so many different sounds.
Regarding the misaligned textures, are you just referring to the rock? I had to scale that up in a few areas to make the map compile (good old MAX_PATCHES error). I guess I could make the scale more uniform so it's consistent. I wanted to have more detail near the playable space, though. I spent many hours aligning textures, so saying there are many misaligned textures makes me wonder if something went horribly wrong somewhere.
yes, its mainly on the side of the rocks. there is one or two in other places, but not that i remember now where. About the quantity, i would say that some more than 10, but 4 or them are already on the entrance to the cave, from the castle's side. Given the amount of faces one map has, 10 or 20 faces aren't a lot, so don't worry, you did well. In 10 or 20 different places would be a very different issue.
As much as I would love to have really organic terrain, it doesn't really work well in vanilla Q2 (you lose control walking down slopes). I had to add walls and fences to keep people from falling off the map where I did have sloped terrain, so I kind of kept that to a minimum.
More than doesn't work well, the problem is because they aren't used, because we aren't accustomed to control the movement in those circumstances, so its harder than what it seems,. It's like the first time you play an ice level in a platformer's videogame: you fall lots of times, but you barely do when you finish it. Its hard to move, but after you finish the level can control the awkwardness and even use it to your advantage. The problem is that its a circle: its a problem to move because we aren't accustomed to that, but we aren't accustomed to that because its a problem to move.
Apart from this, the issue has a solution, make the differences in height small, no more than 16 units per 128-192 units of length and width. The changes will be noticeable, even more in indoors, and the drawbacks will be kept to the minimum. Or make those height changes as mounds, near the walls or corners, where they won't interfere with movement but still can be seen.
yeah, i dropped to death several times due to the slopes, but its something normal, so i haven't commented about that.
Regarding the indoor lighting, I actually did add a lot of light sources to light the indoor areas while trying to keep things looking natural. The only place I didn't was the cave, so maybe that's where you're referring to. I kind of ran out of time there and just decided to leave it (maybe people would find the dark cave interesting to explore/hide in). You shouldn't need to turn, though -- you can just walk straight forward through it -- you can see one end of the cave from the other. I can certainly lighten that up, though. Oh, I guess there's another area leading to the steps within the wall. I should probably remove that little dead end. What are your brightness settings? Seeing your comments on giftdm6, I'm wondering if you're playing with really dark settings, since that map looked plenty bright to me.
I was talking mainly about the stairs near the castle's gate, and the path to the blue cave, the blue cave itself is good enough. On the stairs, i had to rotate myself to see where to go now. The fact that one of those paths (the one for the GL on the top of walls) have an small dead end in the darkness made it harder.
About my settings, when reviewing and making suggestions for the maps in the contest i talk comparatively to Id DM maps, as when taking into account that the disparity in brightness settings Quake 2 community is huge, doing it another way would be pointless. When playing them i tweak the brightness settings for each map, as each one has its own very different intended settings, and without doing this one can't get a decent look or even play the maps well.
Don't remove that dead end, it isn't even a secondary route, and even less people will notice or even use it, so it isn't an issue.
Housing placement is mostly done for technical reasons, blocking line of sight and such to keep r_speeds down and avoid the sky overlapping visible geometry. That's not to say I couldn't do more with them, but it's a little more complicated than copy/paste/move/rotate.
By placing houses to block vis, even with that in mind there is always options. I said it mainly because most houses are in the middle, without touching each other or the walls, so it seemed that there wasn't much planning, hence having more room for improvement. But if that's our decision after planning them, that's good enough and i retract myself from my words.
Sky overlapping visible geometry? Whats this? How it affects brushes so afar from it? First time i hear this, but from those clues all i can think is when the visibility is too high, and the furthest brushes begin to disappear from sight.
Regarding the MH door, I do have angled clip brushes around it to help guide players into it. Once I added those, it didn't really seem like a problem getting in. Maybe I could make them a bit larger:
I mostly agree with what you're saying about areas inside of buildings, but since the MH is a critical item that's often placed in hard-to-reach areas (ex: q2dm1), I felt this was reasonable.
yeah, as its an special items, that issue isn't important there, that's why i said it as a possibility. Well done there with the clipping, should have done the same in some parts in mine, but that's a thing i don't like to do.
More than the door's frames itself, i have more problems with the fences on the sides of the stairs. Making the stairs wider could solve it ... but they are easy to jump over or run on top of them, so it isn't important.
You make several comments about the brushwork being simple. Do you have an example of a map where you think the brushwork is detailed? I didn't have time to make the rocks look as nice as I wanted to, but I do feel like there was quite a bit of brushwork detail in other areas (window frames, ivy, railings, fences, chimneys, arched door frames, rooftops, etc.) I couldn't go TOO crazy, since the map is so open and r_speeds would be a problem, but there's certainly stuff more complex than the stairs.
If you read it again you'll notice than i am talking about the castle and sides of the rocks there. Mainly because theres lot of big on axis faces (mainly the castle, rocks and houses) and that's for sure simple brushwork. It doesn't mean that is bad or that you haven't worked enough on it, as that theme doesn't ask you to make more advanced brushwork or texturing to look decent. For example, if you made a ruined castle, the theme would ask you to make more advanced and detailed brushwork or more detailed texturing. Doing it so would give you less benefits than to others but could add enough.
I usually say in these cases simple but effective brushwork and texturing to reflect that, but seems that i forgot to do that this time. Also, take into account that i try to be as objective as possible on the first paragraph of the reviews to make them blunt data. More info on that on the linked thread that comes with the review-suggestions.
When giving suggestions, i don't usually take into account limitations, except if they are too obvious. First because if i limit myself my ideas will be restrained also, avoiding some ideas that you can find a good way to use that i haven't thought of, second, because i don't have the source nor i do know the map as well as you, third, because suggestions are ideas, possibilities. no one knows if they are going to work till one tries them out.
Thanks for taking the time to write up detailed feedback!
OK, so you are thankful to me ... hehehe. Then you won't mind returning the favor back by writing for me some review, feedback and suggestions for my maps, won't you?
Nah, i am just joking. Some suggestions with an explanation on why those parts should be changed would be more than enough.
I prefer for the second over the first map.
Thinking about it, if every person someone gave feedback to gave it back would make the subforum very lively ... Not that its going to happen, but dreaming is free.
Would be hard to miss so many different sounds.
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