What's the coolest feature you can have in a map?

[quakeulf]

I'm looking for something spectacular to use for my next map(s), but I don't know exactly what to look for.

I think animated textures and objects, enemies that behave a little differently and large secret areas are neat, but I wonder how far it can go.

Also the circular tunnel doors in the game consisting of many tiny pizza slices of a door "rotating" open is cool, but I don't know how to do that. (Help, please?)

What do you think?

[spirit]

A strong & fresh theme. Let players explore a place that means something and is special -- something more than "some military complex with lots of dark & random rooms and corridors".

[Panzer]

If you are really interested in figuring out how to do this, download any of the Neal&Bob maps if you can find them. Jester and I used a lot of brushes that moved on func_train setups to show players where to go and draw attention to certain locations. This could easily be used to set up your doors, but keep in mind that the map_light will make those door pieces dark if they are in the open position (retracted into the walls) when the lighting is done in the compiler and you will also have to account for where those door pieces go (make very thick floors/ceilings for recesses). Good luck...it won't matter how long you work with Q2, you will always run across something that makes you ask "how do I make this work?"

[knightmare]

Do you mean the 4-part octagonal doors in the Reckoning's moon base maps? Those are made of 4 func_door_rotatings with an origin brush at each hinge point. A trigger_multiple that targets the rotating door pieces surrounds both sides of the door, instead of the auto-spawned trigger field that a normal func_door would have. A door with more pieces just requires more func_door_rotatings.

Just be careful with how many brush models (both func_* entities and trigger brushes) you make in a map, as regular Q2 has a hard limit of 255 on the number of models (both bmodel and alias) that can be indexed at once. KMQuake2 dramatically raises this limit among others, and is your best bet for supporting large, complex SP maps.

You should also look at using the Lazarus mod's support for rotating func_trains, along with player ridable track trains and other entities that "movewith" the train itself. You can make vehicles such as helicopters and trucks using this feature. KMQuake2 (which includes Lazarus) makes this even easier by adding support for rotating trains that follow path_corners by their origin brush, instead of 1 unit below the minimum coordinate on each axis like regular func_trains do.

[quakeulf]

I know the limitations of the engine, but I was also interested in seeing what you all were thinking about this. I ended up doing a bit different things for my maps so far, but I might take this further.