Organization matters

[underTaker]

Ok. Since nobody has written anything about it, here are two matters that i would like to talk about:

How do we work about it - everybody does his own part separately to finally join it with everything else, or in queue style?

And the second one - what is our member count and wall count?

As i understand the style of the map is beach theme joined with small city or some kind of town. Do we want to use polymer with TROR or not? And will the map will be only 1-map or splitted into two maps?

[Micky C]

We did talk about it a bit in the public thread but it was really spread out, so it's a good idea to lay it out all in one place.

Everybody will work on his own part separately to join together at the end (we need to spend a decent amount of time joining it properly). If there are rocky cliffs at the end of 2 sections, we can join them with a tunnel. Otherwise we might have to resort to sewage pipes or underwater sections.

There are 7 members, and we're going to be splitting this up into 2 maps to maximize wall count. I'm going to go with: 4000 walls per mapper.

We should also try to make the map compatible with polymost and classic this time. You can use TROR, as long as it works in polymost, so nothing fancy.

The theme of the map is beaches beaches beaches. Try to make your section focus around a beach(es) as much as possible. It can have a bit of town if you want, but try not to have too much. I hope at least one guy will make a beach section without any kind of city elements. I might make another thread where people post pictures of their latest progress so that we don't all use the same idea. I.e someone looks at the thread and goes "oh so Undertaker is doing that thing, I'll have to do something else".

[Drek]

How about new art? If we want to go this route, I say we get a tile set together asap so we all have the same assets to map with. For example we could all use that wavy sand texture Micky showed off, and some basic beach themed sprites. I'd be more than happy to organize assets for us, although I feel I might have just overstepped my first timer CBP role, you guys know how to do it too.

[quakis]

Everybody will work on his own part separately to join together at the end (we need to spend a decent amount of time joining it properly). If there are rocky cliffs at the end of 2 sections, we can join them with a tunnel. Otherwise we might have to resort to sewage pipes or underwater sections.

I can already foresee many problems here. Who's going to take on the daunting task to merge everything and deal with the ensuring problems? Texture misalignments, especially floors and ceilings, typically happen when moving around segments. Height differences between sections. Sprites disappearing. Tagging. Then you've got to consider the placement of each segment and simply inserting a tunnel or sewer route 'just because' is a very tacky way to connect areas together. Any mess and inaccuracies left behind in peoples sections may have an effect and possibly displease others if not done properly/breaking stuff. We already had a similar incident with CBP8.

For better flow and consistency, I suggest we stick to routine. It'd be better to do the usual and allow mappers to choose where to build off from and expand. This can in turn spark ideas for the next mapper. I'm fairly sure this has been standard practice for every CBP and has worked well.

The theme of the map is beaches beaches beaches. Try to make your section focus around a beach(es) as much as possible. It can have a bit of town if you want, but try not to have too much.

Might be best to allow for some creative freedom in terms of location and let mappers do as they please within a common theme. There's plenty of interior or city districts that can still give the sense of being near the beach/coastline afterall and somone's strengths might be better there.

Just my two pence.

[High Treason]

I personally was hoping to link my section by using a fake train I invented ("To South Beach" or whatever) - there's always railway stations at the seaside - along with using a wave effect I invented on my beach and I have a concept in my head for the actual section that I'd have to throw in the bin if it was linked directly to someone else's bit of the map.

To cut a long story short; I agree with quakis.

[Micky C]

Ok, it sounds like the problems of working on it separately then joining it outweigh the benefits of saving time. So we'll build it the traditional way, in which case we'll have to make an order.

@Drek, as much as I'd love to use some Caribbean sprites and textures, if we start adding any of this stuff it's then starting to turn into a mini mod. The deal with the CBP is that it's a bit of a challenge; you need to build a good section within the limitations. In the past, this was either time or wall based, but with the increased wall limit this isn't much of a problem. However there's still the challenge of creating a beach feel without any specific beach textures, but often a challenge such as this can lead to some pretty inventive stuff 

About the build order, how are we going to go about that? Quakis has a section already started, and I kept on adding onto my mockup and it's gotten pretty big, so now we have two half finished sections. Perhaps Quakis and I should upload what we've done of our sections, see how we can join them, then keep on working on them and when they're done, actually join them and give it to the third person to continue?

[High Treason]

Glad to know I wasn't the only one that might have cheated;

Beaches aren't a strong point of mine it seems and I don't think I could do much practical with that... Also I don't want to get rid of my waves but letting the player on the beach it looks rubbish. I do plan on having a seaside themed hotel as the main area of my section though, rooms with a sea view.


I can make larger waves, they can vary in height and go around corners unlike the SE29. When tags are assigned I'll probably start refining the mechanism and detail what they are in case anyone else wants to leech off my timers for something in their section. Conveyer Belts work on these waves too, which I shall be experimenting with to see if I can find anything cool to have moving around on them.

[underTaker]

I haven't started anything yet - i had some work to finish first, but don't worry, i'll do it. I'd just like to talk about one more problem - tagging, we need to specify who is using which tags limits so they won't overlap.

For the mapping queue i like your idea, Micky.

[Micky C]

We've ultimately decided to go with the regular idea of mapping sections in order (adding on to the full map rather than joining everything at the end).
And because of this, we can use the smart tagging system where you just start typing a new word and it assigns an unused tag. So there's no need to worry about tags. Just in case we can include the .maptag file so we know what tags we've used.

[underTaker]

Oh, right, i didn't think about it. We could use some kind of prefixes too, right? I guess when two people use the same name (eg. SomeDoor) it will be assigned the same tag, so we could use like our names prefixes like ut_SomeDoor, mikko_SomeDoor, so we won't need to constantly look into .maptag file.

[Micky C]

That's a good idea, but instead of writing a long name each time, I think it's sufficient to start off with a letter.

For example, if I'm m, I could make a tag "mdoor1"

So:
Micky C: m
Captain Awesome: c
High Treason: h
Drek: d
UnderTaker: u
Supertanker: s

[underTaker]

I like it

So, to be completely sure - after currently started areas are joint, next mapper will be chosen to create his section, am i right?

[Micky C]

Yes. It seems that High Treason has also started something, so he can go third. Do you want to go 4th?

[underTaker]

Why not. There's not time limit, right? Only sector one?

[Micky C]

Yeah I don't think there needs to be pressure on a time limit. People should be allowed to work on it as long as they want; it'll probably average out to 2 or 3 weeks per person. No one should take much longer than a month though or this will take all year.