Last map you played

Started by Puritan, 02 December 2011, 08:14:26

Previous topic - Next topic

0 Members and 13 Guests are viewing this topic.

High Treason

I could never like Billy Boy's stuff either. I could appreciate some of the exploits he pulled off, but the maps were often filled with other locations that were just plain ugly, glitchy or just downright annoying.
[glow=black,2,300]sprite[].sectnum -1[/glow]

Forge

#541
annoying puzzles aside, the stuff Billy Boy made and the foresight he required to be able to make those puzzles just frazzles my brain.

As for as aesthetics; oranges and valves were a bit on the bland side due to lack of proper trimming, and he had those weird ass walls of textures at the top of big light, but other than that he made some nice looking industrial levels. I also liked the outdoor areas of his hospital map, but the indoor parts were kinda bland.

speaking of oranges; it might be the way my logic circuits work, but i found that one easier than valves even though valves seemed to be more linear. I just didn't like getting trapped and having to do a restart, or having to navigate half the map again because investigating a floor shaft means finding out it drops into an underwater tunnel that unlocks and goes all the way back to the start. Of course getting pissed at investigating floor shafts and ignoring them ends up costing even more confusion because one or two of them actually have necessary switches in them. 
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

ck3D

#542
billy boy made my favorite maps that i'll never actually play. i think he is / was a BUILD genius and made the most awe-inspiring levels be it in terms of atmosphere, layout, feel and overall grandeur ; technically speaking the construction in his maps in generally insane as well with all those humongous structures and complex room-over-room tricks (zaxtor is the only other, later mapper to have ever come close again to this type of stuff - dude had TROR figured out ten years before it even became a thing). all the fancy-looking modern maps with the tiny details and carefully trimmed walls are little kid stuff in comparison to the vision and skills it takes to make the stuff billy boy made - even with the seemingly bland looks, odd texture picks and unconventional aesthetics, he manages to put everyone else's skills to shame. his work is just larger than life.

but yeah the thing is, as far as levels in a video game are concerned, the amount of skills it takes to generate them is not all that matters. while technically he might have made some of the best and most immersive levels ever, they are just not so fun to play. i love long maps that feel like proper adventures as much as - if not more than - the next one, but i don't want to be stuck in front of my computer screen for 4 or 5 hours and find myself swearing twice as much as i just did with every new move i make. i guess getting lost and accidental backtracking is realistic as in it is bound to happen to anyone who were to explore a huge location they have never even thought of visiting before in real life, but it isn't the kind of deal i want to experience everytime i manage to find some spare time for leisure and choose to fire up a duke map. for this reason i think i have spent more time going through his levels in build / mapster in order to be free to carelessly roam around and look at all the surrounding awesomeness than actually playing the darn things. which may or may not be a bad sign but hey, at least i am glad they exist, and the impression they still leave me to this day keeps convincing myself that billy boy is one of those unsung heroes that was, and might still be, far ahead of his time.

methy

Yeah that's what I mean. If the map fails to be fun, it fails at its primary goal. I appreciate the grandeur and vision he has in his maps, which indeed makes you feel like he has a bigger consciousness of the whole thing than a normal human being, but like I said imo what he lacked was someone to tell him when he went too far and when things were becoming annoying or not understandable anymore for the player.
http://thisshitaintscary.blogspot.com/ - The only Blog solely dedicated to Horror video games

Forge

#544
Valves is the only map of Billy Boy's that really irritated me to frustration. Memorial Hospital had me temporarily stumped a couple times and made me wander around aimlessly until I got back on track.
The rest of his maps I didn't have any problems with solving the puzzles and it always felt like i was making forward progress. In those later maps (post oranges & valves) pretty much everything is labeled, there are view screens, and there are clues and hints placed out in the open. It's just a matter of remembering where the labeled door is when the matching labeled switch is thrown.
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

ck3D

wangnukem by duke 64 : http://www.scent-88.com/reviews/W/wang/wang.php

took me 15 mins to look around on the internet in order to remember where the heck i could have got this map from in the first place, in order to establish where my due comments should be posted (i like to give my feedback in the corresponding release thread - when there is such a thing - to ensure that the map author gets to read it). could have sworn it was from this site, a suspicion confirmed by how it appeared to be nowhere to be found be it on duke4 or MSDN, but it wouldn't show up in map search. so i looked it up on other sites until i eventually went back to this one and double checked - turned out i had been looking for an erroneous file name. gah.

map itself was pretty nice. the layout and gameplay format was what i liked the best - very fundamental. without the occasional misaligned textures and general lack of visual fine-tuning, i could have seen this map being out of one of the original episodes due to its simplicity and overall feel. the action and puzzles are pretty old-school, i liked them. got lost for a while in order to figure out what door that switch had just unlocked, backtracking to the previous locations of the map in circles and trying out all the decorative doors - there's a bunch of them - which slowed down my progression at a crucial time. i would have at least used an activator rather than an activatorlocked to make the path more obvious to the player, seeing as the door that gets unlocks looks the exact same as all the decorative, unfunctional doors. no biggie though - i eventually found my way to the end. trains in the last section were nice but could have looked better.

overall a good map, wouldn't put it in the 90+ drawer quite yet though, although with just a little bit more fine-tuning and decoration it could have been a real winner - to me it felt kind of rushed in some segments, especially toward the end. still a solid play and an enjoyable experience.

ck3D

#546
long shot and i am on quite a rush so sorry for not finding a more appropriate thread to post this in, but, i was just randomly thinking about that one map today that i played eons ago, which was (as far as i remember) hi-tech- / moonbase- / space-oriented, and involved two cycloids, one you could see trapped in an underground cage halfway through the map that you couldn't fight and one that would show up at the end of the level, all making for a trick the author of the map was trying to pull off in order to trick the player into thinking that they were finally getting to encounter the same beast they had seen behind bars earlier into the level. if i remember correctly the level was rather long and felt fairly epic as a whole, even though it didn't come with the most professional-looking design, i remember loving the experience a few years back but i can't seem to remember its name, maybe anyone on here has a clue ?

Puritan

Hmmm.....I've made a map where you encounter a trapped cycloid emperor in the beginning and also towards the end...
It's a space / moonbase level too.
But it isn't what you're looking for?


Undesirable Elements
Bitter words mean little to me. Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time, when they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine, and the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

ck3D

#548
that was the one ! thank you ! memorable level, kind of messed up that i couldn't remember that it was you who made it though, sorry about that - my memory tends to be real bad with people sometimes which is something i always feel really bad for but really can't help. anyway, you know a level is good if people are still getting random flashbacks from their playthrough years after despite omitting the details ! also the design looks a lot better than i remembered. the central room with the first cycloid comes with some of my favorite structures ever made for duke, due to both their functionality and looks. i need to play the map again, i remember the whole experience as really immersive. have you been working on anything new as of late ?

edit - can't believe it was never reviewed on MSDN either. hot map material for sure, Mikko needs to catch up on that for one of the next updates

Forge

Quote from: ck3D on  29 August 2014, 19:31:33
it didn't come with the most professional-looking design
;D
Take it down to the beach with a hammer and pound sand up your ass

ck3D

#550
ha ! my memory is a mess, really. by 'professional-looking design' i actually really meant '3DR-styled', but it is true that thinking of that map i had (for some reason) recollections of large battles in storage, warehouse-looking rooms that were more on the emptier side - which (and i just checked in mapster in order to make sure) all appear to be absent from Puritan's map. so i guess i got confused somehow and mentally mixed up sections from two different maps i probably played around the same time period, thinking they were the same one in retrospect. i am thinking the other one (with the hectic battles in the empty-looking storage rooms) might have been by Zaxtor, not sure. anyway what i said about Puritan's level still stands, it's a really good one, and looking at it again in Mapster i am still very impressed with the design, the texturing is very colorful, the spritework is omnipresent, i really like the whole thing and it must have been quite tedious to make as well.

Puritan

Quote from: ck3D on  30 August 2014, 12:23:00
. have you been working on anything new as of late ?


Thank you for your kind words!


Well, my latest release would be "Afterglow; Twin Creeks".
( I'm also in a sort of long term build project with another guy. A release is not scheduled as of yet)
Bitter words mean little to me. Autumn winds will blow right through me
And someday in the mist of time, when they asked me if I knew you
I'd smile and say you were a friend of mine, and the sadness would be lifted from my eyes
Oh when I'm old and wise

methy

Quote from: ck3D on  21 August 2014, 14:43:02
wangnukem by duke 64 : http://www.scent-88.com/reviews/W/wang/wang.php

took me 15 mins to look around on the internet in order to remember where the heck i could have got this map from in the first place, in order to establish where my due comments should be posted (i like to give my feedback in the corresponding release thread - when there is such a thing - to ensure that the map author gets to read it). could have sworn it was from this site, a suspicion confirmed by how it appeared to be nowhere to be found be it on duke4 or MSDN, but it wouldn't show up in map search. so i looked it up on other sites until i eventually went back to this one and double checked - turned out i had been looking for an erroneous file name. gah.

map itself was pretty nice. the layout and gameplay format was what i liked the best - very fundamental. without the occasional misaligned textures and general lack of visual fine-tuning, i could have seen this map being out of one of the original episodes due to its simplicity and overall feel. the action and puzzles are pretty old-school, i liked them. got lost for a while in order to figure out what door that switch had just unlocked, backtracking to the previous locations of the map in circles and trying out all the decorative doors - there's a bunch of them - which slowed down my progression at a crucial time. i would have at least used an activator rather than an activatorlocked to make the path more obvious to the player, seeing as the door that gets unlocks looks the exact same as all the decorative, unfunctional doors. no biggie though - i eventually found my way to the end. trains in the last section were nice but could have looked better.

overall a good map, wouldn't put it in the 90+ drawer quite yet though, although with just a little bit more fine-tuning and decoration it could have been a real winner - to me it felt kind of rushed in some segments, especially toward the end. still a solid play and an enjoyable experience.

Sounds like you've never played Shadow Warrior. That map is a recreation of the first map of Shadow Warrior (it's not just 'inspired' by Shadow Warrior, it's almost 1:1 with some minor differences), which was made by 3DRealms which explains why the layout, gameplay and progression feels like it could belong to the 'original game'. (though I am unaware if DN3D and SW share similar level designers)
Also this might be where you got the map : http://forums.duke4.net/topic/7010-duke-nukem-3d-steam-community-workshop/page__view__findpost__p__202654

I know you're probably more interested into Duke Nukem 3D itself, pure DN3D mapping close to vanilla with stock textures; rather than Build as a whole, but I still recommend you (and anyone, really) to play Shadow Warrior and Blood, it really opens up your vision of what Build is and what can be done with it in the right hands.  Considering you know DN3D effects by heart, you will also be amazed by the kind of advanced effects those games have in comparaison.
Also, I'm sure it is also inspirational for DN3D mapping. After all, train levels were done in DN3D after it was done in Blood.
I'd even recommend to play Exhumed (aka Powerslave) and Redneck Rampage series (especially RR Rides Again In Arkansas, the sequel to the first RR and which is a LOT better than the first), which even if they aren't perfect, are really interesting and good in many regards.
http://thisshitaintscary.blogspot.com/ - The only Blog solely dedicated to Horror video games

High Treason

Quote from: methy on  30 August 2014, 17:26:40...but I still recommend you (and anyone, really) to play [...] Blood

Yeah, if you wanna corrupt your hard drive.

I'd give that one a miss, it plays like a beta, has serious bugs and balance problems as well as looking butt ugly in places where they couldn't be bothered to polish it properly - if it doesn't crash. It really offered nothing that SW didn't do better, though it's level editor is very interesting.

Other games though, go ahead.
[glow=black,2,300]sprite[].sectnum -1[/glow]

methy

#554
No idea what you're talking about (especially with the 'corrupt your hardrive' thing, no idea where you got your Blood from; but if that a real common danger it would be a known thing). Blood is completely different than SW and it's just as great for different reasons. SW is the next logical step after DN3D, but Blood is something else entirely.
Blood has the best weapon/enemy balance of any 2.5D FPS I know,  It's all about constantly switching between your weapons and even their primary/secondary fire depending on the enemy and on the situation, and that's executed better than any other 2.5D FPS I know. Also the AI of enemies is far superior to any other Build game, cultists especially.

You know, when you play an old FPS with WASD+Mouse, you quickly feel the limit of the game, like for instance how you can easily circle strafe in Doom and DN3D to avoid even hitscan shots; well, in Blood that doesn't really happen, if at all, and on the contrary WASD+Mouse gives much more depth to gameplay. To me that only shows how superior Blood's gameplay is, the game really feels like 2.5D FPS gameplay applied to control devices other than keyboard only, and it really is the only 2.5D FPS that feels like that. The AI of cultists was ahead of their time, they are proto-HL grunts, except actually fun (and fun exactly because they made them intelligent just enough, unlike HL grunts which are too intelligent).

Yeah, level design isn't as polished in the later episodes, and I used to think the game sucked because of that (back when I gave too much importance to small details because I lacked the ability to see the greater scheme behind a level) but the leveldesign shines in other departments; and that they chose to polish gameplay over map detailing is exactly why it's so good.
http://thisshitaintscary.blogspot.com/ - The only Blog solely dedicated to Horror video games