Messages

I tried starting a map for that but couldn't get far. My inspiration for Vanilla Duke is just so damn low these days.

@Forge yeah I'm pretty much relying on contrast to make that area look good for the most part.

@Arghantyl, I get what you're saying; the whole "less is more" idea, and I do tend to follow that myself. But this room has no enemies in it and is a plot-relevant room, so it can afford to have a bit of clutter.

What I meant was don't share it with the folks at Duke4.net or anything like that

Don't expect the whole level to look like this though, it's a special room

No one has anything to say? 

Exclusive sneak peak. Shh.

That does look nice.

Note that there's a mapster scipt that shading of surfaces at different angles automatically, which should help give a nice first pass of shade for the natural terrain in that cave.

So is it pretty safe to say that they are working on Half Life 3? Even if it's only messing around with stuff at this stage?

It's not like I was standing still, of course I was moving around but it just seemed like I was taking fire from all direction most of the time. I'm hardly the best player though so that wouldn't have helped things. I do prefer that more methodical/organized approach.

There was definitely some good design and some nice ideas in there. I enjoyed crossing the actual bridge itself (you don't cross a bridge like that in Duke every day), even if a Commander did spawn in my face 

Finally played this map. Design, detail and progression-wise it was very nice, but the gameplay... I have to say it's the most stressful map I've played in recent memory.

3 things: no difficulty curve, poor pacing, repetitive.

I'm sure some people like this sort of mega fragfest but I'm going to list my personal thoughts on the gameplay below. It's going to sound negative, don't get me wrong I liked the map for the above reasons, and the atmosphere (i.e the "intense" feeling) was pretty nice, but blow me down I was always just a bit short on health and ammo, and ended up using god mode for the last 25-30% of the map.


So for the first problem of the difficulty curve, the map throws a lot of stuff at you right at the start: liztroopers, pigcops, enforcers, commanders all at once almost. You're pretty much surrounded taking hits from all directions, and not only do you need to deal with the enemies up close, but there's also a lot of enemies at a fair distance away draining your health all the while. The game keeps on doing this, so as such it doesn't really get that much harder because it already starts off pretty damn hard. Sure there are some battlelords at the end but otherwise the difficulty is pretty damn constant (and high). I played on the easiest setting, although I recognize that it's difficult to implement difficulty levels with a respawn-oriented map.

          This leads into the pacing, it feels as though you're always fighting everything all the time. No real ups or downs besides those brief moments when you've killed everything before moving onto the next switch to spawn the next wave of everything. I know that this is pretty much an arena battle map so I shouldn't really criticize it for not having some calmer moments, but once again it's a preference thing and not my cup of tea. I also realize that you can't really control the pace or difficulty on a non-linear switch hunt map like this because you can't control the order in which the player presses the switches.

          The above point is pretty similar to the point of repetitiveness. As I said before, it feels like the map throws everything at you all the time, and all the waves felt pretty damn similar. Sure further in you had a few extra weapons, but you really need to vary the enemy types more, especially when you're fighting the same enemies in the exact same location each time. For example there always seemed to be some liztroopers at a distance whittling down my health with their lasers while I was taking care of the closer up dangerous enemies like enforcers (which were also tearing down my health). Now having to worry about two or more sets of dangers like that is an interesting mechanic... once or twice. But it felt like it was always the case. I always make a great point in my maps to try to add as much variety to the combat as possible as the player progresses, however my maps are more linear than this one so it's much easier to do. I really think this map could have used much more variety in enemies as well. Perhaps have different waves focus more on different enemy types, or have one wave of really close up enemies where you urgently need to take care of the threat, and other where they're all loosely spread out and you have to hunt around for them.


So as I said above, some people (steam megaton users definitely) would love this kind of map, otherwise at least half the problems I mentioned above are as a result of the non-linear open-area button hunt gameplay style that you've chosen, and aren't necessarily your fault. Otherwise it's a fairly epic map.
Also unlike other people I didn't have any framerate problems; I wonder if that's related to the polymost optimizations TermiX was talking about which drastically improved polymost's performance. I also didn't get lost or stuck or anything which is nice in an open map like this.

In eduke the user can control music volume separately from sound so they can put it to what they're comfortable with. I.e I don't see any real need to change the volume level of the actual track.

There's no way to define the volume of the music with eduke by the author, however if you have a more modern format like Ogg then you should be able to edit the volume level of the music itself in a sound editor. Audacity is pretty good.

8 hours per day or 8 hours over 10 days? If so that's not a lot of time, although you may be taking into account an excessively busy job or something like that.

Is Mike von Skellington in the running for mapper of the month? His two maps hosted here that I checked out didn't look super flash, but some of his unreleased stuff, such as "city crackdown fragments" easily makes him some kind of mapping god.

I think I adapted one of the more classic-styled maps of the pack to vanilla Duke, added gameplay and polymer lights a while ago. Maybe I'll try to dig it up and it can get reviewed.

You do need to give different walls different shades though, to make them stand out more. If you're worried about things turning black then in that case increase the visibility. The point is having everything the same shade is very bad. Lots of maps have pulled off outdoor shading really well.

Don't know what's going on in that screenshot but it's not normal. Make sure you have no negative shades and that visibility is constant.

Think of TROR as vertical, and WOW as horizontal. You can also do things like elevators with multiple windows stacked up over eachother into the elevator shaft (currently impossible since sectors cannot rise up into other TROR layers). Windows over each other in 3D buildings will no longer be restricted to individual TROR layers and can be at arbitrary heights. You also won't have to extend an entire area just to get a little bit of 3D going on, which is particularly an issue for outdoor areas, especially if the shapes of the areas are anything but small and simple.