This was an idea I came up with to help motivate people to continue moving and do less camping in an infection style map. The basic idea is that after a curtain amount of time a teleporter in one area will spawn and teleport any unfortunate person within the teleporter radius into a killball. Any entryways into that area would then be blocked off by a kill-ball preventing anyone from entering that area. One idea is that ten seconds before the teleporter would spawn you could have a soft-kill boundary spawn ten seconds prior, alerting the players that they have ten seconds to leave. This can be referred to as a "chemical spill" after all in many zombie mythos the zombies were a result of radiation. So it would make sense. However you would probably also want to make it game specific only to infection otherwise it could ruin the game-play of other gametypes on the map. If anyone has any other ideas on what could serve as an "environmental hazard" in halo reach please feel free to post here.
Can't delay-spawn Soft Kill Boundaries. Wouldn't work. I have an idea, but I'm still working on it, so of course I'm not going to share it...
Wow I didn't know that. Thanks for the information as that changes a bit of my idea. However I still plan on working on this style map. Does anyone have any ideas as to how an environmental hazard could be made as an element into an infection style map. [br][/br]Edited by merge: Another thing you can do to create the atmosphere that there is an environmental hazard is by sealing off doorways with Emergency Activated Screens (EAS) instead of Kill-balls. Thus closing off the area without wasting the kill-balls, which the teleporter leads to. As a result it will look like an Emergency system has activated and has engaged the EASs. However this tactic can only be made believable in a corridor based environment otherwise it will look like it has been added for no true reason other then to waste forge credits.
I'd recommend finding ways to open new paths when others get closed off. It could add tension -- like some artificial intelligence going, "Oshit, can't let you go there, lemme open this instead, hold on just a second."
Wow... Anyway I did this awhile ago for a map. Water...that's all you need, then with proper lighting, and a well placed soft kill boundary, it becomes Acid, or Lava. Have players jump on objects partially submerged, or fully submerged, then you force them to move around. The rising and lowering water will keep them on their toes, and not having large areas of ground to stand on will keep them moving to avoid death. However this really works best with the map I used it for, and my gamemode. Anyway I hope that inspired you. Oh and you can't despawn items.
The teleporter could lead to a kill area instead of a ball. I think that the death camera would stay in the room if you teleported into one. No, but you can make paths not accessible by distance and then connect it to the main map via ramps, walkways, and grav lifts
While I really like the idea presented, I think you should try to make this idea work in a less gimicky was. Instead of just outright killing people, give them incentives to move on. For example, you could spawn FX that make the map very dark in places. If you make the zombies force colored black then it would give them a great advantage in these dark areas and it would give then humans a great incentive to move on to a place with lights. It seems like this would be more fun, dynamic, and forgiving then a simple death penalty.
You mean kind of like the superintendent from halo odst. Now that is a pretty cool idea. As for using water as a bio hazard it doesn't really work that well with curtain map designs however spawning the player into an instant kill area would work pretty well.