This is sloppy but it's playable and I'm going to be playing the **** out of it before I make anymore changes. http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/A 3 Legged Goat/video/16432480
It's so difficult to make the lighting work... I already deleted so many details to get it down to 98%, but there are still so many black pieces. HELP
Finally updated Trestles with the new weapon pad in place of the drop spawn plasma caster. Also due to whatever lighting adjustments 343 did in the update I got to delete unnecessary lights to open up budget for the sounds I always wanted. Gameplay was not affected by any of the changes & I plan to do the same for Ector tomorrow. Not only does it have a drop spawn rocket but it also has a dummy rocket spawn at start where the drop spawn rockets fall so that the intro cam shows where they are. I had to script the dummy rockets to move under the map 10 sec in to the intro so the usable rockets wouldn't suck up the ammo. Couldn't just script the dummy's to disappear, just wouldn't work but now with the update that pain is gone. BOOM! Go weapon pads!
I'm going to go through some of my old concepts and apply what I've learned to them to get them playable. This is a map from several months ago that I blocked out in a few hours and scrapped soon after. I felt that it was too difficult to get around the map and too easy to get away from other players, so gameplay would have devolved into a lot of cat-and-mouse, which I don't like. I tried to fix it by making the pathing more restrictive (in the video above, i'm testing a new lift location). However, I lost interest in its visuals once I started to work on the weight. It's very "bottom heavy" and I don't like my maps being bottom heavy - i prefer to distribute the weight evenly in the center on tiers - so I couldn't really get into it. Perhaps some more opinions will change my mind though. If the layout is worth salvaging, i'll rebuild it and see what I can do with it. Otherwise, i'll just take some of the aesthetics and put it on my other maps.
I know it's not really much in comparison to everyone else's beauties, but I'm pretty happy with how I iterated on an old design I had called 'Cache'. I think the increased segmentation will (hopefully) make movement, encounters, and sightlines more meaningful and less frustrating for players.
So, many moons ago someone posted a video on glacier where they were discussing creating a believable and immersive environment using fog and rocks and other natural pieces... and I tried looking for it in my subscriptions on YouTube (but I have way too many, even when I looked at the Forge ones. ) I thought it was Commander Colsen, but I couldn't find it on his channel. Can someone please help?
welp, i think i just figured out what map i can adopt that layout to. will need a palette swap but the geometry should work, provided i can solve the sightline problems.
If you really wanted to, you could finagle it using the Glacier ivy and some point light trickery, but I'm hoping they release a third color variant of all the foliage that's more of an orange / autumnal color. Cherry blossom / pink-colored stuff would be cool too, but I'm not holding my breath. Ghosts of Meridian adjusted the way the lighting engine affects all the Forge objects in order to reduce cases where objects would be completely "blacked out" under certain circumstances, or where baking lighting in certain sections of all the maps would make playspaces way darker than they needed to be. Most of the prior lighting / ambience of those maps could be achieved just by adjusting the lighting a little bit.
Don't adjust your map NGA. I'm gonna lol so hard when 343i changes the lighting again and everyone has to redo there redos. Wait for an official starment on what's happening with it first.
I guess I don't really understand all of the outcry about the lighting changes. All they really did is add the light bake option to objects that didn't have them previously. All of the objects that didn't have the option previously meant they essentially had Light Bake: Off (which is why they showed up black). All I had to do on Purple Reign is turn Light Bake: On for those objects (which were the Ring pieces I used for my partial ceiling) and everything was fine. I even got some objects back because I previously had to use smaller pieces that had the Light Bake option in place of larger objects that didn't have the option (for example, using four quarter Rings instead of two half Rings).
I don't have to cover half my map in lights for the shadows to not look incredibly dark so I'm pretty happy.
I haven't noticed anything changing drastically on my maps either, but some people have. It's possible that it affects different skyboxes, filters, or lighting setups in different ways.