This is a map I am close to finishing. The entire thing exists inside Forge World's cave tunnel. Surprisingly it's not all that cramped, though I'd definitely describe it as a small team, close and mid-range combat type of map. It will eventually be set up for all game types except Invasion, Infection, Race, and Stockpile (actually it already is set up that way, but I have yet to play test it). I had initially wanted to give it a darker look, but there's not enough lighting to make it work. The bases were OK but the middle section of the map, and particularly two tunnels around the outside perimeter, are just impassable unless you know where you're going. C'est la vie. I think it will be a fun map as is, just slightly less atmospheric than I would have liked. Features: two bases at opposite ends of the tunnel, each with a unique look, some weaponry, a health station, and four points of entry. A tangle of tunnels and rooms connecting the two bases. A single teleporter sender/receiver combo. A centrally-located overshield. Weapons: five DMRs, two ARs, two needlers, one needle rifle, one grenade launcher, one concussion rifle, one shotgun, one grav hammer, two magnums, two spikers, two plasma repeaters, one plasma pistol, grenades. I stayed away from heavy explosives because they'd be way overpowered in this fairly close environment. Also there's clearly no real need for sniper weapons. Comments and suggestions more than welcome. I'm also looking to play test it soon, and I won't need a large group to do it - 3 vs. 3 would be my preference. Video and screenshots! I highly recommend the video tour, as screens don't do the layout justice. YouTube - Cave map preview - Halo: Reach
I was thinking of calling it Speleology but I think a lot of people won't know what that means or how to pronounce it, so it might not be the best choice... Added after 13 minutes: Oh, also wanted to mention - I have a vast amount of budget left, so if you have crazy aesthetic ideas that don't alter the playing space much, hit me. One thing I was thinking of doing was embedding some vehicle man cannons in one place strictly for the sound they make. Ah, the freedom of making a small map for a change...
You can call it speleology. I'v got you covered if anyone askes: just click this Edit:On all the tele's you could merge a flat rock into the metal part to make it look more natural. And I think the vehicle canon idea is great.
Ha ha, classic. Yeah, unfortunately I'm all out of rocks, flat or otherwise! That's OK though, there's a non-cave component to the map already - the red base is half man-made structures (including some vehicle man cannons that I recently added to the roof as "lights") and the blue base, while being more cave-like, has a man-made "back room" where the teleporter and health pack are. So I don't mind having the teleporters look just like basic teleporters. Actually, I'll share what I was originally planning to do, since it turned out to be such a pain in the butt that I gave up on it. I knew from the start that I would have a little trouble with blue base - it's at the narrower end of the cave tunnel and there's only so many ways you could enter it, and I'm always worried about setting up choke points or rooms that are easily camped in. So I wanted to have a one-way teleporter in (which ended up being what you see in the video - that also serves as a spawn point, just in case the room is getting spawn-camped you have a couple spawn points back there slightly out of harm's way). But my original idea was that the two structures in the bases which are now simply fancy lighting fixtures would be the teleporters - the sender in red base, the receiver in blue. You would grav lift up into the one in red, and fall out of the one in blue, as if they were vent tubes rather than teleporters. To complete the effect, I was going to build an actual vent tube outside the map, with a teleporter in at the bottom and out at the top. So you would grav lift up in red base, hit a teleporter, teleport into the bottom of a vertical but curved vent tube; grav lift/man cannon through the length of the tube; hit another teleport sender, and then fall out of the vent into blue base. Aesthetically I thought it would be really cool, and it solved a problem I had with thinking the teleport route was too direct and quick - the whole process would take at least 7-8 seconds to complete. What I found though was first of all it was needlessly hard to teleport into the tube and immediately hit a man cannon or grav lift, unless I made the tube really, really narrow (not what I wanted to do). Half the time you'd teleport in and then just sit there, one inch outside of the man cannon's effective radius. And my thought was that the speed of the whole thing would create an illusion that it was somewhat continuous (players might not understand that they were being teleported, twice, but rather would think they were literally venting from one base to the other). But that proved to be really hard to do too. My last ditch thought was to build a HUGE tube wrapping around the entire cave tunnel from one base to the other. But I got a headache just thinking about it, and I would have had to do serious remodelling to the bases on both ends. Eventually I decided to convert my vents to lighting fixtures (that was basically where I wanted my lights anyway), add the extra back room to blue base, and put the sender somewhere outside of red base a little bit to incorporate a little travel time. Hopefully it all worked out for the best.
Glad to see I'm not the only one building a map in that cave. And finally someone else knows the headache of building in there xD Would like to take a look at it in person though, see what you did up close Does look interesting so far.
Oh god, you're not kidding. It's a LITERAL headache - I made myself nauseous and had to stop forging like three separate times because of spawning huge objects (mostly the arch and the sea stack rock) and my poor guardian self being zipped all over the place by it. I've gotten better at predicting when that's going to happen and looking away, but it's still the closest a video game has gotten in years to making me actually sick. Nothing like being thirty feet away and then BAM! six inches away. Bleagh. Plus when you rotate things, a lot of times it puts you back in the center of the piece - which would yank me forward and backward, or against the walls... or THROUGH the walls... man, what a pain. You're quite welcome to grab it from my fileshare if you just want to play with it - click here. That's the latest build, the "final beta" until I get some tests in. If you feel like helping me test this weekend, I hope to be online either tonight or tomorrow night, somewhere between 8 and 10 Eastern. My tag is Nutduster.
The map was pretty fun. Nice interesting little map in the cave. It was awesome seeing how differently you used it from me. Worked out much better then when we tried my map
Thank you! To be fair to your map, it seemed like we needed fewer people playing and more spawns, and that would fix the main issue we were having (everybody right on top of each other all the time). But yeah, I thought that test went pretty well. The only weirdness I noticed was red team spawning inside blue team's base when the flag was away - not sure why it did that but I'm going to set up more respawn zones to try to fix it. I also think the flag point is a little too close to the teleporter (there's no good incentive to take it any other route unless you absolutely have to) so I may move it to a different spot in the base. Slayer was fun, I had an assortment of good little battles. And nobody seemed to get hung up anywhere, break the map, or just confused as to where to go. I'm trying to get a test in tonight with some other friends, and it's up on the tester's guild forum as well - pending those results I'll release the thing. Hopefully early next week. Thanks again for helping out!
Teleporters are probably unnecessary on such a small map, and might cause confusion as to where enemies are. You might be able to expand the space in the map by using catwalks so it's almost like two levels to the map. This looks like a great map.
I do try to avoid teleporters whenever possible, but in this case the entrance to blue base was a choke point issue - I made three physical entrances but all three are on the same wall, so a decent player can just sit back and camp. Because the whole map is situated in a big tunnel, the only way to get another point of entry coming in from a different side was to use a teleporter. I actually did start with a catwalk structure, and one of those entrances comes in from above, but the vertical space there is just not enough to really do it justice (unlike in red base, where I did exactly that - there's a catwalk coming in to a couple of Y-platforms, and it's a great covered route into the base). In any case I think the map size is comparable to Chill Out (Cold Storage, to Halo 3 players), which positively drips with teleporters - there are three sender/receiver pairs. So my relatively austere single pair hopefully won't cause too much confusion. Anyway, thanks for the feedback, and the compliment! Final version should be out soon. I'm working on a preview video now (not just the walkthrough on the beta map posted above). --- Map is now released - link in my sig.