I gave it 10 minutes and I still can't connect to Live. Dramatic sigh. Microsoft must be having some issues tonight - too bad, I was really enjoying these games.
Yeah, I can't sign in right now at all either, otherwise (while late) I'd try to help fill the lobby.
I got booted, got back in to play Lee's map, HE got booted then so did 2 more. Lobby full of randoms nowjust unrivaled left. I didn't even get a test on my map. Maybe we can reconvene ;-)
My buddy on Mass Effect 3 got booted as well. It's not Halo wide, its Microsoft wide. And damn, is Microsoft wide. hehe.
I guess I should be glad I couldn't make it tonight. Being booted would have pissed me off. I'd have flashbacks off the backup server. In other news I finished that map I was working and its ready for some hard testing. And I started on a new one thats feeling promising.
Sorry for having to cut early, had to get college work done. I'll be on thursday for Audience' lobby and then again Tuesday for yours. Edit: Would like to add that it was a lot of fun!
Looking forward to it Fenix. I'll be interested to see what you do to your quake map. I'll reserve the rest of my comments for the feedback thread. I'd just make it but I cant create threads here (see what an awesome co-host I am, guys!? lol.) I get that gorilla. I'm actually rather busy all the time it seems, but I use forge as a creative outlet so I make time. I've had those low activity spells too though. At least we all get some new schmexy gorilla maps out of it!
I remember when playing my map, House of Frag, people were having a rough time of understanding the layout. This original sketch, that is pretty close to the map itself, should help you when writing feedback of the map for reference. The 3 story building was the low-grav room and the 2 story housed the teleporters to the central pad. Weapons on the map: Initial Ordinance - Incineration Cannon 240 respawn Random Ordinance - SAW x2 Placement - Hammer @ 1 location: 180 respawn (spare clips x2) Placement - Binary Rifle @ 2 locations: 180 respawn (spare clips x0) Placement - BR + 2 Frags @ 4 locations: 60 respawn (spare clips x2) Placement - Shotty @ 2 locations: 180 respawn (spare clips x0) Placement - Supressor + 1 Plasma 'nade @ 2 locations: 30 respawn (spare clips x2) Sketch:
That's a great sketch. If only you could texture some of the pieces. maybe even simply change the overall color. also I can tell what kind of pen you used.
Do you have any small maps. house of frag was fun but its quite. large. It sucks everybody didn't get to test their maps yesterday and hopefully we won't have this problem in the future.
Recap for Tuesday Jan 29th Talk about the games we played, before XBox Live vomited all over us. Speaking of which, I apologize the lobby was cut short (though there was nothing I could do about it). After it had booted a couple of others, who were able to get back online, Live unceremoniously booted me as well and then refused to reconnect. I gave up after ten minutes and called it a night. If you were signed up and didn't get to test your map, let me know - those people will be given priority for next week's lobby if they are able to attend it.
I'm redesigning the player attributes to be more like quake, it'll play much faster. Edit: Also I wouldn't have left if I didn't have to, I understand it was unfair to some. I had college work to get done and it was my son's 100th day of school today, he went to school with a awesome custom shirt because I made time last night. For Thursday I'm requesting to be placed last.
Sorry I couldn't make it last night, but knowing my internet luck I probably would've been the first to be irreversibly booted from xbl. Nutduster, do you mind adding whatever feedback you can recall for that map of mine you played the other day with X2sora (and Sora too if you read this). It was that asymm on ravine... Btw when we played that small-sided game on Octave I just realized how pretty the map is. I can never stop and smell the dynamic lighting roses with 8 or 10 players on the map (although those games are fun too), but I felt like playing with fewer players really brought out the best game play and nuances of the map as well. Sorry to clutter up your thread even though I missed last night, but hey at least it's feedback related!
Before I get started I would like to add again that I was sorry for leaving early, this won't be a regular for me. I wanted to stay and had a lot of fun and hopefully can provide a lot of help for you guys and your maps. I played very competitively and tried to exploit every map to give me any and every advantage. The "Fenix" in my name stands for the fact that I love to fly (Jet Pack) so if you wondering if your map can be broken by it, I'm your man. Chimera V2 Pros -Felt like Narrows to me except turned into a 4 way, which was cool. -Loved the Weapon Layout Cons -The Area on the green rocks is pretty OP -Almost all action takes place in the center of the map, maybe try adding some elbows? -I shouldn't be able to get from one corner of the map to the other by jet pack. I evaded so many battles by jet packing this way and there was nothing the other player could do. I felt like I left him saying, "Did he just do that?" as he waits patiently watching the small print notifications poping up, hoping it would say I died. Black Briar Manor Pros -Asethetics are very cool here -Loved how tight the areas where in the buildings -Map looked very good on ravine, gave off a "City of Paradise" feel to it Cons -I feel the warthogs in the open area are an annoyance. In reality if this was on matchmaking, both hogs would be occupied and that would be no fun for only 2 initial flood players. You could probably hold them off every game, the entire game when you combine the other players shooting at them with the turret fire x2. I understand they are suppose to look like cars driving by but my first impression was a conveyor belt because they are moving way to slow and that when they spawn they drop from a great distance as if something falling onto a conveyor belt. -I was really annoyed by the parts of an object rising above the floor in the doorways. I felt like I had to jump though too many doors to avoid the nasty bumps. House of Frag (my map) Gameplay Recap House of Frag 4v4 CTF Zinc Pros -To be honest my first impression was, "This map looks like crap" but Erosion has a wonderful way of doing just that to any map built on it. After we were playing for awhile I'd have to say this was my favorite map of the night! I had a lot of fun with the way this map was set up. Big Differences in LoS and height variation, which made it awesome. It felt like there was small battles going on all over the map and you couldn't even engage in half of them because of the layout. -4v4 played great here even with it's large size -Loved how you could "stay low" on CTF when taking a route back with their flag. There were plenty of options to ambush the flag carrier as well as keeping the flag carrier from getting shot at from across the map. Loved it! -Gameplay was a lot of fun, did I say that already? Cons -Jet Pack in my opinion dominates the map. I felt like I had such a huge advantage being able to ambush anyone from anywhere and being able to get to the flag area from ways that caught the defenders very off guard. It was cool for me, but probably not for the guy way below me with his back turned, watching his radar and saying his last words to himself, "No, that can't be above me, there's no way." Zinc 4v4 CTF Bleached Pros -Reminded me of a Spartan Ops mission to me with the layout design. There were plenty of LoS barriers an routes. Some structural areas felt very unnatural to me though. Cons -I had fun playing on this map but got kind of bored just because it felt like it had a "Been here already" feel to it. There's nothing wrong with the layout, but just feels like it provides no new interesting gameplay. Vandelay Pros -Even with it's simple layout, I enjoyed the map quite a bit. I only used the side routes and felt like you could predict the enemy team's movement and kind of guess which route you could take to sneak and grab the flag. Which was cool. -It had a very "Unreal Tournament" feel to me with the design because of the "Push/Pull" tug'o'war style gameplay that happens with limited routes, but yet there were ways to sneak around. Cons -Felt like the side pads that extended off the main routes were almost useless. -I think the aesthetics could be bumped up some to give you more of that "arena" feel. Vandelay 4v4 CTF
RECAPPIN' Chimera by unrivaled - This map saw some significant improvements from its first version. The mancannons were much better, and you did away with the two-step lifts that basically turned spartans into skeet-shooting targets. The main, long corridor of the map seemed to be broken up a little more and movement around and through it was a bit more fluid; either it changed or I was just more used to it. Cons: 1) I still feel like the various areas of the map are quite separate; wherever I spawned, I rarely felt any need or even ability to move from there to some other place I could see in the far-off distance. The only area that feels immediately accessible from most other areas is that long hallway, which contributes to the feeling that that is the only place on the map worth being. People gravitated there until by the halfway point, we were just doing the same thing as last week: hanging out in the hallway and shooting down the entire length of it. I think it might be a good idea to radically re-think the design of this map, if you can stomach it; shrink it down maybe, and most certainly break up the long arms of that hallway somehow. Offsetting them so they aren't exactly lined up with each other would help, as would making both of them shorter than they are now, and maybe also shrinking the width of the central platform between them. Also, as Hulk mentioned, the natural geo area feels overpowered: it's elevated, it has lots of cover, and it's basically a good place to hang out and DMR or snipe, but not good for much else and not a hotspot for foot traffic. I'd de-emphasize it as a power position, and find a way to integrate it better. If you do rebuild the map, maybe everything else could be moved closer to the mountain to help address this. Black Briar Manor by unrivaled - Still like the feel of this (it's actually pretty frightening) and the aesthetics. We found a problem with the hogs - you can stop them just by whacking them with your gun. Considering how devastating the turrets are to flood, that's problematic. Though if you give the flood more rooftop access near their initial spawns, that would help; hogs are a lot less powerful if they can be descended upon from above at any point and from any angle. I appreciated the multiple new ways to the rooftops - definitely a needed improvement. // Things that still need fixing: I agree with Hulk that the buildings can be hard to navigate inside. They are bumpy in places and hard to get through some doorways, especially as flood since they jump so much higher. At least one flood initial spawn is facing the underside of a ramp, which is annoying; generally all spawn points on all maps of whatever kind should be in a fairly safe place, but with easy, uninhibited forward movement available and a somewhat open line of sight for player orientation. Also, you need human spawn points just in case, apparently! As a flood I once got trapped in a spot I couldn't get back out of - check your theater film and either add a jump-up there, or a kill zone. House of Frag by Fenix Hulk - I said a lot in the lobby after our two games of this, so I'll quickly reiterate a few of the key bits: 1) I really enjoyed the different design of this, so obviously inspired by old arena shooters and Quake in particular. 2) Aesthetics were sharp and right in line with the map's inspirations. 3) Mancannons are problematic. You might try adding walls around them so people can't jump or walk into them sideways; when that happens they tend to fail and people tend to die. 4) Framerate in the middle needs work, and ditching those stairs ought to help. 5) Looking forward to playing this again with a trait zone over the whole map for higher speed; I think it will make the map feel less enormous. Zinc by Iznel Wettham - Dude, nice map. My only significant worry is the one platform with the pipes around the edges as railings; the combination of elevation and cover it affords makes it a strong power position and a good place to just hang out and drill people from afar. It needs to be either less powerful or more vulnerable, or both, IMO. Otherwise I thought this was a really well-designed, intricate, good-looking map, and it played well in both gametypes. Flag was especially fun with good routes for runners and defenders alike. Lots and lots of verticality and long, open lines of sight - both in a good way; it never felt unnatural to me or a product of bad design, but more like I was fighting in a city or something. Cool map, thumbs up. Bleached by me - KOTH was not the gametype this map was really made for, but I thought it went fine. It's really a flag and slayer map and we'll be focusing on those as I keep testing this. Though I don't know that it needs a lot more testing - being partly a reimagining of a previous map of mine and partly a bit of disguised thievery from The Pit, it plays pretty much exactly like I hoped and expected it would. It's basically meant to emulate those life-and-death struggles in CTF games that I loved on The Pit in H3 matchmaking; if it ends up providing games nearly that good, I will be satisfied and then some. Vandelay by me - This was basically an experiment with trying to do something with the big structure on Ravine, since hardly anyone does. I expected to abandon it after an hour of building, so the fact that we ended up playing a game on it is a pleasant surprise. Actually I kind of liked how it went. The design ended up somewhat related to Elongation/Longest, with basically just two long paths end to end, and limited means of getting from one side to the other (actually Elongation and Longest had more connectors even than this map does, which the fault of the architecture of that structure I built around - but I didn't notice it being a big problem). // In reply to Hulk (I love typing that) about the outer platforms, they are basically there for 1. initial ordnance locations, 2. dropdowns to the lower level, and most importantly 3. to get a different line of sight on the flag spawn positions rather than just having to shoot straight down each side. We'll have to see how heavily they are used in weeks to come. // Oh, and I think I'm going to remove the snipers and replace with some other kind of ordnance. Those long straightaways are just too dominated by those weapons. I'm not a great sniper and I was wrecking **** with that beam rifle. Something by Audience - Sorry Audience, I have forgotten the name of your map, Hulk wasn't in that game so I can't steal it from him, and I'm far too lazy to look on Waypoint! (I'm not sure it will show it anyway since I got booted before the game was finished.) This felt suitably Endeavor-esque which is a good thing, though it was more open and less segmented-up than Endeavor, which is also a good thing. I think it might work better for slayer than flag; flag ended up being a somewhat awkward gametype to me, though maybe it would play better as people got to know the map more. My main beef with the design right now is connected to why I wasn't crazy about CTF on it - those 2-unit-wide walkways (with no railings) are super-vulnerable positions, making them very hard to defend and very hard to attack simultaneously; I found myself wishing the design of them was different, e.g. 1-2 units wider, maybe at least partial railings and/or partial cover, and another way up there that didn't require jetpack. That's a whole lot of "please change this"es, and it's based on just one game, so take it with a grain of salt - but at the same time, do exactly what I say. Anyway I like to see a 4v4 map from you and I'm looking forward to another pass at it. To anyone who didn't get to test, my apologies again - hope we catch you next week!