[version 1.4.9] The latest version anyone has played has been 1.3.7 After many long months of building, trying to test, testing, more testing, rebuilding, I am now roughly 40% of the way done! Hooray! A 10% milestone! Onto the map. What began as a test to see if I could make a map with more than just cramped spaces and sightlines [was lost to the save system but] eventually led to what I hope will be a grand invasion map one day! First, a picture of the phase 2 field, with some Meta-style explanations to show that I am in fact, as opposed to popular belief, not slapping random nonsense together to hope it works [mouseoverimage=http://i.imgur.com/JOmOE.jpg]http://i.imgur.com/OYvF7.jpg[/mouseoverimage] And the explanations: Spoiler -purple lines: exactly one evade -yellow lines: exactly half a sprint -green lines: one full sprint -white line: slightly above the max height obtainable by jetpack -Rock 1: Provide cover, as well as keeping the ghost in this phase on the move when it gets to cover -R2: There anyway. Probably shouldnt have marked that... u___u -R3: Spawn protection for FT3, and an approach along the farside for mid-field support -R4: Spawn protection for FT2, and any straight line from here to any point of cover on R7 overlaps with the plasma pistol (red circle), for easier vehicle control. -R5: Spawn protection for FT1, and lateral protection for moving to the caves/mid field ledge -R6: Cover to tower doors, and helps with vehicular spawn trapping. -R7: The main cover rock, and an ascendable spiral to rockets -R8: Far field support cover! Great for lending a hand, kinda open for straight chargin' -R9: Besides the angled rock on the top of that to move the Ghost along, this is cover and a field separator. -R10: More spawn protection for DFT3, as well as making an area with mid range sightlines over the grenade behind it. -R11: Final approach cover before tower; also helps keep vehicles from being too overpoweringly mobile. -R12: Defense mid-field support cover. The red circle are, as mentioned, a plasma pistol (on the grass) and a plasma grenade (on rock 2). Then phase one, the apparently-initially-confusing/dull-thus-redesigned/rebalanced drop phase! Now with more creativity, use of AAs, and hopefully more believably as an anti-air artillery platform with it's lower loading bays open. And of course, now phase 3, the Beleaguered Orison herself. Built from combined forerunner and covenant (and stolen human) tech, this could present all kinds of threats...Hopefully the attackers can take it down. Has 5 different entrances, is explorable inside, on the top, and on the bottom (yep). And there we go! I still need to do TONS of testing, as well as convincing people that I do indeed plan out my structures, but that's what I have so far. Might be ready in a few months.
The ship looks really good, but please add more pictures so we can judge it better. A weapon,a class and a vehicle list wouldn't hurt either. Also, banshee > warthog. Good luck.
Well, I like to think I balanced out the Banshee with the rocket hog/sniper, but testing will show otherwise if that's not the case. Either way, better than the scorpion I had instead of the hog >_> As for the lack of pics...it's a preview ;P. Maybe a few more as I get [slowly] closer to release.
The ship is great eye-candy, but I'm not sure it would play out well. Banshee bombs will beat rocket hogs as the 'Shees have their evade move which they can spam and become virtually invincible.
Thanks! I'm surprised you say that; the ship is probably the most "normal" of all the structures (ie, most similar to the general style I see here), and hopefully the game type tweakings I did last time will have changed it to flow even better compared to early tests. Yeah, the Banshee worries me. In all the testing I have been able to do, there is never any problem with it, but there's always the potential for mass, one-sided carnage thanks to it's FRG. It's on a loooong respawn timer and the rockets on the central rock pillar are slightly easier to get to as the spartan teams, but further testing should show if that doesn't really help.
Damn dude, the ship looks amazing. Other structures look less impressive though, some feel as if they don't belong, they are just blocks and bridges stacked around and on top of each other. Seriously though, love the ship.
Heh, yeah..I get that a lot. Still, the things I made are things I've never seen before. I wanted a tower structure which was small enough for some very intense CQC fights, was navigable on the inside, and also left plenty of room on the outside for alternate paths. Not counting jetpacking and leaving out the obvious weaving back and forth/going back, there are 32 possible ways to the top of the building, each having a different flow and style potential. The two cap points or either open or closed actually force a gameplay choice beyond mere directionals. Not that directional choice alone is bad, but I wanted approach choice too. The air platform, yeah, I'll concede it probably looks the most "plastered together", but I tried to get vertical more than anywhere else, since both teams start out with jetpacks in that phase. I've never seen round bunkers used like that, and certainly not at the drop speeds it's done with. ...I also ran out of budget and have absolutely zero structural items except 63 decorative pieces left >_< Thanks for the complements on the ship though! You wouldn't believe how long that thing took...sheesh. It was ridiculous, given forges "as-bad-as-humanly-possible" angle system...
Actually, testing this I found all three phases to be incredibly campy, and the map looks a little sloppy apart from the ship itself (though inside wasn't amazing.) Here is a rundown of each phase: P1: I definitely got a sword spree as an elite here while the spartans tried to take the bomb, but even without the sword we still could still have clustered the entire bomb area and stopped anyone from getting down. I personally feel the bomb was only planted out of simple luck that no one saw the planter, and in the end that area is way too small for 12 players to run around on. I believe many of us also die after phase 1 disappears, which if this is the case is not enjoyable. P2: the phase 2 lower objective is in a very small room, so cramped it could be cleared by one plasma grenade. If a drop shield was there it was still easy as you could just walk in, stick the ground, and either run out or die with them, only to respawn closer. The top objective was better, but there was only one way to it, and taking it was a much longer walk and you had to be lucky and find no one up there already. The building itself was a downright disaster, it really looked like a group of blocks thrown together and functioned like one for the above reasons. The short term speed boost elites got only further hurt spartan chances while making it so elites couldn't evade without launching themselves past the facility. The rocks in front were too spaced out, and it was difficult even here to win before even getting to the campy objectives. P3: The ship looks cool, but in the end you have one way into the ship and elites can just wait in those little hals to the side or shoot down on you as soon as you come up. It felt like a shooting rally for elites and a slaughter-house for spartans. Even if you get past this, there is another camping hole at bomb spawn, where elites can wait around the corner. Then the bomb has to go across the entire elite controlled area, down a long line of sight, and plant at the end of the long line of sight, where elites can just spam nades and shoot at. I also don't see what the banshee does, everyone is inside the ship, so all it can even shoot at is bomb plant, nowhere else. The man cannon is a good start to adding more paths, but people don't often see it is a spawn option. s for elite spawns, it isn't so great if the jetpacks are gone from those two bottom of the ship spawns, as you either have to wait or kill yourself to get out. Overall, a lot of problems with gameplay. Edit: this was for a slightly old version of the map, so bear with me if things have changed. Sorry but new phase 1 still looks horrible, as does P2 building.
As you can probably tell, I redid the entire first phase, including removing the sword entirely and making the platform not randomly kill people when the phase ends. Hopefully a lot less campy of a bomb start as well, but testing will prove otherwise, I'm sure. Phase two, I get where you're coming from, but I never [ever] see anything that close/cramped, and I wondered how players would react to it. The inner capture point was meant to be initially easier to get to while harder to hold, and perhaps this will become moreso the case when I severely cut down on the number of nades in the phase. Phase three, I added 5 more entrances onto the ship besides the kill-circle you mentioned, and changed the spawns around to make these extra entrances more apparent. This includes editing the elite spawns so the jetpack rooms on the bottom aren't a prime way out. I also added a lot more cover to both the forward and backward parts of the ship, as well as changing it to a core instead of a bomb. As for the looks, well...eh. Perhaps this is the wrong place for it, as this forum [arguably justifiably] judges aesthetics VERY heavily, but that's never been my style. I couldn't care less about aesthetics; as I said somewhere else, I'd tear down a statue to improve even the tiniest part of my map, even if it made it hideous. It all counts for nothing if it doesn't play well. Apparently, this "play" bit still needs a bit of work, and I'm in the process of completely redesigning the P1/2 buildings, but I will still always put unique gameplay before absolutely everything else.
I see the effort here and I like the ship, especially the use of the circular inclines to give it that curvy Covenant feel. On the game-play side of things...well...it's just not working. All the phases are scatterbrained and lack cohesion. None of them are particularly fun and I soon found myself wandering around trying to break the map until the time ran out. Just about everything Shoe said is spot on from the version I played. Even with fixes, I can't imagine any changes to parts of the map will be able to fix the broken whole. Rather than spend months trying to fix this, I would take what you've learned from this experience and start fresh. Sometimes it's simply the best thing to do in these cases and your future maps will benefit greatly from understanding what problems plagued this one. Keep it up man, I can see you have an eye for aesthetics. Try to use less bridges/narrow walkways and reaallly try to visualize how variable scenarios will pan out. How are my lines of sight looking? Is this place campable? How does this weapon/objective/vehicle placement affect the balance and flow of my map? Just keep asking yourself these questions and you'll see your map-making skills really jump up.
Hmm. Harsh but true! I'm surprised it's seen as campable as it apparently is, since narrow areas never struck me as terribly easy to camp...blind corners, maybe, but I [like to] think that I didn't have many blind corners. Oh well. I did go into this constantly asking myself those questions, but a distinct lack of competitive experience on my part was probably the most damning aspect. Oh well. In light of such stark criticism, I'll just remake the entire thing/try again. A few questions, both for general forgers and for anyone who played the map: -How do I break the height limit? I heard something about a height glitch, and I'd love to see what I can do with that... -Is it possible to set a phase such that it can have two aspects (say, two bomb sites), BOTH of which NEED to be blown up to progress to the next phase? -How do I adjust the field of my teleporters? I tried changing the shape, but that didn't do much at all. Well, it did, but at larger shapes it wasn't very reliable. -For whomever played my map: how disorienting was the P1 attackers drop? I have no idea how to make that portion more obvious, but I was told continuously that people were confused when they spawned into it.