Gold Rush

Time to oil this feedback up.

A map this size shouldn't have as many forge blocks as there are. Frame drops are pretty bad in most areas and you can easily avoid that by removing some of the aesthetics and conserve the rock pieces by using larger ones. (Try getting the object count to around 1400)
The rocket launcher should be a standard pickup. Don't use weapons pads.

With power installation being as open as it is, I'm surprised you went for the tight butthole approach with this one. There is very little room for humans to move around let alone successfully hold out. About 80% of the map is a cave system which just doesn't work with infection. Those areas need to opened up and expanded both in width and height. Currently it favors infected too much and it'd be impossible to utilize mid-long range weapons.

I do like the atmosphere of the caves and the theme as it's rarely seen. I can imagine this becoming a well received infection map if you take the time to polish it.

 

Alright so upon looking at this map I have determined it is a 5.0/10 (2 and a half stars) (WHICH IS AVERAGE DON'T BITE MY HEAD OFF), many of the issues bringing it down are aesthetics based, among a few game play issues. But overall gameplay is not the huge highlight of this critique as you have clearly already made changes and there are not too many horrific issues.

Now since you have no frame rate issues anything I am critiquing can be improved for around, or at the same budget, there are a few exceptions (the outside building) but overall you absolutely can improve the look of this map and in some cases save budget, there are a lot of consistency issues with some of the aesthetic.


I------------Lighting and light map

Now I understand you are colorblind, i'm not trying to be mean i'm just taking it into account so I will go easy when it comes to light color, however I highly suggest selecting all of the lights and changing the color to brown, with no filter this suits the color of the map the best I found. In some areas around the map you have yellow light yet in some you have a really deep orange light, you can't really tell as much in the screenshot here as you can in game, but in general this orange is too orange for even fire.


Another thing that you should get under control is lightmap, currently you sit around 120% lightmap which will result in really ugly low quality shadows, light glitches, and in some cases worse performance. What I did to improve this is to select all rocks on the map, turn off lightbake, and after redoing the lighting I went through and only turned lightbake on for rocks that stood out or had bad lighting in the cave, after doing so I ended up at 76%. You will want lightmap around 75% for the best quality shadows. As I go deeper into the review and show some examples of what I did you will see some of these changes come together.

II.....Skybox and Environment

This one bothered me quite a bit, one of the best features of Barrens, ESPECIALLY on the sunset skybox is that beautiful sun, you covered the whole outside part of the map in a shadow when the outside part isn't even in a cave, you are robbing your map of one of the best features of the map.

This is a relatively quick example I made, you want to highlight the sun on your map, not remove it. However I have one theory for why you wanted to do this, and that is the direct impact it has on the outside of your map, it exposes all the flaws your map has on the outside. I have a piece of advice that will really help, you have to make something look good with lots of light before you make it dark, basically meaning do not use darkness as a crutch to hide poor aesthetics, which was seemingly done quite a bit on this map.

Before-Forge Police are kind of suspicious


After-Forge police exposed an undercover opperation


When you are on the map itself it looks better than this screenshot since you are on the map and not at a distance (Don't pay too much attention to the rocks, you don't see the ugly pile at all on the ground) with direct light but in general it shows that this area needs a lot of work, which I will get to later.

Another issue your skybox had in the outside area was how low the ground was, as a player despite the very out of place looking border pallets it looked like I could jump down onto the area, you need to make sure your maps convey very clearly to a player where they can and can not go, there is nothing I hate more than an infection map that just spams invisible borders along areas that look accessible to keep players contained because of poor environmental design.

One less serious but still annoying issue is this section with the dead tree that is somehow in a desert, the walls are incredibly low, and as a player in infection that looks like a spot prime for camping, or a low wall to get to another area potentially, you may not agree but it will confuse some players, and some players will get killed trying to travel somewhere because well, the map does not convey to the player that they can not go there. This is a simple fix though, just drastically raise the walls and make them a bit more flat and less angled outwards so it lets players know it is not meant to be traveled.

Before-


After-

The last and final thing about the skybox is fog and immersion, never have 0 fog on any map, it looks really bad.


This looks very gross in the distance, if you apply some light blue fog not only will it look more natural, but it will make the lighting outside feel more believable, you never ever want to use 0 distance fog on an outdoor map, it accentuates the lower resolution and general ugliness of the skybox, this is why 343 has it on by default. Another issue I want to point out is the distance the skybox goes, you just end it on the edge and it ruins immersion because it just outright ends, if you redesign your skybox to accentuate the sun and delete unnecessary rocks , then you can kind of get away with some trickery to give the illusion that it goes on forever like a skybox should, you should never look at an area and think it doesn't look like part of the map. You can save some budget by deleting the terrain on the floor of the skybox and just utilizing most of the floor of barrens for it killing 2 birds with one stone, lowering it to convey to players its a death pit, and lowering budget, I would recommend using a few large hill pieces and merge it into the natural terrain on barrens though to make it seem more natural when it is lowered.

III......Assets,building and believability

Now some of the assets on this map are rather poor at best and really do not convey to me that it is a western mineshaft (my assumption), or whatever you were going for.
First off, these lamps, what are these, I know its hard to find small objects but this just looks ridiculous, I can't even tell you what it is supposed to be. Oddly enough using the same exact objects I made a more believable and in my opinion vastly better looking lamp, for this I took 2 of the lights you used, flipped them so the light sides are facing towards each other and merged them, then I took the cap and it merged in perfectly to the top, if you copy this make sure you turn one of the lights off to save on performance. This design also has a 2nd benefit, the game has an annoying bug that forces it to have lens-flare on, if you mess with the cap you can manage to hide this which will really help make it less distracting to players in game since the lamps are fairly low hanging.

Side by side example, you could even experiment with hanging lights on the walls and finding a way to make an even better version than the one I made, which is very possible because merging objects will allow for more clever ways of creating a lamp, this is just to show that there is a better way to make the same style of lamp.


Now onto the outside building, typically I like remaking stuff for others but this stood out so much for not fitting the theme that I felt like it wasn't worth doing since id have to redo the whole thing. Not only did the outside not look anything like a old western building or even like something that belongs in a mineshaft, but the inside was just baffling. Why are there only two bunkbeds? Why do they sleep next to a mineshaft? Why is the desk so heavy duty, how am I supposed to sit here?!


It honestly feels like you didn't try on this building, it makes no sense utility wise and its just empty and awkwardly sized, I feel like you casted a shadow on the outside of your map specifically to hide this building. Id recommend using more budget and doing the outside building, i'm sure you can find some ways to get this. There are ways to do something better looking without sacrificing performance.

I would like to take another moment to point out some of the rather odd pallet borders, they look very out of place, id recommend pulling the outer edge rocks up a bit to give a natural cue that it is the edge of the map and just deleting them all together, if you must have a fence id recommend having a slightly broken fence using primitives with grime covered wood. Also the small wood pallet crates are cool and work well, the large one looks very off and gross.


Now...Lets get to the cave, one issue that immediately caught my eye is how you did the turns on the track. You had incredibly wide and very off looking turns and this is due to one thing, the pieces.

See how the long quarter one makes a complete turn but the small one does not?

The 1/8 rings sadly do not make a full turn at 1/8th the size, but instead is just 1/8th of a ring, to get around this is actually fairly simple, you can use 2x2 simple blocks and make your own version that does a complete turn, it is actually a lot more difficult to notice than you would think, and if it is noticeable it is far, far less noticeable than the awkwardly sized ugly turns it had before.

This is on the nova filter with a bright white point light, look how hard it is to notice it is 5 2x2 blocks in the brightest conditions. I used snap 15 degrees and around 5 blocks to achieve this.



Is this an alien cave? Why is this a perfect hole? in what world would you think this is a good idea? I have nothing more to say other than gross about this.


Alright now for the tracks themselves, you had them shiny before which is very odd to me considering it is in a cave, I don't care if these tracks were put down 3 days ago, there is no way in hell they are shlaque with 10 reflectiveness. This does not seem very believable to me.

For this I have a before and after, I took off the shlaque, and I made it grimy dark iron, I also replaced the destructible wood with a grimy khaki colored wood block since this helps frames and looks better in my opinion (Too many destructible objects can effect frames and plus you can't make it grimy, not a lot, but it can make a difference), the wood going under the tracks is up to you, but I decided to not do this, I feel like this is easier to manage and keep consistent but if you want to keep that feature I understand.

Before


After



Ok now we can move on to terrain meshing, don't ever directly mesh terrain, it looks horrible in 99% of the the cases ive seen.

This looks very odd and poorly done, I had to shine more light on it to show it better but I feel like this was another example of using darkness to hide poor design, do not do this.


If you absolutely have to mix terrain, which you should only do on this map going from the open outside area to inside you should use a flat rock as a separator.


See just how much better this looks, it isn't my favorite since the transition makes no sense in the first place, but hey it is a step up. Id recommend using asteroid pretty much everywhere but directly outside and in very exposed areas. Also you have some natural plants growing in the cave, which makes no sense.


Now for the final part, the mineshaft area. I like the idea of using terrain pieces the way you did but the fact it is asteroid and not barrens on the walls makes it look really awkward especially when you mix it with barrens rocks.


If you are going to mesh those blocks then mesh the barrens ones so the color and shade matches the walls and use flat rocks to cover most of it , make the flat terrain turned on its side take a very minor role in the aesthetic instead of it being the wall itself and you will get a much more believable look, here I actually manage to delete a lot of rocks and items and just using flat rocks and a tiny bit of barrens flat pieces I was able to redo this area, look at how much more sense it makes, I also changed the hole to something more natural looking, this saved budget and just look at it, it makes me want to make a mineshaft, I was getting attached to this map.



Now I know I am reusing the same screenshot but that is because this is around the same area and there is one more think I want to point out, and that is the wood holding up the mineshaft, why would they use fancy wood pillars in a mineshaft? This is also an immersion issue, if you look at a picture of a real old mineshaft you will know they use khaki colored ugly wood pillars with no regard to how it looks, in the screenshot above you can see I changed this to primitives to reflect this. Also see how the asteroid terrain as the walls looks bad in bright light, especially when mixed awkwardly with barrens rocks? That means you should find a different solution, not make it dark in hopes it will look better, when making caves flat rocks are your best friend, use them in combination with a flat piece of barrens terrain and utilize some of the rocks that are their already and you will have a better looking cave using the same budget!


Ok one more thing

You should really simplify the lever here, not only is it way too shiny like the rest of the tracks and area, but it looks way off, id suggest using a more simple solution.



IV.....Gameplay

Now I am not going too in depth here but there are some things that are an issue.

A) Easter egg- You can't have Jorge's Chaingun with 35% as an easter egg dude, it's one of the most overpowered guns in the game, it takes 1% to kill an infected player and it has massive aim assist, also unlike most turrets this one allows you to move at a high speed, seriously remove this, even if you gave it 5% ammo it would be awful, any weapon that no one can fairly defend against should not be on an infection map.

B) Spawns-You have some spawns on normal physics, they can actually be moved in game causing people to spawn facing walls etc.

C) Initial spawns- This one annoyed me a lot, I tested the map and I walked 4 feet and died because the infected spawn right above you near a hole (Which they will always naturally go down since it is a point of interest for your eyes), this is not o.k, spawn them far from players so they have at least a good 10 seconds to figure **** out.

D) Weapon Pad/Rockets- I know you want to have a glitched weapon, but seriously do not have weapon pads on infection, not only is it odd for infected to know the location of a weapon, but this is not a core map, people will all rush to that direction causing them to not travel naturally and explore the map, also why you would want to make a rocket launcher easier to use on infection I have no idea, this map is pretty cramped, rockets are extremely OP for last man standing, if the map was more open id think its o.k, but the map is pretty cramped so all they will do is funnel infected and genocide them over and over.

This is just a note but understand that players naturally gravitate towards light and points of interest like a hole, use this to your advantage to funnel players towards areas you want them to be in more.

I like the theme, I like the use of palletes as weapon crates, I like the destructible walls, I somewhat like the atmosphere in its current state.

TLDR-

-Redo walls in cave (use barrens flat rocks, regular rocks, and terrain, make the terrain on its side play a minor role in the look not a major.
-Redo Lamps
-Make all lights brown (For a nice natural fire look)
_Use 2x2 primitives to do the small turns on the track instead of 1/8 rings
-Make everything nice and grimy
-Make non believable parts believable (No dead trees,No plants in caves).
-Redo outside house
-Redo skybox to bring sun into the map
-Do not mesh sand and asteroid, if it is transitioning from outside to inside use a flat rock to break it up.

All together the map just needs consistency and belivability, the map has a lot of potential.

 

I explained that my lanterns hid lens flare, but besides that thankyou for appreciating the review it took a long time to do.

 

Holy **** extraspicymemes goes hard

 

Spicy, this is so much feedback that leaving a review is conflicting. This looked personal. No hard feelings.