[map] Bloodprison-CTF

[Ed]

Apart from misaligned floor lights at a ramp at the blue base I found nothing obviously wrong.

Fixed. Thanks for pointing that out, almost certainly means something else will be the same so will have a search round when playing.

Personally I'm not sure if it's good to have the flags at the lower level - you can basically runn in a straight line from flag to flag. This could underline the value of a good defense though, so it may be actually a good thing.

It was a tough decision and I put them down there partly to test a hypothesis. One of the major problems in CTF is when both teams capture the flags and everyone runs round the level looking for the opposite flag until the 2 meet. By making a level so that the route between the bases is simple and obvious, this is less likely to happen as the flag carriers are more likely to meet. At the same time it is just a straight corridor so anyone going down it is likely to encounter stiff resistance. There are also multiple ways of dropping in on the corridor to recover the flag.
The routes around the top of level are intended more for attack so you have to put more strategy into your attack than your get away.
We'll have to see if it works, if not I'll move the flags up to the ledge. The problem there is that room is tight and there could be more camping defence.

The map pictures are supposed to be 256x256 so no video memory gets wasted (300x200 will use the same amount of memory as a 512x256 picture)

Forgot the menu is all done in the 3D rendering stage. Will fix it, had thought that the 256x256 was a bit odd for the aspect ratio. All of the standard Nexuiz ones look a bit funny as they're 4:3, not 3:2 as the window would appear on most peoples monitors. Perhaps the screenshot area could be rewriten to always be the same ratio on every monitor?

[esteel]

I really like the map.. hope to be able to test it online soon. Though your map is smaller then the original Bloodprision is scaled up by 1.2 in the compilation phase.

[Ed]

Though your map is smaller then the original Bloodprision is scaled up by 1.2 in the compilation phase.

I saw the 20% scale up being talked about but I didn't know it was done in the compilation phase. Thought it was a bit small. How is that 20% done? It might be better to do it to widen some of the corridors and make it how people will be used to. It's not supposed to be a particularly small map so I should probably adhere to the original size wise.

[esteel]

Simply by adding -scale 1.2 when calling q3map2. There is a script used to recompile all the nexuiz maps. For reference the currently latest version is here: http://svn.icculus.org/nexuiz/trunk/dat ... iew=markup
I remember that there were problems in trying to use radiant to resize the map. Think it destroyed the texture alignment so it was done in the compilation phase.

[KadaverJack]

I saw the 20% scale up being talked about but I didn't know it was done in the compilation phase. Thought it was a bit small. How is that 20% done?

I'm not a mapper, but according to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Q3Map2#Switches you need to run q3map2 with -scale 1.2.
div0 has put a script to compile Nexuiz maps in SVN, which supports scaling: http://svn.icculus.org/nexuiz/trunk/mis ... iew=markup

Edit: d'oh, to slow

[esteel]

Edit: d'oh, to slow

But you were faster in the other thread

[Ed]

Another update:
Edit: obsolete link, see end of thread for latest

Fixed:
- 20% bigger, that's 44% more floor area and 72.8% more volume! Thanks to esteel and KadaverJack for the -scale 1.2 help.
- Realigned light texture on ramp in blue base. Thanks to SavageX for spotting this.
- Changed screenshot to 256x256, optimised compression a bit. Actually it's from the previous version but the scaling is the only thing different.
- Some more colour coding. Should be finished now.
- Fixed deathmatch start points in blue half so they no longer point at walls.
- Added dm, tdm, lms, rune, arena game mode support. Not all are that useful but they work and are only a few hundred bytes just in case someone somewhere wants to play one of them.
- Bot waypoints. This was a fun one! I wanted the two halves to be identical so I took the bloodprison.waypoints file and calculated in a spreadsheet their displacements from a point in the red base (taking into account the scaling) and then converted these displacements into positions relative to the corresponding point in the blue base. It worked very well and all I had to do is add a few for the join areas.

Still to do:
- Add dom support
- Get tdm spawns to happen at the team points used in ctf. This would make the tdm game base vs base which would be fun. Currently this doesn't seem to work and tdm uses deathmatch points (possibly it's using CTF points also). A minor problem but one that does kind of ruin the gametype on this sort of map. Is this possible or not?
- Tweak bot waypoints. The join is hard for them and they only use the lower level. The upper level they look at and run away, possibly because the jump is too big, maybe it needs cutting a little or is it just too optimistic for a bot to manage this sort of jump? They do look at the side tunnels occasionally but I've not seen one go through them even though they do grab the armour. Maybe they need the bottom lowering so that they can run through better,
- Some optimisation stuff. I've noticed that the roof of the upper corridor is not caulked on top and there's probably a few others.

Anyone noticed it up on a server yet? This one is a big change from the last and probably the last release before a final so if anyone has any gameplay reports I'd like to know.

[Strahlemann]

Good work there Ed !
I think having the flag down there will give some intense fighting and the straight connection between both bases is really dangerous to take for a flag-carrier.
This will hopefully provide very exciting matches.

I noticed some more misaligned textures here and there:



Also the corresponding lights in the red base should get a red touch instead of a blue one



And add some _glow to these lights:


This hallway is definitely too dark:



And there's the old "black items"-bug which was caused by scaling up the map.
I don't really remember how that got fixed, iirc it worked on my machine but not on some others...., maybe you just need the latest q3map2 version (should be 2.5.16) and try again.

[SavageX]

well, q3map2 is buggy. It sometimes will destroy the lightgrid, so items can get black.

The solution:

- do the bsp stage
- then scale the .bsp
- then do vis
- then do light

So the level is first scaled, then lights will be calculated.

Problem: q3map2 removes the light entities from the .bsp file and reads them direclty from the .map file (which is *not* scaled). Thus the light positions will be wrong.

Solution:

Define "_keeplights 1" in the worldspawn of the map. This way q3map2 won't remove the light entities from the .bsp and place them correctly.

Thus q3map2 will read the lights from the .bsp (if it does not and the lights are at the wrong position you have to move the .map file aside to make sure q3map2 doesn't use the light positions defined there. Not sure if this step is necessary).

This is a bit complicated

[Ed]

I noticed some more misaligned textures here and there:

Fixed. Those ones at the top I'd been putting off and hoping no one noticed them.

Also the corresponding lights in the red base should get a red touch instead of a blue one

The blue was the original light colour. I've changed it now so that they're red and blue coordinated. They're only hints at 1 .75 .75 and .75 .75 1 now. The central area lights are a mixture of pale yellow (the original) and white.

And add some _glow to these lights:

I've tried that now by setting the entities _glow to 0.5. That made no difference. Am I doing it wrong?

This hallway is definitely too dark:

Fixed. The one light wasn't enough so there are now three. I've also modified the gap jump to be a bit smaller.

And there's the old "black items"-bug which was caused by scaling up the map.

I've seen this too. I don't really understand SavageX's explanation of how to fix it so it's going to have to stay as is until I work out what I need to do to fix it.