pegasus_ wrote:


Umm, okay, wtf? Have you all been licking 'shrooms off the walls while I've been away and suffering from mass hallucinations now or something? What's all this absurd talk I'm seeing for 2 pages here about the shock rifle being this almighty formidable weapon that spells doom to anyone who dares even gaze upon its business end? Have we been playing different games all this time?


LOL

foibos wrote:
I'm such a bad guy if I want to keep lower visibility in lake and equal ADS height.

The nodes themselves are also not on equal height, you know.
And if you want the lake to be a bit more dark, then I could try to put a negative light there in the next version.

[quote]
Trifling dispute, isn't it? But I really didn't mean to piss you off, as long as you're our only mapper.

I think I should start getting rid of Destroyer and tell you, Peg and Jancsi only bullshit about the editor.

[quote]
Shock Rifles ruin the WW2 feeling of Spiffingrad more than anything else, but if you like them, you should have them. Am I drunk or Peg is praising me? It must be a parallel universe... Thanks anyway, man.

I know, maybe I'll reduce their ammo a bit in the next version, but they are necessary. I also think that the final version is achieved in the next time, though I won't call it final for now.

If you can get me on the other hand the license to use the weapons from the "Ballistic Weapons"-mutator, then you'd get your WWII-realism, though it would play in a total new way, which wouldn't maybe the best at all.

foibos wrote:
[...]Am I drunk or Peg is praising me? It must be a parallel universe... Thanks anyway, man.Yeah, yeah, soak it up, czech boy, cause the next gravy train from me ain't due for another 15 months :p. Seriously though, I just happen to be a firm believer of placing credit where it is due and I think everyone would agree that you've done a good job bringing this server from obscurity to the top of the popularity list, quite quickly too. Of course that doesn't mean that "good" is all there is to aspire to; there's always "better" and as far as that goes, whenever I see something on the server that I know of a way to make it better, you can bet I'll give ya a piece of my mind about it whether you agree with me or not! So yeah, posters who aren't 2-dimensional caricatures and can praise AND condemn depending on the situation... big surprise >_>.

foibos wrote:
[...]But I really didn't mean to piss you off, as long as you're our only mapper. [...]Has it really come to that? There's nobody else around we can count on for map tweaking besides Crusha anymore? BadWolf, or DjAyT, or anyone? I mean, don't get me wrong, our friend here is quickly on his way to becomign quite a decent editor, but he's never created anything from scratch that could be played by normal ONS standards, has he? I'd hate to think our only option for the future is merely tweaking the maps we got and that's it :/.

foibos wrote:
[...]Shock Rifles ruin the WW2 feeling of Spiffingrad more than anything else[...]When did you start developing such weird notions about map editing? The "WW2 feeling of Spiffingrad"? Dude, this is Unreal, who cares if it seems realistic? Does that make the game any less fun or anything? Considering the vast amount of exotic and/or outlandish vecs, weaps and maps that we encounter both on the original game and on TechCom, I honestly don't see how this suddenly has become any sort of priority :s. Let it go, man. As far as I'm concerned, Spiff can be played both with or without the shocks, but I'd rather have 'em in for those who like 'em, since it fits my general mentality about weaps on ONS maps: "just give players all weapons on all lockers on all maps (except maybe for mines, those lame resource hogs) and let ppl decide what to use when based on their experience" - simple. I don't see the SR as anything special to arrange for separately from all the other weaps, so let's please quit making that big a deal of it and move on to better things. That also goes for a certain friend of ours who can't seem to rein in his obsessions and stop fiddling with trivial, unnoticeable and gameplay-irrelevant details... you'll never move on to the dreams you have of bigger and better things if all you do is indulge your compulsion to rerelease the same 2-3 maps over and over and over again, you know?

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]I think I should start getting rid of Destroyer and tell you, Peg and Jancsi only bullshit about the editor.[...]Actually, my main goal when approaching any digital craft/skillset is mostly to just understand what happens and why. After that, there's usually very little incentive left to drive me to actually create something with what I've learned cause I get bored and jump to something else by then. So you got very little to worry about concerning me stealing your thunder here .

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]I know, maybe I'll reduce their ammo a bit in the next version, but they are necessary. I also think that the final version is achieved in the next time, though I won't call it final for now.[...]Dude, whatever else it is you think you need to do with Spiff, just take your time, do it all in one last version and MOVE ON! I mean, honestly! And please leave those Ballistic weaps out of TechCom maps. Please.

pegasus_ wrote:
I mean, don't get me wrong, our friend here is quickly on his way to becomign quite a decent editor, but he's never created anything from scratch that could be played by normal ONS standards, has he? I'd hate to think our only option for the future is merely tweaking the maps we got and that's it :/.
[...]
That also goes for a certain friend of ours who can't seem to rein in his obsessions and stop fiddling with trivial, unnoticeable and gameplay-irrelevant details... you'll never move on to the dreams you have of bigger and better things if all you do is indulge your compulsion to rerelease the same 2-3 maps over and over and over again, you know?

Well, I started something by scratch already with the goal to make it a normal ONS-map but that was long time ago when I was really new to the editor, so I decided to wait with that until I got myself some skill with it. I now even have a rough floorplan of a new ONS-map I wanna make and at least some ideas about the design of the map that comes after that.

For now the only thing that is keeping me back, the "bottleneck of skill", if you want to call it this way, is that I didn't got into 3D-modelling for now and the maps would really suffer if I'd make all models within the editor, if that is possible at all.
I gonna try to model something when I find some time for myself to do that in the next time. Once I made an object in Blender that is more than a simple cube and exported it successfully into the editor so that I know that it works, I gonna start with my map.

The only real thing I still know almost nothing about yet in the editor (what a sentence) are the emitters, but in that case may copy & paste the best, or using xEmitters.


About the Spiff: I am sorry for the many versions, but since I tried some things out for the first time then, I had to test how they work out online and with real players.
And you surely understand that it makes no sense to call something final without having a last Beta before.

crusha_k_rool wrote:
Well, I started something by scratch already with the goal to make it a normal ONS-map but that was long time ago when I was really new to the editor, so I decided to wait with that until I got myself some skill with it. I now even have a rough floorplan of a new ONS-map I wanna make and at least some ideas about the design of the map that comes after that.[...]Show me!


crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]For now the only thing that is keeping me back, the "bottleneck of skill", if you want to call it this way, is that I didn't got into 3D-modelling for now and the maps would really suffer if I'd make all models within the editor, if that is possible at all.
I gonna try to model something when I find some time for myself to do that in the next time. Once I made an object in Blender that is more than a simple cube and exported it successfully into the editor so that I know that it works, I gonna start with my map.[...]Nah, nobody designs anything 3d in the editor beyond terrain and BSPs, I believe. For anything more advanced you'd need to create and export it from a proper 3D app like Maya, 3DSmax, zModeller or whatever. Perhaps we have a few ppl here who're adept in some of those programs and might be willing to lend a hand if you created a thread and asked for help? If memory serves me right, you already worked with Hunt on those (annoying) czech hedgehog antivec obstacles for a couple of the maps you've edited recently, maybe he'd be willing to help you some more or guide you while you learn to model something yourself. On the other hand, if missing the necessary meshes is your problem, why not do what most other young and aspiring map creators have been doing all this time while getting their feet wet with their first maps and, you know, just grab whatever you want from other maps? Surely with so many maps online plus the wealth of the Unreal anthology's mesh library at your disposal you could at least find most of the objects in there, no?

crusha_k_rool wrote:
[...]About the Spiff: I am sorry for the many versions, but since I tried some things out for the first time then, I had to test how they work out online and with real players.
And you surely understand that it makes no sense to call something final without having a last Beta before.Why not try modifying your approach as a test and see if it helps doing it this way: first off, post a TODO list here with all the features and changes you want to include. Assuming that Foibos or the majority here have no objections to it, or any suggestions of their own (like I do about adding the sniper rifles back to a few more easily reachable places like they were before or removing some of the hedgehogs), you can start adding them on your own pace and when they'are all there, as well as any other less important or aesthetic tweaks you might've come up with, release a final version beta. Beta gets playtested for a week or so, gets fixed if necessary, then it's out and we're done. I think that way beats the continuous back-n-forth between you and Foibos over IM, server chat and msg board posts with any mind changing and whatnot that may involve, plus the process becomes a bit more... transparent for the rest of us who'll be playing the map afterwards and we get a chance to chime in too during the editing stage. How's about it?

Show you what? My first map or the floorplan?

The map is deleted probably, as it had only the terrain with one texture and the skybox so far, I lacked the knowledge of how to make a FluidSurface.
The floorplan is somewhere where I don't know, as I made it in my holidays (I was bored and it was flying through my head all the time). And even if I had it, my printer/scanner doesn't work under Vista anymore and I was too lazy to find myself a new one with a good price but also good quality.



Yeah, Hunt helped me a lot already, but I need to become more independent if I want to make my own maps. The hedgehog was actually just a test if it worked, but I liked it and after all the problems we had until it was imported with fitting texture-alignment into the editor, I just added it to Spiff because it fits there nicely.
They were taken by Foibos then and set into Battlefront. Was not my idea, but if he wants them there, then they should be. Not that anybody ever drove there really and Mantas can still easily get over them.

I use Blender as modelling program because it is free, but I watched many video-tutorials already (though they are not really made for mapping. They often talk about render-only features, and never think about keeping the poly-count low.
But also a reason for Blender is, that there is already a custom exporter that works with Unreal, probably better than what we have for 3Ds Max.



Your TODO-list sounds good, but I often get most ideas about changes during the edit-phase and wouldn't really have much to think about before. I'll try to consider this next time.

It's been a while… I collected many ideas and would have waited longer, but I think the improvements are enough for a new version. The next would need my toolset, but that could take some time to finish.

First thing to mention: This map drove me crazy. Not only in a good way.
It was very likely to just shut the editor down without saving when I wanted to save it or when it should rebuilt the paths. The problem, how I found out later, was that there is in fact some kind of limit in the editor. Of course the must be one - you can't put an infinity of things into a map. However, the problem wasn't really that the number of actors would exceed a certain value (who knows what would happen if you had 2^32 actors in your map…), but a more hidden and complex one.
It has to do with the way how paths are built. If you had IT in school for a few years, then you might know about pathfinding or search algorithms in a chained list.
UT is using an adjacency matrix for the paths too. That is basically a list that tells which pathnode links to which other pathnodes. And it seems like there is a limit here somewhere either in the number of maximum pathnodes, the number of maximum connections between nodes or the number of connections from a single node… I don't know which one is the cause, but I had to cut down my pathnetwork a lot before I could save the map again without losing data.

Another issue would be, that actually no brush in this map lays on the grid. It's a miracle that the UEd-G0bl1n didn't come yet and hacked a lot of holes into that map. The opposite is the case: the more you try to correct the errors, the more would it actually tear the map apart, so I will just leave this medical miracle as it is.



Let's talk about what things have changed:
-Repositioned the Czech Hedgehogs to open more paths or to give more defense.
-Made it way more harder to get into the northern sniper building, the ladder is removed and the front entrance felt the power of the TerrainEditingTool. There now is a plank on the back…
-Added some ammo for sniper rifles.
-Added a ladder to a new spot to allow the Reds some surprising attacks, if they can use it right. It will give Red a good chance to sneak around the enemy to get the Ion Painter behind their back.
-Teleporters in Blue base are now randomly choosing their destination. Before, the target destination depended on the location at which you entered the teleport pad, so if two guys used exactly the same location, they could still telefrag each other. Now is that a 1:6 chance.
-Tweaked some WeaponLockers. I forgot about the exact things, but I think I reduced the Minigun ammo.
-Removed some explosive barrels from bad locations.
-Added more EAX effects.
-Changed the Sniper Rifle at the southwest Node to a Grenade Launcher and put some more decoration into that building.
-Changed content the WildCardBase at the center.
-Changed location of one Ion Painter.
-Optimized some collision hulls.
-Improved botpathing.


Maybe it doesn't sound like much, but I think you will feel the difference when you play it. It should be more fair for Red now and comeback shouldn't be almost impossible.
If it still is, then the next version will have something like a 'Last Chance' for that case…


Download v2-4-5 (6.35 MB, 7zip)