DjAy has registered (hi Dj ) and we can finally criticise his maps shamelessly. I'm going to load his last creation named ONS-Surripere-)o( in few days, so check it out and write your impressions.

Original thread. Download. Get missing files here or here.

Don't make him cry on his first day. Save the pain for later.

Umm, so how long does proper etiquette dictate we have to wait for the mapper to appear and say a few words about his "creation" before we offer feedback? Cause I'm pretty sure however long that might be, it's passed. Or did DJT already realize on his own the pointlessness of this edit and we should all just agree to forget about it?

well, the forum just deleted whole post, so here i go again:

Hi everyone!

Pegasus, you will just have to excuse me. being in and out of the hospital, the last thing on my mind is this "pointless edit" or this game for that matter. your frustrations were noted over and over again the other night in game. i'm sorry you dont have the files that we have on )o( and were 'forced' to download it.(for 1 weapon)

that being said, heres the summary:

-upgraded from the fluid/stock vehicles
-removed mantas from cores to ensure it isn't a back and forth map all game
-expanded the outer borders of the map
-fixed holes all over terrain
-(believe it or not) upgraded weapon lockers + added pepper pot

next projected edit:

-maxed out link in lockers
-minimize fog distance(for better fps)
-more jump pads from core
-make spawn points around weapon lockers in core
-considering making it a night version(instead of day)

I'm still open to suggestions so feel free to express them. when i return home, i'll post screenshots and reply to the hate mail;)

love'
deej

ps- Foibos, if you would like a version w/out the pepperpot, let me know and i will make it so.

First of all, welcome to Techcom!
And thank god there is a mapper alive

Got any screenies, no?

I got issues with terrain in my editor it's always bugged -_- (The tool)


Greetz
VK'

Have no problem with that pepper gun. Download of whole package including the special files and music track available on our SkyDrive. And the original map (with screens) is available here. Btw, you've edited the older non-ECE version I guess. The newer one would be a better option.

DJ, nobody here demanded you take the time to write essays about your edit while you have pending health matters to deal with; no one's that maladjusted among us - to insinuate otherwise seems like a pretty low blow to me. I don't think that something brief like "have pressing RL matters to tend to, will post a description when I can, sorry for the delay" would be too much to ask for, however, instead of letting us wonder for 4 days wth is going on... after having been welcomed and introed by the server's admin no less.

Btw, sorry if my ingame "frustrations" frustrated you; guess it took a while to fully outline all the ways in which this map (and its edit) doesn't work. But just to avoid having them dismissed as merely reactionary or caused by pack mentality, as it often happens with ingame comments, let me elaborate here.

Let's start with the file trail. It may not be a deal-breaker on its own, but it certainly doesn't earn the map any points that for new players to join, they first have to DL 34megs, spanning 11 files (by the time they're done, the map will've probably already rotated) just 'cause the editor wanted one weapon from a pack but didn't bother to mylevel its code and assets and just tacked everything on the side. And I'm not even getting into whether the pepperpot provides a gameplay boost to offset this drawback or not here (hint: it doesn't). Still, the WoE pack is probably popular enough that this would be a one time hassle, so regulars can overlook this.
That said, there's a very good reason why mappers try to follow the doctrine of "myLevel the few, sidesource the many": it achieves the best distribution method by saving both players and the server time and BW and that's exactly why I was bringing this up as a flaw. In fact, it surprises me that there isn't a mandate in place by now from Foibos stating that for any new map requiring additional files to be accepted, those should not exceed the 50% mark of its filesize. Either way, thanks for suggesting my critique was based on nearsighted, temporary inconvenience. For the record though, don't feel bad about forcing me to DL anything; in the 6+ years I've been playing this game, my cache dir has always stayed well stocked in resources and from more gametypes than you've probably ever played yourself, I can take care of my UT file needs even without mappers' providence .

Onto gameplay now, where most of the suffering takes place. I mentioned this was a pointless edit and this wasn't me just being sensationalist or petty against you (I don't know you, I have nothing against you); there's a reason for this and it has to do with you picking a bad map to edit in the first place.
Surripere is the crappiest map Outpt made, even from its ECE days: rote theme and meshes, no music, humdrum and uninspired geometry, very little use of the z-axis, a glaring terrain hole, bad bases design with hard to hit cores, nodes with artificial barriers, lack of weaps and ammo (no linkgun in center even), poor vehicle loadout especially for 32p matches, those absurd center lifts... the works. Seriously, I can't think of a single aspect where this map does better than dead average. I've no idea what urged you to pick Surripere to edit, but IMO it's a pointless venture by definition and unless someone changed everything about it (essentially creating a new map on top of it), it'll stay irredeemable forever.

Since you did pick this map to edit, let's review what you did. First, you changed a few vecs around to create a mix that seems even more disparate and ill-suited for the map's terrain (badgers are already finnicky on flat surfaces, imagine here with all these hills; let's not even talk about the scorp variants), then you threw some spider mines, LGs and a pepperpot on top of that (which essentially is just a fancier avril). Mantas helped a lot with getting around the map fast though, but you removed the ones at bases and added the PPC of all things, a lumbering and spammy artillery type vehicle, esp. when you left the SPMA there as well. Music's still absent, lack of overall feeling through lighting, particle emitters, localised audio fx, interesting skybox, water or anything else persists, terrain's still the same minus one hole, those center lifts still alert campers above to incoming enemies (seriously, wtf?) and now the cave node attackers have mines to deal with as well as no linkguns waiting for them if they make it. "Expanded" borders don't help much either since there's fewer mantas too, so that's yet more wasted effort. Only change I found myself agreeing with was the switch from a cicada to a raptor for the center node's roof spawn. So... in what way is this edit better than the ECE one? Chokepointing the link setup to each core would pretty much be the only way to make this map worse.
Overall, this seems to me like yet another example of the oft-applied "omnify to improve" school of thought and the foundamental flaw of this mentality can easily be seen here as much as anywhere else because they make about as big an improvement to a map as eating crappy food out of colourful plates. Fact remains, you started out with a bad map and ended up with a bad map, but for slightly different reasons.


Now, I may be new at omni and not know exactly how high the standards there are and what evaluation process new maps have to go through before being accepted, but from what I've seen, nobody there seems to think there's anything worth mentioning at all about this map and the ingame comments weren't as many (or as detailed) from a nearly full server as one would've expected for a new map either. That concerns me, both for what it might imply about the quality of content already there, as well as how it might affect a mapper's regard of their work's actual quality. If anything and everything is good enough, after all, you're not working towards better quality, merely larger quantity. I would hope that TechCom's map quality requirements are slightly higher and that prospective new maps really undergo a process of examination and possible resubmission stages by our community before being added to the maplist. Hell knows, this one sure needs it.

Welcome to the msg board, btw.

Should the map stay? There are better maps, but if we keep Severance or Lucid, why not this one.

Never actually liked Severance. That Levi-thing just looks like a crime that someone did on nature…

Which one was Lucid? The one with the big canyon of green goo in the middle and the EONS Scorps? That one is fine, though. Never takes too long and feels kinda oldschool.

foibos wrote:
Should the map stay? There are better maps, but if we keep Severance or Lucid, why not this one.Even if Severance and Lucid were as bad as Surripere (which I do not believe to be the case), this is very much a slippery slope mentality: having some bad maps on the roster already becomes an excuse to include even more bad maps? If anything, the roster's evolution should be moving in the opposite direction and identifying a couple of bad seeds in there should be a reason to start searching for even more to weed out. Hell, I can name several examples of bad maps that we could stand to drop thereby improving things, but that's taking this topic to places it's not meant to be going. If you believe it's time for something like this, create a new thread specifically for such a convo and I'll be happy to elaborate. As far as this edit is concerned though, I do support axing it.