played grotto!

[Balton]

hey Nach! I played. It it cooooool! What I disliked so far is the weapon placing. There are not enough weapons and ammo. I somehow end up with 2 enforcer and an empty ripper fighting an bot with the flak. Weaponstay would help a bit... but if you can put in more weaps it'll be nice.

what I like
the architecture, the setting. The sniper point with the alarm. The door that gets invisible, the breakabel wood thing in the house...
lots of good stuff in !

and maybe you didnt had the time yet but the little lake/puddle where the invis door is, there is no water zone in yet... plays a bit strange...

[ULTBase]

Nach, its amazing. I really mean it, it is soooo good. The whole map spits out perfection. I can;t wait to see this fully complete :)

[Nachimir]

I've been on it for... more than ten hours. It's much prettier now, lighting is nicer indoors, the laser alarm has been upgraded for a much better version, and a large rock divides the outdoors in two... BSP is looking okay. I'll tweak the paths and get Beta2 up in the next few days.

Balton, thanks, weapon placement was one of the things I was wondering about. There are locations that blatantly need inventory to make them worthwhile. The empty waterzone is a side effect of rushing with a bad BSP.

Thanks Base; silus-in-another-thread. :)

[Silus_of_Earth]

Yeah, the weapon placement will be important because the map is pretty big, so there's a chance people will just hang around areas with good stuff in.

(That was said before coffee, okay? Stating the obvious is sometimes fun)


As for BSP, except for that river bit it all seemed really nice and solid, which is quite an acheivement looking at the architecture.

There was a bit of texturing in one of the corridors that looked funny - I think it was a rock texture, but it wasn't aligned properly - too big for the segments.

Should be a good'un!

[navboy]

there was a bot-getting-hung-up problem at the switch-back in the path from the house to the next tier up. Like they're trying to take a shortcut a few feet in from where the ramp starts and just running in place. Easy pickin's ... ;)

so what are the lasers for in that one doorway and lil' red button nearby?

Oh i almost forgot, i didn't look in the editor to see, but if there aren't any DV triggers on the top edge of the redeemer cliff (that overlooks the grotto) might not hurt ... I stood up there with the ripper alt-firing and racked up several kills and only stopped when i got tired of it and jumped down.

yep, love that damn monster sound and the trap if you go in there. very funny.

[ULTBase]

How about following what Silus did Nach, as I think that map would make an amazingly good DOM map as well as DM?

[Nachimir]

Sorry, sorry. The path network is just the basic pathlogic one. No fancy stuff in yet, but I've just finished all the geometry and will put refined pating in over the next few days.

The lasers used to trip the red light in the sniper nest, but it stopped woking the other day. I hadn't changed any tags or anything... <frown> but I found a better way of implementing it yesterday. Now the lasers trip a little siren and the light flashes.

Hmm... yeah, DOM points. Probable locations would be:

The cellar,
The cave with the cascades
The donut-monster cave
The upper end of the outdoor area (Um... the end near the house, not the arch).

Hmm.. The cellar and that last one are brought very close by the teleporter... oh, I've got it. But the bit I'd use isn't in that Beta... tomorrow; tomorrow :)

[navboy]

... make a map both DOM and DM?

or do you just release two versions at the same time, using DM- and DOM- in the filenames?

[Nachimir]

I think UT will automatically remove dom points if the map is played as DM, and I have seen one old temple map that did that.. I can't remember what it was. And (just a guess) that approach might lead to some odd bot behaviour in DM play. This approach also involves users faffing around renaming the file too.

Silus did two versions of Venus, and I think I'll go that route with Grotto.

[Mxtrmntr]

Originally posted by Nachimir
I think UT will automatically remove dom points if the map is played as DM, and I have seen one old temple map that did that.. I can't remember what it was. And (just a guess) that approach might lead to some odd bot behaviour in DM play. This approach also involves users faffing around renaming the file too.

Silus did two versions of Venus, and I think I'll go that route with Grotto.

The temple map was Chico's DM-Tezcatlipoca, I think. But I can't remember if the bot behaviour was affected or not; Nalicity gave it a 9/10 rating for bots, so I guess they weren't bad. Another map that had that feature was DM-Tuscan, I think... and lots of other maps that I can't remember atm :)

[Nachimir]

Aha, thanks for that Mxtrmntr.

==========

Okay, I've emailed all you fragadelicans with the Beta 2 link. There are quite a few changes in it.

The botpaths are greatly improved, though not entirely finished.

Things I'd realy like feedback on:

Player-counts. How many is too many/too little?
Inventory: Enough? Placement ok? Too much?
How does it flow?

Framerates + PC specs would also be useful.

Also, I left a visible trigger in this version, so you can just jump up to it if you want to play with the sniper nest alarm. :)

I'm aiming for Friday night / Saturday morning release.