DM-PianoHorror Beta 1

[navboy]

To all cartographically-obsessed simianesque cohorts gathered together with a gnave and grooving with a Scottish waterpic:

Have ya ever wanted to blow somebody to pieces while simultaneously playing something cool on the piano? No?! Well here's your chance.

http://home.swbell.net/navboy/DM-PianoHorror.htm

is where to get the beta of my new map, DM-PianoHorror ...

Lemme know what ya think, guys. I know the botpathing still needs work, they're too easy cuz they don't really move the way i want em to yet, and i lose a fair amount of them off the edges of the playarea ;)

Mainly want ideas and reports on how it does framerate-wise on different machines. Also curious to know if i've solved the dreaded "disappearing faces on movers" problem (the piano keys are the ones to watch, the hammers for some reason have always behaved). Is it too dark down inside the piano, etc. Any other ideas, though i may have reached a limit on adding architecure, what with all the movers.

[MrSpoon52]

yeah my isp has del my isp account because im on adsl now really good of them to fit it for me.
anyone got a nuke


ahhhhhhh stress of it all

[ULTBase]

Dam dude, those pics look ace. I downloaded the map but it wouldnt work. It was missing a file called PianoHorror_texs. but the extension was different to usual and I cant remeber what it was. You included all the files as stated in the readme, and this looked like something that perhaps is needed in some of the coding. Do you get what I mean, coz I dont!!

[navboy]

aw crap, i changed one texture after i made my zip file, shouldn't be doing this stuff when exhausted.

Anyway, i re-uploaded with the new tex file, and for anybody that already downloaded, here's just the tex file by itself, zipped:

http://www.pol.lawrence.ks.us/DM-PianoHorror/PianoHorror_texs.zip


I would have just attached it to this post, but i don't see a control for attaching a file, even tho it says you can ... ??

okay, late for work ;)

[Nachimir]

Wow. I usually detest giant room maps, but this one is well executed, and the piano is a really good gimmick. Using the hammers for risk/incentive is great, though it's very awkward to squeeze past them.

It might be better to make the lower area of the room an automatic kill area by zoning it off and putting the gravity right up. I say this because:

- Most giant room maps are very sparse; preventing access to the floor and confining the action to the piano would tighten it up greatly.

- Being obligated to commit suicide on a mousetrap to get back up is a real pisser.

- It looks funny when I go over to one side of the room and the wall is in the skybox.

I like the detailing like the smoking cigarette, and the mousetrap kickers. There was a DM-Breakfast (or something) that completely pissed all over other giant room maps, because it was packed full of detailing and custom textures. That might give inspiration for some more details (Sorry I don't have a link, I think it's probably on Nalicity).

[navboy]

Okay this is weird ... Are you saying you're not dying when you hit the floor? There's a TriggeredDeath in there that does exactly as you say, kills you when you hit the floor, and the mousetraps on the floor are just for effect, they're not even functional. If the TriggeredDeath is not working i need to know; that's bizarre.

Were you playing God mode or something?

[navboy]

oh another question -

You're right, getting past the hammers is awkward, though i thought i may be justified with the reward being so great. I wonder though .... The way i had it originally you could not fall through between the walkway and the soundboard where the strings are. So, it wasn't any less awkward, but it was actually quite a bit easier to get the goodies because you just got up flush against where the strings were and ran along it.

This had the effect of it was easier to get at the stuff (too easy i thought so i changed it) but on the other hand there was a much greater incicence of getting popped by the hammers, which is of course cool and gratuitous and i like to see the custom hammer death message come up on the screen. ;)

Guess i'm not sure which is better, easier to get at/more hammer deaths versus harder to get at/less hammer deaths. I say less because it's so damn easy to fall through and the time you're actually behind the hammers is quite a bit less seems to me.

[Nachimir]

Ah, my bad, sorry. I have "behindview 1 | god" bound to n.

Hmm, I appreciate the gap making it harder to get the goodies, and it would be too easy with no gap. It just depends where you think the balance is. I thought there were so many other goodies in the map that I could just go get them instead.

[Silus_of_Earth]

OK, got it working. Nice!

I like it. Clever and different, the piano keys are cool. Bots seemed pretty good at it, too. How much more do you have to do to it?

[navboy]

Well, here and there the bots will just go flying off on big jumps and kill themselves on the floor below. Not sure if it only happens in melee or in going for a spot near the edge and overshooting it because they have jump boots on, something like that ...

Also wondering if the mousetraps are sufficient the way they or i'd thought about adding a center bar that runs from the kicker side to the coil, then a little tab with a piece of cheese on it, but it seems like a lot of complication and detail to add if this stylized version i've got right now is good enough to sufficiently suggest a mousetrap, i don't know yet ...

Item placement is still a little strange; i added jumpboots to the top of the lamp on the endtable just because it's *possible* to jump over there, and it gives you a not-so-easy way to get to the damage amp if the other boots in the area are already taken. But i'm not sure whether to draw the bots and players over there or not .... I've kind of left it sparse because i'd like the flow to mainly be on the keys and piano bench, inside the piano and up that rear area and back over the top of the piano.

On the other hand, it seems clunky to me to have an area of the map accessible (the endtable) and have it nearly empty just because you don't want players to spend too much time there. Kind of stumped on that one.

It's also too easy to camp on the right-hand end of the keyboard, from what i can tell, so i guess i need better flow to that area. I've already got some DistanceView triggers but they don't really prevent camping unless you have at least 8 bots in the game. I don't think human players would let people get away with camping there, but i don't want it as a weak spot with the bots either.

Finally, wondered how it does performance-wise on people machines ... Did it run okay or is framerate lagging? etc.

[Astyanax]

I downloaded it to see what you did to the movers to prevent their textures from disappearing. They worked flawless, but I wasn't able to find out what you did to them to ensure their textures to stay. In one map I'm making I'm having great difficulties with disappearing textures on movers, so I was hoping your map would give me some solutions.... :(

About the map:
Wow I love it! I thought Gravadyne (or however it's spelled) was nice, but this is really excellent work!

I played it with high texure and world detail and 5 bots (your recommend amount of players) and it ran perfectly smooth on my system (600 MHz CPU + Voodoo 3).

I really liked those piano keys playing notes when you step on them. I think there are too many jumpboots, like in Gravadyne. I never carefully watched the bots, but I didn't notice any strange or bad behaviour while playing. They did fall to the floor a few times, but that was because I'm good with the shockrifle :D. I think you need to make the radius of the trigger on the floor cover the entire floor, because you can safely translocate to the corner with the bottle. The inside of the piano was dark, but not too dark, just what you would expect inside a piano ;). The spot next to the piano keys with the shockcore is really a good camper spot, pretty easy to win from da bots from there using shockcombos, because they spend a lot of time on the piano keys.

[navboy]

hey, thanks for the feedback.

MOVERS: As far as the movers, i thought i discovered some principles early on, like order them all last. It really seemed to help. But as ai added more architecture, that seemed to have less and less of an effect. For a while after that, ordering all the hammers last seemed to work (the hammers being the most complicated movers, yet never showing any problems, i guess because they're smaller than the keys?) ... Once again, with more stuff added, that no longer worked. ;(

In the end, i spent a long time ordering and reordering and trying different brushes as semisolid. I think roughly what i did was get everything into the order that i wanted it (skyboxes first, then main room, then main subtractive brushes, then the rest in order of degree of detail. Then ordered semis to last, then nonsolids to last, then movers to last. The result was awful, so i converted all additive brushes and sheets but the movers and huge brushes to semisolids (just as awful) then slowly began converting semi's to solids, generally stiving to keep the stuff right around the movers as semi and making distant stuff solid, but also trying to keep simple on-grid stuff as solid while more complicated off-grid stuff as semi. By trial and error i got something that worked pretty well, but still messed up after a few games.

Then i tried different settings of the Cuts (top slider bar) when building, and finally arrive at 26 for the beta map. In all the times i've played it, i once saw one of the "problem" mover faces disappear ever-so-briefly (because i was so in tune with where the problems were) but then it redrew itself immediately, unlike before when once they disappeared they stayed disappeared to the end of the game except when actually triggered to move. Should probably note however that in some configurations i tested increasing the slider bar only made matters worse!

Something else strange is that somewhere along the way i realized the faces were also disappearing in 3d view in the editor. When i noticed that, i started moving the keys ever so slightly apart from each other (grid-wise), offsetting them a bit here and there so their surfaces weren't flush. Initially i also had the movers intersecting each other and the non-mover keys when they moved, which is normally no problem with movers, but repositioning them to where they absolutely intersected nothing helped quite a bit too. Getting them not to disappear in the editor didn't work 100% for in the game, but it helped quite a bit i think.


DM-PIANOHORROR: As far as gravboots, i guess i like the idea of jumping so high over the play area with all the danger of falling off the sides, and when i'm at one end of the keys and see a bot come flying down from above shooting the whole time it looks too cool ;) But yeah, i may have overdone it, not sure exactly what the detriment is to too many boots (except for screwy bot behavior) but maybe so ...

Which brings up my main problem right now, which is the camping at the end of the keys factor. When i play it, i tend to test it by camping at the right end of the keys; it sounds like you're saying you camped at the left end of the keys. Hmm, i was less worried about that end because there's so much activity there and it seemed much harder to camp, even though you do get the shockcore regenerating (on a long timer, btw), but that may just be my mediocrity as a player that made camping seem difficult there, heh ;)

I'm half tempted to take out the Shock Rifle altogether, but in a map with edges you can fall off off with goodies near edges (body armour, DamageAmp, health, etc) it just seem like you must have the Shock in there ... Yet definitely when i win (i play at Adept with 5 or 7 bots usually) it's because i was able to camp a few times with the Shock Rifle doing combos, though some games i spend so many lives trying to get set up to camp that i lose by 10 or 15 so i was hoping i was on the right track.

Also, don't know when you downloaded it, but Christmas Eve i added a soundtrack to it. Still needs a little work, but basically it's got some bar ambience (hubbub, applause now and then) and a standup bass and drum line for a kind of standard jazz-swing combo accompaniment, so it's like the players are the piano player in a little 3-part combo meant to be supporting a torch singer. Most people won't have their music up loud enough to make it effective i don't think, but it's hilarious to get several bots in there (or players) and hear the piano riffs that get created against the bass and drums! It's got slow swing parts and then a really fast relentless section.

Thanks for the tip on the translocator, i haven't played with it enabled yet, and didn't realize the corners weren't covered, i'll check it out.

[Astyanax]

Ouch! Changing the order of the brushes in my map with malfunctioning mover surfaces is not really something I look forward to; the map has 851 brushes and is over 10MB in size! :(

I deleted a lot of movers and the remaining movers are working OK now, but it looks by far not as cool as before. :( I'm still struggling with lots of collision errors caused by the enormous amount of spiral stairs. Also cylinder-shaped movers seem to be very 'sticky'; you get stuck when you walk passed them (while touching them with your side). I wondered if it was because of the rest of the map, so I created a new map with only a subtracted cube and a cylinder-shaped mover, but that one was sticky as well :mad:. What to do?


I didn't have any music with pianohorror, but the bots created their own symphony on the piano keys. ;) I suggest you delete some boots, and give the remaining ones a faster respawn time. This way you won't run into a pair of boots around every corner, but you'll still keep your flying bots :).

You could try putting a sniperspot (or whatever it's called) at the left end of the keys. Maybe this'll draw some bots who like to camp to that spot and make it harder for players to control that spot. Whatever you do, don't take out the shockrifle!! For those who are good with the shockrifle (like me :cool: ) it is great fun to try and push other players over the edge to the floor with it! :D

[Mxtrmntr]

Originally posted by Nachimir
I like the detailing like the smoking cigarette, and the mousetrap kickers. There was a DM-Breakfast (or something) that completely pissed all over other giant room maps, because it was packed full of detailing and custom textures. That might give inspiration for some more details (Sorry I don't have a link, I think it's probably on Nalicity).

Just came across the thread, and it probably doesn't really fit the topic at the moment, 'cause I haven't played your beta yet... but anyway, I remembered the review and just wanted to post the URL :) : http://nalicity.beyondunreal.com/reviews/dmbreakfast.html

It's a map for Unreal 1; didn't play it myself, but I guess it's one of the better "little people" maps.

btw., this "John" = Angelheart

[Nachimir]

Originally posted by Mxtrmntr
btw., this "John" = Angelheart

Ah-Haaa... right.

BTW, love your avatar Mxtrmntr. :)

[Mxtrmntr]

Originally posted by Nachimir


BTW, love your avatar Mxtrmntr. :)

lol, thx ;)

It's some Radiohead stuff, I think it can be used as buddy icon for some instant messenger service... there are still some other icons left, if you want :D

http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead/rha_primary_frame.html?buddy

They should appear in the other window that's popping up at the same time :D

[navboy]

hehe, yes nice and freaky, angel ...

and thanks for the review, i'll check it out, if i can in fact play an Unreal1 map with UT? Seems like i played a DavidA warpzone tutorial once that was an Unreal map ...

[navboy]

Asty -

10MB?! ****! My understanding is that the movers share the same BSP as solid brushes, so basically they're competing with all the other solids in your map. This must be why reordering has such a big impact.

As far as sticky movers, that's weird that it did it in a simple test map ... I've noticed walls get sticky in a busy map with lots of cylinders, just figured it was tiny phantom ledges from BSP errors. Did you try it with both the 2DSE and primitive cylinder button to see if how you create the cylinder makes any difference? Only other thing i could thing of mover-related that might make any difference at all would be the placement of the pivot point.

Okay, ShockRifle stays in, i removed the shockcore and put in two health vials instead, tweaked the botpaths a bit more, added a DistanceViewTrigger, still campable but it's better. Maybe i'll try the AmbushPoint though i hate the idea of suggesting they camp out where they're so vulnerable (i've already got a couple in the dead-ends inside the piano). Will try less boots too just to see. What do you have against lots of boots anyway? ;)

[navboy]

damn, the DM-Breakfast link is bad, NC is relocating the mirrors or something. If anybody knows of a different link, lemme know.

[Mxtrmntr]

Arrghl, noticed that the link doesn't work atm but I forgot to tell you about that, sry :(

There are several links when you search for it through Google or whatever, but I dunno which ones are good... anyway, I guess the guys at Nalicity will have that problem fixed quite soon.

[Luggage]

Originally posted by Mxtrmntr
lol, thx

It's some Radiohead stuff, I think it can be used as buddy icon for some instant messenger service... there are still some other icons left, if you want

http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohe...rame.html?buddy

They should appear in the other window that's popping up at the same time


Hey thanks! There are some really cool ones! And I love Radiohead... :D

[Mxtrmntr]

Originally posted by Luggage


Hey thanks! There are some really cool ones! And I love Radiohead... :D

Glad to hear that :D