UT3 VCTF-Harbour, Beta 6

VCTF-Harbour

VCTF-Harbour


It is done, my first map is complete. Thanks a lot to everybody who helped getting this project along, I couldn't have done this without the aid of both the Epic tutorials and, even more so in the end, the community. I hope you enjoy the map.

There's multiple paths to and from the flags - essentially, there's about 6 ways up and 3-4 major ways down of the ships, not counting the countless suicidal options for the latter. The open ground in the middle of both sides, covered by rocket turrets, is dangerous ground to carry a flag through, but there's a couple of sneaky paths along the sides of the map that make it perfectly possible to capture with some map knowledge.

There's plenty of powerups and specials on the map: A slow field, two EMP mines, a Redeemer, Keg'o'Health, and a UDamage, and two pairs of Jump Boots. There's also a lot of health lying around, and both Chest and Head Armors and a Shield Belt. However, that's necessary too, because the high ground of the ships and the great sniper positions make them great bulwarks and tough to get in and out in one piece. The map also has plenty of jump pads, and some paths not accessible by vehicles or even vehicle fire, making it less vehicle-dominated than others.

Both sides also have two AVRiL spawn points, and there's AVRiL ammo in two positions per side as well. Regular weapons, there's every single one except the Bio Rifle. Sniper Rifles are in sniper positions, Shock Rifle and Rocket Launcher are a bit harder to obtain than the Stinger, Link Gun and Flak Cannon - the latter are dispersed in weapon lockers throughout both bases, and there are some of those near every spawn position. Available vehicles finally are a Scorpion and a Hellbender near the start positions, and a Goliath near the map center. I guess the two rocket turrets count as vehicles as well.

As for trick jumping, that certainly does help getting from one point to the next ... the Jump Boots of course help with that, since they provide ways up to the walkways and fast ways off the ships, but there's some spots where wall dodging is beneficial too. Lift Jumps help with both obtaining one Rocket Launcher that's not accessible otherwise, and with navigating the center building. And not to forget that there's a big hoverboard air into the ships from the walkways.

Screenies


Have a look at the enclosed readme.txt for a version history ... changes I made since Beta 6 are mostly that I reviewed bot paths once yet again, taught the bots to swim, and then I tweaked the gameplay a bit too with more cover everyhwere. Add some bugfixes with blocking volumes and a few detail meshes here and there, and voilà.

No PS3 cook yet

I have to apologize to all PS3 owners, right now there's no PS3 cook yet. The main issue here is that the PS3 doesn't support importing custom sounds, and thus I'll have to give it a go first and then have some people have a look at it, but this means that I essentially have to rework sound, and have to find workarounds for not having proper sounds for birds and ocean waves in the stock packages.

Since this is the final release, I'll eventually kick myself in the butt and do that of course. There's still some hope nevertheless that Epic strikes a deal with Sony and it's somehow possible to import custom sounds in the future, since I really feel the map loses a lot of quality without those custom sounds.

@Cobra, thanks a lot I will tweak bots again before the final - the water thing I know of, I know of 2-3 other places where they get stuck as well. It's not easy getting paths right when you haven't pathed before like me I'd be very happy about tips though as for places where I should do things differently!

@SirTahngarth, technically no, not at all of course There is a DM-Harbor though, so the additional "u" does avoid confusion I hope, and I still have the probably silly idea that maybe it'll be a custom map on some servers eventually too maybe, and then a different name would lead to redownloads

Aaand complete Thanks for your feedback! And ... only when posting this here I remember that I promised you to let you have another look at the paths, Cobra You're mentioned in the readme though, you were a great help!

Thanks for the commendation

There is pathing up there, every health pickup doubles as a PathNode as well The bots just don't like going up there it seems, for whatever reason... - you can test it by dropping a flag up there, the bots will know how to reach it to send it back, by means of both the ramp and the lift, and from the center building as well (with that lift too). They also know that they can jump down from the AVRiL tower to the jump pad below, and they have some other spots for jumping down there as well.

They can even lift jump to the top of the walkway-passerelle-thingy, I've seen a bot do it once to get to the rocket launcher up there

What doesn't work is, they still can't properly use the jump boots to get out of the flag area fast, and I couldn't teach them the big air no matter how hard I tried

I'm not sure if it's really too many path nodes ... the build process does create reach specs (which takes most of the path build time), so the bots don't have to compute every single path node every time they try to get from A to B, and I found it necessary for them to be able to use the Hoverboard properly that they have straight paths everywhere; with all the edges and corners this meant nearly redundant nodes in places.

The path builder also keeps spilling warnings about nodes being redundant near the water, but when I remove the node in question the builder starts spilling errors (not just warnings) that the water path nodes that were linked through those no longer have paths anywhere - really annoying. That's why I stopped caring about those warnings eventually. Same goes for the stock maps by the way, those seem to have those warnings everywhere as well

As you know, I do value your opinion, but ... if you mean the same gangway as I do, then there really is pathing, all the way through... what's a fact though is that the paths aren't always green or better (which would be white), there's some blue ones, and as we know bots don't like those. I guess that's the reason why they don't like walking up there, but there's really not much I can do about that; that's because the path is too narrow, and, well, it's meant to be narrow - I'd have to change the entire map to make it more bot-friendly for that...

Have a look, this is what it looks like when I show the paths (P in the editor), you can see clearly that there's green paths in most parts, going both ways, and when flying through it you see that the paths go all the way through too, just not always green:



Did you mean this bit?

I do believe you - maybe if I'd have invested more time into this I could've made them like the bit up there after all. I do remember them using the walkway more in one iteration of the map, guess I had some path nodes then that I don't have now (after scratching the paths after Beta 6) that made the paths more likable...

The map is meant for online play mostly though, I just hope some server admins eventually find it good enough to add it to their map list