MH-Determination{MHM}

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MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -HellFire- » Mon Sep 21, 2009 11:32 am

Here is the map I spended a few days on.
Check it out :D

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http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3283 ... 0c2f906379


Hope POTS can make a better rar with compressed files and everything you need to play the map.
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by *POTS* » Tue Sep 22, 2009 6:13 pm

The only missing file was "ONPfootsteps.uax".

http://rapidshare.com/files/283675019/M ... _.zip.html

I like those skaarjs working at the terminals, I don't know how you force them to do that pose.

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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by Blood Asp » Tue Sep 22, 2009 7:33 pm

1 thing i will say about the map: The lighting isnt too good in it, concluding the shots a few of em are a little bright and just generally waay too white, You could really do with some ambience around by mixing colours, If you would like an idea check Derdak2Rot's MH-LostInTime, the starter bit is a good example of it, mixing colours to make a good general lighting impression, just have a look, you can learn alot about skaarj based maps on Derdak2Rots design. :)

Otherwise the map is quite decent based on BSP And other things... a good general impression. Just the lighting :)

*EDIT*
Also checking into Ued now, i must say that the map does have a huge lack of monsters and in the corridor with little light, that would be a perfect place for Pupae... also i like the fact u have pupae spawning with the queen, However it seems a little bit weird and only 2 at a time :/

Also the room with the queen could do with some QueenDest's so the queen will teleport around the room

Another thing with the Queen room is tbh it is kinda boring Could do with more trim and pillars and stuff, The first room and last rooms should always make the best impressions :)

Hope these comments and criticism's can help you with it.

Also on some of the lights, the LensFlares are sorta just floating around with no source to them.
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by Blood Asp » Wed Sep 23, 2009 7:51 am

I Sent this off to XYZ who is a professional tester, just because i want to help you become better by seeing what you can improve in the basis of ur maps XYZ Said:

First off, about the nature of the map. To me everything is generally decent especially the start being a prison is a good thrust forward for the players to take an interest in the map. The Skaarj theme is as effective as always but the theme could be laid out better. I’d want to consider the layout – you simply presented a linear path of progression from start to finish and there isn’t any interesting spot to discover within the map. Unless you were doing ‘speedmapping’ just to increase the amount of maps in MH, I’d advise you take more time in building your map and give it more polish.

Now for some more specific details, your BSP architecture is decent but I believe it could be better. The impression and detail in the corridor following the spawn room look fine. I most especially like the teleporter room with the lights further increasing the definition of its hexagonal shape. The curvaceous corridors that follow are also nice and a good place to do some flak monkeying with monsters. Everything seemingly goes a little downhill however once you reach the Queen room. The use of primitive brushes becomes prevalent in the entrance corridor and as you climb the stairs to meet up with the Queen, the raw cylindrical nature of the room becomes prevalent and the kneeling pillars you set beside aren’t helping to change the impression of the area. If you could add more detail to the cylinder subtraction itself, it would remove the impression that it’s a mere primitive shape such as a sloping ceiling or circular trims around the floor.

In general, I would prefer using soft-edged shapes more then simply cubes for the basic shape of any room as that would make architectural flow easier to follow for the players. Additionally, I believe many brushes you built using the 2D shape editor could be built with just primitive brushes and a little vertex editing. Using the 2D shape editor for almost everything is extremely inadvisable as it produces those shapes with segmentation that put stress on the engine to rebuild and this especially becomes a problem on larger, more complex maps. Conclusively for BSP, be more ambitious with shapes. Go BEYOND what cubes can offer.

For texturing, the selection of walls and floors are quite fine in general but you seem to have skipped aligning them when it comes to pillars and wall braces. First off, the pillars that are curved halfway up throughout the corridors virtually have unaligned textures on their sides and you simply masked it with shadows to hide them. If it was me, I would align these textures to complement the shape of the pillar or easier, you can just apply a base texture to them so alignment wouldn’t be a problem. Also, the polygons of these brushes are appearing with wild divisions on its surfaces. You should try selecting these brushes, right click and then Polygons -> Merge then rebuild. Now about those braces with the pipe textures (the ones with the “blah2” texture specically), the texture there ends abruptly on either directional end of the brush and makes it look very misbelieving. My suggestion is that you rotate these textures to complement the shape of the corridor or you may leave it that way but add trims to “stop” the abrupt end of those textures. Now there are those pillars in the teleporter room that suffer from the same thing I mentioned earlier about texture alignment in pillars – either align the edges of the pillars or apply a base texture to them to negate the need for alignment. Lastly, you used a lot of cylinder brushes to make decorative shapes in your map – again, cylindrical primitives are more preferable for pipework more than anything else. Texture alignment on cylinders are almost impossible to maintain so if you could just drop the cylindrical shapes within the corridors and replace them with more shapely brushes that follow the corridor’s shapes, it would look better.

Now for lighting. You know, hitting lighting with the right notes can make a simple-looking map EXTREMELY better but getting the wrong notes can make a good-looking map REAL worse. I will commend you for using colored lighting on most parts but I must say lighting is extremely simple throughout the whole map. Each part of the map is bathed in a boring, single-tone lighting that doesn’t produce much ‘wowness’. There’s also a bad case of underbrightening for light textures that count as light sources. I can see that this map is heavily inspired by the likes of ONP and ONP is well-known for being the project that industrialized and standardized the use of good lighting for the entire community years back. If I were you, I’d at least follow the trend. First off, pick at least two complementary colors for a part of your map such as orange and blue. Add weak blue colors for ambience and to define shadows in your map rather then leaving them completely black or bathed in one color throughout. You can even spread the blue color throughout the entire map if you want but make them weak enough to not overbrighten any surface but enough that the player can see it. Now for the orange or any other color, you would normally place these light actors near light sources such as the lights you placed near your lamps. Your selection of color for these lights are spot-on but significantly brighten them more – the light source textures don’t look like they are emitting any light at all and it makes it look unrealistic. Light sources should be small-radius actors that emit extremely bright lights and make it look like their light source textures are actually the ones emitting light, not an invisible floating actor in the map. I wouldn’t touch anymore on shadows or drop-off lights as they aren’t needed for now. For the heck of it, you might want to check on the concepts of color theory as well as how more established mappers create lighting. (I suggest looking at either tutorials from Team Vortex (creators of ONP) or from Hourences’s website).

Now for gameplay – first off is weapon balance. You put some strong monsters in the map and put some equally strong weapons to counter them – that’s all good. I’m personally not a fan of the Unreal 1 weapons as I prefer using the UT weapons for Monster Hunt but this is neither a minus or plus on most maps – just never mix them up together. The way you put the weapons however are laid out directly on front of the players telling them to “use this for this part of the map” and there’s generally no sense of tactics for the players on what weapon to use for that section. This apparently delves into the linear layout you implemented for your map again. I can’t say much about weapon balance as I was able to weave my way through monsters with the limited selection just enough.

One of the weakest parts of the map’s gameplay outright is the use of a linear layout – players just keep attacking, charging at monsters until they reach one end of the map. There’s no option for them to choose alternative routes or even just have a little backtracking to give a little more variety in their general movement. When I said more time should be given into the map’s construction, this was it. The length is fine, but the in-betweens are not. You can make a small map look big by adding areas for the players to rediscover and give them a reason to play through the map again. You might have seen maps like MH-darkpassage that have something like 15 monsters and only 5 minutes less of playthrough on many servers – DO NOT follow this concept. As for MH-LongCorridor and its 2006 version by Derdak2rot and Nr.2000, those two MH maps can be classified as “party maps” that require a large population of players (4-6 is large enough for today’s standards) to play. Given their linear nature but their excessive lengths, they relied on the mayhem of having to attack lines of monsters for the fun but a short and linear map doesn’t have such an element especially given the sparse positioning of monsters throughout your map.

Delaying tactics may sound lazy but they are a good way to extend playtime if implemented properly and they are a good replacement to non-linearity if you wish. You could create a control room for the teleporter and give the players at least a minor objective – such as to hit a button in the control room, and defend the teleporter room for five minutes while waiting for the teleporter to charge up and open a warp gate to their escape route and to the Queen. I don’t think this would be hard for you to do being you already know how to use CreatureFactories and create good triggering/scripted systems. You could also add something like having the players to destroy shield generators around the Queen’s stasis chamber before attacking her themselves to add a few more frills to your map. Even linear maps with minor objectives can help interrupt the players’ impression of “This is just another MH map. Kill some monsters and find the endpoint and we’re done.”. This part of my advice is actually already a staple for those who built maps for the old singleplayer and coop department. MH is a very close cousin of SP and many elements in SP could be shared in MH as well which explains why some people out there have chosen to port SP maps to MH. I will no longer delve into the variety of creatures you have as you’ve used a Skaarj theme as your basis.

That’s all I’ve got to say for now – the map is decent but I must brutally say, not exceptional. It doesn’t have to be exceptional either but at least above average to gain interests of players.
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -HellFire- » Sun Sep 27, 2009 9:31 am

Made some changes:

* Better lighting at some points.
* Some more trim and stuff
* 3 spawning Skaarjs (instead of 2).
* No counter now for the pupaes (Because there are new corridors added which has spawning pupaes also).
* Some other minor fixes/changes.

***Not all the redirects are in the rar.***

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3283 ... 9d3b204475
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by *POTS* » Tue Sep 29, 2009 11:50 am

OK finally my ADSL is back.
Here's the updated ZIP archive with all required packages:

http://rapidshare.com/files/286563496/M ... _.zip.html

Just a suggestion HellFire: try to avoid using the "+" suffix after making changes to your maps, since some of the dU (formerly known as |bah|) mappers used to add monsters to already existing maps to make them harder and then rename those maps by adding a "plus" or "double-plus" character.
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -HellFire- » Tue Sep 29, 2009 11:57 am

Ahh.. I see.
I thought it was better then V1 etc :lol:
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by BIOMECH » Tue Sep 29, 2009 1:46 pm

So they would inject spam into the map and add a + on the end, interestingly proving that even they didn't want to associate themselves with what they were doing. :roll:
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -HellFire- » Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:49 am

Ok, here is the LAST version I made.
dU did liked more monsters, but for MHM there are no 20 people so it's hard to make it all right for everyone.
So I tried to make it good enough for every server now (which is impossible).
Anyways, I added a room, corridors and made the pupae cave look better.
So here it is including the uz. files :wink:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3283 ... a51b339e39
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by gopostal » Fri Oct 02, 2009 6:50 pm

Rant hat *on*

Hellfy you really have to stop this man. You are going to hurt the MH community releasing multiple versions of every map you make. I talk with some of the other MH and UT admins and it's come up a couple of times now. Many of the admins like to keep a comprehensive library of all released materials and your stuff is creating a mess. You release different versions of your maps with the same name or many versions only slightly different. Some of them don't know what is what (I mean FINAL final? What the hell is that?)

You know I have nothing but love for you but you should learn patience and take the time to test things. Don't create a negative in the MH community by having maps on server with errors. You have really good developing skills so put them to proper use.

Rant hat *off*

Whew...thanks. I needed that.

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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by Blood Asp » Fri Oct 02, 2009 7:27 pm

Wise words from gopo there, there can only be 1 main version of a map, however its posible for test creations to be done (As formed by Andromeda) The point of test maps on that scales on servers is to test for any online bugs, thats the point of Test servers being open.
You CAN Ask for those tests to be placed on a proper server UNDER SOME CONDITIONS

The conditions: The map is a good map, it has a MHEnd, no bugs and is not stupid and unbeatable, it must have a good flow and seem like any other MH Map.
The Map should not have a new test version popping up every week, if your going to have a test version hosted on a main server then work on the map and even if u finish it, DONT resend it to another server for at least 4 months just to get that impression that you have done all you can and worked on it as much as posible. Nobody likes someone who is sending them large files to throw into server and redirect every 2 or 3 days.. so chill on the creating, i know your probably excited to be able to use the editor well but just relax on it, take some time to yourself, and get ur school work done, get ur life sorted, get girlfriend (Woot woot start this again! :D) And if u got one make her happy an d spend aload of time together, maybe if she is interested in computers you could show her how the ued works and stuff then at some point make the map together.

But anyway what i am saying is dont give up on the creation of MH Maps, just chill on the rate of them a little bit, take the time to plan them, and you will find you are much more respected as a mapper.

And most important of all, make sure your life is all sorted out first. YOUR life is way more important than the life of a game.
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by BIOMECH » Sat Oct 03, 2009 2:09 am

EA_Elemental wrote:YOUR life is way more important than the life of a game.
Wrong! :lol:
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -HellFire- » Sat Oct 03, 2009 7:44 am

Yes.. Yes.. I know..
Next time (if there will be one) I'll listen to you guys. :P
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by -SuPreMe- » Sat Oct 03, 2009 12:50 pm

Hellfires just a RUSHER!

In-game and In-editor :mrgreen:
-------.[ ]
---- -//|::|\\
----////| .|\\\\ <- 2 times the arms 2 times the awesomeness!
---* * | | |* *
-------||||
-------||||
------..< >
{MHM}
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Re: MH-Determination{MHM}

Post by Hermskii » Sat Oct 03, 2009 6:53 pm

Gopo nailed it I'm afraid. I have always said that I avoid beta maps for this reason. Test them on somebody elses server. Get it good and right and finished then send it to me.
~Peace~

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