Duke4.net Forums: What makes a map great? - Duke4.net Forums

What are your thoughts about what makes a map really great?
Things like good level design and lighting are minimum requirements for sure, but what makes it really great, outstanding or something you think is THE thing for a great map?

Would be nice if you can mention some examples. ;-)

Gameplay!

kwa

https://docs.google....dit?usp=sharing

Micky C, on 27 September 2016 - 02:49 PM, said:

Micky has a Word doc for just about everything. =P

neoacix, on 27 September 2016 - 12:53 PM, said:

Personal taste

I think almost all resumes on being fun, immersive and that flows flawlessly, which method do you use to achieve this, is the complex part of the story. A great map needs to balance all the elements that the maper decided to use.

Mine will be a bit different of an answer as it's personal taste. But I've always enjoyed "unique" maps, usually a location or a theme, followed by how fun it was. Some of my favorite usermaps ever were 2bizzare (bizarre parallel world theme), quest (Unique hell-like realm that followed a fixed path), carnival (Was a carnival deathmatch level that had lots of secrets and an interesting atmosphere, was my favorite deathmatch level.) and there was another whos name I've sadly forgotten, where duke found a portal to a strange puzzle-like world in a house basement that he just moved into.

Needless to say, with those being my favorites, I've always focused my map design on unique designs/themes that noone has tried before, or at least that I can give a unique spin on.

Thanks for your replies.

Best thing of Micky Cs doc is the "Your map is shit!"-part.

I think for me it's some mix of good gamplay, immersion and the surprise factor, something new and what you don't expect to be in a Duke map.
Lots of good maps I played have nice shading and stuff, but often lack a good flow.
Otherwhise other maps have a good gameplay, but look like shit and are not very creative in their settings.

Best example I can recall fast, for a good example, is DNF2013.
It looked good, if feeled good, it had a good flow and it had the curiosity factor of something new.
I know it's a mod and not only a map, but if you pick it apart from a mappers point of view, it was just great.

1. It should be thematic. Even if it's a city level, it should have a theme too, like being placed in a cinema, shopping center, postal or something extravagant like rooftops or highway area, or in the case of The Dream, an ordinary place with a shocking twist. If it's a space level, it should be a little thematic as well, given the circumstances. In the original 2nd episode, almost all maps have a theme: Warp Factor is a Star Trek type tribute level with a big outside scenery and lots of drones... Fusion Station is an eerie alien infested level, Occupied Territory is built for an inner Mini-Boss level, Lunar Reactor is a Star Wars tribute level, and Dark Side needs no introduction. A space level with some mismatch is forgettable even if it's well shaded and designed. From the original game, levels like Launch Facility (a mismatch of sewer and space station), Tiberius Station, Bank Roll, Fahrenheit, XXX Stacy should be dropped, as their quality is weak, and their theme is very lousy. Most modern maps look good, but they are just mismatch of old themes. Levels like Traffic Jam or the Duke2013 casino are memorable of their new and original themes.

2. It should have a good flow as others said. Having traps and bad puzzles don't make maps great. Gameplay alsho shouldn't be that big, or over 30 minutes really. Episodes are better, because you can coordinate your thematic maps much better. Bad Puzzles include too many button puzzles especially without hints, hidden, but crucial routes, routes that can't be seen well (like routes at the ceiling etc.). It's also a typical mistake to use push-button-that-opens-door-in-the-other-side-of-the-map gameplay. That is boring, even with respawns.

3. It should use special graphics/sprites as real gimmicks, curiosity, unlike in most levels, when they were just a mismatch. Pics like a poster with a dog or a microphone are used in the game for a reason. They don't look good everywhere, especially without the original easter egg content put in. For easter eggs you need extra coding, custom art and sound though, so it's a difficult, but worthy addition.

4. MONSTER PLACEMENT! In the original game, monster placement is smart. Respawns aren't used in the typical push-button or get-the-key situations. They are surprising and add value to the atmosphere. Also, the levels shouldn't use a big mismatch m. placement too. In the original game, you see levels without Lizmen, Pigcops, Octabrains etc, because they are thematic. In most user levels, everything is everywhere. Even in the great maps. Again, Duke2013 is something, that use memorable and smart m. placement. The same goes for weapon placement, although most maps should use all weapons.

Nancsi, on 29 September 2016 - 12:13 AM, said:

All good points, but this one especially. As a player, I roll my eyes every time I read someone complaining about hitting the 16384 wall limit (4x higher edit ok 2x higher than the original maps if I'm not mistaken). Smaller chunks are usually more fun and if broken down into separate maps in an episode it gives the player a feeling of accomplishment each time they complete one. Also, if you have one huge map it's very difficult to have good flow -- the player usually ends killing all the monsters they can find and then criss-crossing the map looking for the next thing to do.

How did you get Star Wars from Lunar Reactor? Besides that Luke in the cave easter egg there's nothing that would suggest it.

In hindsight they really should have put a bit more effort into recreating areas from popular moves in Episode 2. Besides the overall shape of the level and the bridge secret, there's nothing really Star Trek about Warp Factor.

Edit @Trooper Dan: The wall limit is only double what it was originally. It's the sector (and possibly sprite) limits that got the x4. That's why you never run out of sectors, while in the past it was always the sector limit you hit first.
Btw it's not just about having good flow. Maybe mappers simply want to have a high detail level, or have a lot of unreachable scenery.

Micky C, on 29 September 2016 - 12:24 AM, said:

But what I'm saying is you can still have a lot of detail etc. as long as you don't try to put it all in one map via level geometry. Modern engines divide big areas into separate maps and make you wait through load screens, why is Duke 3D expected to allow 32768+ walls in one map like some people want?

Trooper Dan, on 29 September 2016 - 12:37 AM, said:

To build more walls! Make maps great again!

Joking aside, I don't think a map necessarily needs to stick to just 1 location like the Original game. A map needs to be coherent though.
Ideally, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
There needs to be a story or a logical sense of progression. A beginning, a middle and an end. IMO of course.

The technical aspects are already covered by Micky C, so not much I can add there. .
I tend to lean towards conceptually grand maps, like the dam level in DNF2013.

If there's a great concept behind the map, and it's executed well within the context of DN3D gameplay, you have a great map.

The quality of the 2nd episode had been discussed in the past quite often, I'm still saying it has an edge over the 3rd episode if we take leveldesign into consideration. Obviously Dark Side is THE space (or better said, the moon) level of the game, far and away the best of the episode, but I also like Spaceport (which has no theme, but a really good starting level with cornucopia of secret places), Warp Factor (while not Star Trek-y in every aspect, I love the feeling the loneliness of the space and the vacuum in the level, it should have a little less drones though), Fusion Station (for the eerie alien feel) and Occupied Territory (for the heavy boss fights, especiall on higher skills) as well. Lunar Reactor is fine too, it has a nice storyline, although some parts are dull (those slimer parts), The remaining levels should have been better though, including the half-baked Overlord level.

As far as unreachable scenery goes, I'm not sure if that's a good thing in modern maps. IIRC John Romero (or was it John Carmack?) said, that he has strict rules of leveldeisgn, and one of them was that if you have a scenery, one way or another you can get in there... and I agree with this. Why those places are there if you can't visit them? Also, I HATE INVISIBLE WALLS. The original game never had an invisible wall (not including the forcefielded areas), and the only unreachable sceneries I remember are the helipad in LA Rumble, an underwater place with a sunken UFO in Area 51 and the scene of Bank Roll in Raw Meat's end.. The last one is justified, I don't like the idea of the blocked helipad and sunken UFO though. But even those aren't built with simple invisible walls. One is seen through a hole that is physicall impossible to reach, and the other is forcefielded.

You have unreachable scenery so that the map feels like a real world as opposed to a box that you shoot things in. So I have to disagree with John as I think you need to take immersion into account. See, what he said probably made sense back in the day for a few reasons:
1. Hardware was limited so you didn't want to waste rendering power on something that didn't contribute to gameplay.
2. All the early games such as doom and quake mostly took place in indoor environements. All you needed were a few rooms and corridors, as opposed to large outdoor areas where you have buildings and things in the distance.

As for invisible walls, I think they're OK to have assuming there's some kind of indication the player isn't meant to go any further. There's a level in the AMC TC, island facility, where there's an invisible wall in the ocean marked by buoys. I don't see any other possibility for having a physical barrier there while making sense and not breaking immersion. So sometimes you have to have them. They can also be handy in saving the player time and frustration, in either not dying from a fall, or wasting time exploring some massive empty area.

Or would you rather have something like Hollywood holocaust where the map makes absolutely no sense, because both ends of the street have large concrete walls so that nobody can leave or enter the area?

Edit:

Trooper Dan, on 29 September 2016 - 12:37 AM, said:

The problem with this is that not all detail requires equal resources. If you want to have a lot of curved walls, that chews through the wall count very quickly, which is unfortunate. Another thing is terrain; if you want to have some realistic terrain with a lot of sloped sectors again that chews through the wall count pretty quickly. Or even just having a detailed hallway segment that you'd want to copy and paste to use all over the map. All of these detail types drastically restrict the possible size of your map if you use them.

Not anyone wants to (or even knows how to) include extra files such as con files that turn a bunch of maps into an episode or link them into a hub.

SE13

I don't like unreachable scenery very much, in my opinion it's more fun if the player is allowed to visit all the scenery in the map.

Micky C, on 29 September 2016 - 03:25 PM, said:

Who would beelive in this "real world"?! The people who never opened the editor? We all know that there's nothing behind tha map's limits, and all these scenery is just a decoration that will have no use even if you reach it.

Sanek, on 30 September 2016 - 10:30 AM, said:

considering the amount of background scenery you had in the last lorch map, that's a bit of an odd statement coming from you.

background scenery is nice for environmental depth, but it shouldn't detract from the play area, and it shouldn't be a drain on the resources that could have gone towards the play area.

keep it simple. keep it limited. the play area environment should have priority (and i've failed at this on more than one occasion).
e.g. it's nice to have a window in your moon base that looks out on some lunar landscape - but that landscape doesn't need 100 sectors and 200 sprites to make it visually immersive.

I tried to make a map, where almost every scenery is reachable and it was big and hit the wall limit (the link is in my signature).
And I consider it an overall failed attempt.
It's not the fact that it run slow on fps, but more the realisation that the gameplay in most parts of the map is just no fun.

I often recall my memories, when I first played Duke3D and wanted to reach some areas which were not reachable (like the gun that shoot on earth in one of the space maps).
Back then I used noclip just to look how it was made. But after I saw how it was made, the magic was gone.
So I realised, that imagination is allways a big part in maps.
Maybe you know it's fake and you can't reach it, but it's not without purpose and you, as a player, should just enjoy the ambience!

Forge, on 30 September 2016 - 12:11 PM, said:

It was actually a wrong thing I did in that map. I spent way too much time and resources trying to build that scenery, but don't paid that much attention to the gameplay area.

In singleplayer maps, unreachable scenery is good. In MP, it's fine too as long as it doesn't slow things down too bad.

Bonus points for cars moving, a subway or bird flying around in the background, waterfalls, buildings, forest.. etc..
I like to hide things in those areas, for people who used a cheat and did some exploring.

Players can cheat and see some writing around a corner, a nice big pair of boobs, unused art... that type of thing. Maybe a penis.
(just kidding, no dinkies in my maps to date, except for that damn Lo Wang of course.)

I think this is the place I can ask my question:

How can I hide a sector's wall so it doesn't show behind a "city view" setting?

For example, this map from the DNF mod also lacks the outer walls. In 2D mode, the sectors also seem to be placed outside the grid.
http://i.imgur.com/NFh7TQg.png

If I drag the white sector away from where the "city view buildings" were drawn I can see the view from that sector, but I cannot lift the ceiling much further because then the walls would show up again.

Assuming you have parallaxed your sky with "p",
you have to make some walls around the outer sector, also parallax their ceiling and then drop the ceiling to the floor.

I think this would be the result, but now this has become an area where you can't go up high because of the sector walls here:




In 2D it looks like this:

neoacix, on 30 September 2016 - 12:22 PM, said:

I think a successful attempt at this can be seen in the Megabase map in the AMC TC (first mission of episode 1). Geoffrey moulded the level such that you can access the vast majority of what you see, but that it always looked like you were surrounded by 'unreachable scenery' wherever you were.

Still, these days we just use a skybox, which is a very quick, easy, and wall-efficient way of making unreachable scenery.


Edit @ MOtM:

What you need to do is create a thin sector along the edge of the map that's parallaxed, and drag the ceiling down to the floor.

Micky C, on 02 November 2016 - 03:32 AM, said:

I tried doing this, but dragging the ceiling down also prevents me from going up high with a jetpack. Is this inevitable?
Maybe I don't really quite get it and visual examples might work better for me.

EDIT: I got it working. Thanks guys!

also once you've done that make sure to block all possible access to the sectors with the lowered down parallaxed ceiling (turn all the red walls pink), because if the player happens to enter one of them (by accident or on purpose) they will get insta-squished, this is something commonly overlooked (and / or brought up at the beta-testing stage) in people's first user maps - it's easy to forget to block a wall or two, or eight, and there's always someone who will find them

Thanks for the reminder, I'll make sure to block the sectors. It is possible I won't let players get close to the lowered ceilings at all and keep them at great distance.

Analyzing the new maps by AHB and Levelord, it seems they still know it how to make great maps. AHB really outshone his earlier masterpieces, Dark Side and Derelict with Mirage Barrage and Golden Carnage. He seems to continue his trend to use limited enemy type per map, as there were no Pigcops in Mirage and Enforcers in Golden... The theme in the episode is also obvious, except for Russia and France by Levelord, although Tour de Nukem was flattered by authentic Sewer/Abyss design so you can forgive the lack of omelette du fromage there.

Of course, both authors grew a bad habit from usermaps, which include the godawful decorative door use (was really unnecessary in Bloody Hell where it reached its peak) and the invisible wall use. At least there weren't any detailed scenery outside of your reach, so it's not that bad of a problem.

Another thing what makes map great especially AHBs:

Scale! Witnessing a large construction from a shaded distance then entering it later on is a win. Also, vertical mapping is somewhat rare, despite it looks pro. I've never seen levels like Fusion Station or Abyss, except some attempts to mimic the original style.

Large scale was used best in some LRWB maps. Those maps were oversized, but shading and large scale made them look awesome. For example the level before the Stadium with UFO looks so professional and beautiful. You see a great scenery at the start, and its no decoration. It delivers.