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[WIP] Flag Memorial

User is offline   elandy 

#1

Hi there, I've been working on this map that i think is pretty much finished but i only ever tested it myself, so if you find any bugs please comment here and i'll try to fix them asap.
I hope you enjoy it!

It's inspired in the famous monument, the Flag Memorial (Monumento a la Bandera) of the Argentinian city of Rosario (not an exact copy of the area but it has elements of it).
The map is pretty big and open area type: you have to visit several locations in any order to unlock progress to the arena, and kill the cycloid emperor.

The real location that inspired this map is this: https://www.google.c...2!4d-60.6304658
You can use Google Street view to see the monument.

Some pictures:
Spoiler

Attached File(s)


9

User is offline   DNSKILL5 

  • Honored Donor

#2

Just finished this map, here is my "review" as promised though there are people in this community much more capable at writing them than I, I've decided that I should try to be more vocal about what I play so that maybe we will see more stuff coming out when mappers see there are people playing and reviewing more often...

Anyways, I don't know if I've ever heard of you before or not, so I'm not sure if I've played anything else that you've released thus far (if this isn't your first), but I REALLY enjoyed this map. I played on Come Get Some and got 100% kills (261 I believe was the score! - Wow!). I didn't find any secrets though, but I also didn't actively search for them (I actually thought I had found a few but they weren't actually secrets, so it wasn't for a lack of trying). So as I said I played on Come Get Some, and I really got some! Lol.

Very large and detailed map that is very challenging. I had a lot of fun and was happy to beat it., but I'll be honest and say that no, it wasn't a "perfect run" (or "no death run", whatever the name they use these days lol) - I had to save and load quite a bit to get through to the finish. While I'm sure others will be able to plow through this quicker and with less deaths than me, it doesn't really matter. The difficulty here is not taking away from the overall enjoyment of this level. I am not familiar with the real-life location so I can't comment on how authentic it is to the source, but judging from the Google map, it certainly seems to be pretty spot on to the real place. This is certainly a more enjoyable "World Tour" than any of the ones we got officially. Great effort. This has inspired me to stop screwing around and get to making maps of my own. Please keep up the good work, and don't get discouraged. That's my short and sweet review, but below I'll give you (and other readers) some extra review info and input as a player to a mapper...

But first, here's some screenshots of my own:
Spoiler


I did run into a few bugs, but nothing that I would say are "game breaking", just the occasional sprite flickering and the like, but I don't think it's really a big deal since it is usually just stuff much further out from the player's view. There's also a few rooms that seem to change the palette of the player and enemies, but, again as a player I see this often in usermaps so maybe there's not much to work around that. Here's something onlookers shouldn't read until playing the map:
Spoiler


Textures don't seem to have any issues as far as I can see, and buildings and other things like that feel like they are all fairly realistic, at least on par with the original game I'd say so well done there, but I do agree with ck3d about the lighting and shading. It could use some work to make some areas look even better, but my personal recommendation would be to transform this level into a night themed map. I do like the daytime look, but I feel this map would really shine in nighttime, but this is just my opinion. I don't think it's a huge deal though, but maybe something to consider for future maps.

Enemy placement is very well done here and as a player, I think it was the strongest aspect to this level next to the architecture and texture layouts. I swear, something about this level makes the AI's act much smarter than they usually do, or at least it sure feels like it! Here's an example with a suggestion too: The starting apartment area might work better if when Duke jumps out, the inside collapses. There is only one other bathroom area and it is one of the areas I initially assumed was a secret area. To me, making this area become blocked off once the player escapes would prevent them from venturing back inside the apartment to refill their health. Maybe this was your intention, and if that's the case then don't change it. Anyways, as I was saying about the AI behavior seeming a little more intense here is when I ran back in there one time, I thought I was clear from enemy threats.... but I am not kidding, FOUR enforcers managed to jump their way into the apartment and fuck me all up! I wasn't expecting it and it was a very awesome moment. I really wish I could've filmed it in action because that was honestly really cool. There were a few other instances where I truly felt the AI was really trying to piss me off, and it made it all the more fun.

One other thing, there was an area of water (near the police crossing line) that maybe you could make where Duke can swim under there for a 4th secret? I'd like for there to maybe be a few more Duke lines scripted in to the final version of the map, but that's really all I can think of for this post. If I had to give it a star rating, I'd give it a 4/5 currently, but it will be 5/5 if you fix the issue in the spoiler. This is definitely a map I will revisit more than once, as it was very fun for me and I liked all the action. Again, great work!!

This post has been edited by gerolf: 25 August 2020 - 04:32 PM

2

User is offline   ck3D 

#3

From those screenshots and the ones of your previous map I can tell you have a really cool style as well as a good eye for proportions and architecture design. One thing that keeps striking me is the inconsistency of your wall shading though. You seem to use it for some strong contrast every now and then, but then everywhere else you also have a lot of non-adjacent walls that still share the same shade value (as visible here on most of the first and last screens). A bit of a shame as you cleverly pick your textures and your structures in general are built in really cool ways making good use even of the vertical axis (with the slopes etc.), but as the lighting looks flat you lose a lot of the depth and mood some of those locations could use for maximum potential. That point aside - still looks like a very sweet map.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 25 August 2020 - 02:22 PM

2

User is offline   DNSKILL5 

  • Honored Donor

#4

View Postck3D, on 25 August 2020 - 02:16 PM, said:

quote

I agree with you that they might want to take an extra moment to check over the lighting and shading, but I think you should definitely play through this map if you haven't done so already. The screenshots don't do it enough justice in my opinion.
1

User is offline   ck3D 

#5

View Postgerolf, on 25 August 2020 - 04:26 PM, said:

I agree with you that they might want to take an extra moment to check over the lighting and shading, but I think you should definitely play through this map if you haven't done so already. The screenshots don't do it enough justice in my opinion.


I definitely want to, soon - I'm familiar with how screenshots can't do a map justice, especially in the case of levels of that scale. I'm only a bit perplexed because the author is obviously good at what they do and I love their approach to construction, yet wall lighting/shading is such a basic (and fun) skill to master in comparison that it puzzles me how underexploited it is here. It's nothing personal either as I've noticed a subtle influx (on the scale of this community anyway) of mappers nowadays that somehow deliver Roch-level architecture as soon as their first maps, yet shade every wall like it's 1996 and I don't understand it. For such locations, sector, sprite and texture work is 90% of the effort, and then lighting is pretty much meant to come together on its own by mentally contextualizing the place and subjecting it to elementary real world physics, the author still has to press the +'s and -'s to achieve the full effect though so when they just stop there after so much focus on integrating all the props, it makes me feel like they didn't care about the atmosphere of the map all that much. Kind of like user maps with zero ambient sounds - the more advanced a level is, the less forgivable basic mistakes can be because 1/ they'll stand out even more then and 2/ the author could have ironed them out very easily to complete the picture after putting in so much work into the terrain/structure design. Actually weak wall shading/lighting might actually be worse than no ambient sounds or weak sector shading because it requires zero extra resource to be implemented (which also means zero extra 'terrain' work in areas that are otherwise detailed and complex already), so in reality no author ever has an excuse in that department.

That being said, I'm definitely looking forward to downloading those maps and checking them out soon, and excited about new talents like elandy joining the community and releasing quality work. Just stuck on a non-Duke computer right now and giving feedback on what I can see for the moment.

Also gerolf that wasn't a badly written review at all. I know Puritan is always on the lookout for help when it comes to reviewing levels on CGS (old and new), if you like the exercise you could probably get in contact.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 26 August 2020 - 01:06 AM

2

User is offline   Merlijn 

#6

Judging from the screenshot, I agree with ck3d. It's not that there's not any wallshading, but it would be even better if it's used consistently on every object and building.

That being said, the city & the monument both look very well made and fun to explore, and I'll play this once I have some more time (probably this weekend).
2

User is offline   Aleks 

#7

It's great to see new talented mappers around!

I've just played the level. Gameplay was really challenging and in general I really enjoyed the map, although I must admit it's not really my type of gameplay, with large battles happening quite "suddenly" and monsters cornering me all the time. Second gameplay issue for me was monsters seeing and attacking me from too far away, sometimes hidden behind some bush, but I don't think there's something you can do about it in such an open map. As for the design, I really liked the architecture and the clever use of textures. The plants are probably the biggest highlight here, they are very detailed (and I don't only mean the trees using heaps of sprites, but also the ivy on the walls in the courtyard or the cactus inside one of the building. It's also nice to see some sloped sprites (I've noticed them only on the green fire bowls around the memorial) which is still a novelty. Killed all 263 enemies on CGS, found 1 secret (the room with "Tom & Jerry" on TV). Took me about 50 minutes, but I took some time wondering around doing screenshots etc. The boss battle was very good - the Battlelords and tank there were quite annoying buggers, and the area was perfect to be able to dodge the missiles, but still make Cycloid quite dangerous.

Now for the issues with the map:
I have to concur with what MRCK and Merlijn said about the wallshades, which are really lacking here. It really takes A LOT from the design and makes it look kinda like an early map with all the novelty design ideas put in. The central memorial, which uses mostly white textures for walls and floors, suffers the most from it). Furthermore, the map uses weird way of shading the outside area, with some walls having their shadow values on minus (the wall in picture 1 has a shade of -81 in Mapster!). I think that should be used for "glowing" elements – instead I think a better idea would be to make the walls shaded normally to achieve the 3D effect and instead experiment with the overall visibility of the map to achieve the no fog/long distance daylight view (also, such weird thing with visibility wouldn't happen - see pic 2). As for making the map in the daylight, I like this idea, it fits with the theme. However, maybe you could try changing the skybox texture to something less plain. Furthermore, the borders of the map need the proper parallax effect – otherwise such weird things may happen as in pic 3 (that depends on the display setting of the player).


Spoiler



As for the gameplay, the puzzles were quite easy (although it took me considerably more time to locate the yellow key, which – in contrast with the other 2 – was not in plain sight). Maybe there should be some hint as to open that window or maybe I'm just dumb that it took me a while to notice it. There's been some issues with monsters getting stuck – the weirdest one was probably Battlelord and tank spawning beside the closed fence (pic 4), making them very easy targets (this was after the respawn in the 3x atomic health, red brick thing in the park). Some other were enforcers (pic 5) and some drones (pic 6 - they're behind the fence here, spawning after the yellow key spot) getting stuck.

Spoiler


The beginning was probably the most challenging part, as the stayput Battlelord spotted me very soon. I also didn't notice the RPG laying on the car, so had to do some crazy antics around and ended up killing him with a shotgun from behind some cover with about 15 hp.

The map was very laggy at times, especially on two main streets (not so much in the park itself, to my amazement). It uses insane amount of sprites (checked in Mapster and was about 14 000!), but I think the problem is when the engine tries to draw too many of them at the same time. This results in some sprites glitching/disappearing as in pic 7 (I played in Polymost mode). Maybe try reducing the number of sprites used for trees or for the "pseudo-extended" sprites like these in pic 8 (BTW, I liked the choice of sprite for that sloped cantilever here).

Spoiler


Some indoor areas seem quite empty which contrasts in a weird way with the outside areas (for example the first room - pic 9). Maybe it would be better idea to move some resources here. Also, I would suggest not using palettes on floors, as this makes Duke and enemies change their colors too (pics 10 & 11).

Spoiler


One more annoying bug I found was some issue with sector over sector (pic 12), where both of them seem to be visible at the same time and produce an ugly glitch. For smaller things, I would suggest changing the vent sprites on some doors on the outside to something else, as vents can be busted and it looks weird then (pic 13). Maybe the stairs in pic 14 could also be changed to produce a more natural first step (they are also quite steep). And I would reduce the size (height) of the cones in pic 15, now they seem enormous.

Spoiler


Some more minor suggestions:
  • Pic 16 - I don't think there has to be an invisible wall to block the player from approaching;
  • Pic 17 - I suggest masking the brown dirt/sand under the car with sprites. In general, the car could use some better proportions too I think;
  • Pic 18 - Maybe it would be better idea to make these doors open outside. Now with swing doors being blocked by player or monsters, it was a bit difficult to get it opened, as the enemies inside spotted me before and moved towards the door;
  • Pic 19 - I'm not sure if this was intended, but this switch can be used from the outside of the door, unlocking the room. Maybe making it one-sided would fix the issue (again, if it wasn't intended);
  • Pic 20 - I found this area to be a bit pointless, as getting there requires actually running past the final boss - not sure if it's worth it...
Spoiler


Hope you will find some of these comments useful to even more improve your skills and further levels! Keep up the good work!
4

User is offline   Merlijn 

#8

Just played the map - I really liked it! Design feels really fresh and different, probably because it's based on an actual location in Argentina.
Design and spritework is top notch, those trees were really well done and I love the sloped streets (you don't see that too often in duke3d)

Gameplay is really different than I expected, the beginning really challenging and I died a couple of times, but I think that's your intention so no complaints there.
Once I located the RPG and managed to create a bit of a perimeter for myself, things got easier.
Had no trouble finding the keycards and none of the combat scenarios felt unfair to me, just challenging.


There's room for improvement, but I see a lot of points I wanted to make have already been made by Aleks.

Like Aleks said, you should really use parallaxed sky to prevent those weird visual glitches. Visibility of the outdoor area could be changed to 240, to completely eliminate the fog.
I also had sprites flickering and disappearing in the distance (played in classic mode) but I'm not sure if that can be fixed. In any case, it didn't affect the gameplay.

I feel the staircases leading to the yellow keycard could be spiced up a bit with shadows and darker bits (perhaps some of the lights went out).
2

User is offline   elandy 

#9

Thank you all for the input! I'll try to fix everything you mentioned when I have some time to build.
I have a couple quick questions about the last comment though:

View PostMerlijn, on 28 August 2020 - 12:36 PM, said:

Visibility of the outdoor area could be changed to 240, to completely eliminate the fog.


I actually thought the global visibility setting in mapster32 was just for mapster32, because every time i set it and saved the map, it would last for that mapster32 session only. It's like that particular setting is not being saved to the map file. And when testing the map, it always showed the default visibility. I set it with ctrl+alt+plus and ctrl+alt+minus. How do you set the visibility so that it actually affects the map in game?

View PostMerlijn, on 28 August 2020 - 12:36 PM, said:

I also had sprites flickering and disappearing in the distance (played in classic mode) but I'm not sure if that can be fixed. In any case, it didn't affect the gameplay.


I made a test for the sprite flickering problem: a giant square sector (bigger than the whole flag_memorial map), divided in two, with 15000 sprites. I couldn't reproduce any flickering whatsoever, from any distance, within the same sector where the sprites are AND from the other sector. Any idea what could be happening? Did you observe something similar in another map? Could it be that i'm dragging some sectorwork problem from rosario1.map? (i copied some sections from there to flag_memorial)
1

User is offline   ck3D 

#10

View Postelandy, on 31 August 2020 - 04:15 PM, said:

I actually thought the global visibility setting in mapster32 was just for mapster32, because every time i set it and saved the map, it would last for that mapster32 session only. It's like that particular setting is not being saved to the map file. And when testing the map, it always showed the default visibility. I set it with ctrl+alt+plus and ctrl+alt+minus. How do you set the visibility so that it actually affects the map in game?


IIRC, select the whole map (or desired area) in 2D mode then switch to 3D mode and use just Alt + Keypad +/-, also you can pair it up with Shift for smaller increments.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 31 August 2020 - 11:05 PM

1

User is offline   elandy 

#11

About the lack of shading, I think I was too eager to release it, and also I guess I was stuck in a "keep the wall count low" mode because in my previous map i hit the hard wall limit. Shading will definitely be the next improvement. Too bad I won't be able to do the same for rosario1.map
1

User is offline   elandy 

#12

About the lack of shading, I think I was too eager to release it, and also I guess I was stuck in a "keep the wall count low" mode because in my previous map i hit the hard wall limit. Shading will definitely be the next improvement. Too bad I won't be able to do the same for rosario1.map
1

User is offline   Aleks 

#13

Don't worry about the shadows actually eating much resources - on the outside, maybe just play with the sky texture (for example one of the still lava frames, e.g. #1083, with palette 1 or 24) to make the sky a bit cloudy, which should justify the lack of "sharp" shadows, as the sunlight would be too dispersed. Just play some with indoor shadows.

What we meant with wall shading is just changing some shade values on the 2 opposite walls, so the walls that are connected to eachother don't have the same shade value and the corners are more distinguished. For example, all the "north" and "south" walls with shade 5 and all the "east" and "west" walls with shade 7. It gives a nice 3D look. Curiously enough, in my first released map (and only really released one, which was about 15 years ago too), I made some very elaborate and detailed shadows, but I wasn't aware of the "wall shading" like this either, so it still looked quite flat :)
2

User is offline   ck3D 

#14

View PostAleks, on 01 September 2020 - 09:06 AM, said:

What we meant with wall shading is just changing some shade values on the 2 opposite walls, so the walls that are connected to eachother don't have the same shade value and the corners are more distinguished. For example, all the "north" and "south" walls with shade 5 and all the "east" and "west" walls with shade 7. It gives a nice 3D look. Curiously enough, in my first released map (and only really released one, which was about 15 years ago too), I made some very elaborate and detailed shadows, but I wasn't aware of the "wall shading" like this either, so it still looked quite flat :)


Yes totally, again it's something most 'new' mappers commonly overlook because they're so enthusiastic about crafting the architecture of an environment, but what makes it 'unforgivable' to overlook is it literally takes up zero resource and really just comes down to how much care the author is willing to put into the mood of the level, not just its basic structure. Then again personally I've been super into wall shading subtleties as of late myself, I used not to give much of a shit as long as the landscapes I was making looked credible enough but now I'll really study every single wall I'm designing to the very point of shade value to make sure it looks exactly right according to my vision of the room/area. Really it makes most of, if not all the nuance in a map. In fact I have my personal set of rules of how many points apart exactly I like my adjacent walls in this or that context and everything; I think it's a big part of the art whether people might recognize it or not and one of those things that make the difference between a good level and a great level, and also style in one's mapping. Which is why it's always silly to pass on, once 90% of the work aka. the structures is already done and all that's missing is a bunch of +/- presses. I'd recommend just getting into the habit of wall shading as you go and never start a new area in your map before the previous one is done in those regards as well, because adjusting every single wall again late into development sounds like much more of a pain.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 01 September 2020 - 09:26 AM

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User is offline   Merlijn 

#15

In this case though, some sector based shadows wouldn't be out of place and would compliment the map quite nicely. Especially if the visibility gets changed to 240.
I took a look in mapster and the map has plenty of walls left so it would be possible.

But it's up to the author, a more cloudy sky and well implemented wall shading would also work as you guys said.

As for the flickering sprites, I can't figure out what's causing it.
Perhaps Elandy is right and there's a hidden corruption in the copied sectors from Rosario.
1

User is offline   max_nukem 

#16

elandy, thanks for the beautiful map.
1

#17

Quote

(stuff about flickering sprites)

Based on what I've seen, I think this is a renderer issue, not a map issue.
I'm not sure how stuff works internally, but it seems that large amounts of sprites (complicated spritework structures and such) have a tendency to cause the renderer to eat shit.
This can happen even if there is no corruption in the map.

Stuff I don't know:
- the exact number of sprites that can be in the same scene/area/etc. before this starts happening (probably somewhere in the thousands range)
- whether or not sprite alignment (view-aligned, wall-aligned, floor-aligned...) is a factor
- whether or not the new sloped sprite feature affects it

(Funny story: Waaay back in DOS Duke v1.3d, excessive amounts of sprites could actually cause the game to suffer a venetian blind crash, long before reaching the limits of the map format.)

This post has been edited by ToiletDuck64: 01 September 2020 - 05:18 PM

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User is offline   ck3D 

#18

For what it's worth here's my experience with the flickering sprites problem in Duke 3D user maps in general (from the perspective of a non-coder so take it with a grain of salt):

- There was quite a brutal limit to how many sprites could be displayed at once in the base game. There was the plain old crash calling 'too many sprites spawned' but IIRC the flickering sprites thing would also happen when a map had too many non-actor/static sprites visible at once and IIRC that was 1024, at the time we'd call it the 'disappearing sprites' bug and it was quite dreaded, forcing people to keep sprite count reasonable throughout their maps. Sprites didn't have to actually show on screen to count towards that tally, just the game having to draw the sector containing the excess of sprites would make most every sprite on screen pop in and out of existence depending on where the player was looking (thus on whether the combination of all the sectors drawn at once contained over 1024 sprites or less). I'm guessing this based on how I once experienced that problem in a map of mine that had it pretty bad, and blocking the player's view with red walls wouldn't do anything, eventually I had to resort to white walls and non-player space (but maybe that can be pinned down to me being a less experienced mapper at the time and not finding any better workaround). I remember people frequently experiencing that problem (or dreading to) around the time pseudo-photorealistic/detailed maps became popular back when it was trendy to explore that direction as influenced by the Roch and BobSp levels.

- Eventually I think eDuke/Mapster32 (or JonoF?) raised that limitation, probably sometime around the mid-2000's back when the sector/wall/sprite limits were also pushed because around the same time I definitely noticed it stopped happening as frequently, and the problem started to keep manifesting itself only in nothing but the most extreme case scenarii, e.g. large scale open maps with thousands of sprites in plain sight (although when done 'right', those are usually broken down in dozens when not hundreds of sectors though which probably reduces the odds of the player 'seeing' - and the game drawing - too many of them at once depending on their position in the map). It usually takes going overboard with 3D sprite work or detailed vegetation everywhere in the level to break that seemingly new limit though (for instance Dukebot also recently ran into it with Lost World). But since then I've been able to make maps with lots and lots of sprites without really encountering issues in the settings I always run the game on (classic 8-bit mode).

- The renderer definitely plays a role, I've watched YouTube playthroughs of my own maps before where the player would get that glitch (sometimes pretty bad with even the enemies and bosses popping in and out of existence, to the point where it could seriously start affecting gameplay) while obviously running a different renderer or port (usually World Tour), despite me never getting it ever in eDuke32's 8-bit mode (consequently recommended for those maps) back in the testing phase. From the experience of both watching the game's behavior on those playthroughs and walking fine lines with sprite count in the editor myself I've always been under the impression that the limit had been pushed to 1024 sprites drawn at once to an estimation of 4096 for some reason (it's a blind guess but seems to match what happens). Which is still very, very comfortable in my opinion, and really reduces the risk a lot already. Don't take my word for it as I may be talking out of my ass, but I personally seem to get safer results with that idea of a limitation in mind although I'm not sure it actually exists (for instance your report of having made a test map displaying 15000 sprites in just two sectors with no apparent problem is enough to shatter my certitudes).

In general it's always good to remember Build as an engine is pretty ancient and broken in spite of all the comfortable, modern improvements coming with eDuke32 that really help stabilize it, so even though it's always tempting to make resource-consuming maps, staying as far as possible away from the limits is always a safer bet, unless you learn how to structure and design your levels in ways that are practically optimized around them (e.g.. it's possible to make a map using 16000 sprites as long as a lot of those sprites are isolated in different sections, in a way akin to how one has to learn not to ever have two layers of basic SOS showing openings directly over one another so that the game never has to try drawing both sectors and generate HOM).

View PostMerlijn, on 01 September 2020 - 09:43 AM, said:

In this case though, some sector based shadows wouldn't be out of place and would compliment the map quite nicely. Especially if the visibility gets changed to 240.
I took a look in mapster and the map has plenty of walls left so it would be possible.

But it's up to the author, a more cloudy sky and well implemented wall shading would also work as you guys said.


I don't think the author should have to compromise their vision here, the sunny blue sky will work just as much as the next one in reality, it would be regrettable to jettison a respectable stylistic choice just because the map needs a quick band-aid and also if some of the shade values are as fucked as Aleks was pointing out with some of them way down in the negatives for no reason then technical adjustments besides cosmetics are in order anyway (IMO the shade value of a bright but non-glowing or illuminated wall should always be 0, everything else in the map determined around that point of reference and then if one wants detail to pop up from distance it's the map's visibility that they should tinker with). If that's the intended style with the detailed buildings standing out against the bright blue background à la Roch then it should probably stay. Sector-based shadows are always a good addition whenever possible (sometimes detailed terrain or sparse resources can make them a pain) but here I feel like the level doesn't really need new design (although it could use it) - just a gazillion of +/- presses.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 02 September 2020 - 02:51 AM

1

User is offline   ck3D 

#19

I finally got to download and check out the map in the editor, I have three basic observations:

- exploring the map only further confirmed my original impression on the wall shading (it's actually even more noticeable in game and kills a lot of the immersion your map otherwise deserves to bring with its architecture). Taking a look at the shade values of random walls I quickly realized there was zero consistency or logic in the numbers, so it appears as though you didn't give it too much thought and just randomly darkened some bits as you went. I was going to take two minutes to shade one of your indoor areas to take a screenshot showing the world of difference proper wall shading can make on structures like the ones you build without retouching anything else and then I realized you had thrown a lamp on the ceiling of most every room as an excuse for them to be full bright, ha (but although it sounds coherent, aesthetically it still doesn't work).

- I can't believe you went through the construction of all those little balconies and three-dimensional bits of sprite work in general yet they're just decorative - they're not even tangible, meaning that using the jetpack the player can just fly through the sprites. I think it should be a rule of thumb when you design something to at least try and find a way to incorporate it into the gameplay, especially here in the case of vertical structures - you should always think about possibilities such as, here, something as simple as making the balconies blockable, lock them inside a sector and have some Stayput monsters respawn there as snipers for a change at some point in the map (if you did that somewhere then I missed it). Also, a lot of the sprites in your spritework in general haven't been made one-sided (e.g. that street bin, which otherwise looks great by the way), too, so occasionally they'll pop up through other parts of your structures from the wrong side, you should probably double check some of that stuff.

- I found one wall that's been left unblocked and probably shouldn't be: the very end of that ledge surrounding the monument, where the Atomic Health is. The player could probably jump atop of an enemy and then up there to get inside the monument early. I didn't check if there were more gaps anywhere else but that too you should probably double check.

This post has been edited by ck3D: 02 September 2020 - 10:56 AM

1

User is offline   slacker1 

#20

This map and Rosario were great. I think I actually preferred the game play of this one over Rosario. The beginning was crazy (had to bunker down and hide a bit in the hotel/apartment building on the corner to get my bearings straight). After getting settled from the initial overwhelming battle, the rest of the map played out nicely. I never felt like I was too out gunned (sometimes close though). I liked the idea of making your way around the memorial to clear everything out before entering in. It was a good reuse of space.

I also had the sprite flicker issue. I only really noticed it on the street side of the memorial with the park to your right.

This post has been edited by slacker1: 03 September 2020 - 12:09 AM

1

User is offline   Ninety-Six 

#21

I apologize for the bump but I'd like to note that both this and Rosario1 are broken in current builds with the all-key slots failing to activate their respective doors.
2

User is offline   elandy 

#22

View PostNinety-Six, on 20 July 2021 - 08:59 AM, said:

I apologize for the bump but I'd like to note that both this and Rosario1 are broken in current builds with the all-key slots failing to activate their respective doors.



I wonder if it has to do with the shooter + duck contraption i used for the triple card door. As soon as i release my current map i'll try to fix it. Thanks for the info! :D
2

User is offline   Aleks 

#23

Yo Elandy, was just talking with Mikko and we were wondering if you're gonna still work on this level or Rosario 1 or should there be considered done and released as they are?
1

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