[Map] DM-Waterfall (working name) 11 day speed mapping

[sarge mat]

Hello GA.net

I had been following Alex Galuzin's 11 day mapping challenge and I thought I would give it a go myself. I am going to cut the crap this year and I think it’s a good way to start. So today is day 9 and I thought it would be a good idea to post it here to get some feedback. Main issue at the moment is lights they still are not quite there lacking something in other words. Still trying to get some mystic type effects going, (floating particles of light etc) but feedback anywhere and everywhere would be great.

I kept a record on my site here Personal Site Of Matthew Nelson

It's a 4 player map I should add.

All meshs etc came with UT apart from the little flare which I made my self. Go me lol

Thanks

[doylle]

It looks like you made quite some progress. To bad we didn't see day 1-9...

I had a look at that youtube video on your site. It looks a bit open, dno if you're still changing things to the geometry, but maybe you could add a bit more props for cover.

About the lighting. imo, the skylight is ruining everything. There are so many maps where the skylight is abused.
Try to lower the brightness (to 0.08 - 0.1, something like that), and then place lights where you have a light source. If you want a bright map then you can add a directional light and fake the sun. (This is where the skylight can come in handy to lighten up the shadow parts). The idea is to create enough contrast, (ie good balance between shadow and light). It could be a personal thing though...

Jeroen

[sarge mat]

Chears

Yea I will still be adding in more cover etc because it needs it to break it up a bit more. Going to look at the lights a more now to see if I can get them going better.

Thanks.

[Dark]

Rotate those crystal meshs around to look more natural. I thought they were groups of cactus at first.

[sarge mat]

Thanks dark

day 9 is now up on the site in case anyone wants a look.

[sarge mat]

Watefall_Beta_1.zip - FileFront.com

Beta is now online (will post shots later). I have to say I am very happy that I did it and stuck to the 11 days to get a beta out. Thanks to everyone we provided feedback or helped out in any other way.
There are still things to do to it but I look forward to feedback on all parts of it so I can make it better.

Thanks guys.
Mat

[sarge mat]

Ok here are the images I said I would post. Took a break after I posted the beta last night but I might start to think about changes I need to make later tonight.

[doylle]

hi,

Just played your map for a while. The lighting looks so much better now. Hard to tell how it's gameplay whise, but I got a few suggestions on the technical stuff...

-There's a big invisible wall near the waterfall itself. With those jump boots you should be able to jump right into those spikes. It's probably a better idea to add a kill volume where the spikes are, and a smaller blocking volume near the bottom so that people can't walk into them.
- All the cristals have the same 0.4 scale, i'd make those more random. Especially where you have multiple cristals next to eachother. (same with the vegetation)
- Ad distance fog to your map. I don't think there's a single situation where you shouldn't add distance fog, especially in outdoor maps. It'll add allot more sense of depth and scale to your map.
- adjust the jumptime on the jump nodes. if you press P you can toggle the path visibility, and see the curve that the player will follow. Some of them go all the way up, for no reason.
- Build clean. If you rebuild your map, make sure to fix all errors you get. Most of them are just small things, which don't really affect anything. But i've recently coocked someone elses map, which crashed all the time whilst cooking. So after rebuilding the map there was a massive list of map errors. After fixing what i though were the most critical errors, cooking wasn't a problem anymore. So, clean builds are definitely the way to go.

cheers

J

[sarge mat]

Thanks.

I will look at all those points you brought up. The jump boot's thing needs to be looked at. A guy on map core was telling me better ways to use blocking volumes in stead of the default collision mesh’s on some objects to improve performance so I have done that too all the spikes. I think as you said I will add a kill volume so if they use jump boots they will die once they jump over.

At the moment my desktop has the blue screen and I am trying to fix it. Hope this restore point works. So that’s stopped me working on it all day. But everything is backed up

Thanks again

[sarge mat]

Beta 2 is now up for download here: Waterfall_Beta_2.zip - FileFront.com

Made a lot of changes.