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Author Topic: am_lavaarena & 2 CTF versions  (Read 110275 times)
kernel panic
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« Reply #75 on: November 25, 2009, 08:55:43 AM »

Oh, I know how to reply to this. And I'm going to do it mainly because you broke my balls already. Q3, of which like it or not OA is a clone, is a competitive game. Its enourmous success didn't come from retarded short-lived 'fun' tricks that players could do in-game. It won its popularity due to the amazingly good physics and playability that encouraged players to learn its ways. Those physics and a very well thought set of weapons provided the players with many degrees of freedom to master and put in practice in the arena. We are talking about a game that basically consists in shooting at your opponents to score points. Whether you take it as a competition or as pure fun, the game remains the same.

The distinction between 'fun'and 'competitive' maps is artificial. There are two kinds of maps: the good ones and the crap ones. The less bad of the latter will be played for a while but will not really make it for too long unless a constant flow of noobs is pumped to the servers. In newspeak, 'fun' maps are what in more honest times one would refer to as 'crap' ones.

Good maps are fun precisely because they are balanced, facilitate (or rather don't obstruct) good movement and encourage clever gameplay. You can have whatever attitude you fancy while playing, good maps won't get in your way. On the other hand, 'fun'/crap maps (I hope the meaning is clear now) will negatively condition your game play, be it because their geometry is badly designed (or too poor, or with a hideously chosen scale, or with the wrong distances, whatever) and/or because of stupid items and weapons placement (an almost sure to have flaw when the mapper insists on using the new 'fun' weapons from TA).

In summary, crap maps are crap maps no matter how you look at them. The only good maps are the competitive ones. Nobody plays this game for the high quality of its graphical content. Gameplay is all that matters, and OA is an online competitive game. Under this light, your wondering about whether Cosmo is "relying ONLY (or at least TOO MUCH) on the online competitive side" is utterly absurd.


PS. Which leads me to the conclusion that instead you are relying on the (barely non-existent) single-player friendly aspect of the game.
PPS. For the record, I don't give a damn about your maps. I only posted this to support the right attitude when it comes to map design.
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Udi
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« Reply #76 on: November 25, 2009, 01:55:05 PM »

It's not a place to argue whether a single player audience exists or not, but believe there is one.

Quoting Star Wars: "Only a sith speaks in absolutes." But if you have binary syndrome, here's the deal: from the view of OA there are GPLed maps and non GPLed maps. If you keep kicking contributors in the teeth you lose OA maps. The texture replacement project is not in a good shape, so right now you cannot play all the pro Q3 maps. Either leave non-competitive maps and mappers alone, or ask them politely, or hire them with donations, or fork the bad maps, or create new maps from scratch, or make textures so you can play Q3, CPMA etc. maps. There's a wide scale you can _help_ the game, just grab one.
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cosmo
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« Reply #77 on: November 25, 2009, 03:01:20 PM »

Thanks kernel panic. I would not like it that harsh but yes, you got the point. I am fed up by seeing players going only for a single map again and again. It might became better with 0.81 but not much. OA includes with more than 30 maps but only a hand full gets played by the audience. You might say in Q3A there were just a few maps which are classics and get played no matter if competitive. At all I have the slight feeling there are more good/high quality maps in Q3A than we have so far.

Something like a quality control would help OA a lot for:

1. reducing file size which fromhell is complaining about
2. keep it fresh and entertaining without many disappointments
3. OA will shine as a good quality project

Of course there are funmaps like 'fan' which are not serious. There are servers which have them in rotation. Regard me as a Single Player player or at least it is important for me to have one. I never liked fan and love the few good maps because I enjoy a good fight which feels good instead of brainless carnage. The latter can be nice for a few minutes but not motivating for long.

Conclusion: yes, I try harder to create maps with more competitive play which does not deny good looking, high quality maps. (Your 2nd attempt of this map is good looking and of high quality, Neon Knight) It is a matter of time and experience. A lot of testing is required which could mostly be done by a team of testers (testing not only maps but check playermodel animations, sounds, etc).
Still I am not satisfied with the ones I created because I didn't talk with enough people about it. Anyway you will get the best critics and hints in play with other humans. There are a lot of jerks on other forums telling you everything is 'none sense' but don't tell you why. Yep, people without manners. Children. Do not take them serious.

I just told you what came to my mind when I tested your map with TA (but you asked for). I had to kick whole TA out of my OA folder because it messed things up. q3map2 was looking for the wrong shaders.
Sure TA is alluring. Vanilla OA still lacks things. I am not sure if it was a good idea to include most of the things into default OA. Okay, more weapons are cool. The additional powerups are fancy but a little bit confusing. Q3A TA was never accepted by players because it's not balanced enough. It is average like average, not good maps which don't find their way into server rotations. We would need to tweak them a lot to get them good.
I like the Nailgun myself and that is why I put it into new ctf_inyard although I know it should do less damage.
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Falkland
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« Reply #78 on: November 26, 2009, 04:42:10 PM »

.... from the view of OA there are GPLed maps and non GPLed maps. If you keep kicking contributors in the teeth you lose OA maps.

From the point of view of OA there are good maps and horrible/unplayable/boring maps ... STOP

OA doesn't need new "oa_ctf2-delta-czest***-cbctf1"-like maps , but replacing them with good-quality-maps. Or at least OA needs a map repository , a better and advanced download system ( with messages that explain what a player has to do ) and a higher focus on the texture replacement project ( even if many good maps are known to work in OA as they are - see W1zard's map-collection-pack ) so to let servers admins to use the large amounts of Q3-compatible maps

Frankly , the quality of a free project should be in general commonly and as much as possible objectively accepted as "good" simply because if the final user will discover it's not confomed to what you'd expect from it/ will be not happy with it , the user will stop playing and will wipe the installation without thinking ( HE/SHE DID NOT BUY IT BY SPENDING MONEY ).

Quantity over quality is what OA DOES NOT NEED AT ALL at the moment :

- http://www.google.com/trends?q=openarena
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=urban+terror
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=openarena%2C+urban+terror
- http://www.google.com/trends?q=openarena%2C+quake+3%2C+urban+terror



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Udi
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« Reply #79 on: November 26, 2009, 07:36:57 PM »


Nice relevant keywords there:
  • NIGER: Rebels accused of launching Iraq-inspired “urban terror” campaign
  • URBAN TERROR: Live Grenade Thrown Into Crowded Area
  • Vintage rifles can’t fight new face of urban terror: top Indian cops
So don't get fooled by numbers.

Quality is a subjective matter, both you and me think that oa_bases# are crappy maps. In another topic you said you would also remove czest1tourney, suspended and fan because they are garbage. But I say those are great maps, if you remove them you kill the refreshing maps from the single player mode. The same goes for lavactf2, I like it, you don't. So if it won't get into the next release I would be sad and wipe out the game from my harddrive. But the difference is, that probably you wouldn't heard any complains from me, since I don't value face2face competition I wouldn't even bother to argue in discussions. "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I think there's a much more larger audience out there which we don't see and even Google cannot see, and if we drop out the maps which some of us don't value high, than we do more harm than good. Let's put a little more emphasize on _Open_ Arena and don't rip out content making it Q3_Min_.
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fromhell
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« Reply #80 on: November 27, 2009, 02:11:16 AM »

Urban Terror is an unfair comparison regardless of irrelevant search results. Urban Terror started out in 1999, and relied heavily on third party content sites for its maps. Urban Terror didn't have restrictions for license consideration. The peak of UrT's content production was in 2003. Many of their 'best' (such as EarthQuake) have since moved on to working for the games industry. The same goes for World of Padman and Tremulous which are also available in standalone game form retiring from their q3 mod status.

OpenArena started when Q3 editing wasn't cool anymore and editing for HL2 (at least FIGURING OUT how to edit for that game since its tools sucked) and Doom 3 was the trend, it has long missed its talent opportunities (the only exception of such is jzero and multiplex's initial textures and models (ammo prism, grism, armors, weapon icons, shotgun/lightning) which have been in OA since forever)
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asking when OA3 will be done won't get OA3 done.
Progress of OA3 currently occurs behind closed doors alone

I do not provide technical support either.

new code development on github
Proti
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« Reply #81 on: November 27, 2009, 05:08:42 AM »

---PEACEFULLY CENSORED---
« Last Edit: April 09, 2011, 04:52:00 PM by Proti » Logged

THERE WAS A REFERRAL LINK HERE.
Neon_Knight
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« Reply #82 on: November 27, 2009, 08:06:43 AM »

Well, I won't join to the flame war started at the beginning of this page... simply I'll start to ignore comments and posts from such tards who enjoy saying "OA sucks period". As Udi -and in its moment, leilei- pointed out, there's a lot of people out there who don't play online for many reasons and still enjoy the game. Just because you hate space and fun maps doesn't mean that everyone hates (or should hate) them as well. Not everyone wants competitive play all the time, you know? It's a very single-and-narrow-minded way of thinking, plus a killing idea, to just focus on one part of the OA people, instead of most (or all) the others. All the developers out there want to spread their games' focus on many people, for good reasons. I fail to see why OA shouldn't. Hell, even Q3A itself has fun maps such as q3dm16-19, (with q3dm17 standing among them) q3tourney6, q3tourney5 and q3ctf4. And, to some extent, q3dm11 (the health and armor regeneration tube) and q3dm12. (The "secret" entrance to the Quad room, which was near to the Haste room, and that MH open area, very criticizeable in other maps, but since "it's an Id map" Roll Eyes) And you know what more? All of them (with the exception of q3tourney5 maybe) have found their way in one way or another onto Quake Live.

Oh, and I've forgot to say that there's already a comp-minded game out there. It's called Warsow.

Going onto the map, I'll be doing lavactfxl with most comp play in mind. (Leaving some stuff like the BFG in the big lava pool, just I'll be sure to make it to not to interfere with the gameplay) And maybe less weapons and items. The original lavaarena and lavactfxl were very bloated with items and weapons (IMHO) and, in most cases, the placement part was very unthoughtful. I guess the layout will be different tho. I'm thinking on a U-shaped map.
« Last Edit: November 27, 2009, 08:44:22 AM by |TXC| Neon_Knight » Logged


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Falkland
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« Reply #83 on: November 27, 2009, 09:04:29 AM »

Well, I won't join to the flame war started at the beginning of this page...

Sure ... you are not joining the flame war, you are saying the wedsnday's peaceful Pope's Angelus pray.

Anyway , TA is funny _ONLY_ on large or very large maps : iplaying on small maps is really frustrating , exactly what most of the players do not expect to find in a game ... check the original TA mpteam(1-8) maps (with the exclusion of mpteam6) and the mpterra(1-3) maps.

The original Q3 CTF maps are all too small or boring : the best CTF maps are all 3rd part maps like the 3W series ( q3wcpxx )

Most of the time you build your judgement about a map only after playing with bots at level 1 or 2 , but you will find the limit of a map while playing with bots at higher levels ( possibly at nightmare level )

Suspended is a map without reference points , many of the times you spawn without realize if you are at the bottom floor or at the middle floor and you spend significant time ( in the order of some seconds ) to exactly know where you are and where you have to go. It's "funny" playing there only with bots at level 1 or 2 , but extremely frustrating at higher level or on a server with many players . The same for fan which has a non-existant gameplay and for czest1tourney in which most of the time you will be moving into the too small corridors or jumping over the jumpers here and there like a yoyo.

« Last Edit: November 27, 2009, 01:24:46 PM by Falkland » Logged
Falkland
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« Reply #84 on: November 27, 2009, 09:11:42 AM »

And kamikaze item? wow, i cant imagine that, but walls should absorb most of damage.

The walls will not absorbe anything because of the splash damage bug.
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Udi
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« Reply #85 on: December 06, 2009, 06:36:26 PM »

NeonKnight, it seems that am_lavactf2_a2 and also the previous a1 overwrite some shader files, which cause some missing jumppad textures in czest1tourney, image attached. Could you please fix it?
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Neon_Knight
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« Reply #86 on: December 06, 2009, 06:44:50 PM »

Did you've tested with a pure 0.8.5 version, plus the pk3?
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Someone_mad
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« Reply #87 on: August 15, 2010, 12:39:48 PM »

This is a good map, but I always forget myself in it...  Undecided
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« Reply #88 on: June 18, 2012, 05:01:41 PM »

where is the BFG in lavactfxl? I could only get those useless BFG ammo  Smiley
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Neon_Knight
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« Reply #89 on: June 18, 2012, 05:29:52 PM »

Hint: Use the battlesuit.
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Tiago
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« Reply #90 on: August 19, 2012, 01:38:53 PM »

This map Lava Arena will stay cool!
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Neon_Knight
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« Reply #91 on: August 01, 2016, 10:24:24 PM »

I'm continuing the development in this topic.

http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4883.0
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