Razorback

Had alot of fun playing this map.

Architecture was really great. Map was very vertical with lots of places for jumping around. Weapon placement could use some tweaking, though, I feel like it's hard to get my hands on a decent arsenal.

It had a lot of really cool little touches like the crystals doing a color correction effect and the chains swinging in the breeze. Definitely a map I'd like to see in circulation whenever we do HLDM.

Neat colour palette, calm and cozy atmosphere, a couple of cool little things like crystals and some steam that harms you, and pretty fun to play. O.o

So good that it crashed my game when ribcage whacked me with a crowbar. Amazing.

Super cleanly mapped and original. worldspawn also has a chance to be at the top of the scoreboard in this map. Gameplay is good even though it lags on my crappy computer, makes me want to get a proper PC... Love the chains too. I still wish the lower interiors had a bit more contrasty lighting.

@Dimbeak, @Admer456, @Bruce: Thank you for the words and ratings. I may be dependent on people's attention a bit too much but receiving it always is very motivating!

Bruce said:I still wish the lower interiors had a bit more contrasty lighting.

Yes, the lighting stays one of the major problems of this map. However, I think that the brightness levels are fine enough, and the real problem is the bland color scheme (unless you meant color contrast there ). But either way, I've failed to come up with a more original color combination than pink + gray.

Dimbeak said:Weapon placement could use some tweaking, though, I feel like it's hard to get my hands on a decent arsenal.

I came to agree with that while we were playing it on Quakeroach. Putting an MP5 instead of the revolver at one of the obelisks, as well as replacing the MP5 at the lower level with a shotgun, would certainly help. There have been trolls claiming that the map is terrible due to an excessively high amount of weapons but I don't think I can do anything about it: if it had little weaponry scattered around instead then someone else would surely complain about that, too. Besides, there are 16 spawnpoints, come on! There must be enough guns for everyone.

Bruce said:even though it lags

Man I know, honestly I'm even contradicting myself with this map. I have used some optimisation techniques, though, like using VHLT's CONTENTWATER tool texture to make the lamp holders one-plane instead of four. The same trick has been used on small chains. I have also tried to control the splits with setting proper detail levels on func_details but I didn't inspect the results a lot, so there may still be mistakes and unnecessary splits.

There are two main problems, though. The former is that the BEVEL texture is applied in-between many of the triangular prisms which compose the island's terrain. Simply put, BEVEL helps to improve collisions in certain cases like this one. But at the same time the splits on the terrain must be terrible, partly due to the compilers' fault, but also partly because I didn't use SOLIDHINT. This tool texture lacks the advantages provided by BEVEL and mostly works like NULL but helps the compilers split the geometry better in some cases. To be honest, I'm the one to blame here - some terrain pieces still have NULL in-between the triangles.

And the latter problem is the openness of the map. It's a "void map" (or so they refer to that kind of maps in one of Quake 1 mapping communities), which means that you can barely block visibility for players, therefore a lot of geometry is considered potentially visible and gets rendered.
I wish I had the willpower and the skill to optimise it further, but for now 3500 wpolies on average it is.

I plan on maybe rolling out a patch (which will be pretty useless because it's too late, the map has already been downloaded many times), and even then I doubt that I'll alter anything crucial about the map. As someone said in some thread on this website: "Fix your mistakes in your future works". You may take it as laziness but I certainly want to finally be done with this map and move on.

I need to play this again but sober.