TWHL Tower Created 9 years ago2015-02-07 21:24:31 UTC by monster_urby

what a bunch of idiots, Malle's map was the best so far

You stirrer, you.

Being irritated by a puzzle makes it a nice puzzle

I take issue with this. Firstly, it's not relevant, because the last two sections of your floor (which is what is getting most of the complaints) are not "puzzles". That would be like calling Super Meat Boy a puzzle game. The jumping part is 1 minute of figuring out what you have to do (or more, for reasons Pengy mentioned) and then vastly more than that just trying to get it right because it's overly sensitive. The crusher part might qualify as a puzzle if there was any way to get through it without dying the first time (short of pure luck, of course). Pure trial and error a puzzle does not make.
Secondly, no, being irritated by a puzzle does not necessarily make it a nice puzzle. Sometimes you're irritated by a puzzle because it's a bad puzzle.

The floor is entirely redeemable. It just needs tweaking.

in fact I found Malle's map more fun than the entire Portal 2, lol

in fact I found Malle's map more fun than the entire Portal 2, lol

stop crawling in my butt plz

on topic: nice commentory jessie since u broke the rule of the limited space.

since u broke the rule of the limited space.

Check again, she did no such thing.

I found a couple of exploits in Strider's floor that can lead to the player getting trapped - In the office, you can either hide under the desk (taking some fire in the process) or dart into the hidden room and close the door to avoid getting killed. Then, just wait out the turrets and they won't be activated when you go into their line of sight again.
This effectively traps you in the room, since the barriers come down.
The laser tripwires stay on, so it might be a good idea to at least have them rigged up so they can be triggered to bring the turrets down as many times as needed until the power goes off, so the player dies if they don't get that they have to reload.

That said, I wouldn't have even noticed either of these hiding spots being game breaking if I hadn't gone and replayed the map so many times. Too good.

since u broke the rule of the limited space.

I feel like a goddamn magician

It was an impressive trick, after all.

It certainly was.

I've seen the maps, so I'll say it again... Jessie hasn't broken the rules in any way.

People are still thinking Jessie broke the rules? That's a great compliment.

JeffMOD: sounds like a problem that can only be solved with more turrets!

Urby: put a turret on the ceiling every 32 units, and fill the secret area with them. If the bullets don't kill you their alarm sounds certainly will!

I'm trying desperately to think of a new map I can make that would make better use of this kind of spatial-trickery.

OH, I think I get it now! You used func_wall_toggles, didn't you?

Not likely to fall in with your plan of limited space Jessie but I already have an idea for another TWHL team project.

The focus would be on descending, but there would be no size limitations, no logical restrictions like "You are in a tower."

As long as your map focuses on heading downward, it's all good.

But alas, this comes first, then The Core.

Maybe in a few years.

It's been done.

...I mean, basically that, but a little more varied and not shit.

You can flesh out the floors a little, as long as the player is heading down in the long run. Elevators, ladders, stairs, falling, swimming.

I know what I would do for that (roughly) already. Probably not quite as cool though.

What in the world is the point of that stairs game? Tower evacuation simulator 2015?

One of the thousands of cheap horror games that have sprung up recently, based on a SCP Foundation (a fake horror wiki of sorts) entry.

It's literally about walking down and down and down until the games random number generator decides to throw it's game-ending jump scare at you.

Ah yes, I know of the Silly CreepyPasta wiki. They're making low-effort games based on those now?

I played through this again, in the belief demo recordings work in GoldSource (I guess I don't have to say they didn't). I played it a little more 'thoroughly' now, and I found a couple few glitches, most of them related to monsters (npcs).
On the media group floor (I think it was JeffMod's) you can use an ai exploit on that guy who killed someone (really, what happened there) to retreat all the way back to the stairwell. A bug native to GoldSource (and appearently not fixed in spirit?) cuases the ending door to open if he touches it. Even worse is he can pass the security shield without any problem. He can't come back through since the trigger_push in there affects both players and NPCs. If you then proceed to go through, he will lock you in place kicking you indefinetily, since you instantly regain health, and you just lost your weapon.
On the floor where you have to find the power cells (Tetsuo's?), if you let the agrunt walk around for a while in the holding cell, he may eventually get stuck in a wall. This prevents him from walking to the scripted_sequence, and prevents any progress.
On Strider's floor, if you don't know about the first power locker and don't care to look for stuff like keys, you might think you can be so sneaky and just rush juuust under the sensors of the camera through the door. Of course, the camera will trigger anyway, but you will just have touched the autosave cuasing the death loop mentioned earlier.

That's all I found on this playthrough. I will come back later if I find any more bugs and glitches. I'm also planning on making a video walkthrough of this, hence the mentioning of the demo recoring tools at the begining of this post.

Played the whole thing (apart from two floors that crashed), heres my quick overview:

I thought Mighty Atoms was the best, what good design!
Crashed on Malle's and Tetsu0 so didnt get to play those
Jeffs was the most interesting in regards to premise
Dr. Orange had the cool old school half life feel, which is awesome

I thought Mighty Atoms was the best, what good design!

Thanks, I appreciate that, even though I kinda rushed it at the end as time was running out. Oh well.

Played this, loved it. Wish I'd known about it, cos ten seconds in I got an awesome idea for a floor! Thanks, all.

There will be another installment with a descending theme coming up at any time now, sit tight while Urby polishes the details.

I've already started making mine. And it's already started hurting my brain. I don't even care how premature this is.

Count me in

By the way, is the link to the Alpha not working anymore, or is that just me?

Yeah, cleared out a load of files while restarting my website... I assumed everyone would have it by now.

If the sequel happens, I'm in.

As I said, it likely won't be a direct sequel, but another linked map project with a little more freedom. I really like the idea of several maps focused on ascending / descending.

Having said that, my primary focus for now is The Core though I will occasionally apply some polish to TWHL tower for a final release.

Anyone else is welcome to kick off a new joint project like this. It's nice to get everyone excited and talking about maps every once in a while... you know... on a mapping community website.

All told it would be nice to have a released Tower, to add to Phillip's site and maybe get some publicity.

Really dumb idea: at the end of TWHL Tower (this could be in a new version of it), you jump off the tower with a parachute, and detonate explosives ala Die Hard, destroying the building. A few years later the military finished TWHL Tower 2 at the rubble of the first tower... except this tower is descending and goes underground. You gotta go back and stop the military's plans.

Or the parachute could land you at the top of the next project.

Wich is a space ship. TWHLS.

I would kick off some projects in the interim, but I'm not much of a project leader. Y'know, unless absolutely no-one else around here is either.

It would also help if I could remember what my idea was...

I think you are very qualified as the leader. I see you in the TWHL shoutbox pretty much every time I visit, meaning you are one of the most active members. I also think you have the technical knowl to manage a mod, seeing as you have participated in a number of twhl coop mods already. Hoping to see you start a coop forum thread, whenever you get a idea.

To get ideas: Play a bunch of HL mods

I'm certainly not a leader, so if I can pull it off, I'm sure you can.

So, is there any progress in preparing of final version of the project?

The Core has taken priority for the time being.

I also kinda forgot about it...

Pistol feels a little bit overpowered imo.

I really like how it sorta feels like a story on it's own the way the floors are ordered.

Also this:

Maybe we should give you a deadline as well then, just like you gave us mappers a deadline.

Because why not!

Deadline is 30 NOV 2015 otherwise you're disqualified.

Now that I got the last of that pesky CSGO footage edited and uploaded, I've been working on this today for about 5 hours straight. Done a detail pass on the lobby, some entity tweaking on a couple of floors and made some minor cosmetic changes to Malle's floor to eliminate the guess work / odd behavior of buttons (which may have been a vanilla to spirit transition problem).

A lot of the other floors are pretty straight forward in terms of the tweaks you guys listed, so i should be able to get this released tomorrow, otherwise some time during the week.

can you fix the 2 WON friendly errors?

on malle's floor, some entity has a volume set to 2550, should be 255

on tetsuo's floor, theres a bunch of model errors saying 'cannot find model (model name).mdl' due to the pathnames set to somewhere the WON system didnt recognize. WON searches the models starting from inside the mod folder, but all the models in tetsu0's map start from the Half Life folder instead.

So he used 'twhltower/models/tetsu0/handle_chrome.mdl'
but the correct path name is 'models/tetsu0/handle_chrome.mdl'

There are five models referenced by tetsu0's map, two in his model folder and 3 from valve. likewise, the references to valve's models should also start from models/ and not valve/models pathnames.

Here is a pak file you can place in the twhltower modfolder to fix tetsu0's model problems in WON as well, if you arent sure what I am talking about
http://host-a.net/u/lnn8v6/pak0.pak

I'll take a look, I should just be able to correct the file paths in his map.

Today's TWHL Tower update

Tetsu0's Floor:

• Fixed grunt escape sequence so that the grunt will ALWAYS bust the glass
• Swapped out the cycler entities for Spirit's env_model and corrected the file paths
• Added sprite to keycard pickup

JeffMOD's Floor:

• Altered stairwell door so that NPCs cannot use it. This prevents the bad guy from running away up the stairs when fleeing.
• Increased size of keycard pickup trigger so player no longer needs to jump onto the desk.
• Added sprite to make keycard more obvious
• Clipped wooden frame behind the set so that the player cannot get stuck.

General

• Did a test run in Xash3D and can confirm the mod works from start to finish. Some issues with sound in places, but that's down to the engine.

Sweet! Thanks for the spruce-up urby

@Urby So, it appears my floor still have some bugs with a couple of voice lines not playing. The scientist is supposed to speak a sentence wich is in the map after opening the door, and another sentence played through an ambient_generic is supposed to play after pressing the security button. Do you think you can fix that?