hey man. going off the last two games and the latest layout I have tried to pinpoint things I think hinder the gameplay a bit. It's a good map with a lot of potential, but you need to stay on the sexy gray boxes just a little longer!
Server room is too isolated, it cannot be easily sieged and the only two ways in are very close to each other, this makes it easy to turtle.
Maze and surrounding area leading to server room are just too convoluted, and snakey, That side needs simplification.
The southeast side of the map (boiler room etc) seems unnecessarily complex, its hard to lock down the aliens within the loop the loop area. (check red circles)
To me the map seems like it can be divided into three sections (green blocks to point the chokepoints). This is not a problem but you may want to expand on this in the rest of your map design or on the choke points themselves.
this might be a bit disheartening but just stay gray boxed for a few more tests and it'll be good to polish visually. keep at it man!
Will take the things we discussed into consideration for the next build It will arrive sometime next week, taking a little break from the map this week, getting 22 years old this sunday ^^
Stuff to look at for next week:
- Remove alot of shadows (eating up fps for people in some areas)
- Remake the maze areas and corridors into a more simplified room / area.
- Take a look at the occu geo in some areas.
- Play with the second entrance in Server Room (The high ground one), Flat suggested it ran to the TP in the back of the room. Not sure if I will do this, but never hurts to try out new things
- Add ladders in the Server Room so marines can defend biles from the catwalks.
Rejoice people! Big build has arrived The last couple of weeks prison has been missing from the sunday playtests, because big changes were made nearly every day! I finally got the build nailed down to what I wanted it to become, and I fixed all the issues with the new layout. These changes were brought to my attention by a lot of great people in this community, and I can't wait to see how it plays out !
I will update the patch notes on the workshop and in the first post. Here are some screens of the changes some areas has recieved. Enjoy
Screenshots of changes:
MINIMAP
Skyfall entities rearranged to make up for the new entrance to server
New Server Room entrance from Skyfall
New Server Rooom entrance from Cafeteria
Main Reactor entrances moved longer north
New Laboratory
Corridor connecting Pipelines and Laboratory
New Pipelines
Pipelines towards Ejection
Time has passed and our ejected gorge has grown! This is the new Prisoner Ejection, the RT and the Node is just to the right of this picture, encased in some greybox for LoS
I hope you liked what you saw Don't forget to read the patch notes on the first page. I can't wait to see how these changes play out in the end, thanks for all the support
Very nice changes! It was fun to play. A huge improvement from last time I played it.
I'll just make a list here what came to my mind from yesterdays testing.
- Ventilation lower level could use some pipes to make fighting there more alien friendly.
- Armory has some tight placements for the weapon crates. I don't like bumping into the "scenery"
- Server room tech point has a confusing layout, makes hard to navigate. Plus the entrance from Cantina has a potential bottleneck.
What I mean by confusing is that it's hard to see the routes leading in and out with a quick glance. You could fix it by either changing the lighting to more bright/different color in critical points or making the room more accessible, or both. I got stuck there when trying to figure how to get out of there the first time.
- General population tech point room is too small. People are forced to fight in a pocket.
- Travel times feel long. I know I've said this before but I still think that's bad in some way, makes rounds longer at least.
Precise constructive feedback WhiteDevil, thank you Will keep an open mind around all your suggestions. Already had a discussion with Howser about redrawing most of the map in photoshop. Make this current layout planned from the start; going to do this to remove some of the old fat, that remains on the map from the start of my spark career in dec with RR. Make the map more in line with what have made it fun during the tests, and what makes it fun now.
xtcmenJoin Date: 2004-04-20Member: 28040Members, Squad Five Blue
Great work. Glad to see you are still putting in time to this.
One quick note: Those props in Lab don't look good shrunken like that. Try to keep props at their normal size. If you can't then you need to shrink them proportionally.
*Edit: Changed the picture, to one with more visible lines
I redraw a floor plan for a sort of 2.0 version of prison I mentioned earlier, I want to change some rooms around so that the theme can be more prison like overall. Making a Med Bay instead of Main Reactor, and some showers!
This layout pretty much takes the nice things that prison evolved into over the tests, and just use that layout from the ground up, you got two symetrical 2 RT routes towards a side TP room, and a unique 1 RT route towards the other, The mid section is connected conveniently in the sides in the form of Bridge A and B, the vent routes from armory and ventilation, the rooms next to the start areas, will be normal routes to provide additional flow for both sides.
It's a crappy picture, and the sketch can have various oppinions but I would like to give you guys an insight, and this layout a go in greybox format
Basic floorplan thrown together off the sketch I drew, this should give a clearer example:
I really like the looks and feel of this new layout, hope you do aswell Now it's time for some iteration on this layout and making everything the right scale, right now the bases are far to small and the run times are not long enough yet. Hope you like what you see, I will continue to make it better. When it reaches a good state I will get it playable for the sundays, yet again!
Sometimes starting from a fresh is the only way to go. This is much better layout than the previous one, I am very interested in watching how it develops. Is the center is a tech point? I actually liked the room with in a room idea you used before, Just make sure its big enough this time with no crazy catwalks.
General population will remain a TP and get balanced the best it can, not sure I want to do a dual RT, gun for the middle map. How much roomception did you like about it Howser? The other areas of the prison blocks were never really active in combat, were just empty space. I'm not sure if that would work aswell just with a bigger base room in the middle.
I think my best bet is to make the bridges towards the middle and the mid room, nice areas for combat and strategy, while preserving some fun and good gameplay. My best idea on the topic atm, is making some sort of Crematoria style room, that will surround the entities room, so have it be a normal base and then have a ton of cell blocks around the axis of the room and bridges as art. This can still provide some sort of playability with the cells, you can for example make a vent on top of the room, so it feels like you have transitioned if it's mostly made of grates, while you rest up w/e and get back down to fight the marines. Will provide alot of visibilty ofc for the room and bridges itself, so marines also gets a good taste of prison in ns2
For those that haven't seen Chronicles of Riddick, this is crematoria, the structure would be the same, but not the theme.
It's a giant cave with the cells placed on a few levels near the bottom, the base would be hanging over it.
New build was released during the test last night, and we got a quick round on it I was very happy to see how it played out and I didn't get to see any major issues. Someone mentioned an exo being stuck near marine base, would love to get a clearer point on that.
Here is some screenshots of the "new" map, as always the minimap on the first page was updated
Please leave a comment, especially if you found something last night or in future tests
So we just played this map 6 times, 4 of which ended with aliens bottling marines into their static spawn location and it never progressed past the initial extractors. Whether this was down to poor choke point placement or bad players is hard to say, the first two we lost like that i was commander and players were generally ignoring orders to protect and expand. We faired better the second two times, but again, marines failed to hold secondary bases longer than a couple minutes. General map awareness was low, but the long winding corridors did favour alien mobility though.
The first game i entered was mid to late game as aliens and we lost after about 10-15 minutes. My experience tells me this, too many arbitrary walls and bumps. Every room had a high ceiling meaning jetpackers had free reign over the entire map. The consistant amount of air space made them more than a nuisance and solid walls made it hard to track enemies. Most official maps use pipes or trusses with gaps that offer moderate protection but don't allow you to entirely lose your persuer.
Advice: Vary room dimensions and add clutter to the ceilings to prevent jetpackers from just floating about and raining death from above. Players fighting from above, whether it be from a lerk or JP shouldn't have a line of site to important structures from every angle.
The last game lasted a lot longer for marines, we held three bases, but due to poor extractor awareness our economy fell and we lost to some well timed alien gorge rushes.
Advice: For some reason the HQ spots are tight spaces making gorge bile bombing hyper effective through no fault of the marines. Make sure there's plenty of space on any 2 sides of a HQ location.
Power: I noticed the power spots had really arbitrary locations. They really need to be in obvious locations and not hidden behind crates or trusses. One or two secondary rooms is OK, but not every room. Players should be able to see them when they enter a room. I had to refer to the minimap in every room to locate the power and sometimes it wasn't even the power node for the room i wanted.
One last point, corridors. The map was a bit of a maze, but that can't be entirely helped whilst you artpass the map as you have yet to put in landmarks to aid orientation. But it gets repetitive when between each room is a box corridor. There's no reason you can't have a corridor that has the same height dimensions as the adjoining rooms. Think of the corridor between Smelting and Flow Control, the corridor doesn't have to be a long thin room.
Updated the first post with minimap and the changelog since last time. There are now no more grey textures on prison New mid area and an optimized layout. Enjoy! I uploaded a TON of new screenshots to the steam page, if you want screens take a look there
- The new general population, cells will be added down below.
I updated first post with the current builds Minimap. This build was pubbed the 22 of dec, and contains a new detailed marine start while the rest is pretty much the same. I have begun a rather large re-construction of the alien start area, but that new build will have to wait until after the 4th of jan, since I'm going on a vacation today ^^
Feel free to play rounds on the map while I'm away, and please leave the feedback in here!
When I get back the 4th of jan, I'm going to be detailing the rest of prison pretty aggresively, the main reasons I'm going towards a final build now, is that I can't get the idea of how prisons layout looks currently out of my head, there is a lot of stuff I wanted to do diffrently, but today marks the 1 year since I opened spark for the first time and started the map, and I can't do any more complete reworks without folding on the project. I'd need a clean slate.
I want to get this detailed, fix the most crucial stuff, and then move on to new projects. These involves making some NS2 videos (montages) for our custom maps and a project with another mapper. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed the ride on ns2_prison so far, now it's time to hit home
See you all the 4th again, and have a happy new years eve all Keep those eyes and fingers safe!
FInally got a new build out, changes are on the first page Short summary I made entirely new occu geo for the map to improve performance, @Flaterectomy helped me out with marine start and the RR, which I am truely grateful for!
I detailed the exit coridors from the main areas and alien start is pretty much finished aswell. I also fixed a few gameplay issues.
Furthermore I finally refreshed the steam page for the mod, entirely new preview image and pictures of the detailed areas !!
I hope you all continue to enjoy prison! I'll be taking a few weeks break from it while the custom map is being played, detail further sometimes on the offline file. I still aim for prison to be fully detailed in a near future, but for now I need a break after working long and hard on this build.
InsaneAnomalyJoin Date: 2002-05-13Member: 605Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, NS2 Map Tester, Subnautica Developer, Pistachionauts, Future Perfect Developer
Some very nice-looking work here! It's great to see that the Eclipse art set has been useful/inspiring for quite a few of you.
My main critique is that the lighting could probably use more contrast, and that you should be careful not to make areas too visually busy with all of the detailed props.
Great constructive feedback, it's two areas I do keep a heavy mind towards.
I used to play ALOT of cs 1.6, and I never got on board with source, exactly because the game was to heavy on detail. Turning a corner went from instant recognizing green on brown pixels, going for a 1-2 shot to the head. Suddenly the brain had to process alot of flowers, light rays, barrels that could be moved / rolled etc. etc.. Going around what's detailed so far on prison tho', I think it brings value for map remembrance. When the battle was on, it's at a point where it don't distract the players to much.
Will keep a heavy mind of not over-proping going further tho', even for performance reasons, I still got plenty of greybox to detail and windows to make art pieces for
The lightning is every mappers most favorite and hated tool.. It's not something I would consider final, before I have everything in place, you change or add even the smallest thing, and you need to redo the lightning concerning said thing. It can make places look awesome, or make an awesome deco obsolete used wrong.. Everytime I go back to tweaking it, it ends up better, so I'm not done with that for a loong time!
Please give my thanks to the guys behind the eclipse and other map assets They are a blast to work with! Would love to see more of you yellow guys in the threads in here!
Been a long time since january, I have been busting my ass of trying to make the detail of the next area work over the past few months. I've used around 4 weeks on actively iterating on it, but it looks like it's going to be worth it!
I plan to keep busting my ass off, and get the entirely of Surveillance done for sundays test session. I also plan for future prison builds to be more frequent, I want to have the entire map showcase the same quality in detail, but I don't plan on it taking another year, I want prison complete before or start-summer.
Here's a sneak peak
*WIP**** Lightning, props and textures might change. Optimization for framerates might be needed, there will not be that many reflection orbs.
BeigeAlertTexasJoin Date: 2013-08-08Member: 186657Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Diamond, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Pistachionauts
Looking good! The only thing I can think of here is that's WAAAYYYYYY too many reflection probes. The map file size is going to explode if you keep that up. Take it down to about 2 or 3 for this room and you'll be good.
Comments
http://imgur.com/930bEse,0QBOB6g,ynN8IPE,h7LIUiT,E94Cua8,a9QXnbk,fAfXNTW,r4qjpoA,xn0uNWl,oR3l8Mt,URT9qQV,MTUuFfx,RtFcXdC,R1Ok61n,gnDqpvl,db8kB2t,E78dDCR,VD8dawy,gSASYAQ,xt2vO6n,xVYQgc2,QOYIe9Y,SDrg3HB,wh8DRJB,c0i1s7C,AVNBVUn,IPjNRpy,nbqdSnb,gpHC0BR,nbTAk8G,czV1Kln
Fresh screenshots
Server room is too isolated, it cannot be easily sieged and the only two ways in are very close to each other, this makes it easy to turtle.
Maze and surrounding area leading to server room are just too convoluted, and snakey, That side needs simplification.
The southeast side of the map (boiler room etc) seems unnecessarily complex, its hard to lock down the aliens within the loop the loop area. (check red circles)
To me the map seems like it can be divided into three sections (green blocks to point the chokepoints). This is not a problem but you may want to expand on this in the rest of your map design or on the choke points themselves.
this might be a bit disheartening but just stay gray boxed for a few more tests and it'll be good to polish visually. keep at it man!
Stuff to look at for next week:
- Remove alot of shadows (eating up fps for people in some areas)
- Remake the maze areas and corridors into a more simplified room / area.
- Take a look at the occu geo in some areas.
- Play with the second entrance in Server Room (The high ground one), Flat suggested it ran to the TP in the back of the room. Not sure if I will do this, but never hurts to try out new things
- Add ladders in the Server Room so marines can defend biles from the catwalks.
I will update the patch notes on the workshop and in the first post. Here are some screens of the changes some areas has recieved. Enjoy
Screenshots of changes:
I hope you liked what you saw
I'll just make a list here what came to my mind from yesterdays testing.
- Ventilation lower level could use some pipes to make fighting there more alien friendly.
- Armory has some tight placements for the weapon crates. I don't like bumping into the "scenery"
- Server room tech point has a confusing layout, makes hard to navigate. Plus the entrance from Cantina has a potential bottleneck.
What I mean by confusing is that it's hard to see the routes leading in and out with a quick glance. You could fix it by either changing the lighting to more bright/different color in critical points or making the room more accessible, or both. I got stuck there when trying to figure how to get out of there the first time.
- General population tech point room is too small. People are forced to fight in a pocket.
- Travel times feel long. I know I've said this before but I still think that's bad in some way, makes rounds longer at least.
One quick note: Those props in Lab don't look good shrunken like that. Try to keep props at their normal size. If you can't then you need to shrink them proportionally.
*Edit: Changed the picture, to one with more visible lines
I redraw a floor plan for a sort of 2.0 version of prison I mentioned earlier, I want to change some rooms around so that the theme can be more prison like overall. Making a Med Bay instead of Main Reactor, and some showers!
This layout pretty much takes the nice things that prison evolved into over the tests, and just use that layout from the ground up, you got two symetrical 2 RT routes towards a side TP room, and a unique 1 RT route towards the other, The mid section is connected conveniently in the sides in the form of Bridge A and B, the vent routes from armory and ventilation, the rooms next to the start areas, will be normal routes to provide additional flow for both sides.
It's a crappy picture, and the sketch can have various oppinions but I would like to give you guys an insight, and this layout a go in greybox format
I really like the looks and feel of this new layout, hope you do aswell
I think my best bet is to make the bridges towards the middle and the mid room, nice areas for combat and strategy, while preserving some fun and good gameplay. My best idea on the topic atm, is making some sort of Crematoria style room, that will surround the entities room, so have it be a normal base and then have a ton of cell blocks around the axis of the room and bridges as art. This can still provide some sort of playability with the cells, you can for example make a vent on top of the room, so it feels like you have transitioned if it's mostly made of grates, while you rest up w/e and get back down to fight the marines. Will provide alot of visibilty ofc for the room and bridges itself, so marines also gets a good taste of prison in ns2
For those that haven't seen Chronicles of Riddick, this is crematoria, the structure would be the same, but not the theme.
It's a giant cave with the cells placed on a few levels near the bottom, the base would be hanging over it.
Here is some screenshots of the "new" map, as always the minimap on the first page was updated
Please leave a comment, especially if you found something last night or in future tests
Screenshots:
The first game i entered was mid to late game as aliens and we lost after about 10-15 minutes. My experience tells me this, too many arbitrary walls and bumps. Every room had a high ceiling meaning jetpackers had free reign over the entire map. The consistant amount of air space made them more than a nuisance and solid walls made it hard to track enemies. Most official maps use pipes or trusses with gaps that offer moderate protection but don't allow you to entirely lose your persuer.
Advice: Vary room dimensions and add clutter to the ceilings to prevent jetpackers from just floating about and raining death from above. Players fighting from above, whether it be from a lerk or JP shouldn't have a line of site to important structures from every angle.
The last game lasted a lot longer for marines, we held three bases, but due to poor extractor awareness our economy fell and we lost to some well timed alien gorge rushes.
Advice: For some reason the HQ spots are tight spaces making gorge bile bombing hyper effective through no fault of the marines. Make sure there's plenty of space on any 2 sides of a HQ location.
Power: I noticed the power spots had really arbitrary locations. They really need to be in obvious locations and not hidden behind crates or trusses. One or two secondary rooms is OK, but not every room. Players should be able to see them when they enter a room. I had to refer to the minimap in every room to locate the power and sometimes it wasn't even the power node for the room i wanted.
One last point, corridors. The map was a bit of a maze, but that can't be entirely helped whilst you artpass the map as you have yet to put in landmarks to aid orientation. But it gets repetitive when between each room is a box corridor. There's no reason you can't have a corridor that has the same height dimensions as the adjoining rooms. Think of the corridor between Smelting and Flow Control, the corridor doesn't have to be a long thin room.
I updated first post with the current builds Minimap. This build was pubbed the 22 of dec, and contains a new detailed marine start while the rest is pretty much the same. I have begun a rather large re-construction of the alien start area, but that new build will have to wait until after the 4th of jan, since I'm going on a vacation today ^^
Feel free to play rounds on the map while I'm away, and please leave the feedback in here!
When I get back the 4th of jan, I'm going to be detailing the rest of prison pretty aggresively, the main reasons I'm going towards a final build now, is that I can't get the idea of how prisons layout looks currently out of my head, there is a lot of stuff I wanted to do diffrently, but today marks the 1 year since I opened spark for the first time and started the map, and I can't do any more complete reworks without folding on the project. I'd need a clean slate.
I want to get this detailed, fix the most crucial stuff, and then move on to new projects. These involves making some NS2 videos (montages) for our custom maps and a project with another mapper. I sincerely hope you have enjoyed the ride on ns2_prison so far, now it's time to hit home
See you all the 4th again, and have a happy new years eve all
Marine start if you haven't seen it:
Sneak peak of the new alien base:
I detailed the exit coridors from the main areas and alien start is pretty much finished aswell. I also fixed a few gameplay issues.
Furthermore I finally refreshed the steam page for the mod, entirely new preview image and pictures of the detailed areas !!
I hope you all continue to enjoy prison! I'll be taking a few weeks break from it while the custom map is being played, detail further sometimes on the offline file. I still aim for prison to be fully detailed in a near future, but for now I need a break after working long and hard on this build.
Screenies:
Marine coridors.
My main critique is that the lighting could probably use more contrast, and that you should be careful not to make areas too visually busy with all of the detailed props.
Great constructive feedback, it's two areas I do keep a heavy mind towards.
I used to play ALOT of cs 1.6, and I never got on board with source, exactly because the game was to heavy on detail. Turning a corner went from instant recognizing green on brown pixels, going for a 1-2 shot to the head. Suddenly the brain had to process alot of flowers, light rays, barrels that could be moved / rolled etc. etc.. Going around what's detailed so far on prison tho', I think it brings value for map remembrance. When the battle was on, it's at a point where it don't distract the players to much.
Will keep a heavy mind of not over-proping going further tho', even for performance reasons, I still got plenty of greybox to detail and windows to make art pieces for
The lightning is every mappers most favorite and hated tool.. It's not something I would consider final, before I have everything in place, you change or add even the smallest thing, and you need to redo the lightning concerning said thing. It can make places look awesome, or make an awesome deco obsolete used wrong.. Everytime I go back to tweaking it, it ends up better, so I'm not done with that for a loong time!
Please give my thanks to the guys behind the eclipse and other map assets
I plan to keep busting my ass off, and get the entirely of Surveillance done for sundays test session. I also plan for future prison builds to be more frequent, I want to have the entire map showcase the same quality in detail, but I don't plan on it taking another year, I want prison complete before or start-summer.
Here's a sneak peak
*WIP**** Lightning, props and textures might change. Optimization for framerates might be needed, there will not be that many reflection orbs.