eta?

cp_sunshine_b1 released!

DOWNLOAD (DROPBOX I'M SORRY!) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/cp_sunshine_b1.bsp.bz2

MEDIAFIRE DOWNLOAD http://www.mediafire.com/download/g955q660allnpnk/cp_sunshine_b1.bsp.bz2

If there are any problems at all that impact the play of the map, such as exploits, clipping errors or missing textures, please report them! Otherwise, have fun!

Yeah, there are probably a ton of little things that are a tad bit screwy - I just wanted this out the door tonight, though, and with all the problems packing I just decided to release what I got. Hopefully this'll be enough to satisfy, for now.

Thanks to nightwatch, benroads and obsidiian for helping with the damned packing. Couldn't have done it without you guys.

CHANGELOG:
- Detailed the entire map
- Rearranged various health pickups
- Added gully-like 'secret' area to last
- Expanded platform on side of last
- Changed geometry of lots of areas in general
- Tons of custom content (and deer)!

Screenshots:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00004.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00005.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00006.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00007.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00009.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/84556731/sunshine/2013-11-11_00010.jpg

Goodbye homework, hello sunshine!

The bell does not sound when capping.

Noticed some spots on mid, intentional?

http://i.imgur.com/ViyeFnI.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ckCu2Wd.jpg

Some more spots flanking mid on the weather vanes.

http://i.imgur.com/FEyle8F.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/FpWnzOI.jpg

Oddly glossy beams on red side next to spawn. I assume theyre supposed to be wooden?

http://i.imgur.com/iWNqsf7.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/1oZ0KwJ.jpg

Maybe delete these little shreds of caution tape protruding from the corners of mid? They're on 2 opposite corners.

http://i.imgur.com/vZIcrIk.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xC3FDVilEE

Greece/Acropolis rollout, uploading the choke one right now but youtubes processing is taking forever so the quality might be terrible.

edit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnqAYGu3OIw

Choke rollout, for some reason my demo slow thing turned on during this recording.

embedding multiple videos does not work

THAT WAS NEVER GREECE AND IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE GREECE

I was under the impression it was called pump room but now it doesn't even have pumps

Cafe?

new codename is greece/acropolis

Stunning!!

You think valve wanted shithouse to be called shithouse?

2 bad

also choke rollout since above one did not work

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnqAYGu3OIw

Better version of the cafe rollout (THERE WILL BE NO GREECE OR CHINA OR AFRICA IN MY TF2 DAMMIT). Faster + more HP.

http://youtu.be/vqnK0uBKPKU

Yeah I was trying to do something just like that but i'm terribad at demo jumping and didn't have time to record it.

If any Europeans or east coast americans (at a sensible time)are play testing this then let me know, I'd love to play it.

+111111111111

That was supposed to be for the flank

You know. The flank with what looked just like giant greco-roman pillars in it. Which is the whole reason it was called greece. Which what became the cafe room never had.

Negative,

http://puu.sh/5hNFc.jpg

was originally called as acropolis then changed to greece/greek halfway through the pug

I think the layout and terrain is really interesting, but I feel like the way you've done the textures makes the map very visually busy and distracting.

I think it looks nicer in your screenshots so it might be due to low quality textures, but these stone and brick patterns in particular are very busy: http://i.imgur.com/NYR5sqm.jpg, http://i.imgur.com/w5E1KcC.jpg. You use patterns in other places where the slabs are all the same size and in a nice grid, and those are a lot easier on the eyes.

A lot of the windows also have light bricks around them which makes them stand out from the wall, but they're not solid or important so it's just distracting. If it's not important, it should kind of just blend in with the rest of the wall so you can focus on the important things.

Another thing is you have a ton of props on the map. I get a few here and there can help to make an area interesting, but I think you went a bit overboard. For example here: http://i.imgur.com/09EzJwY.jpg. Most of the props here are pretty unnecessary, and I feel like trimming down on these types of things could help make the map simpler. I can sort of get the garbage to block you from going in the doorway (although you can actually go in enough to hit your head on the arch when you jump), but it would be better if you chose something with a colour that doesn't contrast so much with the wall, like some planks of wood over the door. It seems like you must've put a lot of work into detailing so it would suck to remove some of it, but the visual appearance of a competitive map is pretty important, and I wouldn't want people to get hung up on that when the rest of the map seems really interesting. I think this quote from Scorpio sums up the mindset you should have when detailing a competitive map:

You realise "They don't really care how it looks" applies to having plenty of detailing just as much as it does to having very little, right? Because it does. I really don't believe any of that detailing is going to seriously distract people while they're playing, but what it does do is make the map look REALLY nice.

No. It causes visual clutter and WILL distract. Why do you think comp players go through tons of effort to get as flat/smooth textures as possible in this game? Even Valve themselves went for a "brush stroke" style texture set for their TF2 textures, because it makes the playermodels stand out more from the map geometry. Also, using a lot of props, invisible walls, and small geometry details makes a map a pain to play for splash damage classes.

It's good that someone brought up this question. Being the map maker, and being experienced with making multiple different maps of varying environments, I feel like this is absolutely an issue I have to address, and an issue I have been considering since the start.

Let me begin with an explanation of what I wanted to do with the map. Sunshine is most likely going to be my final mapping project I work on for at least the next few months, as my workload is growing and I'm finding other interests that I want to sink time into besides mapping. As a result, I tested the map vigorously and wanted to try something that very few other mappers have tried: the maritime theme.

The theme itself is inherently busy, with a lot of brick textures and custom props that aren't default with TF2. Whether this is a problem or not is up to the players, but I personally recognize the business of some of these textures and I know exactly what you mean by this.

I will try my best to alleviate the problems you may have. I already plan en enormous clipping and blockbulleting pass for b2, in order to make the map less "catchy" and provide a better playing environment.

I will not, however, be making this map use any more concrete than it already does. I understand the positives of detailing in a sparse and simple concrete theme, as it is by far the easiest theme to detail and provides the most streamlined environment for play.

My problem with it is that it is very, very boring, and has been done many times. Metalworks is probably the most boring and plain ESEA map, due to its abundance of bland, grey textures. This is exactly what I don't like doing - making a map boring, under-reaching on its visuals. Unlike Scorpio, visual detailing is my favorite part of the entire mapping process, and I dedicate lots of time to making sure my maps look nice. Whether this is a detriment to the maps' chances of being in ESEA is up to you, but all I gotta say is that boring and bland detailing does, in fact, have impact on how the players feel when they play the map - as well as happy, bright detailing like I planned on Sunshine.

At the end of it all, I recognize and have been addressing the problems skeej and trog brought up. It is indeed a problem, and if you could maybe point out more textures you think are busy, that'd be great. I will try to tone down on prop usage in areas that aren't visually important as well. The doorways were a purely visual thing and most likely they'll be clipped off, block bulleted and/or simplified.

Thanks for the feedback!

Sounds great. I have no issues with the visual style as a whole! It's awesome to see someone try a fresh and colorful map again. It's always a hard task trying to make a good looking map and deviate too much from the standard 5cp style and still satisfy the comp players (cp_croissant).

I think most people won't mind if you keep the geometry detail and props but make clipping and bullet blocking smoother and more forgiving. Then, for players, it's just a matter of getting familiar with the clipping, and all will be fine.

just playtested it and the map had a nice feel to it
the main problem was that the last felt cluttered and awkward to move around in

I like that map overall though, definitely has potential

ehh as long as there isnt major clipping issues when firing rockets and shit i dont think its a problem

I'm going to NYUHacks this weekend but I'm not sure how that's gonna go. SBU Computing Society is weird (as in ask the organizers and leaders a question and they'll just go uh and um a lot and drift back to their little clique) so I might be back in time to run NMW PUGs this Saturday if these guys start acting weird. If not I'll find someone to run them in my absence.

Detailing with custom props is hard. There isn't a standard for how they're used, and TF2 players aren't used to them yet necessarily. In addition, a lot of them just plain look different. All of those things can cause problems, and for the most part, only people who aren't used to the new art style in the first place will be able to point out the problem.

Some of the props have "Random wound up hose on a concrete hall in the middle of a combat area" syndrome -- that is, they don't seem to have any reasonable place to put inside of the play area in TF2. If you go and study the old TF2 maps and how they did detailing, especially dustbowl, you'll notice that a vast majority of the in-game-area props they use fit in with the area that they're in perfectly, visually and purpose-wise.

The dark black trashbag is probably one of the weirdest props to put in the middle of a doorway. It's too dark, it doesn't fit in with the area around it at all, and while it makes sense at first glance it's not really like that much of valve's TF2 detailing. Wherever there's part of a TF2 map that looks like "this is part of someone's daily life", it's part of a joke about how stupid it is to have that kind of thing in a competitive game's map (HAPPY FARMERS), or a jab at the characters (like if you put sniper's coffee mug on a bench on a battlements). This is why 2fort gets away with the art style it has. Everything blends together nicely or it's part of some kind of humor or has some kind of psychological implication about the flow of the map.

Process and standin were picked to be stock maps because they were fun for low level players (that part is a presumption) and they were ridiculously intuitive. This is partly because of how they're sparsely detailed, but it's not the only thing. He uses default spawn orientations, lighting, and prop density to imply things about the spaces and routes in the map that wouldn't be obvious to new players otherwise.

For example, when you first spawn in on process, the fastest way to the middle of the map goes right by every control point. Lighting (or sometimes propping) is used to make a contrast between the inside and outside of important doorways that might otherwise be overlooked. Props in areas where fighting usually doesn't happen are much more dense, which makes new players at least slightly mentally block out those places as being different from the open ones. The layouts of the maps are startlingly simple after you've walked around on them enough because there's a drought of actual numbers of routes, and every area has some kind of special ambience.
Here's a couple images showing some specific cases of what process does:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1811521/dsafgsetgsreg.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1811521/asdf3easdqewd.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1811521/sdfgsgferwf.jpg

These are all effects that were achieved *through* detailing, rather than being a side-product of the detailing that happened to be done. If you're trying to prove a new art style, you should prove that it can be used to direct players, rather than just look good or impressive or not rape framerates or any other arbitrary minor goal of using an art style in a video game might be. There are a *lot* of competitive players that have a grudge against "art maps", because they don't seem to understand where TF2's artstyle and its gameplay intersect, which is everywhere.

how to give feedback with wareya

I made some demo rollouts, these are the fastest I could find.

I also included some alternates for the first jump since it might seem a bit hard(it really isn't tho)

The most accessible rollout is the left alternate, I think everyone can pull that one off :)

NOTE: I know that with the choke rollout you are left with very little HP but the purpose of that rollout is to counter a demo who goes left :)

Sorry for no youtubes, don't have the time: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5zd4mp25wwf50fn/sunshine_demo_rollouts.7z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycKUuyT3A-4

Takes about 10-11 seconds to get to mid as soldier and will leave you with almost full health at mid.