Done with classes for now so my schedule should be fairly open, also considering putting a team together using the Wutang roster.

Personally I don't have any issue with people who have a few seasons in the lower end of UGC/Open since it's somewhat of an awkward area since they typically have better DM than most of the people in newbie mixes but still make the same mistakes. Ideally there could be some better way of judging players skill but this is something that is incredibly hard to do as shown by basically every matchmaking system ever. I also think this would be pretty hard to implement into mumble as right now people kind of just sort themselves and I have personally seen people change the level they think they play at 2-3 times in a night. I'm not sure if this was to increase their chances of getting picked or they were legit unsure of what skill group they were in. Right now they're pretty vague as they are only defined by seasons of UGC, I have seen players like Gravity come in and absolutely roll because he played other DM games before but since he had no UGC exp he was technically a "novice". Because of how few games happen a night it's pretty hard to have a kind of placement system but I think if coaches were willing to take it on you could kind of give them a general rating that they could use in the future to better place themselves?

I do really like the idea of a FPS config installer with general settings that could be tweaked on the installer (Netsettings,Ragdolls,Gibs, ect ect). Also maybe some of the other basic stuff like P-REC and some custom HUDs as well. Since I don't really have much experience with coding outside of some small java projects for classes I probably would not be of much help but maybe building off existing things like 4plug or other installers.

Updated to a6

This will most likely be the last alpha version unless I feel like the layout needs some somewhat major changes. Based on feedback I have gotten this does not seem to be the case currently. Either way please do test it and let me know your thoughts on here or on steam. Per usual the complete changelog is in the first post along with some updated screenshots.

Personally the coaching incentives don't really make a difference to me as I already have all the items I want but if they help draw other players I see no harm in having them.

The general problems I see with the current state of newbie mixes is how different each group of people is, for example last Friday I had a person who wasn't aware he needed to use the escape plan to roll out as pocket. But then the very next mix I had a group of players who had all played 2-3 seasons of UGC Steel/Silver and I spent a good bit of time going over rollouts and callouts only to find they already knew them. At least from a coaching perspective I almost never know what my player do and do not know so I either end up wasting a lot of time telling them stuff they already know, or I incorrectly assume that they know things that they do not. I think a way to solve this would be to kind of have a better placement method for newbies into their skill groups as right now people kind of just sort themselves based on what they level they think they are at. This often leads to either stacked games or a lot of confusion and frustration between the players and the coach. If this system was reworked it could potentially save a lot of time before the mixes and after drafting as sometimes the pregame chat can end up being 30+ minutes long.

Another pretty big change that I have seen in the past 4 or 5 months of coaching is how the general "lobby" chat has gone from discussion about the game and competitive to random memes and pubs. It's gotten to the point that I normally stay in the unlinked Coaches channel so that I don't end up with a massive headache from listening to 50 people talk about Getawhales pub server and pyro hats. I remember it used to be fairly quiet and coaches/admins would just answer general questions during the downtime before and between mixes. I know this has been offputting for a few people that I have asked to come coach as most people just simply do not want to deal with it and I can understand and respect that. I think trying to make it into a generally more serious environment versus a fuckaround half the time and waste a bunch of peoples time the other half would for sure provide a better environment for the coaches and the players who do want to take this time and get the most they can out of it.

For the people who had poor experiences with coaching in the past I would recommend giving it another shot. Coaches typically do not play anymore and some people may dislike this but personally I think it is a smarter way to do it as it prevent a lot of the problems listed above. In the past year or so I have probably only played in maybe 4 or 5 of the probably 50+ mixes that I have coached and myself and most of the admins agree that is probably a better way to handle the situation overall. From what I've seen the only time that the coaches do play is when people leave before or during the game due to bedtimes or whatever (this happens probably 3 times a night cause some coaches spend like 40 minutes talking before each game).

I also really like the ideas of short YouTube videos for basic stuff like rollouts, one of the main things that I spend a lot of time going over every week is the basic heal rollout for medics (please finish these shdwpuppet) and having a nice concise video on it as well as other things such as callouts or maybe basic positioning stuff because often I recommend people to go watch Marxist's YouTube videos but doing that before a mix starts is kinda impossible as most of them are quite lengthy. Having these to quickly pass to players who ask the same question that I've answered 3 times that night alone would save coaches a lot of time and allow them to focus on more specific questions and such.

EDIT: a general checklist before playing would also be a nice thing to have, having 3 or 4 people with 75 FOV is pretty depressing as it pretty much physically hurts me to watch them play with it. Having a video or simple installer for configs would be nice as I remember when I started playing I was super afraid to do anything with my configs or HUD as I was paranoid about fucking my game up.

Small update on what I have been doing for a6:

http://puu.sh/jjvJM/10e3f8687f.jpg

The underside of the map has been pretty much overhauled and I have added in some displacement ground as well as props in each corner and little platforms for all the major stuff down there. All the edges of said platforms have bulletblock ramps around them so splash bug pretty much are impossible, that being said because it was my first time really working with displacements I used one large power 4 displacements and I have been told that this has strange effects with splash damage and player movement so I will most likely be converting it into 4 power 3 displacements as to prevent that and to add a small amount of extra detail to the terrain. The props in the corner are currently just using their default collision and I will most likely fix that up by hand covering that area with clip/bullet block.

http://puu.sh/jjvMw/35c90b3697.jpg

The top side of the map stays mostly the same with the exception of the addition of fence props by suggestion of someone in AMS's stream chat to make it a bit more clear that the mid level roof area is inaccessible (Sorry I forgot your name I just wrote down the idea when it was brought up) . The edges of the main spawn builds have been slightly angled just for aesthetics and will be cleaned up and done properly when I begin to detail. The skybox was changed from upward to the generic night sky. Personally I am not very happy with how it looks visually and will most likely end up trying to find and use a custom night skybox that would look a bit nicer. Currently I am still using a light_enviroment for a day skybox despite it being night, mostly because I really don't want to spend a lot of time doing lighting right now but once I start detailing it will be another thing I will fix. Every other change was pretty minimal, I changed the window shutter to be a darker metal so it did not look exactly the same as the doors. Enabled the fog_controller enitity mostly to help with lighting since it's pretty bad right now.

Per usual any suggestions would be appreciated and I will most likely have a6 out in a few days based on feedback I get from testing.

Fairly sure that it was done on a map level so it cannot be changed nor moved. Maybe if valve adds support on the hud it will be possible in the future.

in HudDamageAccount.res find and change the fonts for delta_item_font and delta_item_font_big to "" like this:

"delta_item_font"		""
"delta_item_font_big"		""

bump, free most of this week

After I fixed the edges eating splash nobody complained about it being slightly raised, if it becomes a problem later I might consider making it flush but for now I think it looks far better and makes the upper area slightly more interesting. Also it fits better into my plans for detailing as it will be a large sheet of metal similar to the original ultiduo map. Actually the only area that someone has complained about splash being an issue on is the actual cap point model which is strange cause I have never had that happen to me on any map.

Updated to a5!

A complete list of the changes is in the first post. Thanks to everybody who has tested it and given me feedback. Ideally I want to get quite a bit more testing done so that I can be sure on the general layout before I start working on detailing.

http://puu.sh/jaAzo/9ddaac1721.png

Getting an issue w/ custom backgrounds and for some reason the main menu now shows the fps counter?

edit:

http://puu.sh/jaKGR/d40a6e0c99.jpg

having the same issue on other parts of my game as well

http://www.teamfortress.tv/thread/26604/how-to-fix-most-hud-s-scoreboard-after-gunmetal

edit: ninja'd

I actually have no idea how I missed that, going to blame it on 5am until I can figure out a better excuse.

http://puu.sh/j76CU/87e4444eea.jpg

Please move spawns so that they are all on the same level, I see no reason to have them on different levels

http://puu.sh/j76F0/4217f9367a.jpg

Clip over both the stairs and the big circle thing to prevent people catching themselves while jumping in spawn

http://puu.sh/j76Hb/cf9650bf05.jpg

Make these railings not have collision like the others and put a playerclip over them, some of the bars can eat rockets and such and having different styles of railing is strange

http://puu.sh/j76Lx/87d1b024db.jpg

Clip over the edge of this sign so players cannot get caught on it

http://puu.sh/j76NO/58650a0c22.jpg

Move both of the box props back slightly so they fall under the clip brush and dont catch people as they're going up the ramp to point.

http://puu.sh/j76TY/d370b1a2eb.jpg

Bulletblock over this little crack to prevent it from eating rockets and assorted other projectiles.

http://puu.sh/j773p/9b22ba6e76.jpg

Clip this corner and maybe redo the angled edge of the brush so that it fits flush with the wall and does not make that tiny space? Also clip the edge of the pipe on the left side

http://puu.sh/j779u/cb4c49dc8f.jpg

Bulletblock the edge of this ramp leading to the displacement, also maybe adjust how the crate hangs over the edge since it kind of makes jumps off that wall really annoying to do.

http://puu.sh/j77f8/6d6a455a3c.jpg

Clip around this area, specifically the area right next to the lamp post but also the little indent in the wall as i've seen many ubers ruined by people getting caught on basically every part in that area.

http://puu.sh/j77Ir/156f5e13f2.jpg

Probably should clip over these two windows since you can kinda get caught in/on them.

http://puu.sh/j77Mb/64bc891cf6.jpg

This clip brush should extend into the ground AND cover up the pallet props so it can be surfable

http://puu.sh/j77P6/7bf0451a72.jpg

Clip over the edge of this staircase since going under only really lets you get stuck, could be cool if you extended a box out or two so you could climb up a bit quicker though.

http://puu.sh/j77Tn/65200326f8.jpg

Move the clip brush down a bit so that instead of sliding up in a flat corner it smooths the edge out between the displacement and the concrete, probably should also turn it into a block bullets to prevent splash as well.

http://puu.sh/j783k/a563c451fb.jpg

You can still get caught on both of the doors in this area

http://puu.sh/j78eL/9b82d39cd5.jpg

Edges of this door aren't clipped so you can get caught but please leave the top standable as it opens up a pretty fancy spam angle

http://puu.sh/j78n0/ca3f19bf15.jpg

Edges of this door are not clipped over and it actually still seems to be textured/lit on the inside so maybe cut that out since it servers no purpose.

http://puu.sh/j78rQ/6f4734e504.jpg

Clip the corner of this ramp so you do not get caught when walking up to the pack

http://puu.sh/j78w3/19b695da9f.jpg

This area has always been kind of awkward to fight cause of all the gaps with the crates, maybe throw some more stuff down there and then just around the whole area?

http://puu.sh/j78Hy/78fbff3f4d.jpg

Extend the bulletblock on both of these stairs (Ones leading from ground -> choke and choke -> point/choke->little raised platform thing) so that it extends into the ground making the transition smooth and fixing the splash bug

http://puu.sh/j78YV/4de2a0e1ab.jpg

Clip over the edge or honestly just make it exactly like the other ramps where the trim brush is the joiner between the displacement and the actual ramp, imo it looks far better and provides smoother gameplay

Another major thing about the map is how stalemate prone it is, I believe this is partly due to how easy it is to hold last (fairly long distance to cover, lots of place to retreat behind point) I would suggest that slightly decreasing the spawn time for teams attacking last could help this but this would lead to a problem like old snakewater where most teams would just sack 4 players in and by the time that the other team would start to work out a push the spawners would already be on second.

Maybe slightly tweaking the spawns as well as slightly reworking the area on last so that defenders do not have a huge covered area behind the point that they can hide and spam behind could prevent this. Another "problem area" seems to be second as pushing in without a fairly large advantage leads to some stalemates that are quite unfun. I think that increasing the spawn time slightly for teams holding their second point could help fix this as it would make picks a bit more valuable. But the main reason I think that this area is very annoying to push is at basically every area the defending team has a pretty large height advantage and can see where you are pushing from very far away. This makes backing up into the more chokey areas leading to last and re-fighting fairly easy. This issue would be a lot harder to fix as the layout has been pretty well defined at this point in the maps life and making serious changes to the connector areas would be annoying and confusing for players. If other people have suggestions on how this area could be slightly tweaked I would love to hear them as I think this map could be quite good but the constant stalemates are very off-putting for players. Hopefully some ideas can get brainstormed and a new version will be out for next season. Apologies if this has a bunch of formatting errors as I wrote most of this in notepad before posting (preview button please enigma)

It was flush before and it looked pretty awful and did not really play well, in a5 I plan to add the blockbullets to it as I have the point on the ground.

http://puu.sh/j5Els/e4942f0a37.jpg

When I get around to detailing it will probably end up being a large metal sheet similar to the regular ultiduo and I don't think anybody had problems with that map eating splash on the bridge area? Either way it will probably stay for now.

Regarding the area under the fence, it was originally added so that if you left the mid level spawn you could not get corner fucked as easily by the fence but it ended up providing a lot of fun in the form of crackshots so it will probably stay for the near future as well.