What are your opinons about specific maps?
 

This thread is simply to collect people's views about what's good and what isn't about FF's maps, this is being done in the hope they can be made better.
Honest, specific responses are required about any issues raised.

Okay here's a few of my personal suggestions for a couple maps, nothing real detailed or anything.

On well I'd like to see the team only energy wall/fields added to each of the conc ramp exits. Would still allow shooting into them but would keep the enemy players *out* of the conc ramp so they can't infect and take over the ramp so easily.

Also on well It would be nice if it could be lightened up just a bit, it's so gloomy and dark. But that's not really a big issue of course.

On Crossover mid-field is absolutely monsterous. It's a good map it just is too big mid-field. This is another drab lifeless map color/light wise. It's pretty depressing the feel.


Aardvark is great for colors/light and fun to play. The energy field to the spawns are so easily spammed it's so hard to get out of spawn when the enemy begins to overwhelm the other side at all. A demo can destroy you for quite some time if he has an HW to back him up.

Would be neat to be able to climb up on the rocks, or have some sort of sniper coves/caves up in the rocks too. But that's just personal on my part isn't a real problem and not sure it would really benefit the map much.

That's about all I can recommend, other than the maps that have green players like Monkey where it's a slight advantage be on the green team and mix with the trees/terrain easier than the other team.

I agree with Fathom. I love the dual bridges in crossover but does seem pretty "wide" but then again I definitely don't want to go back to how crowded it was in TFC. I can live with this I suppose but I really miss detpacking walls :)

aardvark is fucking annoying if the enemy has a sniper on the deck :p

Agreed agreed agreed, a thousand times agreed.

Aardvark needs one or two really tall objects (like hills, or a neutral mini-fortress) right in the middle of it, such that snipers can still be useful but players won't always be running from that ominous red dot :mad:

-Joker

I like fathoms idea about sniper huts in the rocks.

I am sorry but the only map im not to sure about is well, I think its been changed to much, like the curved water ways outside and the change of battlements IN MY OPINION are far to different to the origional well which worked amazing well. << PUN OMGZ LOLZ. sorry.

I think the FR in well is beautiful though :D

Monkey. It will take a bit of getting used to as the outside has completely changed so not made my mind up about that yet,

Other than that, great job, I love shutdown2. :)

Doors suck pretty much in every map (no I don't mean the weird behaviour of them caused by that server variable thingy, just the way they are made), at the exception of the front door in ff_shutdown2 - it stays open when a player is standing below it.

What I can't understand is that TFC was the only HL mod that had doors working as they should: when a player moves near a door, it opens, and when all players move away from the door, it closes.

Why can't doors work like this also in FF? I can think only two reasons, of which one is probably right:

A) Mappers have no idea what OnStartTouch and OnEndTouchAll outputs of trigger_multiple do. If the doors were made so that the trigger_multiple's OnStartTouch output triggers the func_door's Open input, the door would open when a player moves inside the trigger_multiple, and if the trigger_multiple's OnEndTouchAll output would trigger the func_door's Close input, the door would close when all players leave the trigger_multiple.

B) Mappers know exactly what OnStartTouch and OnEndTouch do, but because of bad network code or something, they don't work properly in multiplayer.

Now what I'd like to know is which one is the problem, A or B.

Source engine bug is what I think this is, so C. If you try just using source sdk base doors will behave just the same as FF.

Ok that's it... I'm gonna use force fields instead of doors.

most maps are too dark.

plz bring back tfc style overbright so we don't have to squint all the time.

I like Well. It's so gawthic.

Seriously, I love the water drip sounds of Well in the flag room, and the general dark atmosphere of it... beautiful. Same with Crossover, and the snow is a really nice touch. If it's too dark, try using your flashlight :P I would like to see a map or a playstyle where a flashlight would be useful.

Aardvark is great, but on smaller games I sometimes have trouble getting to the enemy base. Say if they have 3 guys standing guard outside their base, and at least one of them is a heavy. An other, sniper. I'd like to have an alternate route into their base, but that would be too much of a change. Oh I have a question: What is the point of the button that teleports you into the fire boxes? Do they have any other function? Every time I pressed it, that is all that happened to me.

There are some things I could nit-pick, but overall, every map I've played is awesome IMO.

I cant believe I am the first one to mention deathmatch. These guys got a great deatmatch game here, but it seems to me everyone is comparing it to tfc and dont want to try anything different :(

Anyway, their deathmatch mode has not gone unnoticed by me . . . . and DEVS...... I owe you big time for actually caring enough to put deathmatch into a "FREE" game.

Thanks for the thread Own3r....good topic :)


*Frags*

Aardvark was one of the best surprises about FF... release more maps like that!

I find Dustbowl to be enourmously frustrating for the attacking team, it's a little bit too easy for the defenders to spam the attackers spawn exit with Sentries, demo-packs and the occasional sniper. I've seen entire games stuck in the second or third spawn with such a tiny chokepoint = (.

A slightly brighter and cheerier Well would be nice too = ) considering it's so often played on the servers (Add some clowns and fluffy clouds and rainbows and stuff maby? ^^;)

<3 ardvark too = ) Nice and open with fun bumpy terrain = 3

The problem is that maps like dustbowl, monkey, crossover, .. make use of the simply implemented door trigger system, which seems to make use of onTouch to open the door. Hence, once you entered the trigger brush, the door closes after a while and standing inside the triggerbrush doesn't reopen the door.

Maps like shutdown, push, well, blis_2fort, flare, .. have overrrided the door systems by making use of onTrigger systems. Hence whenever you're inside the triggerbrush, the door gets the open command. You still see the doors trying to close a bit, but this should be fixed soon.

I agree with my fellow Cornishman on that.

Also, I hate how bland Well and Crossover look. I demand more pretty maps! with equal space for all classes.

what made tfc so good is it was far from the doom and gloom that made quake type games so awful to play. make sure FF continues in that manner

aardvark is definitely one a good example of this, and probably the best maps out there, esp how it seperates off/def spawns, and the general bright/happy feel it has to it. whoever made aardvark is awesome.

crossover and well both suffer from the dark/gloomy/depressing feel. anyone got a razor?

monkey could probably do with a wider yard/bridge, and possibly something else to help seperate off/def (like fast chutes from respawns to outside or something similar).

once hunted gets voice comms working then itll be more playable (if u have a hunted who knows what he's doing).

dustbowl its easy for defence to spam out from their spawn exit thing towards the blue start point...make the wall come out a bit more so the defence has to come "out" from the tunnel bit from their spawn.

maps like push shouldnt really have made it into default mapcycle etc as they expose FF poor FPS in spammy conditions (and not everyone has a 4ghz C2D as would be needed to hold 75fps minimum). physics cpu time goes thru the roof, a lot of it due to ragdolls. map itself is good though.

SD2 - Pretty much perfect in my opinion . Looks good , plays well .

Monkey - Design is good but too much crap in the midmap and the decision to have half the map filled with green foliage and then use Red/Green team pretty was just very silly.

Aardvark - Probably the best map so far i think ,the design is very good , aesthetically its very clean and polished and playing on it , even in pubs , is a great deal of fun. Love the climbable sniper trees aswell :)
This man should make more maps

Dustbowl - Played it a few times and unfortunately I find it one of the ugliest maps I have ever seen. Getting a world record for number of textures used in a single map seems to have been the design concept . Unless custom textures make an appearence then I can safely say my Dbowl days are over.

Crossover - It's nicely done with some reasonable changes but i think the midmap area is ever so slightly too fucking HUGE . Hard to guage playing performance as it seems to empty servers fairly frequently.

Well - As a public player the new version of this map just depresses me . Graphically it is very nice but the playstyle/design changes really don't work for me . The conc exits really need to be closed off for the enemy team (and personally I would make the upramp a little speed booster like Aardvark to get rid of the standard 4 snipers clogging the area up) I do not like the new offset RR setup and the area generally feels entirely too cramped .Worst point is the closing of the sniper deck window for flag throwing . Having to take a flag through the FD or Water is just annoying on public servers considering you normally have a 80:20% at best Def/Off split. Its a sup'ed up DM map now.

Good - SD2 , Aardvark
Average - Monkey , Crossover
Bad - Dbowl , Well

I also agree with Icarus with the exclusion that I didn't dislike dustbowl as much. Neither FF or TF2 recreated the true dustbowl "feel" though. Hopefully someone will do a straight port with only a slightly improved layout. dustbowl had what think one of the best designs in TFC. A pub game could go either way for either team. The overall "look" to FF's dustbowl is hard to follow at first. I knew where I was going simply because I remembered.

Dustbowl: fix the gates. The most anoying thing about dustbowl is that the defense demos and pyros and engs (emp) spam the shit out of the gate RIGHT befor it opens so everyone dies including snipers. I hate that about the map. It makes me not want to play attacking team ever. imho no grenade/detpack should get through the gate ever when its closed.