Set in the freezing mountaintops, this specially designed tournament killing ground offers purity and absolution. A mix of wide open spaces and close quarter blood baths, connectivity and fast paced bloodshed. VextArc Inc. avoided environmental hazards this time in the interest of increasing the hazard of being open to your opponent's attack.
This is a large DM map. I'm kinda sick and tired of the tiny cramped maps we've all been seeing so much of lately. I felt it was high time to return to the roots of Unreal's success: open spaces. Don't get me wrong, you'll find some nasty tight areas, but you'll also find yourself being swallowed up in the wide open spaces of these gargantuan halls.
On the non-player side of things, I'd like to speak about map making. If you're not into map making then this will be boring to you, but I'd like to share this with those that care.
One of my goals with this map was to largely stear clear of "basic brushes". Of course, in areas where only a basic brush would make sense, that's what I used, but I tried very hard to stay away from them and use the 2D shape editor instead. This is a good way to make maps. You find yourself being freed from the humdrum shapes that will otherwise haunt you.
Another goal of mine was to avoid the room-hall-room cliche. I still used it to a degree, mostly because I couldn't not. But in a few areas I really did pull it off. In my next effort I want to have no halls at all. I don't know if I'll succeed, but it will be interesting to try nonetheless.
Connectivity was the order of the day. I wanted things to interconnect and provide a lot of different ways of travel. That, along with flow, really seems to have worked. One big problem was the big room. It has a shieldbelt and a Keg which pulls a lot of action there. I spent a lot of time working the balance to pull some of that action away from there. And while the big room is still the focal point of the map, if you camp it you'll be missing a lot of hot action.
My second biggest enemy in this map was bot support. These damn buggers are stubborn and useless. I spent more time on bot pathing than I did on the damned architecture of the map!! Most of that time has really paid off, though. They will get nearly everything (not the Udamage, though, unless you give them the TL), and they move fluidly. They rarely stop moving or spend long periods of time running at walls (AcidBurn has that problem in spades). If you want the bots to really shine, though, pick bots that prefer the rifle (the bots have weapon preferences, and if you want them to be bad ass, they need hitscan weapons in this map).
The biggest enemy, by far, was building the map. The BSP is stretched to breaking here. Losing sight of zones, creating BSP holes, artifacts, and walls. So every time I had to fix something and rebuild the geometry, I then had to spend hours tweaking here and there until the BSP errors went away. Along the way I've learned to banish most of these types of things, so I guess I learned something for all that frustration.
