Morganan

This is a copy/paste of something I put up on another site, but the more input and suggestions I get from people, hopefully the better the final product will be.

A couple of friends and I are working on a somewhat new style of campaign, and I wanted to lay out some of our concepts to gather some opinions to hopefully refine our work. We are just starting to lay out the maps in hammer, so no SS's or videos to show as of yet.

anyway,

Our concept is to make 3 map "campaigns" instead of the 5 map campaigns valve does, only increase the length of our maps considerably. Basically we want to make them as big as we can within reason but to still make them run well for any user. Basically the survivors will be lead around by a voice over a radio/loudspeakers to an extraction point where they can escape. We are going to lay out the maps in such a way so that they are little to no "pick up items" to be found if the survivors follow the "suggested path" so we put choices to the survivors of either trying to go quickly through the map and risk being pistols only near the end, or taking some detours to find ammo/pills/weapons/grenades/etc. These maps are being made with vs. mode squarely in mind so they will hopefully be better balanced with more places to allow smokers to force survivors to backtrack and more good pounce-damage locations for hunters to utilize.

The biggest twist will be how we handle our "finale", we want that to be less of a "move to the extraction point and hold off the infected until rescue arrives" and more of a "you have a set period of time to make the extraction point otherwise you will get left for dead". We all think it makes for amore interesting finale to have multiple "crescendo events" where you get the typical horde and a tank spawn which you not only must handle, but do so in a timely fashion. We want to give the survivors a feeling of "we are almost out of here, we gotta keep moving to get rescued" instead of just having survivors do a "last stand" scenario like all the current finales.

Currently our layout is as follows:

Map 01: the survivors move through a residential area for a few blocks going street by street with a couple of detours possible to pick up pipe bombs/molotovs/ammo/pills. Then we want the survivors to move through a block of row homes that are in varying stages of decay. Once they move through the row homes we want them to have to get up on the roof of them and travel roof-side for awhile, giving smokers the opportunity to pull survivors down on the street or back in the buildings forcing them to backtrack. Eventually they get into a warehouse district to find the safehouse. We are looking at one or 2 crescendo events on this map and multiple alarmed cars.

Map 02: We want the survivors to have to travel through a warehouse district going through multiple structures all with decently sized sections that have no light other then flashlights. We are looking at 3 crescendo events in this level increasing in difficulty so by the time they hit #3 event, they have no-place to really corner/closet-camp. Here is where we want to introduce the survivors to the concept of timed events. For example we want an event where once you trigger it, you have 2 minutes to make your way to an exit door that gets unlocked in 2 minutes from when you start the event, and gets locked again in 2 minutes 30 seconds. If the survivors miss the exit they have to travel back and trigger it again. Eventually they make their way out to a shipyard where they find the next safehouse.

map 03:
Our goal with the finale is to give the survivors a set period of time to make their extraction point. We want to delay them with some events that spawn tanks in leiu of the normal expected timed spawns the current finales have. The survivors will move through a passenger area for cruise-liners, a baggage handling area and then one last area before being able to board the ship to escape. (We want this idealy to be a big luxury cruise-liner, but it might end up being a drydock depending on how easy/hard making a detailed cruise-liner is and what we think the "fun factor" of going through one is) Like I said earlier, you will have a set period of time to make your escape, we wont give the survivors a "countdown clock" but will allow them to figure out how much time they have left until the boat leaves without them. We dont want people to have to keep a stopwatch by their computer, but we defintely don't want a timer ticking down on their HUD either as that gets annoying. We want to put the onus on the survivors to play well, stick together and keep moving if they want to escape and reward the infected team for making the survivors move at a slow pace. Obviously the right amount of time to give here is something we will need to test the hell out of to find a time limit that gives the survivors a feeling of urgency but doesnt require a speed-run to complete under the time limit.

We want to put a little bit of the "feeling of the unknown" into the maps in such a way that caters to the 2 main playstyles people employ (rushing or exploring). We want to have an almost risk vs. reward system for pickup items where if you want the reward of the pickup item, you have to take the risk of searching for the items instead of just finding 3 medpacks, 2 pills, 3 molotov's, 3 pipebombs, a second pistol and 2 ammo dumps along your intended path. We are still going for a linear style map, but more like a maze then a straight path with lots of dead-ends. I'll explain the area I was fleshing out last night..

The start of map 01: The survivors wrecked a truck they were using to escape, so now they are stuck on foot. There will be the normal shotgun/uzi choice and 4 medpacks laying at their feet. The vehicle they were traveling in is on fire. They hear a voice from the car beside them, it's a boat captain at the pier telling them over AM radio (thankfully the car's previous owner left it on and the battery hasn't died yet) he saw the accident and is willing to wait for them a little while and him giving them instructions as to where to go to the next safe area and letting them know there will be some markings out in the street for them to use. So they head down the street torwards their destination. As they head down the street they will see a gap between the homes that allows them access to the back yards of that row of homes. Back there they see approximately 5 garages they can get inside. 2 or 3 of these will have pick up items spawns possible in them, but all of them will have triggers on the door to call in a horde when they are opened. The garages themselves will also be made up of mostly breakable walls so there are no worries of closet-humping or what have you. Each garage will have a skylight and the infected will have climbing spots to have access to every roof. Do the survivors want to risk the hordes for the pickup items or not? There will be very limited spawn entities set for medpacks, so the survivors cannot expect to find 4-6 bonus medpacks across the level as that seems to be the best way to add risk to the risk/reward scenario. The more the survivors tend to stray off the quickest path, the more rewards they will find.

Another example: We are planning a crescendo event for near the end of this map in which starting the event spawns a tank automatically. The horde that typically comes with these events will come XX seconds after the tank spawn. The props in this area will be made up mostly of physics objects instead of static props, so the survivors will really have to be careful they dont get a car parked on them. If the survivors didn't explore the level a little to find some pickup items, this tank is going to be a problem for them. They are going to have no molotovs, no dualies, no pipe bombs and they will be low on ammo. The horde spawns for this event once started will not stop until the map ends one way or another so they wont just want to kite the tank and slowly kill him. They have to deal with him and his special infected friends quickly and efficently otherwise they will get overwhelmed by the normal infected and find themselves unable to make the safehouse. That way a real good team *might* make it through without any pickup items, but the survivor team that took some extra time to explore will have the molotovs and enough ammo to be able to deal with the tank in time to make the safehouse before they get overwhelmed.

As the maps get farther along via videos and SS's we will make these points clear to the players along with the "writing on the walls" can help us get the players of the proper mindset to really enjoy these maps. Any comments/suggestions about what we have so far?

DrBeat

The 3 map concept seems interesting, the only thing I can see being frustrating would be at a higher level of play (expert) would be to restart the entire level, but it would be an added challenge. Sounds good so far.

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Morganan

We aren't looking to make these for co-op and thus expert play. Until the SDK is out I cant say if it's any extra work or no extra work to place spawn points for special infected or how the director handles them in co-op mode. I will say if it requires extra work to make a map ready for co-op mode, we wont be the ones doing it. We'll do all the required nav inputs so the survivor bots dont just stand there like idiots and do nothing, but we will be doing no work in that area for the special infected. This campaign is being made strictly for vs. mode. All the current official maps were all made for co-op mode, and adjusted slightly for vs. mode. This project will be the polar opposite in that it will be made primarily for vs mode, and we wont ever care if it gets played in co-op mode. Unless valve changes it's stance on vs. mode, all of us working on this project agree that what makes vs. mode in any way slanted to the survivors is the length of the maps and the frequency of the pickup items. It's why the harder difficulties are preferred by some, as it's the only way you dont get 5 medpacks, 11 molotovs, 8 pipe bombs, weapons strewn out everywhere and ammo every 200 feet. In L4D the mappers create spawn entities for the pickup items, a medpack and grenades can spawn here, a pistol and ammo can spawn there, etc, and the director chooses which of those entities can spawn items on the fly. Our goal is to make it harder on the survivors via good mapping and a lot of testing, not by changing a difficulty setting.

Pistolfied

Map 01 With your idea of the roof on map 1 make sure the backtrack area isn't too great, try and get it to be no longer than the spawn time of a smoker (30 seconds) to get back into position, or an alternative way to get the person back. VALVe has done this very well with no mercy 3.

Map 02 Having no light sources in a level is simply a bad idea. VALVe has made light a key aspect of L4D, it is placed as a guide of where to go in a very subtle matter. Light is what players will follow by instinct, having no light can cause problems, very little light however is something that can work well.
For the timed event part, try to remember that 1 minute can be a very long time in L4D depending on the situation and area, or it can be a very short time. A lot of play testing should be dedicated to just getting the timer right. The AI director can be a big part to play in how long this timer lasts as the director is what chooses how many zombies will be going after the players.

Map 03 I completely support the idea of having a finale in which you keep moving towards your rescue point, the only problem with this would be tank spawns though. The reason being is you would have to make the entire map balanced for a tank battle as the tank could spawn at the start if the survivors are being defensive, or somewhere in between the start and the end if they are being more aggressive. For the timed part it should have visual and audio cues as to how much time they have left, try and give them a sense of urgency which will deteriorate teamwork and coordination when also showing they still have a fair amount of time left, this will really give the feeling of actually being there and wanting to get on that evac vehicle. It will also give that "epic" feeling once having reached that vehicle which is lacking from VALVe's maps.

Overall The concept of having only three maps is a questionable one for versus. The reason being for this is the point system of reaching the safe house, one team can be doing ultimately better until one point where the director feels like destroying them, while the other team may not be doing as well but the director doesn't feel like throwing hordes upon hordes at them. If this were to happen for a single map it would have a much bigger impact than if it happened on one map of a five level campaign. This will also require much more testing to find places to have medical kits which work well throughout the level along with pills and pipe bombs/molotovs.

All I can say other than all that is good luck on the project, I really hope it turns out well as it has huge potential.

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Morganan

Understood, we want to have 1 or 2 ladders set up on the street to get back up but honestly this one will be difficult to do how I want, so I will probably end up figuring out a different method to get some opportunities for a smoker to pull the survivors down from a height either on this map or elsewhere. You have the benchmark right, the survivor pulled down should make it back up where he was within 25 seconds, no longer.
Ya, understood as well. The idea is to lead them from light-source to light-source with dark area's outside the "main path". The dark areas will contain the item spawn locations. I want to make it as dark as I can without giving survivors a headache from squinting trying to see in the darkness. (or am I the only one who catches myself doing that on dark maps from time to time?) If it's to dark and it sucks/isn't fun, we'll change it.
Ya, I shouldn't have written down any exact time references, the idea is we want the events to be short enough to give the survivors a sense of urgency, but also long enough so they dont feel they have to sprint to make it. Our idea is to test with no timer, and take a series of tests where we tell the survivors to go as quickly as possible and base our time off a median number of how long it took the survivors on our test series and then adjust from there. While the SDK isnt out to confirm anything, from what I understand you will be able to set a minimum number of "waves" for the director to spawn for a pre-set panic event and set a time interval for those waves.

This is another thing a mapper can control. The mapper will have the option where or even if to place tank spawns at random locations for the director to use. For example the co-op version of no mercy 01 has no tank spawn entities in it and no events where a tank is hard-coded into the map whereas in vs. mode he can spawn at one of 3 places if the director wishes. No mercy 05 the director has 2 spawns to use a tank if it wishes, but once the survivors go through the grate they are disabled and then there can only be a tank spawned as part of the event. Our goal is to have a few clocks scattered across the level that will allow the survivors to see the time, and have our man on the radio give them a time he is leaving. For example, he tells them he is leaving at 12 midnight and the clock in the saferoom reads 11:45. (setting the clock to start moving once either the survivors or the director opens the door)

We "hope" to take some of the funkiness out of the directors spawning habits by making spawn entities for the witch and tank at specific locations with vs. mode firmly in mind. You have to understand Valve just made the co-op map, then copied it and went to work adding roof textures, finishing off building views, clearly marking climbing points and then subtracting things for vs. mode but basically limiting any removal/replacement of things to the finales. One thing they didn't mess with are the witch spawns. With L4D unlike CS for example, you only place specific spawn entities for the survivors and for the tank. The witch and the normal infected get spawn nodes, which for the normal infected cover basically every part of the map the survivors can travel and the for the witch certain areas that can be as big or as small as the mapper wants and overlap normal infected spawn nodes. We should be able to make the witch more balanced for vs. mode in that while we wont control if she spawns, we can defintely control where she spawns. No custom map should ever have a "useless witch spawn". You can place the spawn nodes to ensure she can only spawn in a location where the survivors simply have to kill her. Now if you want to say it was unfair she spawned 25% of the way through the map for you, and 75% through the map for me, I cant do more then shrug my shoulder and join you in cursing the director, but I can guarantee she will be in the way for both of us.

I honestly think the scoreboard system is kinda FUBAR'ed right now and that's something Valve has to address. I honestly think shorter campaigns might help the scoreboard system instead of hurt it. Let me give an example, the max a health bonus can be is 400 points, that assumes the survivors took no damage across the entire level, and they still have their original medpacks and each one has an unused pill container. You simply take your current health, divide it by 2, then add 40 points for having a medpack. Each un-used pill container gives 10 points and if it was used (meaning you still have temp health when the safehouse door is closed) your current temp health is divided by 4 and that is added to your health bonus. That sets up situations where a lucky medpack spawn (say there is one by the ambulance at the end of no mercy 03 and one inside by the safehouse) can have a huge impact on the score. another case of being boned by the director. If both our teams all make the safehouse there but your team gets those spawns and my team doesn't, that's 80*4*1.4 or 448 more points for your team just based off 2 lucky medpack spawns!

Morganan

Ok, assuming the sdk comes out sometime after new years day, I should have map 01 ready for testing within 2 weeks after the sdk comes out. It's not a "pretty map" at this point as I am using basically placeholder textures until I have the balance just right. I am using the logic where it's easier to put polish on a balanced map to make it look good then it is to get a map with a lot of polish invested into it that looks really nice but is horribly imbalanced balanced well for solid gameplay.

Our goal is to get the maps balance hammered out in the alpha stage (along with any obvious glitches/exploits) and use the beta phase to handle polish and "beatuification" of the map and correct any less-then-obvious glitches/exploits.

Since this is my first big map-making project, I have a few questions...

1) Does our concept of "balance before polish" seem sound? It just doesn't make any sense to me to spend 15-20 minutes getting the textures on a building just right, only to find out after testing that the building should be removed or adjusted requiring me to spend another 15-20 minutes re-doing the same work again.

2) Anybody have any "funny anecdotes" they would like to add to the "wall writings" in this game for the maps my group is making? We hope to use the "wall writings" with our campaign right like how Valve uses them in the official campaign. Some sad stories, some funny stories, and some as a means of passing along vital information. We will gladly give credit to anyone who's little "bit' we use, figure 15 words or less, with less being better. (these things are not difficult, but very time-consuming to make. It can easily take an hour to create and get set just right one simple 4 word saying "follow the train tracks!")

3) Anyone interested in testing an "un-polished map" for balance concerns? The textures in some cases will not be pleasing to the eye on purpose. It's easier for me to leave the side of a house that I decided to make "hollow" so that infected can spawn inside orange so the guy who is coming behind me making and placing doors and windows knows to only make 2nd floor access to the house as survivors aren't supposed to be inside, the houses survivors are supposed to get in are marked with the purple checkerboard texture. The sky has a HL2-esque portal storm going on right now (mainly because I wanted to see what I could do with it, and now it just amuses me and will be removed at some point).

=Sarc=

Balance before polish makes sense. It's the 80/20 rule where 80% of the work gets done in 20% of the time. It'll be better to use the remaining 80% on texture tweaking instead of object modeling.

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Morganan

Just wanted to give an update on this project..

Map 1 and map 2 are generally completed. I have not messed around to much with the hacked sdk for l4d so I have refrained from placing the entities and triggers and using any placeholder objects. Once I get around to generating the nav meshes for bots I'll grab some SS's for posting..

Map1 has undergone some changes. I couldn't rationalize any purpose for non-linear maps. We all know once someone finds the best way through the map, all the rest of the map that can be used will be ignored. Hell, how often do you use the "back route" on nm1? rarely, so I saw no point in wasting my time laying out alternative routes when eventually as people get better acquainted with the map they will only use the "best route" anyway. I have kept some "alternate routes" but they dead-end and their only purpose is to spawn pick-up items. However I have added a "risk to reward" ratio to these pickup items in that to gain access to them, you must trigger an optional event. (in one case, you have to open a door into a garage where items will spawn on a table inside, but opening the door causes a crescendo event to begin) Map1 is fairly short (should be roughly the same playtime as bh1) but it ends with something best described as a "lock system". There is a system of 3 locking gates. Each gate has a "charge up" time to open, and then a short period where it remains open and then closes. At this point I am using 45 seconds to warm up the device to open the gate, and it remaining open for 15 seconds and then closing. If you fail to make it through the gate, you have to repeat the procedure. Of course each procedure is a crescendo event because I'm an evil SOB. The last "lock" has a tank spawn when the gate is activated and the horde comes when the gate finally opens. Now the last one is not repeatable, as I don't want to see multiple tanks running around so for this one the gate remains open. Unfortunately for the survivors the horde never stops coming once it comes, they have to reach the safehouse to end the event. One thing to note, there are no molotov or gas can spawns on this map, so the tank wont be set on fire and the survivors will have to deal with him in a roughly 50x50 area. They simply have to "man up" and kill him while dealing with any special infected. Ideally we dont want the tank passed around to other players here, and hopefully will be able to impliment that if the tank would be passed to another infected player, he just dies instead. The flip side is director tank spawning will be disabled for this map and he will only spawn as part of the last lock event.

Map2 is based around a military base, with 2 large warehouses and an open parade grounds being the main areas the survivors have to traverse. We are looking for roughly about a 15 minute traverse time for this map. There will be an event in each warehouse, along with a highly difficult event taking place on the parade grounds in which a tank will be automatically spawned. The director will be also allowed to spawn a random tank in this level, but in return we won't be quite as frugal with our pick up items as well. We still aren't quite happy with the layout on this map so I dont want to get as in-depth with my descriptions as things still might change. Currently this map ends near a Naval area of the base as our current plans for our last map has the survivors fighting across a couple of ships in a timed escape event.

Map3 is supposed to be about the survivors fighting across a cruise liner and a battleship then having to fight through a repair facility to reach their escape vessel. The idea is to have them start filling a dry dock with a ship and a pilot already in it and then reach it before the dock fills with water and the pilot leaves them. We have everything figured out to make the whole concept of a "timed finale" work, but our limiting factor right now is I can't get hammer to make a big ship that looks worth a damn. The words I have currently to describe my frustrations with getting a ship to just look right are best not said on these forums as I do not believe there is a language filter installed here. We might just ditch the entire dock concept and do something else while still keeping the "timed finale" aspect in the game. That would involve changing some things about map 2 as well so my hope is I just stop sucking at making a good ship sometime real soon.

After putting in a decent amount of time, I can say most of the custom campaigns will end up being 3 maps or less. I have another guy helping me do the mapping, and a third guy handling scripting and sound engineering so this "team" is bigger then most custom map teams and combined we have almost 100 hours into this and realistically only have put the amount of time in to finish 1 of the 3 maps in our campaign and the one we completed was the shortest and easiest from a development standpoint to complete.


More about the "lock system" of crescendo events on map1. The first and second lock are almost identicial other then small aesthetic differences. In both locks the survivors can travel either at ground level or on a series of scaffolds across a fenced-in area to the next gate. Traveling on the scaffoldings will minimalize the amount of normal infected that can engage them at once and keep them out of boomer bile range of the ground, but smokers will then be able to pull a survivor down into the horde which will make life very bad for him. We are looking for a fall distance to give 5-15 fall damage at a minimum and maximum. There will be higher vantage points on either side of the "playarea" as we call it for hunters to get in 15-25 point pounce positions and some cover in the "playarea" for SI to spawn. We wanted the survivor to feel a sense of urgency and add almost objective-based play to the current game. We will have a ladder in the playarea2 side to get back into the first playarea and one in playarea3 to get back to playarea2 so if one survivor doesnt make the gate the others have a choice to leave him or go back and repeat the event. Playarea3 with the tank we will start off balance testing with no physics items for the tank to knock around and only give him any if the event seems to easy on the survivors. Ideally over the course of this map we want to put some tough choices to the survivors about helping up fallen comrades or leaving them behind.

If you dont think it's fair to not get 20 medpacks a map or not have a closet to camp in or a corner to wedge all 4 survivors in while clipping into each other to survive events, you wont like our campaign. Nobody will like our campaign on any setting above normal as it will feel like it already is on advanced settings. It's going to be tough to make the saferoom on our maps, but hopefully the team that does will feel a sense of accomplishment when they do make that saferoom.

WhiskeySix

sounds awesome!! Looking forward to the screenshots!!

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Reflexes are for mistakes only. Reaction implies surprise. Be surprised less.

Morganan

Waiting until you finish designing and entire map to compile it is a bad idea. 614 entity errors, (that means it would take less time to start from scratch then to find and repair all those bugs) map gets deleted. Now I know better, /smacks himself in the skull. I've decided to use the hacked L4D SDK this time around as well.

I'm doing this project now by cutting a map into 4 to 6 sections and doing a compile after each section. It makes it easier to do bug fixes and makes life easier for my partner who is doing lighting/AI/triggers. Even with the hacked sdk, it's impossible to do proper crescendo events currently, along with placing tank/witch spawn triggers or doing infected ladders or breakable walls. The drop down options in the SDK just dont allow you to set everything up properly. You can do simple panic events and alarm events however. I've found a new aversion to creating more open areas opposed to more restricted sight lines. Sure, they are easier to create, but you really limit the directors options for spawning in regular infected. If the survivors come around a corner into a decently sized open area and quickly shoot all the normal infected there, the boomer becomes almost useless because there is nowhere for the director to spawn that horde at even if he biles on all 4 survivors. It's good to have areas the survivors have no sight lines or access to set for infected spawn to retain some effectiveness for boomers in more open areas.

Section 1 is undergoing bug fixes. (7 errors instead of 614, yay!) The nav is completed and once the bug fixes are done and the lighting is finished, I should have screen shots for all to see, figure 2 or 3 days. Sections 2 and 3 are designed and drawn but need to be populated with props. I'll lay out section 4 once the first section of the map is finished. We are on target for our first map to be ready for serious playtesting within a week of the SDK being released. We are still undecided if we want to do a map-by-map beta release or wait until the entire campaign is done and then do a beta release of the entire thing. I prefer map-by map for more focused feedback, but my partner thinks people wont mess with it until the entire campaign is released. How valve adjusts the matchmaking for custom maps might play a role in our decision as well, there is time for that...

This post has turned more into a blog then I had initially wanted, but I'll deal with it. I guess if our campaign ends up sucking people can read this and laugh at us, or if it ends up being popular it might generate hits for this site. *shrug*

Morganan

Here are a few SS's, I have no idea why the film grain is on there I dont play with the grain turned up this high, but *shrug*.

Starting off in a warehouse, hope you aren't afraid of the dark



Infected apparently do not keep a tidy office!



Francis hates offices!



More pic's coming soon (minus the film grain) once we clean up the few remaining entity errors and start adding more knick-knacks.

Morganan

More updates:

Last night we figured out how to turn a normal, ordinary forklift into a car alarm panic event. The way we did it means we can turn almost anything into a panic event without it being a "crescendo event" or having any obvious trigger. Opening a normal house door? Can do. Just walking by a particular object? Can do. What does that mean? It means we can use a proper risk/reward system for allowing the survivors access to pick-up items. Say there is a dark alley off to the left. You know the one of the two T2 weapons spawn locations is back along that alley but there also are some great infected ambush positions. You also know going back that dead-end allery just for a 50% chance of finding T2 weapons you will trigger 2 or possibly 3 howling hordes before you find the weapons so you have to decide if they are worth the trouble.

We doubled the size of the starting warehouse, it just didnt feel big enough. We've also decided to add a 3rd section to it with a loading dock once the outside is set up properly, as a warehouse looks stupid without a loading dock.

We found out you can have multiple saferooms on a level that each could lead to a different map. SR1 can lead to map 2.1, SR2 could lead to map 2.2, SR3 could lead to map 2.3, etc. What we dont know is what would happen if survivors chose different rooms? What would happen in vs. if different teams of survivors chose to go to different maps? What does this mean really? It means you can almost modularly add to your campaign at any time. Once all the conditions are figured out, imagine being able to add 2 new maps to the middle of a finished campaign simply by adding 1 new saferoom to an existing map? Eventually you could have a standard 5 map campaign but via additional saferooms have the campaign have 12 maps and the survivors "choose" the 5 maps they play in the campaign based on which saferooms they choose.

We found out to make tanks and witches spawn naturally (at the directors discretion) we need to give a new file for each server or the server op has to manually edit the current file valve uses for it's official maps. That means any server that runs multiple custom maps to get tanks and witches spawning properly will have to manually edit a file on their server to add the custom maps that make up a campaign so those maps fall under the directors purview for spawning tanks and witches. What a pain! I hope valve addresses this somehow, otherwise they might force mappers to make their tanks/witches more static spawns that happen all the time instead of randomly otherwise they wont spawn at all unless the server op jumps through some hoops. (which you dont want to count on as a mapper)

I've found out why Francis hates railings, they are such a pain to make work properly. Either they are not solid or they are solid but there is an invisible box around the railing. As much as I want to have some railings in the stairwell, I've put in so much damned time on them already trying to get them to work properly I'm considering scrapping the railings entirely and just putting remnants of railings on the floor below. We are trying to keep the size of the .bsp file down by only using L4D native materials since we are going to be adding a lot of sound files to the .bsp but to solve this railing issue I think I am going to have to include a hl2 railing model with it only because I got that one to work properly or trash all the railings entirely!

By the time the SDK is officially released we will be ready for some serious playtesting for both vs. and campaign mode.

Exploding_Silver

I read some of your posts but not all
I can tell though that you are really putting the thought and work into this so GREAT !
I look forward to seeing the final product or even a alpha/beta build

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Morganan

Thanks, beta1 of map1 short of some unforseen consequences (hl2 reference there) should be ready within 72 hours of the sdk being released and if they draw out the sdk release until mid to end of May, map2 should be ready for testing by then as well. We are going to be looking for testers for both campaign and vs. modes of our maps.

Skylark

Sweet!

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