It's been quite a long process, but it is finally here!

ETERNAL PUBLIC BETA!















Click me to download!

Enjoy guys. Remember, your critique is very important to me.
Edited by Nickster5000 on Jul 31, 2013 at 11:17 PM

I'm loving the looks of how this is coming along! :D Here's what I really love so far:

• Lumoria (hi-def classic) tagset! Pretty, yet classy. Geddit?


• The ominous, dark color theme is pretty good, and it really reminds me of Precipice.


• The new (Halo 2?) vehicle sounds are pretty fresh, since you don't hear them much on most maps.


• The underground tunnel part is really clever, and I'm liking its potential... though how good it could really look will seriously depend on your lighting skills :P No pressure~

Though... well, good thing this is a beta; I noticed a couple of (easily fixable?) problems:

• Plasma Pistol's pickup icon shows a Rocket Launcher instead... whaat?


• The grenade is labeled as an M6D Pistol


• ...and a shotgun is supposedly a needler, and an AR is called a battle rifle. Looks like something's up with your entire tagset's names


• Tiny, falling dots of water vapor (?) are around the middle of the bottom of the waterfall, "falling" differently from the rest of the waterfall...? Is this just bad tiling, or...?


• Not sure if you're supposed to be able to climb those mountains so easily, though... The ones next to the Banshee decks, the edge of the map... Steeper cliffs might help out a bit?


• I feel like the ocean should extend more out into the horizon, so that you can't see the edge of the water surface polygon (see Death Island vs RPG Beta 6.2

Besides that, this looks like an amazing improvement from Celer Exile, and I hope this map won't be as underappreciated as Precipice or Revelation!


Edited by renegade343 on Aug 1, 2013 at 12:11 AM

Lots of glitches and laggy. Also a few exceptions.

Beautiful map man can't wait to look around.

I mean I think you know the obvious stuff like the way out of the map and the wraith problems , so I'll skip that.

I would not have a powerup right next to the banshee, it's pretty powerful to have an overshield and a banshee, plus both power weapons are on the way, so in one straight line I can pick up a fuel rod cannon, overshield, and banshee, and that's a guaranteed like 3 or 4 kills minimum.

That said, I think there needs to be some kind of incentive to go to the banshee area, it seems like everyone just goes straight at each other. I feel like the map needs a third way to enter the bases, perhaps a tunnel and some rooms in the mountains which connect the sniper platforms? I'm thinking like b40 style corridors into a room in the center, just like the rooms you fight in during b40.

I think the tunnel might need to be turned into a U shaped thing, or just have some extra branches somehow, because most CTF games started off with both teams jumping into a warthog and jousting. Nobody ever went the long way and whoever won the warthog joust got 3 or 4 kills in on the enemy team once they respawned. If the tunnel was expanded to include alternate routes, this might not happen as often. I mean, it was so prevalent that the banshees hardly got used except on a few occasions, despite the fact that they were clearly the key to winning.

I think the fact that the tunnel is literally a straight shot to the enemy base is directing a lot of the action there. If that route were to be edited even just a little bit so that it wasn't so direct, I think you'd see people start to branch out more in the ways they reach the base.

Side note about the tunnel: those little bumps on the border of the glass floor slow the hog wayyy down and it's annoying to run over them. I'd consider removing them and just putting the lights directly on the floor.

Also I think it'd be cool if the banshee could fly over the mountain, right now you have to fly around :[

The vehicle balance felt way off. The gauss hog was very powerful, but felt agonizingly slow to fire, the ghost also seemed to fire slower than normal. I would think about toning down the number of vehicles on team games. The most you'll have is 8v8, and you have enough vehicles for 18 players right now. I would consider giving each team 1 Warthog, and 1 ghost, then having 1 Banshee in the middle. The wraith is cumbersome and doesn't seem to fit in this level, maybe replace it with a rocket warthog or something? I like the idea of having a unique thing in the center of the tunnel though, perhaps move one of the power weapons there?

The bases feel very small and open at the same time. The walkways are quite small and the dark lighting didn't help that much. However, at the same time I felt completely exposed to enemy fire. There was almost nowhere to hide on the actual base itself. I think the bases would benefit from being expanded into the mountain, with the flag at the back, more cover out front, and have several separate entrance points instead of just the two ramps up.

Oh and here's a script for a killbox, just place a tvol covering the area you want players to die in and name it "killbox1" and you can block off the way out of the map.

(global short plyrnum 0)

(script continuous lulz
	(if
		(= plyrnum 15)
		(begin
			(set plyrnum 0)
		)
		(begin
			(set plyrnum (+ plyrnum 1))
		)
	)
)

(script continuous kill
	(if
			(volume_test_object sky (unit (list_get (players) plyrnum))) 
		(begin
			(unit_kill (unit (list_get (players) plyrnum)))
		)
	)
)

I hope this helped a bit. It's a good map and I like your forerunner geometry. The tunnel is modelled really well and the team gametypes were the most fun for me. It's almost a shame the map is as small as it is, because the warthog assaults were probably my favorite part.

E: oh and sometimes the rain stopped falling, or else was falling really slowly, like what happens when you see a car's wheel spinning really fast, you know? Dunno what's up with that.
Edited by UnevenElefant5 on Aug 1, 2013 at 12:54 AM
Edited by UnevenElefant5 on Aug 1, 2013 at 12:56 AM
Edited by UnevenElefant5 on Aug 1, 2013 at 12:57 AM


Also here's me being a cheap butt and spamming the FRG:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdUZZrlcOys
Edited by UnevenElefant5 on Aug 1, 2013 at 01:10 AM

I knew I forgot something! Thanks for reminding me, Elefant!

Nick, another thing I noticed; the lake/stream on top of the waterfall felt really deep, especially for a place where you don't have any underwater fog...
Any chance you could make that shallower and/or make that mountain inaccessible?

I keep getting exception errors. I already tried removing OS.

Do you have any other third party stuff installed? I have vanilla halo and got no errors at all.

Just Open Sauce which I already tested. I tested it as a vanilla halo and it still exceptioned.

- Cliffs are poorly uv'd, you can easily see the seams on every single triangle. Go back and fix this using the UVW unwrap modifier and going to mapping -> flatten mapping -> press okay, and then manually stitching all the faces back together. Also make sure to give them a smoothing group, as it seems you didn't.

- Ground looks good but needs to be smoothed out especially around the hilly areas, they are pointy looking, you should also consider making an actual ground map with trails in it to make it more realistic looking + increase the detail map which seems stretched and at a low resolution. Also needs smoothing group.

- Glass bitmap inside your tunnel way that you can drive on is set to dirt for the shader type.

- Make the teleporters that go up to the overhang bits two way teleporters (just do the same thing and move the flags to where you exit/enter), I almost fell off when I walked out...

- General rule of thumb for most structures and buildings is that any pathway you build should be at least two player's wide + a tiny bit extra. I kept feeling cramped while just walking up your bases as some parts were just too small.

- Utilize strip textures more. Plenty of places you could use them and chose not too which resulted in bad looking structures in some places.

- Annoying little tidbit. Most background sounds from the original Halo also have one where the indoor noise also uses part of the exterior noise (for example in a30, there is a background, and then a interior where you can still hear the noises outside but its muffled). See if c10 or w/e map you used to get this sound from has one of those for your interior section (the tunnel). It sounds really bad when you walk in and out of it.

- The waterfall just looks bad. Same with the water. Extend the skybox to fit that and increase its tiling. For the waterfall you need to go back and probably create "multiple" streams of water falling down and also get rid of all those misty effects except for where it hits the water at the bottom.

With all that being said, however, it seems like it could be a great map and definitely has the potential to be so.
You have work to do. Good luck.
Edited by Higuy on Aug 1, 2013 at 08:23 AM

To what Higuy said, the waterfall made me laugh a bit

I thought the map was bigger *sad face* but I still liked it.

looks good but some of the map disappears at one of the sniperpoints

Thank you all for your criticism. It is very helpful. I am going to shoot for a final release on September 1st. :)

Will it still use the stock weapon tagset?

Yes, it will.

It's a fairly nice looking map but it has its fair share of issues.
-The most obvious being clipping/portal issues, which are most apparent when walking through the tunnel to get the wraith or on the cliffs.
-I noticed you attempted to keep the player from flying the banshee to the bottom of the water underneath the bridge, but this is easily avoided. I didn't notice whether fall damage is on or not but I just jumped out of a banshee into the water. You could also just walk down to it from the blue base.
-You set the banshee fly limit too high. If you want a limit at all it should be lower, that way I can't just do the old bloodgulch fly-backwards-and-get-out trick to walk around on top of the cliffs, where portal issues are going off all over.
-When walking down to the water from blue base, you can just walk around to the right to the edge of the map where the faces just abruptly stop appearing.
-When flying the banshee, the firing sound effect stops playing when the whole banshee whistle/scream sound effect comes up.
-The chaingun warthog sound effect is drowned out by the rain, whereas the ghost sound effect is loud and crisp?
-Not understanding why there are reach warthogs, a halo 2 banshee, and stock halo 1 assets.
-Weapon icons are jumbled up, as mentioned before.
-This is more of a stylistic preference, but I feel as if the map is too dark and the forerunner structures are too scratched up and grimy. It's difficult to differentiate them from the cliff wall. If they were brighter and cleaner they would stand out more as bases.
-There are too many weapons at the spawn. It would be better to have players actually have to move to sections of the map to obtain other weapons, regardless of whether or not they are power weapons.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with at the final release. I noticed you have dedicated yourself to a strict schedule, but I feel as if you are rushing yourself.