dogbadger, you have a keen eye
The moonbeams are in no way accurate. I pretty much threw them last minute, the day before the contest deadline and even then it was uncertain if i should keep them. The reason i made em was that the map felt rather empty. if you check Beta-99 (available in the betaforums) you can tell for yourself.
The idea behind lightbeams is, as you say, that some lightsource illuminates dust, smoke or other particles in the air. I used lightbeams in Beta1 of Zavod and it worked well there to fill out scenes so thats what i decided to do. They were made and implemented really last minute, however and there are quite a few more things wrong with the moonbeams other than the stuff you mention but untill someone finds them out im not gonna mention em
I can mention that as I made em I ran into a few problems involving the moonbeam-meshes occluding particle effects, other meshes and even playermodels. I had to spend some time just figuring that out and then there wasnt a whole lot of time tweaking their placement and rotation so i gave myself a break and figured people wouldnt notice it all that much (always exceptions, tho. you've proven that
)
In the end I looked at the map and it looked better with the not-100%-correct-moonbeams than it did without them.
They're all square because, again, time constraints but also due to mapsize. The map took up 70mb+ and for me to really make a difference in the appearance of the moonbeams I'd have to tweak the holes in the ceiling and make alot of custom lightbeam-meshes to fit those wholes along with complementing the scene with round lightbeam-meshes to add detail.
The workload was just too big for the time available but I hid the not-looking-accurate bit slightlyby having the moon beams fade i
n and out rather than have a "sharp" line where the moonbeam begins, merging from the ceiling.
And theres no need to excuse yourself, its a good catch.
Next time around I'll plan in the moonbeams in an early phase of the map so i can better calculate how they should be implemented.
*edit
I hessitated to mention this because it further points at me making excuses for the map, which I in no way want to do. I'm proud of Zavod but I do want to shed some light over its production phase.
You might remember the first beta i released last year?It didnt look anything like the final version, taking into account both layout, basic gameplay and visuals and theres a very good reason for this.
After I released that beta Uni-stuff kept me occupied until two weeks before the contest deadline and at that point i looked at Beta1 and realized how much it ****ed.
Visually it was okay but it was a disaster from a gameplay point of view and I made a rather dangerous choice...
Zavod-Final and Zavod Beta1 doesnt look anything alike because i compleatly scrapped that beta1 version and remade the map from skratch, two weeks before the contest deadline.
This means the RO-Zavod final version was made in the final two weeks of the contest, including the lighting, the overall architectual design, botpathing, gameplay tweaking, everything - except a few previosly made art assets I made for Beta1 but I still went in an altered/tweaked those two final weeks.
I know I'm crazy to have done that and I even thought to myself "Wtf are you doing? You know this is just a crazy endevor and you should just polish Beta1 of Zavod and enter that in the contest - that way atleast you have something..." but I dont know... I just kept on going and ignored my negative/realistic thoughts and it worked out well
.
I think Zavod-final is alot better than Zavod-beta1
There are plenty of stuff in there that I wanted to do better, different or compleatly redo but at some point you just gotta take a step back and say "Yea, okay. The map, in its current state, is final" or you'll keep working on the map forever. That moment happend to me about 13-14 hours before the contest deadline. Then i slept a very deep sleep, and it was good! ^^
If you wanna go on a nitpicking tour you should play Zavod more
Plenty of stuff in there that doesnt make sense if you go in looking for stuff.
Thanks for the comments. They were well thought through and motivated. That kind of feedback is the best, regardless of its nature.