RO-Gorlitz Beta 2

[FlashPanHunter]

The second beta of Gorlitz is ready!

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What I have tried to do with this version is get a better playing version of the map, without any major changes in the map art. That will take time, and because of the problems with the gameplay in the first beta, I thought it best to get another out as soon as possible. Because of the positive reaction to the map, I'm inclined to do a bit more art work, hopefully add some more variation, etc, but here is the quick fix that will hopefully allow people to enjoy the gameplay in a much more completed state.

Changes:
-Upped the reinfocement levels. Soviets are now at 750 and Germans at 550.
-Added an additional Soviet tanker slot.
-Removed one Soviet sapper slot, it is now at four.
-Added some more UC transport for soviets.
-Reduced bloom (level at .28)
-Added additional cover around key areas.
-Minor details to enterable house.
-Fixed major holes meshes (some remain)
-Tweaked shadow projectors.
-Reduced Soviet tanks to a single t34 per spawn location.
-Adjusted spawn locations slightly in several locations.
-Adjusted uv map on canal water mesh
-Adjusted rubble texture for greater detail

I may be forgetting a couple of things, but this is the general gist of what I changed. More substantial changes to come, based off of reactions to this beta and other things that still could use more work. As always, please comment, nearly all of these changes are based on the feedback I got, so if you don't like something, let me know, and it will probably be changed in a later version. Enjoy

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[EvilHobo]

Good work; hopefully the rest of the map will be played now

 

[Ranari]

The following is meant to be purely constructive and not meant to be nitpicking, but are pretty serious. I just write this because I think this map has the potential to be one of the greatest maps in RO ever made.

Opening up the map in practice mode, I was able to explore the nooks and crannies of the map, and being the real explorative type, I was able to see a real treat.

-Still a lot of places you can go outside the boundaries of the map. Only one that I found can actually be exploited though. The rest are supurfluous, but still there:

1) You can crawl underneat one of the train cars and get behind the trainyard. Just stay on the rail tracks! =P

2) You can bypass the barracades along both the major bridges by jumping on top of the rails and go for some awfully nice sightseeing. In the first major bridge, you can actually do this and wrap around completely on the other side and flank the Germans.

3) On the first major bridge, you have a street blocked off, but I was able to crawl underneath some of the rubble and get on top/behind of it all.

-Some of your destroyed Stug props appear to be hovering in the air.

-Is it me or do some of the sidewalks kick you back when you run over them? It's like the height difference between the streets and the sidewalks (happens near the water bridges) is just very slightly too high and the engine doesn't know what to do, so it warps you back.

-The asphalt texture on the "BridgeHead" capzone when you're standing directly on the bridge. There's a destroyed Stug next to it. One of the textures overlaps the other and you can visibly see the asphalt run underneath the second raised asphalt texture.

-The powerlines along the waterways don't hook up to resistors like they do in the streets. Probably an art thing.

-Some of the sandbags are raised too high. I can see the asphalt underneath them, and shoot the ground on the other side from underneath.

No gameplay crits though, at least not yet. The size and scope of this map from your beta1 post screenies really caught my eye, so I downloaded it and opened it up to look around. Visually, this is a really promising map. Judging from the architecture style, you didn't happen to play Thief: The Dark Project and/or Thief: The Metal Age, did you?

Going to be playing this all day tomorrow!

 

[Makhno [Anarchist]]

This could end up being a really good map. One thing is: you should make more variation. All the houses and streets look the same to me and I get lost.

keep up the good work

 

[Shadow_Man]

I just write this because I think this map has the potential to be one of the greatest maps in RO ever made.

Cant agree more!Great Job FlashPanHunter ,
this map is one of the best custom map I ever played,I can see people really enjoy playing this map.I do have some suggestion about this map:

1)Adding One landmark for each capture point ,eg. a small department store,a theater or even only a single huge nazi poster.

2)Halftrack or limited Armor support for German side.

 

[Nestor Makhno]

This could well be the daddy of urban maps but.....

my fps never got out of purple except in a few places and I have a pretty good rig.

Some of the doorways are too narrow to pass through (there was one on the corner of a building in particular...near the middle)

There is a sound like the mating call of a brontosaurus in heat all over the centre of the map - I have no idea what it's supposed to be.

Some of the rubble textures have black edges - like the alpha channel needs to be reduced in size by 1 pixel.

The kerbs are a bit too high to crawl up.

This may have been caused by the server I was on (36 players) but allies often missed a spawn and then had to wait for ANOTHER 30 seconds to respawn.

I will eagerly follow this thru development as I do truly believe it could be one of the greats.

 

[EvilHobo]

2)Halftrack or limited Armor support for German side.

If you do this, make them stationary. For instance, you could have a StuG be set up as an AT position, or a Halftrack set up as an HMG position.

 

[SgtH3nry3]

There is a sound like the mating call of a brontosaurus in heat all over the centre of the map - I have no idea what it's supposed to be.

That my friend is the Maybach HL210 engine of a Sdkfz. 181 Tiger.

It's a strange but really demoralizing sound.
Shame that the playable Tigers in RO don't sound like that. :/

 

[=GG= Mr Moe]

....There is a sound like the mating call of a brontosaurus in heat....

GEEZ, just how OLD are you Nestor???

 

[Nestor Makhno]

LOL - not THAT old. I actually heard the original sound on one of Wilsonam's 78's

 

[Mike_Nomad]

Why MORE bias for the Ruskies?. Geez.

The Russians have their sappers.... a T34/85 and a number of UPC's.

The Germans have their FEET and some Panzerfausts.

Because a person saw the Germans easily win means nothing more than, at the time, the Germans won. There are many factors involved in achieving a win. The primary factor is player skills (both sides).

All maps should allow player skills decide the outcome of the battles in that map. If not, that map will quickly be discarded. Balance is the key to a quality, playable map.

That aside, I'd like to ask for more damage to the buildings to justify the heaps and heaps of rubble in the streets. In the main square, a short distance from the fountain is a narrow hole in the map. You can look through and see the cobblestones under the sidewalk.

Cosmetics wise, its a very pleasant map to look at but one soon realizes that the city is in to good a shape to warrant all the rubble.

In all honesty, I see this map developing into one of those that never grows old.. but only if its taken in the right directions to keep player interest up.

 

[FlashPanHunter]

There definately are a number of small little problems with the map, ie hovering stuff, and though I couldn't find any in the testing, places where the player can break out of the playable area. The size of the map makes it somewhat tricky to cover all of these things quickly, so I left them for the time being so that there could be a playable beta out there while I worked on them.

That said, there are a couple of things that I will try to do for the next beta:
-Update the mesh building set for more variation
-Finalize the collision on the map
-Reduce triangle count on meshes where possible
-Fix little exploits/holes in map bounds

Also, this spawning issue, each spawn has 20 player starts, and when I rebuilt the paths, there were no errors related to them. Are people still getting that white flash and not spawning?

 

[FlashPanHunter]

Why MORE bias for the Ruskies?. Geez.

The Russians have their sapers.... a T34/85 and a number of UPC's.

The Germans have their FEET and some Panzerfausts.

Because a person saw the Germans easily win means nothing more than, at the time, the Germans won. There are many factors involved in achieving a win. The primary factor is player skills (both sides).

All maps should allow player skills decide the outcome of the battles in that map. If not, that map will quickly be discarded. Balance is the key to a quality, playable map.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. I added a couple more ucs to spawn at the later points, and an additional tanker position so that there can be two men to a tank. I couldn't run a player test on the beta, so I had to guess the numbers and balancing factors. From what I saw, about a quater of the map was in play, so it' seems tough to say anything conclusive about the map balance or bias at this point.

I'd like to ask for more damage to the buildings to justify the heaps and heaps of rubble in the streets. In the main square, a short distance from the fountain is a narrow hole in the map. You can look through and see the cobblestones under the sidewalk.

With this, the map originally had a lot more damage, but was just too demanding. An undamaged mesh has about a fourth as many triangles as a damaged one, and as it is closed off, an ap can be fit easily into it. Thus, in places, the rubble is a hold over. A lot of the rubble is also good cover, so even if there isn't an obvious place where it came from, it seems preferable to me that filling the streets up with crates, or something like that.

 

[Plattfuss]

The szenario looks really great, the changes are good.

We added the map to our [PzDF]-RO-Servers:

194.60.68.71:6656
85.14.218.188:6656

We added it also to our RO-German Community-Download-Area. You can download the map here:

 

[Mike_Nomad]

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. I added a couple more ucs to spawn at the later points, and an additional tanker position so that there can be two men to a tank. I couldn't run a player test on the beta, so I had to guess the numbers and balancing factors. From what I saw, about a quater of the map was in play, so it' seems tough to say anything conclusive about the map balance or bias at this point.

We played it this morning with 8 guys per side.. The Germans had a very tough time. We also discovered early on that unless there are at least two Russians, their tank is useless. Why not allow the tank cannon to destroy obstacles or, allow the tankers to carry satchels?

With this, the map originally had a lot more damage, but was just too demanding. An undamaged mesh has about a fourth as many triangles as a damaged one, and as it is closed off, an ap can be fit easily into it. Thus, in places, the rubble is a hold over. A lot of the rubble is also good cover, so even if there isn't an obvious place where it came from, it seems preferable to me that filling the streets up with crates, or something like that.

Odd, it seems there are other, equally as detailed maps with extensive damage to the buildings and the maps run fine. Buildings either gutted or with big holes and blown out walls with many roofs missing would help justify the heaps of rubble. It just seems overly surrealistic to see the huge, perhaps exaggerated, amounts of rubble we must navigate and yet, the city is relatively undamaged.

 

[FlashPanHunter]

We played it this morning with 8 guys per side.. The Germans had a very tough time. We also discovered early on that unless there are at least two Russians, their tank is useless. Why not allow the tank cannon to destroy obstacles or, allow the tankers to carry satchels?



Odd, it seems there are other, equally as detailed maps with extensive damage to the buildings and the maps run fine. Buildings either gutted or with big holes and blown out walls with many roofs missing would help justify the heaps of rubble. It just seems overly surrealistic to see the huge, perhaps exaggerated, amounts of rubble we must navigate and yet, the city is relatively undamaged.

The barricades are there for a couple of reasons, first and foremost, to preventing the tank from rushing the axis spawn, and also to force the soviet infantry and armor to work together. Tanks do rely upon their infantry to clear a path, but thats intended to be part of the fun of the map. If it was otherwise, I think it would be even more difficult for the germans.

What exactly do you mean by the germans were having a tough time? They should be pushed back eventually, were they being steamrolled or something?

With the buildings, I will work on this. I think for the next version or the one after that Ill be able to include much more variation, and some more destroyed stuff will be included in that.

 

[Shadow_Man]

I played this map several times online,the farthest capture point the russian team can reach was the first bridge near the hall square,seems that it is a mission impossible for the russian to reach the last capture point or even crossing the bridge within 30-40mins.90% of the map is unreachable at the moment...

 

[Capt.Marion]

wow. One thing: the debris is a little, funky...

also, maybe make the barricades detroyable by an HE shell, or would that pretty much remove their purpose?

 

[Nestor Makhno]

When there were only 2 axis objectives left (the train ones) one of the allied playerstarts appeared to be under the terrain but above the fluid surface (prolly why the engine didn't spot it on rebuild)- causing one player to spawn underground by the riverbank. Happened to me 3 times in a row

 

[FlashPanHunter]

When there were only 2 axis objectives left (the train ones) one of the allied playerstarts appeared to be under the terrain but above the fluid surface (prolly why the engine didn't spot it on rebuild)- causing one player to spawn underground by the riverbank. Happened to me 3 times in a row

Yep, fixed it now. Russians advanced that far in beta 2? What it a full server? Did it seem balanced?