c&c style map

(mazdaplz) #1

i realise now that my maps layout sucks terribly. so i’d like to ask a few questions and try to gather info on if this can be done.(its done anyway, im looking for a way to rewrite it)
ok, first things first. all the time my goal was to make a remake of the bf1942 map coral sea, the first carrier battle in history. so as you know i go and make 2 diferent plane models and a carrier, and there’s this island, which consists of 6 paths-3 and 3 on the other side-; and they meet on a bridge that is way above water (this detail might have cost me a lot of tris) my initial idea was to mimic the first level of goldeneye the dam, but inside a bridge that could block everything out in it’s massiveness(?).

c > .sea. < c
a >}=={< a
r > .sea. < r

that’s the important idea anyhow, 2 carriers on either side of the island, 6 paths that the infantry take.

all the while planes are bombing the 6 entrances to the island, 3 japanese zeros, 3 corsairs. they are weak to small arms fire and if your lucky you might hit one with a missile, but you will also notice that the planes are fighting each other on a random mid air battle with missiles; (looks exactly like this:
)with your planes freeing up the paths to the island everynow and then, and sometimes both planes will destroy each other in the middle. your mission is to destroy the planes, all the planes that will pop out 30 secs after the other one has been blown up. i can set an accum for this to… i was thinking 40ish?, anyway you could shoot the planes off the sky while standing on the carrier, but on top of the islands are 6 constructables, 3 allied 3 axis, and what they do is make the planes tougher, carry and shoot more missiles and reduce the time it takes for them to re-appear, so the team that can meet the goal of controling the objectives will more likely win. i know this map sounds like a mod but trust me it’s not, maybe im just too far out there i guess. right now my map could use clean up, but maybe because there’s open areas it goes 40ish30ish when the planes do their bombing runs. maybe if i could build stairways inside the island instead of just on top? if i wasted all my time, could any of you use a script for a random dogfight with power ups?

(d3coy) #2

prefab it and post it… someone might want to use it… ill add it to my site too.

(broloi) #3

I would be interrested in a prefab of any kind of big ships…

(carnage) #4

an interesting concept and heres my spin on how the map could work

instead of having players shooting the planes with small arms fire as you put it make it the primary objective to capture a position on the island where the only anti aircraft gun is and then use this to shoot down the enemy planes

perhaps by some clever use of tank guns you could make an MG gun or something look more like some kind of AA gun and have the player use that the shoot down the aircraft, and make the aircraft vulnerable only to that cannon. This means that teams then have to fight for control of area with the AA gun and protect the player manning it until he can destroy enough planes to win

as for your ideas about planes dogfighting those are very ambition ideas and you might find that although they could theoretically be done it would be very very difficult especially to change a plane from health to damaged and make it crash convincingly since they would have to follow a continual spline path

for this is would change the way planes function. planes fly relatively low across the island and pass over the area where the AA cannon is. if a healthy plane makes it to the AA cannon without being killed it will drop a load of bombs made of random mortar shooters. Because a plane cannot be made to crash instantly a player needs a way to identify a plane is damaged, this could be done by attaching a smoke entity like of the gold rush tank and turning it on/off depending on plane health and also changing the sounds a plane emits will give a strong audio clue

when a plane approaches it will follow a spline path to over the gun flying pretty low to the ground. when the plane pases over the gun it then is forced into a logic decision. If the plane is health it flys upwards and away on a spline path until it is out of sight. If the plane is damaged it follow a different spline path to show a dramatic crash

to avoid the path of the planes becoming to predictable or appearing that they are following a rigid spline path you could creates at least 4 alternative attacking and crashing paths for each teams plane. and because of the relatively straight course most of the planes would take it would not be necessary to use a great deal of spline points for this

for atmosphere and to stop the AA gunner from having a too easy time it would be good to have multiple planes flying all the time making it a challenge to watch all the angles for incoming aircraft and distinguishing between friend and foe before an enemy aircraft reaches him and blows him to bits. the more planes attacking at a time the more you would want the required kill limit to be to stop the match becoming too short but this is quite easy with one accum you can count to 256 and using 2 accums you can reach 65536 so no limits there

for the infantry battle you would probably want a fairly small map so there isn’t much time wasted walking to the AA area. if the AA gun was so far way to stop one team for reaching it before the enemy has shot down a large number of planes it would be too frustrating for one team and make it far to easy for the other removing the thrill and element of danger occupying the AA area gives. also something to stop filed ops spamming the AA area with artillery and air strikes would be a definite yes or it would be virtually impossible to use the AA cannot before you spammed

another idea would be to make it so that when a team reaches a certain number of aircraft kills, say half some event happens (like a plane crash blocking a path) that blocks of the quickest route to the AA area making it harder for that team to keep control of the AA area

just some thoughts
carnage

(mazdaplz) #5

those are insteresting ideas carnage, thanks for hosting decoy. broloi: i released the ship as a prefab earlier :open_mouth: but anyway…
i was going to wait and comment the whole script file but i really dont want to touch it right now lol so i’ll post everything.
carnage, what do you mean ambitious, they’re actually 2 script movers vulnerable to damage similar to the duck c has in his map you can shoot. they fly mirrored paths and meet on the middle, before they meet i activate a couple of shooters and they hit each plane with a random value, upon death i check a timer and then respawn it at the beginning of the bombing run again. the only thing i’d have to do is lower an accum on the plane’s death or rebirth so that ‘the carrier launches another ship’.
playin the map would explain much better. anyway, there’s another feature it has i didnt talk about. if an ally camps near the first path that the axis take, on the first house the axis plane will shoot a rocket at them, it’s supposed to prevent camping, or something :slight_smile:

oh yea sorry for the words in spanish too

edit: one more thing, the blocksize is set to 0, there’s a TON of hinting done, some of it works, some of it dont, it’s gotten pretty confusing because im not very experienced in that area tho i did manage to improve the area it was drawing when looked at with showtris 2. if youre gonna use the map file you better filter out hints hehe.
this is now open so do with any part of it what you like, and tell me what you think (i know the brushwork sucks tho, i mean scriptwise)

(carnage) #6

i played the map and the dogfight are a lot better than i had expected them to be. but to be brutally honest the map is terrible. there doesn’t seem to be any direction at all i was just walking around hoping to find some way up onto the cliffs. also the transitions from higher to lower areas are way too steep and i even came across a long corridor that lead to a dead end and that would be quite annoying to keep walking down when playing a real match

at a guess i would say u built the map with the sole purpose to give the planes somewhere to fight. i would advise you seriously think about re making playable area of the map. oh yeah and a larger draw distance would be nice as it now not only looks totally unrealistic but you can barely see the planes since they fly in and out of the draw distance in about 2 seconds

(mazdaplz) #7

you’re absolutely right, i told you the brushwork was bad, i spent most of the time making the models the carrier and the script so in the end i was a little frustrated to make the terrain and buildings, the draw distance sucks too because i hoped it would increase the fps, but it didnt do much.
im pretty much done with it tho, im going to keep on modeling since that’s what i was originally (not a model). but if you do think of a layout that lets the planes fight in the middle let me know, i could delete 90% of it and then give it a go in the right direction, maybe get rid of the bombings because they slow it down a lot. thanks for the input

ps. im a little stupid so i need to be told what to do in the general picture, make sense? if someone could give me a different map idea drawn from a top view in microsoft paint, that would make sense and save the vis, that would give me a huge push, the only basic rule is the planes have to be there in the sky (we talk about the carriers later)

(carnage) #8

well its clear you map needs a re make but im just not sure on what the game flow is suppose to be. As its stands you can pretty much guarantee that nobody will be able to cross the bridge since there is no cover and it takes ages to walk down it with high walls on both sides. but with that being the only way across the island i think all you would end up with is a sort of stalemate where very little happens

shooting the planes down is an objective but if that is the only viable objective with no other things where the team actually get to fight each other then i think your going to end up with a sort of novelty map. and the problem with novelty maps is that they don’t have much replay value

(mazdaplz) #9

well the map has 2 constructables now. i was thinking of making a third one to shoot down planes and maybe a real objective (so i use all 8 toi) that you also need to acomplish to end the map. maybe a stealable obj. i realise about the bridge, i was going to put boxes and stuff there but forget the bridge, it sucks. im on the look for sugestions, even i dont know what the gameflow would be like, that’s another field where i need advice, the original idea is get to the other side of the island, but what for? that’s where i was planning to put the obj, i didnt do it because it’s easy so i saved for last. maybe it could be something like shoot down all the enemy planes and steal obj from enemy carrier or something like that