ET: Mapping contest 2004

(pack) #1

Hi,

Four European RTCWnewssites (www.rtcw.co.uk, planetwolfenstein.de, swertcw.com and xfire.be) have decided to organize a mappingcontest for ET together. The contest ends on februari 1, 2004, but first beta’s must be released before januari 10. In februari, we plan to organize a tournament on the best maps. Full rules can be found below here.

I hope some of you will participate :slight_smile:

Rules

(1) Organizing sites are: http://www.rtcw.co.uk , www.planetwolfenstein.de, www.swertcw.com, and www.xfire.be

(2) Your map must be finished before februari 1, 2004. You have to release at least one beta before januari 10, 2004.

(3) Maps should be designed with 6 vs 6 teams in mind. Stopwatch has to be a possible gamemode on your map (no dual objectives).

(4) Maps should have a timelimit of 8-15 minutes. Not longer.

(5) A high performance fpswise and a good gameplay is appreciated more than too much fps-eating eyecandy (a lot of trees in wide open space).
or: (© Menzel):
"I think the most important thing is a good overall layout of the map. Give players several routes and ways to get in and out of the primary locations like spawnpoints and objectives, but not too many as to make it difficult to understand. Also keeping a good balance between performance and visuals is important. Attention to detail also helps to create the atmosphere for a map, as does a central theme that carries throughout the whole design of the level. "

(6) Mapname of beta’s should be mc_mapname_beta1,2,… - Mapname of final version is free to choose.

(7) Remakes or modifications of existing levels of RTCW/ET are allowed as long as copyrights are respected.

[8] Mapsize may not exceed 20 Mb, though it’s advisable to keep your filesize smaller.

(9) Price = none atm :). But:
(a) the organizing sites will announce betaversions of your map and help you find a server and players for betatesting
(b) there is not “one” winner, but the best maps will be put in a mappack for download, and on the selected maps, we will organize a 16-team or 32-team tournament in februari.

(10) for more info, join #etmaps at irc.quakenet.org

(11) good luck & have fun,



www.swertcw.com
www.xfire.be

(MindLink) #2

Great idea, though sadly I guess I won’t be able to take part since the map I’m currently working on will be a dual objective one… And I guess I won’t be finished till february anyways… :banghead: :bump:

(Spark) #3

That’s cool, hopefully something good will come out of this.
However, why the low timelimit? That sounds more like RTCW than ET. :confused: Not that I’d have anything against fast maps like Radar, but why rule out more complex maps like Goldrush or Oasis? Even if those new maps kick ass, it’s unlikeley that GR and Oasis will stop beeing the most popular maps, so why not design maps that go along well with them?

(raza) #4

The aim of this mapping contest is to have a number of maps released that are very good for online league and cup play. That’s why the recommended timelimit is rather low. Of course you can design a map like gold rush or oasis, but just keep in mind that it can’t take 30 mins till you get an objective. If a clan has a good defense in a war it’s almost impossible to set a time (eg. fueldump).

Keep also in mind that the winning map will be played in various hosted leagues. This will make your map very popular!

I hope that you guys are interested in this project, it will boost the community for sure. I’ll look if i can find a small prize to make this a bit more interesting and motivating.

Kind regards,

Jeroen “RaZa” Bolle

Head administrator of Crossfire community

(pack) #5

hi,

Well

If you play in Stopwatchmode (which is imo the only good competion mode for ET/RTCW), you’ll have to play a map at least two times.

If for instance, team A holds full time, and then sets a time of 15 minutes on oasis, than you will have played 45 minutes and only one map is played.
Meanwhile, in RTCW you could have finished a war of two maps (our map, their map) on ABBA system.
Even if you play only one stopwatchround per map (ET), a match between two teams can take 1.5-2 hours, which I find is a bit too long. But opinions may differ off course.

grtz,

pack

(chavo_one) #6

Sounds fun. The 15 minute timelimit requirements will prevent venice from any considerations. Because of the small RtCW timelimits, most mappers will have to start from scratch on a project specifically for this contest. I’m not sure any escorting maps designed for 15 minutes would be much fun.

“Escort the tank down this street and back.” :smiley:

(heeen) #7

damn.

(Spark) #8

I’m confused, from raza’s posting it sounds like a rather long map like Goldrush would be fine and from packman’s posting it sounds like it wouldn’t. :slight_smile: What’s true now?
I know that ABBA is pretty much impossible with long maps like this, but even if many small maps are released it will still be impossible because Oasis and Goldrush are not going away. :slight_smile:
Like chavo said, an escorting map designed for a timelimit of 15 minutes doesn’t sound like fun (railgun comes to mind :D) and escorting is a huge part of ET, too. I agree though, that every competition map should be “completable” in about 15 minutes by average (like Goldrush is).

(pack) #9

be creative :slight_smile:

(pack) #10

damn.[/quote]

Oh i checked your map (beta1) and it’s doable :). Maybe bad example of me. Map looks neet btw.

(Drakir) #11

8-15 mins in a ET map? They must be joking, have they played ET at all? No official maps have that short timelimit.

I understand the meaning of shorter timelimits, so that a game can contain more maps in shorter time.

Count me out from this, the map i am working on is far to big to be played in that short time.

(SCDS_reyalP) #12

If you want to play ABBA stopwatch (which some of us still love dearly), 30 minutes map times make things a bit long :P.

(SirLiveAlot) #13

Agreeded. I miss having 10 min maps, which is one of the reasons why I like church so much. I could always try and review some of them over at my site. I’m too lazy at the moment to spam my site so look at my siggi.

(Spark) #14

ESL tried to introduce ABBA and had to immediately revert it because players were boycotting it. Even with reduced map times, the only chance to play ABBA (without 2-3 hours playtime) would be to play without Goldrush and Oasis… But those maps are the competitive ET. :slight_smile: And why shouldn’t maps be supported which complement them?

(DG) #15

ClanBase plays half of the official maps 6v6 with a 15min timelimit.

The same point is freqently made towards mappers, have they ever played competitively at all? Really though this is against the point; for a map pack to be really successful it would have to be either one of those rare marketgarden/bkforestb1 prodigys, fill some popular niche like ctfmultidemo/sillyctf, or be good for both clan wars and publics - it doesnt matter if the timer is set differently for each.

If you took official maps and played 32v32 I expect you’d need to increase the official timelimits. Just for a example of a map that scales particularily well, mp_beach suits 8mins of 6v6 very well, yet one of the rated busiest servers in the world was jolt 2 beach playing 16v16 with timelimit of 60minuites! You dont have to go making some tiny map that would only ever suit halfsize teams, for any team based game nearly all of the best maps scale well.

Far as I’m concerned the rules are maybe better worded as “guidelines”, and should be deciphered with common sense. Bear in mind the decision of what maps to include will be more or less based completely on what the community - i.e. the actual players - think about of the maps. Our job is essentially to result in a set of maps that will be widely played in the long term; by encouraging maps that are wanted and then pimping them to ensure players are encouraged to actually download and play them.

edit: and yeah of course we all half disagree on everything, its like a commitee. if everyone agree’s you lose half the point, might aswell just have 1 person doing it. :stuck_out_tongue:

(system) #16

my two cents:
:chef:
If someone makes a map that is of high-quality every page will announce it. But most people dont ask the pages to support their maps. :wink:

A contest without a winner is no real contest.
The idea behind a “contest” is to be better then other people. Image Clanwars without a winner. :smiley:

A contest needs some prices. theese are very big pages, but not even some games or some hardware towin??
I made a contest back in 2002 (The Grid 2002) with my small page and had several prices like a graphic card web-hostings and the maps went into a magazine.
Only Activision dind’t reply to the mail i wrote (what a shame for a publisher).
So then one person with a personal homepage witch gots 250 visits per day to that time it’s very hard to imagine that theese big pages could not get some real prices!

I will not participate to this so called contest until there a real prices.
Btw im busy with Tenebrae 2 -Engine.
But for the community it will be a good thing. :slight_smile:

EDIT:
But why do someone have to release a public Beta??
It’s like all other volunteers in the “contest” can look into your cards.
So for example you write down some funky shaders everyone can use them. Or they can look at the gameplay and use them for their own myp (or parts ofthem).
Bad idea. Internal testings would be much better.

(pack) #17

k,

I’ll answer one by one :). Some page do announce every map - some pages don’t (xfire doesn’t). The problem is that at a moment you will get really a lot of mapreleases every day. And really - I know being a newsposters myself, it’s clearly impossible to test them all - let alone to get an impression of the gameplay on it (which is imho most important). For instance bismarck, it will take a while before you find the secret level etc…
If you just post on the other hand every map on a newspage, sure it wil be on frontpage and some mappers will be happy with that, but readers in the long time will ignore all map-posts anyway.

A contest without a winner is no real contest.
The idea behind a “contest” is to be better then other people. Image Clanwars without a winner.

Contest may be the wrong word. But as long as we don’t have (valuable) prices I don’t see the need to point out a “winner”. The best map will be that map that will be played most but that’s most of the time hard to tell.

A contest needs some prices. theese are very big pages, but not even some games or some hardware towin??
I made a contest back in 2002 (The Grid 2002) with my small page and had several prices like a graphic card web-hostings and the maps went into a magazine.
Only Activision dind’t reply to the mail i wrote (what a shame for a publisher).
So then one person with a personal homepage witch gots 250 visits per day to that time it’s very hard to imagine that theese big pages could not get some real prices!

Very big pages, but it’s not like we are earning money with it :). It is all volunteering. If we organise tournaments, clans won’t earn money most of the time, but they still do play.
But you do have a point. Maybe we will get prices, but nothing is sure right now.

(If someone wants to provide prices mail to pack@boozze.be or contact us on #etmaps @quakenet.org btw :))

I do remember your contest but what maps of that contest are still played nowadays? Even directly after the contest the maps were not played that much (I don’t think I did find a crowded server at that time).

A sort of our price is that we will promote a map, once it has reached a certain level of quality. There will be organised a tournament on it, and it will have a greater chance of becoming ET’s mp_beach/de_dust than the average custom made map. I hope some mappers find that idea as attractive as valuable prices.

EDIT:
But why do someone have to release a public Beta??
It’s like all other volunteers in the “contest” can look into your cards.
So for example you write down some funky shaders everyone can use them. Or they can look at the gameplay and use them for their own myp (or parts ofthem).
Bad idea. Internal testings would be much better.

www.gnu.org :slight_smile:
Anyway,
We just want to have best maps in general. If you use funky shaders and someone else takes them over that would level up the quality of all maps :). If you’d release a beta, everyone will know you were the first to use certain effects. I don’t think other contenders will copy original effects that fastly (or we will notice :)).
In the end, we search the map which offers best gameplay, best balance.
Contest will be judged more from a gamers point of view, not from a mappers point of view.

Public beta: Because we want maps to be as bugfree and balanced as possible. Plus I’d like the idea of the whole community being able to give feedback on gameplay,…
This only can happen when properly tested imo. Internal testings never are sufficient, certainly not in such complex maps as for ET.
(cfr http://snow.prohosting.com/etmoves/etmoves.zip = et mapbugexploits, http://www.rtcwfiles.com/file.info?ID=17953 = more of them, or mp_dam in rtcw)

kind regards,

pack

(system) #18

You are right in some points. I agree with your gnu.org statement, but have to point out that we have people like SIN floating around in the E.T scene.
So people have to watch their back. :wink:
And my last public-test of a map (was the gameplay-test for Bunker-Hill early this year) was a complete desaster. I made a big readme with notes for testers and with the things to do.
At the end some pages wrote reviews(!!) scoring my map “from very bad to awfull” not taking notice of the readme. Or the big “TESTVERSION” logo. :frowning:
From then i only made closed tests with clans i mailed and all went fine.
Other disadvantage is that you will got a lot of mails from people with bug-reports you already know. :slight_smile: So maybe im not very neutral to this subject. hehe

but it’s not like we are earning money with it

I did not have made money with it, too.

Even directly after the contest the maps were not played that much

Same with Rummies and Nibs SE_Versions. They were big announced on nearly all rtcw related pages with special options for server-admins and special league setup, but they get lost. Same with nearly all maps for rtcw.
Thats the fate of all custom-maps. many clan-players are disliking customs because of the fps and the layout.
The only attemt by pw.de to get a pro-mappacket witch was supposed to be offical and made by the community was a confirmation from activision and SD “yes! you can do it, we will sent you the mapfiles.”
But when pw.de wanted the files because the changelist was ready noone replied…(as far as i’m up to date)
Like i mentioned its a good thing for the community.
we will see how many maps are in the final mappack and what the support from the publisher will be. Its a long time until first beta deadline and hopefully the clan-community will accept the new stuff. :slight_smile:

(pack) #19

*I’ve never heard of SIN :slight_smile:

*If you’d get too much emails with bug reports, or don’t want to provide email, we can always help you with setting up a forum or so.

Same with Rummies and Nibs SE_Versions. They were big announced on nearly all rtcw related pages with special options for server-admins and special league setup, but they get lost. Same with nearly all maps for rtcw.

*I don’t know if the SE maps were that good for competitive play. I’m rather sure I tested some of them and decided not to give any attention to them (only my personla view). I know te_ufo at least got some play, but that was not one of those se maps, (te_frostbite also got some play downunder btw). I actually liked resurrection, which is mucho fun map- more for competitive play than the se maps :slight_smile:

*As an extra bad point for RTCW/custommapscene (I don’t know if this bug occurs in ET - anyone?), a pure RTCW server can only have a limited number of pk3’s in it before it starts acting weirdly. So admins always have to decide what maps they run. (really had some problems with this when I was serveradmin)

(chavo_one) #20

Consider yourself informed:
http://www.splashdamage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4922