1 thing - dont make a map like radar - no offence to the makers of the map
Its asthetically pleasing - but in game - with 20 ppl and combat walking to side entrance gets me down to 14 fps - and ive got a GF4 ti 4600 - though its a little forked.
I think its mainly to do with the shrubs and bushes all over the place
You’re tellin me. I got a radeon 7200 p4 1.4 and 128 megs of ram and I have to have all the settings maxed to what pb allows and that just gets me to 20 fps. Needless to say I don’t play that map much.
Why don’t you try cg_atmosphericeffects 0? That gives my GeForce1 about 10 more FPS. Also r_lodbias 2 and r_dynamiclight 0.
The way the map is going right now, I’m working on it about 3 hours every night, and I’m getting little by little done… Literally right now it’s only about 200 feet of work done, where the final product will have a few miles of land in it. This will probably take me months to complete, and by that time 60% of you will have bought a new video card for Doom 3/Half Life 2.
jupz and 60% of us won’t be playing this game anymore
seriously dude, alter your goals to make the map more playable
the way it sounds now we have to ask the coastguard for help finding our enemies… 
Then errr what happened on goldrush and radar? Radar particularly is extremely funny 
AMD 2400 + ti4200 and I get <20 fps cos of the foliage when trying to snipe or binoc? Heh gotta love this new technology
Seriously though - what was the logic behind stuff like this (and say the courtyard in goldrush where it’s <50 fps before you add players etc). If a custom had done 'em we’d all be bitching about crap framerates
‘Luckily’ in ET most maps are CPU locked (IE do this test - run ET at 640x480, make a note of framerate, then up the resolution to 800x600 changing nothing else - chances are the framerate is still the same cos it’s the CPU limiting it, not the GFX card), so unless you really go overboard you don’t have to worry about the graphics card particularly. Sure a brand new one can run at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF etc or whatever, but others will still be able to play your map just as fast.
So if it runs crap on your comp and you have a crap graphics card, don’t necessarily expect it to be faster on everyone else’s.
It’s not THAT hard to make a map that runs at 74 fps constantly, but it seems everyone is trying to do BF1942 maps in ET, which it isn’t designed for (thank god, I hate huge maps with bugger all in them).
Personally, I wish more mappers would start with small maps, because you learn so much more, and you always start the next map going ‘man why did I do my map like that???’. If it takes you 2 years to get onto your second map, it’s gonna be a really long slow process…
Start small, and possibly even stay small - well designed small maps are more fun than sprawling messes.
As someone new to mapping I find my mind is always overflowing with cool ideas for my first map. There’s so many things I want to do I find I feel at times just overwhelmed, and then I just think back to which custom maps were the most popular in RtCW and remember they were largely simple maps.
Wizernes is a perfect example, the majority of people I know say Wizernes was their most favorite custom map for RtCW and yet all in all it was one of the simplest map designs. Meanwhile complex maps of great detail like Blitzkrieg Ardennes (my personal favorite map of all time, both in detail and in gameplay) were largely ignored.
So now whenever I find myself getting frustrated over a window sill because the 16 brushes I just intricatley weaved together to create it don’t look just right, I pull myself back and try and look at the bigger picture. The only people who notice the little details are other mappers, so you need to ask yourself, are you mapping for mappers or are you mapping for players?
In addition to this I think what it comes down to is this:
what makes a great map? great design? lotsa detail? No, in the end it all comes down to battles. I don’t play this game online to see good maps, I just want fun and exciting battles. And so do 95% of the other players. And when you’ve just killed three enemies and you are trying to disarm the dynamite with 2 health left you just don’t give a rat’s ass if there’s detail around you or not
This is something mappers need to realize. I understand most of you have great ideas and want to make a beautiful map - and I too am interested in some of the projects going on at the moment, some designs are downright beautiful -, but for the players all that matters is gameplay. So if you want your map to be played on most servers and if you want it to be fun for players, make a map that has great battle potential and never mind the detail, and you will see that fps rates won’t be a problem either…
yes - but some maps that are being released right now, are just too darn ugly - take for example - both of Marko’s maps - he probably created them in a few days.
A map which i am very fond of is password 2, but not many people are aware of it.
shame.
Agreed about Marko’s maps - I was pointing out to my girlfriend the difference between say, his corridors (simple tunnel, single texture, 90 degree corners etc) and my own efforts. Obviously she wasn’t really interested, but I was
Full marks to Marko for getting his maps out so quickly, but then again I wonder how many maps I’d get out if I was so scathing of any form of detail at all?
It was precisely maps like his (he wasn’t the only guilty party by any means - sadly he’s the most high profile simply because he was the first) that for me sounded the death knell of RTCW maps - out first, overplayed, gave bad impression, put people off custom maps.
Actually, my current pet hate, and it’s been around since I first saw RTCW custom maps, is terrain. Would people NOT simply have max height for bits you can’t reach, and min height for bits you can? Take a look at Return to Carnage Canyon - got to be the crappest terrain I’ve ever seen (and that’s saying something!).
So please people - if your map looks a bit crap, shelve it and start again - your next map will (hopefully) be a lot better.
It’s not so much detail, as at least a passing reference to ‘reality’ for what it’s worth. If I’m in a destroyed building, I want it to look like I am, not that I’m surrounded by a perfect box with simple textures.
The problem with ‘big’ is it usually means ‘empty’, and if it doesn’t, it means it’ll run dog-slow, which is not very helpful to anyone.
So keep maps fast, and looking like they actually depict what they are supposed to show. Layoutr, gameplay-wise, is something you can only get from experience or being lucky - even SD didn’t get it right on a lot of their maps (railgun anyone?).
Oh and another point, make map lengths appropriate. As two extreme examples I always point out goldrush (escort / repair tank, destroy 2 tank barriers, blow doors, capture 2 objectives, escort / repair truck, destroy 2 truck barriers) versus radar (capture 2 objectives) which have similar time limits. A bit silly really. For a small map, have a correspondingly low map time. My church one has 12 minutes which seems really short as an ET map, but compared to RTCW it’s more than reasonable. Also, better to have a short and sweet map than one that drags on and on, particularly if it’s repeated in a map rotation (reminds me of a GOTY map rotation - each map 4 times - the server would empty when it came to Tram cos no-one wanted to play the same map for one and a half hours when the rest of the entire rotation often wouldn’t take as long).