One of the problems with making campaigns is that all three levels need to be on par. In making Enemy Territory we cut four levels that were nearly complete because they didn’t make the gameplay grade.
Couldn’t these maps be released “as is”? Perhaps with a note saying that they were released due to fan request and “do not neccesarily reflect the quality of splashdamages finished works” (as you find in a lot of game demos 
). Or are they really that bad?
I’m wondering what your thought are with regard to the multi-site mapping contest which is geared at much the same thing?
Already there’s a few maps appearing in screens & alphas that look promising, but an extra, professional layer of quality control will never go amiss, and the official stamp would be a major incentive both for mappers and community adoption.
All the other organisers seem to be AFK at the minuite, but figured it might be worth querying. Certainly seems it would be frustrating for everyone to go through everything and then for an officially-endorsed pack to appear and have no chance to compete with, because of the official stamp.
her her
The 4 sites (xfire.be is down for a few days :p) all do a tremendous community effort to make et a bigger and better game so we decided a month ago to have this “contest” but of course we can not really compete with an official “contest” from SD 
…
I would be even happier to support an established competition than I would be to organise a new one.
If this is the competition that the community are supporting most, it’s aok with us if the winners were the ones that we helped make in to a campaign.
Is this competition clearly the one everyone supports? Are there any politics surrounding it, or is everyone happy with the rules etc?
Paul/Locki.
Hi,
Well, we tried to have the biggest European newssites to support it (the ones that are often read by players active in competition). And that worked out well… I didn’t ask more sites (other continents) back then, because it would be more difficult to take decisions about rules and “winners” in a more or less democratic manner. I had in mind that this way we could let the community decide what maps they would like best. (watching comments and feedback from players).
It would be great to have official support of SD of course, but then rules should be rewritten a bit to suit both parties (which I guess, we would be willing to do )…
Our only strict rules were: SW should be possible, maximum timelimit of 15 minutes (because a lot of players are asking for some shorter maps), release a beta before jan 10 and release full before feb 1. and having a mapsize smaller than 20 Mb. Other was some advice like “think of fps”, etc. (See for thread in my ignature).
Furthermore the idea we had in mind was more or less like the idea of SD
- Proven to be very well balanced and great fun
- Work well for tournament play
- Complete and ready for beta testing
- Artistically on par with popular RtCW/ET maps
- Have a plot/theme that is original (for the purposes of the campaign)
Afaik our 15 minute-rule caused most problems by some mappers. But I think that this should be a maximum for a map to work well for tournament play ?
-Is 3 maps a maximum for SD? We didn’t want to put a final number on it because we wouldn’t let (for example) a fourth map drop out that was as good as the other 3
kind regards,
pack
While I realize it’s a matter of opinions I’d really go for Drakirs maps, Fliegerhorst and 2Hide are both quite the same mood and really good made, but both a 3 or a 6 map length both could be fun.
Anyway, what I actually was going to write about was my comments on the RtCW custom map issue, my opinion there were always that there were plenty of custom maps released that would have worked fine in competition, but judging from the swedish league I played in, most people didn’t want any custom maps at all, they wanted Beach, Beach, Beach and possibly Base so us custom map fans never got the chance to have any good maps up in competition.
Imo there should be more custom maps in competitions, so what if noone knows how they are built the first time, that’s a part of war, and good players will adapt, work together and find out the goal fast enough for their next round.
Hi Locki!
Thanks for giving us ET.
As far as I know, this mapping competition is THE custom map even. But I can only speak from my perspective (living in Sweden). This mapping contest has full support from the nr 1 Swedish RtCW and ET web site (www.swertcw.com):
http://www.swertcw.com/default.php?c=news&p=view&id=2176
I don’t know about the status of the comp. in other countries though.
Locki, once again, thanks for ET. And the support for the custom map scene!
// Loffy
I’d agree with that to an extent, though over here for a while it was Assault, Assault Assault and possibly Beach, Base etc… Two significant reasons IMHO though, one is clanners tend to be really picky about the map playing right (I’ve thought for a long time Beach is an all round superb map, utilising all weapons, being well balanced, scaling extremely well, having docs-running drama etc). For a map to be used it has to be excellent in so many ways - out of about 15 official maps only 6 were widely considered good+suitable enough, and that includes sub., which many find ill suited because results tended to be a bit “lotto” (luck of the med rush + ease of a semi-fluke sneak plant).
The other is many clans do not want, or “dont have the time” to make good strategies for maps that they will only play a couple of times in tournaments that are for fun. It’s hard work devising map strategies that work, and hard work getting teammembers to learn maps and strategies that will only be used on a couple of occasions. If you have say over a dozen officials and two dozen more scrims in a month, and only 1 official is for one specific map, you dont really want to spend much time on that one map - it can seem something of a poor use of time.
To sum, one problem is maps need to be extremely good in both design and suitability; another is maps have to be widely-enough used in order to make it worth clans investing significant amounts of time in. Hence the mapping contest - assistance/quality control available if mappers want help to sort the first problem, marketing for the second. Of course thats just a narrow explanation for this context, not to be taken too literally.
I’m sure that id and Activision would be happy to put it out via the auto-update server. This is probably the only way to get it widely adopted.
Activision gives a shit on customers. Sorry for the hard words but thats IMO a fact.
Planetwolfenstein.de started to initiate a pro-mappacket as an offical add-on. They talked to top-clans, opend a special forum, contacted clanbase and so on…
They talked to SD witch gave their ok. They talked to activision and they gave their ok too. Activision only set up the rule that all maps had to go through Quality Control but thats not a problem.
As soon as the things were on the run they never answered an e-mail again from the pw.de guys.
Other story:
a german d3-site started an art contest and asked activision for support.
They agreed and wanted to supply some give-aways.
As soon as the contest was announced they draw back and told the admin to stop the contest.
I could write down some other stories but they have all one similar end:
Activision draws back, or stopped replying to mails. and the guys who wrote them were no newbies or unknown 12 year old kids.
Activision is a good publisher and it seems they pay their employees, but supporting the community after the release is not theier business and thats very dissapointing.
I don’t know why you need activision to support it anyway… If you can get a broad base (eg 4 newssites) to support a mappack it is likely to become accepted too. I’m sure we can provide the mirrors ourself
Afaik Activision is far from being the worst publisher when it comes to support for their games (cough EA)
Maintenance of ET still costs some money (like evenbalance, masterservers, etc.). They did release source code of ET to modders who were serious. They did provide the tools to make the maps, and developpers of SD are still helping here. Maybe they will make ET appear in quakecon next year. They cannot do everything. Having read your examplesI wouldn’t say they are perfect, but neither would I say activision gives shit about community.
Having said that.
@ Locki
Could SD specify more clearly what they want exactly or which rules they would like? I guess you won’t agree with all rules we made?
I’m not sure why Activision didn’t reply to the emails, but I can tell you that this hold up was my fault, personally.
Our Producer at Activision needed the complete set of finished ET .maps from us with all the necessary compileable media to give to the pro-map guys. t took us ages to get it all together and we uploaded it all to Activision on Monday The pro-map guys should get it all real soon.
Our Activision Producer has been pressuring me constantly for weeks for the maps for the pro-map guys, so Activision are definitely not the ones to blame. If anything, they’re the ones to thank as the pay all the bills! 
Please pass on my appologies to that team for the delay.
As for the map competition, perhaps it would be worth getting the support of PlanetWolfenstein to ensure the US community is aware? There are some good US Level Designers who might not even know about the tournament.
That aside, I think it’s a really cool idea and I’m totally up for supporting it. Who is the official organiser? How many entrants are there so far?
Paul/Locki.
PW has made a newspost on it, I gather at the time the idea for keeping it at the 4 Euro sites was we already knew each other to a degree and use the same IRC networks (channel is #etmaps on quakenet btw) and whatnot. The more and more sites included as active organisers the more scope there is for “politics” and generally time needed to get anything done (big committee etc).
Enterants are basically anyone who submits map(s), there wasnt need for a official signup or registering in order to take part; basically very little extra effort for mappers bar the deadline and the extensive testing being likely to lead to more perfecting.
I’m thinking for official stamping etc there would need to be more considerations e.g. how important is a constant theme (season/locality) for a cohesive campaign, etc? Might mean more specific commitment needed from mappers, more detailed structure and so on?
Vio gave me this link:
http://www.teamwarfare.com/forums/showthread.asp?forumid=40&threadid=94321
ATVI ThanTastic
TWL Member 11-07-2003 07:54 PM / profile
Hey guys I’m looking for the best of the best mappers and scripters to possibly work on official ET material. Please list mapper name and maps created without getting wordy so I can go through it all fairly easy.
Thanks
SWT
S0ldiers with Th0mps0ns
So Activision is looking for mappers now - no?
@ Locki, we usually get other sites to post all the news too (we’re usually rather friendly to eachother ). If it would be a desire of SD we could involve pw.com (I’m sure Jube will give us her blessing :)) and in australia maybe wolfstah.com. But like DG said, more than 4 sites, different timezones/irc networks may make it a bit more difficult to organize (?) - not impossible though.
Please pass on my appologies to that team for the delay.
Ok no problem. thx for the statement. i will let them know.
I would like start an E.T map, but have to finish my map for the tb-2 engine before i start with other maps so penta wont get angry with me. :poke:
I have tons of ideas for ww2 maps, but i cant get one of them out of my head. if i have enought time and its not to late i will make it.
firstly, i’d like to submit a map i’d been working on for a while. i had stopped to model some props, and then got caught up in work, but now i have time to work on it.
secondly, i had a thought that perhaps the idea of releasing the unfinished sd maps “as is” would be ok, but would it be possible to release them to the mapping community instead to be reworked for the gameplay element/ i don’t know about anyone else, but i’d definitely love to do something like that. and maybe that could be a contest (for us since europe has theirs maybe?) … entrants can submit a reworked version of any of the maps, and have it play tested etc… just a thought
its not a euro contest, it just happens to be getting organised by a few sites which happen to be based in euroland. anyone is more than welcome to enter their maps.
Wow, my thread got stickied, i wud quite like a medal actually.
A suggestion to DG/pack and the other sites, it wud be great to continue the build up to the maps release. Monthly Screenshot realses. and updates like that, because after seeing the post, ive heard nothing since, (perhaps ive not been looking in the right places) just keep the hype up so people really have something to look forward to. and in the last month before release, perhaps release an avi on the beta of the maps (i wud be happy to help with the avi’s construction). I dunno how many entrants you’ve had, nor whether im raising issues that have already been discussed on other sites which ive missed so sorry for my ignorance on this. But rather than just a winning 1 map, what about a winning 3 resulting in a 3rd campaign.
And GJ organising it!
No mapper has submitted anything yet I hear some are working on it though. I saw some nice screenshots of a map with an mp_assault like environment, but the mapper decided after all not to submit it for the contest.
Anyway, atm I think there is too much confusion?
…
so three different initiatives (?) Should get sorted out asap I think…
