Build and Shoot

As suggested by the title, this entire thread will be my thoughts on maps. Things such as what makes a map good/bad, and what to strive for when creating a map will be discussed in here. Manifesto implies its purely opinion, which it is. While I will heavily criticize Pinshit, hallway, bridgewars, etc, some people will actually like them. In no way am I flaming you, calling you retarded, etc. You are entitled to your opinions, and this entire thing doesn't invalidate them. I will not be offering a Table of Contents, nor will I be offering a TL:DR(ok, here it is. Dont make shitty maps). This is because I will likely be going all over the place because as of the time of this writing I myself don't know entirely what all will be in this, bouncing off one idea to the next. If you really want to see a particular topic just look for the bold headers that start a new topic. The pictures I'm(as of now) including will often show examples of what to do or what not to do relating to the topic of hand. Having your/favorite map shown isn't an indication of it being an overall bad map or it being the pinnacle of map design.

Oh right, this isn't made for jagex's version. First off talking to them is akin to talking to a brick wall while deaf, and we can't create custom maps, at least not at launch.

Enjoy
Or at least fucking assume they are. Your map, should for the most part, be able to stand as a perfectly viable map on its own without buildings, trees, etc. Those add a lot to a map, but the map shouldn't ever be created for the sole purpose of building the largest bridge onto the map that you can. A prime example is Bridge wars, the archaic map created when we first gained the ability to do so. It fucked up on multiple levels which I'll get into later. The biggest problem with it is the fact that once the bridge was gone, the map was boring. You could either just sit on the destroyed bridge, hoping you could hit someone on the other side, or attempt to spend twice/triple the time to get into enemy territory. Either by building another bridge(will get griefed), or digging to the bottom and walking across to dig up. Now what?

While Normandie contains a large amount of nostalgia, it also has a similar problem. Not so much that it gets crippled in the first 5 minutes of gameplay, but that it relies on the gimmick of recreating normandie. This doesnt make for a very interesting map. What do I mean? Lets remove the trees and buildings and tell me whats left. A large, relatively flat field. While some may argue that this promotes building, all it really leads to is "who has the best sniper"/"Monkey island 3:ace of spades". "But Fluttershy" you suddenly exclaim, "If servers had more moderation, surley those maps would be left intact and fully functional!". Well besides what I just told you, you shouldn't have to rely on big brother moderators to kick anyone attempting to take advantage of the games mechanics. Disabling building/destroying, the only other option to preserve the map as moderators cant be ingame 24/7, kills the game and forces the game to rely on its weakest mechanic(shooting). Some of you may be wondering about the earlier comment, and whats wrong with being a flat field. Its quite simple really.


Something that annoys me to no end is flat maps. Please take notice that ill consider a map flat if it goes a large section of land without changing(ie, green's side of Gen is flat, despite not the entire map being flat) a layer or two. Maps need natural protection to prevent the recreation of duck hunt bar dog. Don't take this as an excuse to flood the map with buildings and trees, as I was just over this in the last section. Something that REALLY annoys me with flat maps is when they make it on layer one(for reference, layer 0 is water, one is indestructible) and then makes the water lava. This essentially shuts down all stealth and locks the game into stalemate. While some may find things that like that fun, I would much prefer that people play CTF in CTF and not get sniped every time I walked one pixel to the left of cover to build slightly ahead to build a wall one or two blocks forward. What often accompanies flat maps is decreased map size due to natural water boundaries(which in turn are often fucking lava). This gives direction to the map(which is good), but offers only one direction(which is bad).
If you play on flatter maps, this is probably what you're going to see the entire time.
Maps never should take up all of the available space for a map, you're given simply too much to work with. When they do use the whole thing, it makes it far to easy for people to simply hug the edge of the map and sneak up behind them, or worse, act as a disincentive to building(after all, why build a gate or fortress if they can safely and easily walk around it?). In addition, when it gets too small, it forces them into a never ending conflict. People want conflict. Its the only reason people like pinshit, because it forces them straight into combat. Maps should strive to do this(lead them into conflict), without explicitly putting signs up saying to go here, or even worse, only giving them one path(ie, pinpoint). There are several different ways to create hotspots, which are natural or unnatural. Unnatural consists of obsticals forcing people to build(which will then get fought over). This relies on people actually building, which sadly doesn't happen too often. In addition people wont often build due to the aforementioned griefers. Unnaturals can work well, but you should never rely soley on them. Its like cinnamon, delicious, tasty, but it burns when you eat spoonfuls. It needs naturals to give it sustenance.

Naturals are your typical prebuilt paths, bridges, etc. Some of my favorite naturals are prebuilt tunnels and chasms. While they do lead to pinpoint like circumstances, you have to be on the watch as they can come from the walls or ceilings and break your entire defense if you aren't careful. Keep in mind natural paths only really work if theres a reason to use them. If you have, for example, a mountain and a plains next to each other, people aren't going to Dora the Explorer it and climb the fucking mountain(unless they're trying to be stealthy). Rather, they'll likely use the plains instead. Make sure your paths are reasonable, such as cutting a significant portion of time out of travel, protecting you from snipers, or making it the only way to go through a certain point. Keep in mind what I've told you in the first section, never heavily rely on bridges, and dont make it all layer one so they cant grief it.
A pretty good example of what I mean. This map features a natural hotspot with the massive tunnel/bridge going through it. However it also features two paths in the surrounding area from the small bit of land between the tunnel and water. Bridges can be built further out, creating unnatural hotspots, although the likely hood of this happening isn't too great on this map.

It would also help to make your map with landmarks. Nothing too flashy, but they can help lead players to certain areas (making a hotspot) or help coordinate players(meet at X). Landmarks can be anything, but for obvious reasons try to avoid anything too large (massive buildings) or too small (poles). You probably won't see anyone for days.
Kinda going off of the first point, flooding the map with prebuilt structures such as buildings and trees to act as cover never ends well. The first reason is the obvious griefing, but until then, it heavily discourages building until it's removed. Don't take this as "Fluttershy says no buildings", as that isn't true. The map will need some form of cover initially, just not too much. You'll need to find a nice balance between too many and too little. Generally speaking, if 30% of the map is buildings, you've fucked up.
While it makes for a visually pleasing map, rarely will building ever actually occur, and once the buildings are griefed, its just a large, flat map.

[/b]
Yes, this is a well known fact, but it shouldn't ever be evident in gameplay. Both sides should be on perfectly equal footing from start to end. One method some map makers use is to employ symmetry in their maps. This is boring, it's taking the cheap way out. It makes the map play the same no matter what side you go on. Both sides should play relatively differently. While gen isn't a model map due to its numerous flaws, it does display this trait prominently. Because of gen, Blue was often called the offensive/tunnel rats side, while Greens were known as the Autists/Builders. This is kind of what you should be going for, except way less extreme. Two images from the same map. Blue's serene field nicely contrasts Green's crowded city. However it's far too extreme of a difference, and heavily favored towards Green, allowing them to pick off Blue easily from behind the massive wall of prebuilt cover(which I remind you, is a no-no).


I will be adding more thoughts/expanding more thoughts as time goes on, this isn't the final version, and I doubt it ever will be until the forums shut down eventually. Probably because of the guvmint. Feel free to discuss my views, say why I'm stupid, etc.

Recent edit was for...: Addded a few images

Building on top of the Pollution sections, in general you should never build military structures as prefabs. The map should start off looking like there hasn't been a battle there. That's up to the players.

+1

This thread would be greatly improved with more images.

Some thoughts:

I only view the water, hill heights(including roads/canyons), and predesigned tunnels as the really essential parts to gameplay - the rest is mostly cosmetic, although visually distracting terrain like dense trees and rocks are useful as a way to give stealth players a "fast path," this is put to use in the design of random with mountains in the north(slow), trees/hills in the south(faster), and plains in the middle(fastest). A good map will try to allow for some landmarks so that players aren't getting lost, and roads, trees, and structures can help with this - as well as asymmetrical layouts.

Bottlenecks are not necessarily bad, but they are biased towards static gameplay, and I didn't emphasize them in my AoS maps. But any map that follows the "land along the central path, water elsewhere" formula is likely be to at least as popular as pinpoint, because having any land at all makes the no-mans-land cycle through flat/built/rubble stages over time, each of which comes with new tactical opportunities; sniping generally does better at any stage but a stealth or run-and-gun player may occasionally find an opening. The biggest problems come in when there's an excessive amount of water at midmap, which is the situation with Bridgewars. Once the bridge goes down, a substantial rebuild is impossible, making the map very stagnant.

I agree with the "maps are too large" sentiment, but also recall that the maps were big in the context of the old, slow-paced "hide the intel" gameplay. Large maps motivated those ever-controversial pyspades squads as a way to shrink "effective map size" and even out the bias towards own-team destruction - the theory being that by spawning potential griefers into the middle of a battle, they would just fight instead of getting bored and wrecking the spawn, so both builders and fighters would have a more satisfying experience. Auto-squads showed some effectiveness, but they were also confusing, unbalanced, and unpolished, so today map layout and new game modes seem to have mostly substituted for their original purpose. But I wouldn't call the game at this point "perfect," either - it still suffers from some basically "unfair" dynamics like spawn camping.

(A historical aside: before 0.3 or so we didn't have 1-block autoclimb, so flat maps were very chic as they had drastically lower travel times - Mesa was influenced by this consideration. Gen maps felt even larger then.)

Triplefox wrote:

This thread would be greatly improved with more images.

Was kind of hoping I wouldn't have to do this, but I guess I can go look and see if I can find maps that convey my meaning clearly.

Triplefox wrote:

Bottlenecks are not necessarily bad, but they are biased towards static gameplay, and I didn't emphasize them in my AoS maps.

Bottlenecks aren't too bad, but most maps that include them seem to feel the need to make it revolve around 1 or 2 bottlenecks without any alternate path, which annoys me.

Triplefox wrote:

sniping generally does better at any stage but a stealth or run-and-gun player may occasionally find an opening.

I was originally going to try to tack in a section about trying to attempt making areas were certain weapons flourish, but I had a bit of difficulty thinking it up and ultimately ditched it. Primarily because it mostly revolved around not making it flat among a few other topics already discussed in the thing, and I didn't want to make it repeat itself too much.

Triplefox wrote:

The biggest problems come in when there's an excessive amount of water at midmap, which is the situation with Bridgewars. Once the bridge goes down, a substantial rebuild is impossible, making the map very stagnant.

Agreed, excessive water in general is pretty bad unless used to make a the map smaller. Isnt Iceball going to support larger/smaller map sizes? That'll be great.

Triplefox wrote:

I agree with the "maps are too large" sentiment, but also recall that the maps were big in the context of the old, slow-paced "hide the intel" gameplay. Large maps motivated those ever-controversial pyspades squads as a way to shrink "effective map size" and even out the bias towards own-team destruction - the theory being that by spawning potential griefers into the middle of a battle, they would just fight instead of getting bored and wrecking the spawn, so both builders and fighters would have a more satisfying experience. Auto-squads showed some effectiveness, but they were also confusing, unbalanced, and unpolished, so today map layout and new game modes seem to have mostly substituted for their original purpose. But I wouldn't call the game at this point "perfect," either - it still suffers from some basically "unfair" dynamics like spawn camping.

Squads don't really deal with my problem with larger maps too much, with the exception of bringing conflict...In the form of them just spawn camping. I actually refuse to play on any server with squads, especially if it's autosquad.

kmaj wrote:

I wouldn't say Pinpoint is a "bad" map. It's a good wallpopping practice map, it just gets boring quickly.

Remind me of the last time a pinpoint game ended with one side actually capturing the intel 10 times instead of it being TDM based. Hell, on TDM games the intel could give secretly 5000 kills/1000 and no one would even notice. Thats my problem with it, it looses the original objective and instead tries to focus on Ace of Spades weakest attribute, which is the shooting.

Fluttershy wrote:

Triplefox wrote:

The biggest problems come in when there's an excessive amount of water at midmap, which is the situation with Bridgewars. Once the bridge goes down, a substantial rebuild is impossible, making the map very stagnant.

Agreed, excessive water in general is pretty bad unless used to make a the map smaller. Isnt Iceball going to support larger/smaller map sizes? That'll be great.

Well yes, it does, with the new map editor* I've shoved in.



*Map editor is currently quite shit. It will need some way to do colour picking.

Also, the map overview should kindly indicate that 128x128 is probably a bit too small for 16v16, unless you add an assload of walls.

Hey, nice mapping tutorial, man, but what about trenches? I already made a map, but it's unbalanced and needs improvements (boring).

Also, no un-distributable blocks, please.

(I hope you don't mind the revive. )
While I might disagree on some points, and think there's too many no's and too few yes'es, it's instructional to see somebody explain his view so thoroughly. I'll definitely return to this thread to see if I can learn some more out of it.
One of the points I disagree upon is: cover near the base. Too many obscured paths behind base is creeper's paradise. It can turn out to be a disadvantage. And in that sense a flat spawn area and a very crowded one are equivalent, only asking for different tactics.

I think the people of AoS enjoy that fast past gameplay. Personally, I enjoy a game mode like arena over ctf because of the action you experience so fast into the round.

I'd like to see current maps being made like the ones in arena. Small, but not too small. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting tired of the large maps. Small and simple does the trick. I'd rather die a thousand times in the first fifteen seconds of spawning, compared to dying 10 times walking across an entire map.

Cajun Style wrote:

(I hope you don't mind the revive. )
While I might disagree on some points, and think there's too many no's and too few yes'es, it's instructional to see somebody explain his view so thoroughly.

Dont worry, its still relevant as long as people host servers. Im afraid the reason its so hard to say what people should be doing is because it's easier to offer negative criticism over positive., aswell as easier to identify it in the first place.

TheGeekZeke101 wrote:

I think the people of AoS enjoy that fast past gameplay. Personally, I enjoy a game mode like arena over ctf because of the action you experience so fast into the round.

Yeah there is quite a bit of people who enjoy that type of gameplay, but I didnt write this thread for them or about them. I wrote it to be purely about my opinion on what map makers should be striving for/avoiding. It sounds pretentious I know, but whatever.

TheGeekZeke101 wrote:

I'd like to see current maps being made like the ones in arena. Small, but not too small. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting tired of the large maps. Small and simple does the trick. I'd rather die a thousand times in the first fifteen seconds of spawning, compared to dying 10 times walking across an entire map.

Honestly I can't stand arena. Shooting is one of Ace of Spades weakest assets. Its the equivelent of Operation Anchorage in Fallout 3, trying to capitalize on something the game isnt very strong at. It doesnt help that you cant build period.

TheGeekZeke101 wrote:

I'd like to see current maps being made like the ones in arena. Small, but not too small. I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting tired of the large maps. Small and simple does the trick. I'd rather die a thousand times in the first fifteen seconds of spawning, compared to dying 10 times walking across an entire map.

Honestly I can't stand arena. Shooting is one of Ace of Spades weakest assets. Its the equivelent of Operation Anchorage in Fallout 3, trying to capitalize on something the game isnt very strong at. It doesnt help that you cant build period.[/quote]

Well, building is something involved around arena. Smaller maps for most, if not all, game modes would be a bit nicer change in pace. I know for a fact BR was working on a script that made some areas breakable. It's a way to start. Personally I hate how people can do anything, and everything, to a map. I like the maps the way they are. I don't want Timmy destroying a nice, pre-built structure to make his weak bunker. In some cases it just gives the other team the advantage and screws everyone else over.

Well, telling people the way maps should be made is kinda stupid. But I agree that most people don't have the patience for full on huge CTF maps these days. It's really annoying playing on small maps all the time, it takes away a huge tactical element and is a lot less challenging.

Sasquatch wrote:

Well, telling people the way maps should be made is kinda stupid. But I agree that most people don't have the patience for full on huge CTF maps these days. It's really annoying playing on small maps all the time, it takes away a huge tactical element and is a lot less challenging.

I don't think it's the patience with huge CTF maps that rustle players' jimmies. It's just the increased opportunity camping on them. It's sometimes impossible to find the camper in a huge map.

Revolet wrote:

Sasquatch wrote:

Well, telling people the way maps should be made is kinda stupid. But I agree that most people don't have the patience for full on huge CTF maps these days. It's really annoying playing on small maps all the time, it takes away a huge tactical element and is a lot less challenging.

I don't think it's the patience with huge CTF maps that rustle players' jimmies. It's just the increased opportunity camping on them. It's sometimes impossible to find the camper in a huge map.

Watch the minimap for tracers. Map awareness is one of the key differences between average to good players and really good players.