DOM-Tiamat
Map Info
	File Name dom-tiamat.zip Author Homeslice Gametype UT Domination Date Added 08-30-2003 File Version 1.00 File Size 3.46 mb Player Count 8-16 Map Description This here is a map that was a joint project between me and L.J.Paranoid. And Cobra did the bot pathing. Review Rating 4 User Rating 7 Overall Rating 5.0
Review
Reviewer Ironblayde Awe Score:  1.0/3 Date 05-02-2004 Build Score:  2.0/3 Review Schema Cast Score:  1.0/3 User Point:  +1 Overall Score:  5.0/10 AWE: 1.0 The screenshots I saw of this map looked promising, and I like the theme the authors were going for: an abandoned church, with both indoor and outdoor settings. Upon playing the map, however, I found the visuals to be wholly unimpressive. The church façade looked pretty nice, and there are a few nice touches to be found here and there -- lily pads calmly drift on the surface of some water outside, and one indoor room features a skylight with an Iron Cross in it -- but the large majority of the map is lackluster. Indoors, the map mostly consists of a few large, rectangular rooms. Aside from a few nice arches and flourishes here and there, the architecture is very blocky, and contains a number of odd choices and silly mistakes. Among these are significantly oversized lanterns everywhere (about twice as tall as a player), a sconce floating in midair, a section of trim that was either mistakenly deleted or never added at all, and a rock formation that’s physically impossible. That last may have simply been intended as an artistic touch, but a rocky exclamation point floating in lava doesn’t do it for me. Outdoors, the church exteriors look nice enough, but the terrain is awful, full of sharp edges and points. Texture choices are good for the most part, and use a number of textures from The Wheel of Time. They’re nice textures, too. I believe it’s the same pack that KaMi used in his LastCrusader maps. Unfortunately, little effort seems to have been made in aligning the textures, and the mistakes are often in very conspicuous places. The map’s lighting is perhaps its weakest point, aesthetically. In a few places, the authors have created some sharp and decent-looking shadows using outdoor lighting, but unfortunately, they can’t sell the overall effect. The angle of the shadows is inconsistent with where the light seems to be coming from in the skybox, and is even inconsistent from one room to the next. Still, that doesn’t look too bad. It’s inside where the lighting really gets ugly. Coronas in this map are often too big and distracting, and worse, they are often used as primary light sources. Generally speaking, coronas are set to not give off any light of their own, because they need very big radii to be visible from a distance. Not so in this map. Many of the lanterns’ lights have impossibly large areas of effect because coronas were used in this way. This is especially evident in one room whose floor is covered with red carpeting. The somewhat large room has only small lanterns around its perimeter, but they light the room completely with almost no room for shadow, and in the center of the room where all those lights’ ambits coincide, the carpet gets so bright it could almost pass for lava. There are some other eyesores to be found among the lighting as well. Improper use of non-incidence lights has created many unnatural-looking circles on the floors of certain rooms, and in another room, a fountain has four differently colored lights underwater, one of which is a bright, hideously saturated green. It’s another light-emitting corona with a huge radius, so everything around the fountain is bathed in a gross shade of green. BUILD: 2.0 DOM-Tiamat fares better in the build department. It’s about as close to being free of BSP holes as it’s possible to get with a map of its considerable size. Zoning is done exactly right, except for one small zone at one edge of the map that isn’t separated from its neighbor properly. There are some inefficiencies to be found as well. First, there are a few unmerged polygons on complex surfaces, and when I say "a few" I mean "hundreds." Second, high shadow detail is used on every surface in the map, which is rather wasteful, especially considering the fact that lighting is rarely used to good effect here. Even so, performance is usually good, but older machines may have problems. These could have been alleviated somewhat with a little more discretion. My other big gripe about the build is the use of audio. In most places in the map, the ambient sounds are appropriate and add to the atmosphere of the map. However, there are several places (too many) where there are lights that flicker on and off, and they’re accompanied by that commonly used intermittent electronic buzzing sound. Lanterns shouldn’t be making electronic sounds. There’s one place in the map where there are two right next to each other. Only there are so many lights in the area with such wide areas of effect that you can hardly tell the lights are flickering at all, and there are two sound actors in there, so you hear this horribly loud, horribly irritating electronic sound in the middle of an old church, with nothing apparently causing it. This is right next to one of the control points too, so while defending that point, you may be overcome by a desire to hurt small children. The music is bad too. Aside from the fact that it doesn’t fit the atmosphere of the map, it’s just a lousy track. The bot pathing is competent and efficient, but I would have added a couple of small things. There are a few places where translocators are useful in this map – for instance, they allow you to pass through openings in the walls that are too small to walk through – but there are no translocator paths defined for the bots. There are Anti-Grav Boots in the map too, but again, no pathing to teach the bots how to use them. You may want to turn up your difficulty settings a bit if you want to play this offline. CAST: 1.0 Proper placement of items, weapons, and spawn points is important in any map, but it’s particularly necessary in a Domination game. Sadly, this map falls short in many ways. The three control points are not placed well. The Altar point is visible from the Gate point, and there’s a teleporter right next to the Gate point that takes you immediately to the Fountain point. This layout effectively renders half of the map nearly useless, as going through it would be a waste of time. Item placement is not particularly good either. The placement of health is all right for the most part, but there are too few weapons and too much ammo. For example, one of the control point rooms has two health packs, thigh pads, Anti-Grav Boots, invisibility, and nineteen ammo pickups of various kinds –- but only one weapon, a minigun sitting in one of the entrances! There are many rarely-seen pickups lying around too, that seem like they were just added for variety’s sake, without considering whether something else would be more useful. There are extra Enforcers sitting around, a number of Enforcer clips, single shells for the sniper rifle, and even a bunch of Nali healing fruits. Finally, the spawn point locations are poorly chosen. Many of them sit right next to control points, which isn’t good. Anyone defending those points will be more than happy to spawn kill you. At the other extreme are spawn points in the "useless" parts of the map, which can make players impatient to return to the action. Regardless of where you end up spawning, chances are you’ll have to walk a ways to find a weapon, and you’ll be an easy kill for anyone who happens upon you in that time. I don’t like the use of teleporters in this map. There are three sets. One, as I mentioned, links two of the control points much too conveniently. Another, which looks ugly because it was created with a volumetric brush rather than a sprite as is usual for its type, takes you onto a narrow ledge where, if you weren’t facing the right direction when you took the teleporter, you’ll abruptly fall off and take damage. The other accesses a keg and a Redeemer, but they can be reached just as easily with the boots or a translocator. The teleporters could have been left out entirely. FINAL SCORE: 4.0 Domination runs a close second to Capture the Flag as my favorite game type in UT, and not many people make maps for it, so I really wanted to like this map, but it’s too flawed in too many ways for me to enjoy it much. A balanced layout is the sine qua non for a good Domination game, and sadly, the lack of such is DOM-Tiamat’s biggest problem. It might be worth taking a look at, and it’s clear that a good deal of effort went into constructing it, but it’s not a keeper.
Map Comments
Homeslice 09-01-2003 01:10 AM MDT   Not to mention, I didn't do any of the terrain there - I still suck at it! But I'm starting to get the hang of lighting though. If I can just master the architecture, I'll FINALLY be a good mapper! KaMi 09-01-2003 12:22 PM MDT Rating: 8   Great job guys!,nice theme and very funny :) Louise 09-02-2003 03:45 PM MDT Rating: 8   Well done guy's. Damn good map. wazaaa 11-02-2003 03:01 PM MST Rating: 10   in 1 word ..... OWNAGE!!!!!!! Cobra 05-03-2004 09:20 PM MDT Rating: 7   I have told LJ about the size of the sonce, and some other stuff. The pathing is correct no need for the bots to take the jumpBoot's, cause I manage to make them claim the hill whitout the need of those jumpBoot's, As for lift exit whit jumpSpot, Well I think that it is a mater of taste. Cause where I have put a thin pad (50 health) over the top door. The bots take it whitout any jumpspot. But good review. Vertigo 05-08-2004 04:23 AM MDT Rating: 6   a 6 for the visuals. the gameplay is just bad. its too big (well big and open) but the place looks great! paranoid did a good job with the lights too! I like it anyway Hellscrag2002 05-04-2004 09:06 AM MDT Rating: 6   Homeslice has often taken the time to play and comment on my maps, so here's me returning the favour! DOM-Tiamat has an interesting theme, which it pulls off fairly well. The abandoned church, particularly in the Altar area and the large cave with the shield belt in it, is pretty well detailed. I did, however, see a few classic mistakes that the mapper should not still be making at this stage; the stone walls near the Fountain point are far too thin to be realistic, and the rock support for the shield belt tapers away to nothing at one point. Lighting was suitably colourful and interesting, but in those squarer rooms where architecture was weaker it didn't do a lot to help matters, being of too high radius for its sources. There was also a pretty nicely shaped corridor to the Altar that was severely let down by the lack of a trim around its entrance. The flow was okay and the bots certainly effective, but I found the arrangement of the control points quite odd. The map is large but the control points are all very easily reached from one another, in particular the two linked by a teleporter. This creates a lot of dead space in the map, which can leave the newly respawned player running in frustration across big, empty rooms trying to reach an enemy control point. Certain issues bothered me, such as the failure of the authors to assign a default gametype (so that the map started up in DM when I clicked on it to run UT), the inclusion of an unhelpfully named texture package, and the use of a teleporter, approachable from all angles at one end, but emerging in a small box that was only open on one side so that 75% of the time I arrived facing the wall. All in all, Homeslice and co have created an imaginative map here with a good atmosphere (although I have to agree with the reviewer about the anachronistic "broken light" ambient sounds). There are certain issues such as those mentioned above, however, that prevent it from being a real keeper. Keep up the good work! Next time, though, I suggest slightly greater consideration be given to whether the architecture and soundscape you are creating is realistic, and you'll probably come out with a better map at the end of the day. Manticore 05-07-2004 04:44 AM MDT Rating: 6   Big map. Good for four team games. quillion 05-09-2004 07:03 PM MDT Rating: 5   aye, well its a map, thats it! nowt outstanding tbh.