CTF-Hall Of OptimApollo3
Map Info
	File Name ctf-hallofoptimapollo3.zip Author Optimal134 Gametype UT Capture the Flag Date Added 03-31-2004 File Version 1.00 File Size 1.69 mb Player Count 8-12 Map Description A great hall where mythic battles are won and lost in head to head combat.Oh yea dont fall off the bridge while looking at the night sky! Review Rating 2.5 User Rating 5 Overall Rating 3.5
Review
Reviewer Ironblayde Awe Score:  1.5/3 Date 06-07-2004 Build Score:  0.5/3 Review Schema Cast Score:  0.5/3 User Point:  +1 Overall Score:  3.5/10 AWE: 1.5 This strangely-named map brings combatants into a cavernous hall characterized by grand pillars and arches everywhere, along with numerous statues and trophies from the single-player mode of the game, which are somewhat strange to see in a map like this. The overall architecture works well to convince players of the location, primarily due to the generous use of curved surfaces that lend the place a majestic feel. Large corridors dominate the ends of the map around the flags, while the center is given over to a huge lava pit with two bridges spanning it, and a night sky looking down through the open ceiling. Despite the overall appeal of the architecture, it's in the details where the map starts to fall apart. There's no trim anywhere, and there are quite a few places where it's sorely needed. As it is now, angled and curved floors abruptly give way to nothing around the lava pit, and on the map's few elevated surfaces. Arches lacking trim tend to look more like they were cut out as an afterthought instead of planned that way from the beginning. Many pillars and walls have one texture turning into another with no transition. The textures come from a multitude of packs, with Ancient predominating. They do go well together for the most part, though the author's choices tend to make the lack of trim far more obvious than it might have been otherwise. Where texturing is concerned, it's not so much the texture choices that concern me as much as the alignment. The texture alignment in this map is as bad as I've ever seen, about as bad as it's possible to be. You need only look for a boundary between two textures to find a misalignment, always in position and sometimes in scale as well. I'd wager that usually, texture alignment problems don't bother a lot of people, because it's a detail that isn't always immediately obvious unless you're looking for it. In this map, though, you can't help but see it everywhere you look, and cringe. The lighting in here is abysmal, probably the weakest aspect of the map's appearance. For the most part, light comes from no visible source. Lights are pure white in the center, and oversaturated towards the ends. There are torches here and there along the walls burning with team-colored flames, but they don’t look good, and they are far too few to be believable as the only source of all that light. On the red team's side of the map, the torches give off light that's actually less saturated than the painfully red ambient light that dominates those corridors, as if the flames are burning white but are being overwhelmed by the map's mysterious, all-pervasive color. The lighting also takes away from anything pleasant the textures might have to offer, because it turns the map into a monochromatic mess. BUILD: 0.5 On the technical side of things, virtually nothing was done correctly. The author's brushwork is terrible, with almost nothing on the grid. In the game, you can occasionally see little misalignments where brushes don't meet up correctly. More prevalent are unnatural edges in the lighting where too many brushes were used, or too many polygons are present on a single brush. As you can see, this map's problems tend to exacerbate one another instead of remaining separate. The build hurts the lighting, the lighting hurts the texturing, the texturing hurts the architecture. Perhaps the biggest offense in this map is the total lack of optimization. The whole of the map (aside from the water and lava volumes) is one giant zone. There are some giant, extremely poorly placed zone portals in the map, but they don't enclose anything. That sort of thing really makes me wonder whether the author bothered testing this map very much before he released it. What's worse, there are over five thousand polygons in this map – nearly half the map's total – that serve no purpose except to degrade the map's performance and create countless awful texture alignment breaks, because they should have been merged with coplanar polygons on the same brush. I've seen plenty of mappers make this mistake before, but I think this is the worst instance of it I've ever encountered. Bots suffer in this map because there are numerous places in the network of PathNodes where the author neglected to make connections. As a result, there are quite a few of those smaller arches, and even some wide-open places, that bots simply don't know how to get through, so they take the long way around instead. There aren't any AlternatePaths to vary the bots' attack routes, nor any DefensePoints to aid the bots in covering their flag. Thus botplay is far too weak to provide much of a challenge unless you turn up your difficulty settings considerably. Finally, there are some ambient sounds present – some appropriate and some seemingly out of place – placed using ZoneTriggers of all things (thanks to GOD__AM for pointing this out), and some music that doesn't fit the map. CAST: 0.5 Two things in this map do an effective job of ruining the gameplay. The first is that its performance absolutely sucks, thanks to the broken zoning and myriad unmerged polygons. The author's readme.txt states that this is a high-poly map intended for high-end machines, but it got way out of hand even so. The center of this map will tax your computer with over 900 polygons, upwards of 1,300 nodes, and quite a few deco meshes to boot. Chances are that your framerate will plummet even without any players in view. Once you actually get to playing out there, and characters and weapons fire need to be drawn as well, prepare yourself for a very choppy game. A proper build would have dramatically improved performance without costing anything in terms of visual detail. The second problem is that the two bridges over the central lava pit each feature an Enhanced Shock Rifle, so you're going to be playing InstaGib whether you like it or not. Putting ESRs in a map like this, particularly in such a prominent location, should be a federal offense punishable by caning. If you're playing botmatch, which you probably will be since I doubt many servers will be running this, this makes the bots even worse off, because they don't seem to realize that they have the power of life and death wrapped up into a point-and-click gun with unlimited ammo. I went godlike many times while testing this map, even against very strong bots. Even had those two problems been corrected, however, there would still be very little to see here. The layout is entirely flat and very wide open. There are two side routes you can take through hallways, but they still pass through the expansive center area and don't allow for much in the way of strategy. This map is more interesting than war zones like CTF-Thorns, but not by a whole lot. Weapons and pickups are laid out acceptably, if not ideally. Except, of course, for those two ESRs in the middle of the map, which render the rest of the map's arsenal obsolete. FINAL SCORE: 2.5 In summary, this map suffers from an unfinished appearance, horrible lighting, a host of technical problems, virtually nonexistent gameplay (unless you're an InstaGibber with a monster of a machine), and a very unfortunate naming scheme. The author has a decent hand at architecture, but needs to put in a lot of work on pretty much everything else. Don't waste your time with this one.
Map Comments
souldividersjosz 04-01-2004 06:33 AM MST Rating: 4   What he said ^ AceJC 04-01-2004 07:57 PM MST Rating: 9   A well rounded map -- I don't care what anyone says. This map is better than it's predecessors, and it has some really nice treats in it to boot. Of course, you CAN'Tsay that it's the best, but it's certainly not the worst. I like it, I give it 9 out of 10, and if anyone wants to make fun of this map, they should see it in several months WHEN IT BECOMES ONE OF THE BEST KNOWN MAPS OUT THERE! Like Control, for example. Instagib map, but hell yeah, it's awsome. This will be no different, and I think it'll take the clan scene by storm. Whether you're new to the game or not, this is one of the best maps you'll ever find out there. It's a beautiful map, so take my word for it, PLAY IT! GOD__AM 06-17-2004 04:30 PM MDT Rating: 2   The author says in the readme that this map requires a high end machine to run well. I got less than 20fps in the middle with no bots in the game. I don't expect a UT map to bring an xp2100+ gf4ti4400 512ddr to it's knees unless its something truly incredible...which this is not. The whole map other than the water zones and the skybox is one zone. This along with the unmerged polygons mentioned above really kills the performance in this map. It could have been made to run a lot better with just a small ammount of work, but he decided to just say you need a good comp to run it. If anyone (other that his clan mate that gave it a 9) can run this map smoothly in the center with a few bots in view I would be suprised. The zone triggers are what he used for the ambient sounds BTW. Not the best way to do it but I guess it worked... This map still has a lot of the problems it had last time he released it. Read some tutorials on lighting and optimization. Oh and that water fall only falling like an inch in a minute is kind of annoying too... Edit: I knocked off 2 points for having 3 of your clan members comment. Did you 3 get cookies for your support? Fordy 06-15-2004 05:32 PM MDT Rating: 3   AceJC - In several days time let alone several months, no one will even remember this map. If, as you say its not the best map and not the worst map then why give it an ownage score of 9? surely thats implying this is an awesome map which it obviously isnt. why not just give it an in between score of say 5? Too many people on here giving over inflated scores for under developed maps. Hehe I see his mates are in the house ;) Ironblayde 06-09-2004 10:59 PM MDT   The performance problems alone are sufficient to ensure that this map won't be played online without frustrating a lot of players. Just because the game is five years old doesn't mean you can throw optimization out the window! zzeta 06-10-2004 09:22 AM MDT Rating: 2   its a rip DocKavorkian 06-15-2004 03:04 AM MDT Rating: 9   I dont know what [[Animal reference removed by Admin ]] some of you are drunk on, but this map is kick ass. Just because your pathetic wimp of a machine cant seem to handle the nice textures and numerious other goodies for my eyes dont mean you have to bash what you couldnt even build most likely. I myself got a drop in FPS in the center, but my P4 2.4 ghz HT with 800mhz FSB and 400mhz ram and a Radeon 9800 pro 128 meg card, I didnt fall below 50 FPS which is more than enough to be free of lag. And if my semi outdating video card card handle it fine, then people with these new systems are going to love it. So basicly what im saying to all the - what I like to call - pissant whiney babies is, dont judge a map on your pathetic limitation of your system. and stop picking apart completely minor details. You have to be a complete moron to go that route. I have seen maps put out by epic with pretty nasty flaws in them. Hell, look at deck16 in UT and the left elevator glitch. So STFU and build a better map if you can. I will admit I cant even build something this nice and I have fiddled with making a map and did what I thought was ok. Nothing I have ever posted here, probably because dumbasses like some of you guys posting here. So... To the Author...Keep up the good work and make more of this stuff...it flippin ROCKS!!! Hail to the people with REAL Tallent! Splint 06-15-2004 03:31 AM MDT Rating: 10   I find it hard to believe that you guys can put this map down, the peeps that made the original maps made small glitches, and large ones too, so why moan about a guy that dos it for fun, not money, when he makes a small glitch or two, and they are small. As to textures not aligned? OK then, presumably if your reading this far youll will have read the bit about what the original designers did, well they aint perfect texture artists either, no one is perfect, insted of bitchin if you dont like the map, just delete it. As for me, i like the map, its well laid out fun to play, and got alot of nice eye candy too... so like like dockavorkian said, you must be [[Animal reference removed by Admin ]]........ Manticore 06-18-2004 01:35 AM MDT Rating: 2   After playing this map I can see why it's worth a nine or a ten. -2 for annoying me with the song of the sirens audio fx on a short loop.... -2 for including that stupid white angel in yet another map...... -2 for the non-existent lighting.... -2 for using architectural elements that remind me of the level "Monte Casino" from the PS1 game Medal of Honor: Underground.... (That was a good game, that one!) Grand total=2. Oh, and before anyone replies to this I'm entitled to my opinion whether you like it or not.