CTF-Canyon
Map Info
	File Name ut-ctf-canyon.zip Author Kamikaze Gametype UT Capture the Flag Date Added 05-26-2004 File Version 1.00 File Size 1.46 mb Player Count 10-16 Map Description A capture the flag map in which the central conflict is in a canyon, or a valley, rather, with a giant chasm. Careful about the chasm, if you fall, be sure to aim right! Two sniper boxes provide cover, but so do the trees...the bases themselves symmetric with several areas to cover the flags from. Bots play well, overall a bit challenging, but not too difficult. Would be great for online play. Review Rating 0.5 User Rating 6 Overall Rating 1.5
Review
Reviewer Ironblayde Awe Score:  0.5/3 Date 05-27-2004 Build Score:  0.0/3 Review Schema Cast Score:  0.0/3 User Point:  +1 Overall Score:  1.5/10 AWE: 0.5 I can understand wanting to make maps even if you don't have the patience to create very detailed architecture, as the author has stated, but CTF-Canyon takes it much too far. Two identical bases face one another across a canyon in the map's center. Each flag rests on a small cylinder, but aside from that, the bases are composed entirely of axis-aligned boxes. Dimensions are wrong in many cases; there are very thin walls and plenty of too-low ceilings. Various windows and open ceilings offer a view of an awful skybox. Once you get outside, there's more to be seen than just boxes, but you'll probably find yourself wanting to go back inside. The terrain is somewhere beyond double coyote ugly, if there is such a thing. Nothing outside looks like anything that could even remotely resemble an actual location. The ravine in the center has perfectly smooth sides and leads to a perfectly straight river that terminates in a giant sphere on each end. Outside and in, the map is generally lit by perfectly white lights turned up to the highest possible radius, and there are no light fixtures anywhere. Still, I'm willing to give the map half a point here because there isn't anything truly offensive, like particle animation textures plastered onto walls or anything like that. The textures are mostly decent choices; they just aren't aligned anywhere and are very boring because of the lack of architecture. BUILD: 0.0 Discounting maps that simply don't run, CTF-Canyon has one of the worst builds I've ever seen. Let's start with the level geometry. The bases themselves are painfully simple and constructed almost entirely of boxes, so there's little need to worry about creating BSP holes that way. The center of the map, however, contains five large terrain brushes. Managing those without trashing the BSP takes a fair amount of finesse, and the author hasn't got it. There are some huge BSP errors here. In a couple of places, large sections of walls become invisible or display HOM effects. In the map's very center, the errors take the form of faulty collision regions. Walking across the bridge, which appears flat, will lift you up in the air like you're scaling a piece of terrain. Also, there are huge invisible collision regions to either side of the bridge, so you can actually cross the canyon on either side by walking in midair. Predicting what will happen when traversing that area of the map is virtually impossible. Next, we have zoning. There's no standard zoning used here, for which there is no excuse. That's not the worst of it, though. The two bases are connected to the center of the map via warp zones. This is the worst use of warp zones I've encountered. There is no reason whatsoever for warp zones in this map. They accomplish absolutely nothing desirable, and put a huge black mark in the negative column. Hitscan weapons won't trace through warp zones, so it's important that when warp zones are used, they shouldn't be placed in wide open areas visible from a long way off. Yet that's exactly what the author has done. It makes for an extremely frustrating game. This map's readme.txt boasts that it features "something that defies all known laws of physics," but you know, I rather like the laws of physics. What's more, I like being able to hit my enemies when I shoot at them, instead of having my bullets mysteriously disappear when they reach an invisible boundary. The bot pathing is terrible. The huge numbers of nodes that are often piled on top of one another suggest that the pathing was probably done automatically by UnrealEd, which is a no-no. It seems like the only thing the author did manually here was to add five DefensePoints to each base, and not even that was done correctly. Apparently he couldn't be bothered to alter the direction of the DefensePoints, because the ones in the red base all face backwards. (All the PlayerStarts retain their default direction as well, so you'll spawn facing the wall pretty frequently.) Standing in place with your back to the enemy is not a particularly effective defensive strategy. The author has also missed a number of things completely. There are no ambient sounds, no background music, and no screenshot. Actually the author did attempt to include a screenshot, but he did it incorrectly. I don't understand how maps get released with oversights like that. If you take the time to try adding a screenshot, and then see in testing that it doesn't work, why wouldn't you fix it? This whole map exudes lack of effort. CAST: 0.0 The author's readme.txt states that he makes maps for gameplay and not visual appeal. We've all read that plenty of times. Sometimes it actually accompanies a map that plays well, but for the most part it seems to go with maps that are just plain bad. I think I remember Bot40 saying one time that if you can't make a map that looks decent, you probably won't be able to pull off good gameplay either. Such is the case here. The gameplay has not one redeeming feature. Most of the bases' length is composed of a small set of ridiculously long and narrow hallways. I felt like I was going to have an attack of claustrophobia while playing this map. Dodging incoming fire is impossible in those hallways, and when you're stuck in that situation for a length of 4,000 UUs or so, flag running becomes boring very, very quickly. Outside, the various warp zones, BSP errors, and awful geometry effectively ruin any chance at a fun fight. And if you fall into the canyon, it takes fifteen or twenty seconds to run back up to the top level. Item placement, like everything else in this map, is full of mistakes. Most notably, one of the bases has a Shock Rifle where there should be a Rocket Launcher. Thus one team gets to start with the Rocket Launcher and several ammo pickups for it, while the other team gets a Shock Rifle surrounded by rockets. There's no ammo for the Shock Rifle in the whole map. Although if you jump down into the canyon, there's an Enhanced Shock Rifle down there. A bit of advice for new mappers: don't use the ESR. Aaargh! One final bit of lunacy: there's a pair of Anti-Grav Boots outside one base. If you wear those into a base, you can jump out through the ceiling, up into a huge area that's given over to fake backdrop surfaces. For all intents and purposes, you're outside the map in this case. You get to walk through the skybox and see pieces of the base suddenly appear from nowhere as you approach another opening in the ceiling. FINAL SCORE: 0.5 Most of this review has been for the author's benefit, or for that of other mappers who may be starting up. It's kind of a checklist of everything you shouldn't do. If you're going to release a map publicly, you should be willing to put in far more effort than is evident here... or brace yourself for harsh reviews like this one. For everyone else, all you need to know is that CTF-Canyon is a very bad CTF map, one of the worst I've played in quite some time. Avoid this at all costs.
Map Comments
RKArteest 05-28-2004 02:29 AM MDT   Again, thanks. I'm running an 800 mHz 512 MB RAM AMD Athlon with a GeForce 2 64MB video card and SoundBlaster Live!...adequate for UT, but not enough for the 2K games, dammit. Anyway, Now I see what you're talking about, just from the pictures. Canyon is by far, not my first map, but when the map I placed here for sh*ts and giggles, DM-Pong rated higher than this one, I've decided to work hard at making a better map. I always thought canyon was my best map, but you've proven how much of an amatuer I really am. Now that I think about it, I think DM-ShadowRealm is my best, though not posted. There's not a whole lot of errors such as BSP cuts or HOM, and it's a dark map so aligning textures wasn't necessary. Never once did I use warp zones. You may want to try it, if so, mail me at brentlee@alltel.net, and we'll set something up. Again, with ShadowRealm, the brushes were quite blocky...and I had to inact trial & error several times to get the see-through walkway right, but it really is a fun map. Bots use it well, though they don't resort to the higher ground often...weird...thought I placed nodes up there...anyway, it's layout was inspired by a DreamCast Quake III Arena map. My biggest gripe about it is the sky box...I just suck at those. Anyway, gotta run, thanks for your help. Oh, and I wanted to email ya, but it's not posted here. Bot40 05-27-2004 03:51 AM MDT   This reminds me very much of my first map :) Ironblayde 05-27-2004 05:26 AM MDT   You're welcome, Kamikaze; sorry it had to be so rough. ;) My computer's using a Pentium 4 @ 2.5GHz, 512MB of RAM, and a Radeon 9600 Pro, since you asked. The BSP holes that occur as visual artifacts are not as serious in the canyon walls themselves as they are in the walls of the warp zones just as you're emerging from inside. Run around there and you should see what I mean. I took some shots for you so you can see the places where these occur. Here are shots of the holes that occur in your warp zones: http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon01.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon02.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon03.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon04.jpg Realize that those errors are not in place permanently; they only appear from certain angles. So you might have to run past it a few times before it happens... but it happens pretty frequently in this map. And here are the errors that occur in your terrain: http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon05.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon06.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon07.jpg http://www.ironblayde.com/temp/Canyon08.jpg Unlike the ones in the warp zones, the HOM effects here seem to appear no matter what angle you view them from. There are also some other things I've labeled in those shots that aren't BSP errors per se, but still unsightly graphical errors. The more worrying BSP problems, though, are those collision errors, the ones that have you walking across surfaces that aren't there out over the ravine. Check out Bot40's terrain tutorial for some good tips on handling this more carefully in the future: http://members.fortunecity.com/bot40/Terrain/Part1.html The map comments section isn't the ideal place for this kind of thing, so if you have any other questions, feel free to send me an E-mail, or a PM on the forums, and I'll help you out however I can. Also, next time you have a map almost done, consider getting some feedback and beta testing on the forums here and at UnrealPlayground.com. There are lots of knowledgeable and helpful people who will take a look at your map and aid you in getting it cleaned up as much as possible prior to public release. Best of luck on your future mapping efforts! Don't give up. ;) Algus 05-28-2004 04:30 PM MDT Rating: 1   A physics-less canyon I see, In this map is what awaits me. I can not traverse the divide By the bridge seen outside. My advice: Leave this one be! SirTahngarth 05-28-2004 11:56 PM MDT   The poet strikes again GTD-Carthage 06-06-2004 06:01 AM MDT Rating: 10   The rating above is for the poet. As for the map, it's not so good. Something's wrong with it's bot pathing. (You'll see them bump the wall and keep running against it.) It's build is "straight-forward" and too simple. There's not one detail on the architecture inside the opposite bases. But, even if the map doesn't look good. At least the author is still determined to make an even better map after all the unsparing comments. Shao 08-11-2004 07:40 PM MDT   Easy Architecture??? no way! ....................................it is early morning omfg!