DOM-Grove
Map Info
	File Name dom-grove.zip Author goldfenix Gametype UT2k4 Double Domination Date Added 02-28-2006 File Version 2.00 File Size 26.25 mb Player Count 4 - 8 Map Description An ancient temple built by an ancient unkown society was discovered during the war in Vietnam. United States soldiers added on to the temple to cover themselves from weapon fire and weather. The National Historical Society found it again and just until recently gave into the bribe and handed the temple over to the tournaments. The ancient warriors of old call out through the vine thickened walls of the ancient ground, calling to those who fight in its corridors. Review Rating 5.5 User Rating 6.5 Overall Rating 6.5
Review
Reviewer Ironblayde Awe Score:  2.5/3 Date 03-02-2006 Build Score:  2.0/3 Review Schema Cast Score:  1.0/3 User Point:  +1 Overall Score:  6.5/10 AWE: 2.5 Constructed almost entirely from custom static meshes and textures, DOM-Grove makes a pretty strong impression visually. The architecture is for the most part believable and distinctive; even if you're not too familiar with the static mesh packages that ship with the game, Grove has enough originality that it should be obvious that you're looking at lots of custom work. Definite bonus points to the author for that. The only thing in the architecture that I don't like are the broken wall segments, used to form recesses for torches and to join the rock tunnels to the cavern shrines. They're made mostly from ninety-degree angles, which can work when you're doing it on a brick or tile texture so that it looks like some number of bricks or tiles have been removed, but in this case I don't think the texture is appropriate. The breaks occur in the middle of bricks and so they end up looking pretty unnatural, particularly the breaks that form the entrances to the cavern shrines. The caverns themselves and tunnels leading up to them are both natural rock, yet they're separated by what looks like a thin, broken manmade wall. The numerous static meshes included with the map are quite well-made. There's an occasional texturing error to be found where something either doesn't line up or is stretched too severely, but they are few and typically in places that are not highly visible. The textures themselves are very nice too, but there's one that's used pretty often that bothers me a bit. The texture is called jbasestone and appears on a number of pillars and support structures in the interior areas of the map. Whereas the rest of the surfaces look worn and mossy like you'd expect from this sort of location, jbasestone is almost perfectly smooth and thus looks a bit out of place. (Edit, 04 March 2006: jbasestone looks a lot better with detail textures turned on, which I somehow forgot to do before testing this map. Sorry!) This effect is exacerbated a bit by the lighting, which is decent, but still leaves a lot to be desired. It's bland in a lot of places, with too many areas that aren't lit by anything except zone light. This is especially evident on surfaces textured with jbasestone since it's so featureless: it often occurs that, with so little contrast in the lighting scheme, two surfaces appear to be one. The four long rock tunnels have no light sources at all, just zone light, so they too look very bland. The one thing that I like least about the map's appearance is the use of distance fog. The map is blanketed in this very heavy green fog that makes it look as though the place is filled with noxious gases. This is especially true in the control point rooms since they are the most open parts of the map, enough so that when standing at one edge of the room, the other side is completely hidden by the fog. In my opinion, everything looks much, much better with the fog turned off (well, except the skybox, since it was designed with the green fog in mind). BUILD: 2.0 DOM-Grove has enough triggered events scattered throughout it that it took me some time to figure out how it all works. There are doors that you need to use levers to open, traps you can use to defend the control points, and a fair number of triggered sounds, and they all work perfectly. In a lot of cases there's more than one lever that will activate a given door, or more than one event that occurs after touching a certain trigger, and the author did a fine job of syncing them all up to prevent any apparent inconsistencies or strange problems from occurring. The author has also made a good effort at pathing the map, but despite this, the bots still have some trouble getting the job done. Behind each control point is a cavern, and although they're at opposite ends of the map, the author has connected them with a warp zone to allow players who spawn there to reach either point directly. This is what seems to trouble the bots the most. Frequently I saw a bot open the door to the warp zone, walk into it, and suddenly lose focus; he basically stands in place until the door comes down and crushes him. There's also a trap at each control point that brings spikes up through the floor, and the bots aren't very good at avoiding it. Often they'll activate the trap and then end up walking into it, even if there are no enemies around. The other doors don't confuse the bots as much, but it happens from time to time, and occasionally I saw a bot get stuck trying to go up the staircases, or in front of the control points. Don't get me wrong, the game is certainly playable with bots. It just doesn't go very well. They're easy to beat. Performance in this map is something of a mixed bag. On one hand, the author did a thorough job of cutting down on overdraw with the judicious use of zoning and antiportals. But on the other hand, there's still a huge problem. Even on all the lowest graphical settings, the map still runs poorly. When I checked all the statistics in-game I found that emitters seemed to be causing the problem, and sure enough, the light rain falling throughout the map is provided by an emitter, and one that is not eliminated by lowering one's world detail setting. The author really should have used an xWeatherEffect, which I believe would be faster, and can be specifically toggled on and off in the display properties for people who don't want to see it. I set the offending emitter to be removed at low world detail, and found that in the control point rooms, its absence increased my framerate from 35fps to 65fps –- a really astonishing difference that one thing makes. It's really a shame the author overlooked this. One last thing for the author to think about is to be a little more efficient with collision. A lot of the meshes that come with this map don't seem to have simplified collision models associated with them, and some of the BlockingVolumes the author uses are needlessly complex. These are minor points in this map though, and don't seem to affect performance in any meaningful way. CAST: 1.0 The map's layout is straightforward and easy to learn, and it's not a bad design, but nonetheless, I didn't find it very fun to play. This is due to a number of things. First, the control points are too easy to defend. The fastest you can possibly hope to get to the nearest one from any given spawn point seems to be about eight seconds, and that's if you react instantly and know exactly where you're going. And there's always the possibility that you won't get a good spawn, and won't be able to make it to the critical point in under ten seconds. This by itself would be all right, but compounding the problem is the fact that each control point is trapped. There's a lever directly behind each point that activates the trap. Two seconds after activating it, spikes rise through the floor underneath the control point, and remain for six seconds. You take 70 damage per second while in the area, so if you try to get the control point back while the spikes are up, you'll almost certainly die. Another thing is that there are two doors that open into each control point room, and these are also controlled by levers, one on each side of each door. On the control point side the lever is very close to the door, but if you're in the center of the map and want to reach one of the control points, then you need to run a ways down a very narrow, dead-end hallway to hit the lever, then run back. It's very obnoxious to have to be constantly running out of your way to open the doors, especially when the cramped hallway makes you a very easy target while doing so. Also, there's a low torch in each such hallway which damages you if you touch it. Looking at it in the editor, it looks like it's only supposed to do 15 damage per second, but what actually happens is that it takes all your health extremely rapidly, in 15-point increments. I'm not sure why this happens, but it surprised the hell out of me the first time it happened and I don't like it. Chances are it will rarely happen since you can just stay away from the walls, but if you're trying to dodge incoming fire in those cramped quarters, you can inadvertently run into it. Each control point can be reached in three ways: via a curving staircase on either side, or by using a jump pad positioned right in front of it. The jump pad is apparently supposed to help players reach the control point faster, but in fact it seems faster to just take the stairs. The jump pad has enclosing walls on each side of it, so it's in a somewhat awkward spot, and the opening it leads to is very narrow, so if you have any sideways momentum going up to it, you can easily miss the opening. Even the bots occasionally miss the opening in this way. Weapons and ammo are pretty sparse. There are six weapons in the map: Bio-Rifle, Link Gun, Shock Rifle, Minigun, Flak Cannon, and Rocket Launcher. Four of those have one ammo pickup each, and the remaining two (the shock and mini) don't have any. There are no weapons in the caverns, so if you spawn back there, you'll be unarmed except for your Assault Rifle when you emerge into one of the control point rooms. Most of the rest of the spawn points (which are not divided by team) place you with a weapon close by, but not all. And finally, although the spawn points are placed in appropriate places, the directions they're facing had me constantly turning 180 degrees immediately upon spawning. There are four PlayerStarts just outside the control rooms, one on either side of each door. Through that door is where you probably want to go, and the lever to open it is behind you in each case. And if you spawn by the Link Gun, you'll want to pick it up right away as it's the only weapon in the area, but again, you spawn with it behind you. FINAL SCORE: 5.5 This map could have been a lot better, and I wish it had been since it's clear that the author put a lot of work into it. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of things that were added to set it a little apart -- the traps, the lever-activated doors, the warp zone –- end up taking away from the experience rather than adding to it. Hopefully the author will consider reworking the gameplay and the performance issues (and hopefully that blasted fog) and releasing a DOM-Grove][.
Map Comments
Wesley "Boreas" van Dijk 02-28-2006 03:24 PM MST Rating: 5.5   Too bad... I downloaded this expecting a very solid map, but it really wasn't what I hoped it to be. Part of the map feels too cramped, like the the hall containing the lever to open the doors. It is very easy to take someone out using link primary there. The stairs really didn't feel right, and it was hardly possible to get to a control point in time, once you got killed. The trap under the control points mad it way too easy to hold a point. goldfenix 03-04-2006 06:57 PM MST   Well, the only worry I have to people is fps. I hope it runs fast on your machines. Yeah, it is hard to stop the team from scoring, but that's what the warpzones are for in the shrine caverns. the jumppad in front also helps. I believe that there is a part of the map that you overlooked. The 2 doors that open using the lever that activates the spikes. They also open. He never mentioned it, but I think you do know about it. I just discovered that maya PLE cannot use damn ActorX, so I cant continue to learn and expand in game design until I get that setup. If there is a version fo actorx that works for the PLE version of maya, direct to that site. I would make a fixed version (sequel) but I am currently making 6 maps all at once as of now, and some began about 5 months ago, so they have alot of work and stuff. In the nalicity forums? Id ont know how to start one? The walls that surround the jumppad help the player in keeping a straight momentum, in order to get through the vine walls. Texture Jbasestone shouldn't be completely smoothed. It should have a largely scaled detail texture on it for detail, not so blank like in your screenshots. What is user point? Ironblayde 03-04-2006 08:10 PM MST   goldfenix: One further note. If you are having or suspect others may have performance problems, and you don't know what's causing it, the console commands for stats display are very useful. I don't know if you know about these: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Console_Commands/Stats_Console_Commands I found the problem with the emitter by typing 'stat game' while playing and noticing that something like 12-13ms per frame were being spent on particles on my machine. Edit: And yes, I saw the doors that open when you activate the trap -- I assume you mean the one holding the Shield Pack on one side and the Double Damage on the other? I didn't mention them in the review because they didn't really come into play in my scoring process at all. And besides, if I talked about every little part of every map, my reviews would be twice as long, and that's something none of us need. :) Edit the second: Sorry about the detail textures thing, that was a mistake on my part. Normally I play with most of my settings turned way down to get as much performance as I can, and then I turn everything back on for reviewing (at least for the Awe stuff) so I don't miss anything. Somehow I forgot to turn detail textures on this time. Review and screenshots updated. My apologies, again. Edit the third: The user point is a modification to the review score based on the average scores left by NaliCity users, and it can be either 1, 0, or -1. If the average user score is at least one point lower than the review score, then the user point is -1. If the average user score is at least one point higher than the review score, then the user point is 1. Otherwise, as in your case, the user point is 0. Also, if you have any other questions, please use the forums or send me a PM, as those are much better forms for back-and-forth commentary, as opposed to constantly editing our comments. :) sandorski 03-03-2006 08:48 AM MST   Goldfenix: start a thread and give more detail about your Maya problem, which PLE version, and why you need ActorX. Turns2Ashes 03-03-2006 05:46 PM MST Rating: 6   Looks pretty cool but like the reviewer I don't like how it plays very much. Small DOM maps where it's very easy to grab a weapon and get to a domination point within 10 seconds are the kind I like. silverfenix 03-03-2006 07:09 PM MST Rating: 7.5   Your Map is Awesome However, you should add some ninja warriors that eat your head when you go near them. Kantham 03-09-2006 12:34 PM MST   /me waits for bronzefenix jordi 03-10-2006 12:35 PM MST Rating: 7   good job Manticore 03-22-2006 02:51 AM MST   I'm not going to rate this because I'm getting a lot of default engine texture. It's (probably) my graphics card and the lack of fallback materials due to hardware shaders or some such; either that or something didn't load properly. Bummer....