when the map "starts", the elevator door opens. the door should initially be opened instead.
This happens due to the complex, super hacky way the elevator is done and I kind of like it. It gives the map some lively preamble.
one of the fans behind the default reactor isn't spinning. is that intentional?
I'm totally not sure but since it's a lost facility there should be even more malfunctioning stuff than there currently is so I'll leave it that way.
wtf is up with the water/power hoses on the floor? that's bad practice from the management's point of view. the hose in the lower fork looks reasonable (it looks like some temporary repair work is being done), but the hose in the short hall must be removed or hung on the ceiling (in order to avoid blocking vehicles).
As with the defective fan in rear storage I think that the map would need even more cables. The problem is that sophisticated details don't fit my rough brushwork too well and so I'm happy for every corner where a cable doesn't look totally out of place. But I agree this one looks a little out of place and if I come to adding more details I will consider putting some machine there that would make it reasonable to have a cable lying on the ground.
the shape of the rounded stair steps are quite fancy, but noone in real life makes stairs that have visible holes when viewed orthogonally from the top. consider adding depth to the stair pieces, if that won't look worse.
Well facilities in real life have doors to the outer world, too. I think the stairs are not my biggest problem when it comes to realism. From the gameplay perspective bigger holes enable humans to shoot through more easily and since the map is currently biased towards the aliens that sounds like a good feature to me.
the map sections that are now (in beta 2) separated from the rest of the map still reside in the map. TODO: remove.
Yes, of course. Just didn't want to trash them yet since I might be reusing some of the brushwork there in later versions (for example the fancy useless tank thing in the ventilation shafts will probably come back). I won't leave any garbage in later versions of my map, I promise!
in the long hall, what do the grates on the walls protect the walls from? the grating there is fancy, but illogical.
in the front hall, there's a metal cover removed from the wall. is that a computer panel and a big fucking floodlight hidden inside a wall?
Yes it is and yes it's all for the fanciness. Did you notice the big pipes at the ceiling of front storage form a circle? Ha! This is even more senseless. So even though you are totally right with your observations I see no way this map will ever be realistic and logical. If it was a painting there would be some intellectual explanation to all of this so think of my map as a piece of art and imagine the grating shall express anxiety.
the grated, inaccessible rooms in the elevator shafts are pointless from the architectural point of view.
That was a quick fix since an alien base in the elevation shaft would take pretty much all fun out of the game from a human perspective since the hole towards upper storage is gone. But here I agree, there shall be an upgrade eventually.
other than the emergency exit door and the glass opening over the staircase, there appears to be no entrance in or out of the complex. in other words, this base is a base for the sake of being a base.
I had this in mind but now it's black on white on my TODO list. There will be an exit out of the base!
perhaps the elevator would be more appealing if parts of its walls were replaced with grating.
Yes that would look cool. The problem is the static lighting and the fact that it would still be illuminated bright orange when going by the blue lights. I might experiment with it but chances are that it will stay as it is.
one corner in the elevator shaft (attachment: elevator_shaft_corner_clog.jpg) induces jerky movement for humans there. the hole should be filled.
another corner (attachment: elevator_shaft_corner_surf.jpg) causes humans to surf.
Both put on TODO.
i repeat: use texture packs.
I'm not sure what you mean by that. Most of the map is made with evillair's textures and I agree they are in every trem map. The reason I used them anyway is that the sets are, apart from being low definition, very good. I won't retexture the map for tremulous but it will get a normalmapped texture replacement for unvanquished later (I will, of course, do a proper and maintained tremulous release first). The product could probably be backported to trem, too, but it will look shitty as trem's engine expects shadows to be statically included in the diffusemap and q3map2's normalmap support suffers from low definition lightmaps. I don't know any fitting q3-style (non-normalmapped) textures apart from the ones that are used heavily in trem maps or otherwise I had used them instead.
To your "void" screenshots:
This isn't really a hole to the void since otherwise the map wouldn't even compile. I think the problem is that with diagonal brushes real numbers are being used instead of integers and the engine sometimes doesn't render surfaces fitting then. I could solve this at known locations by texturing the regions that are between the brushes and shouldn't be visible at all but that would mean some extra polygons that do little but have an impact on performance. And since some people have complained about lower than average FPS I don't think that would be worth it. You could try to solve this on your side by enabling antialising with "r_ext_multisample 4".
Imperfect lighting 1&2:
I find this ugly, too, but I can do little about it since trem uses static lighting. For the back side of the elevator car I might change the shaft so that the car is lit orange when it's in the lower position. The only alternative would be using external lightmaps and manually editing them in the GIMP after every release quality compile. That would be a huge pita.
Imperfect lighting 3:
Put on TODO.
Imperfect lighting 4:
This looks good with my (high quality) settings so I tend to leave it that way.
Thank you very much for your detailed review!
